Trail” in eight installments, from May 1917 to December 1917.

Grey’s ambition to write strictly psychological fiction in the future, rather than Western stories, would be altered by the critical praise in response to what Harper & Bros. titled The U.P. Trail. Grey wrote in his diary:

My power and my study and passion shall be directed to that which already I have written best—the beauty and color and mystery of great spaces, of the open, of Nature in her wild moods. This decision has been a relief.

To Ripley Hitchcock he wrote on February 20, 1918:

Much good has come to me, in the way of significant appreciation, since The U.P. Trail was published. It is like wine.

I do not know what the critical reception would have been had Harper & Bros. published Grey’s historical novel as he wrote it. One thing is certain. His version contains scenes of unique power and images that will stay with you long after reading it. There is also a psychological depth to several of the characters that was not customary in Grey’s fiction prior to this novel, especially in the depiction of Allie Lee, following her survival of an attack by Sioux Indians and in her captivity with Durade and her later relationship with her biological father. Moreover, despite the occasional awkwardness in transitions, there is an elemental power in this narrative that was compromised, if not lost altogether, in the Ripley Hitchcock version. For his part Grey would not revise his view of editorial intervention in his stories until the conflict erupted over the censorship imposed by Harper & Bros. on The Vanishing American. From that point forward, everything changed. Yet, thanks to the existence of Zane Grey’s holographic manuscript at the Library of Congress of what now is titled Union Pacific, as readers of today we are able to put aside all such controversy and experience directly what Zane Grey wrote and what he himself described so aptly as “the blood and lust and death, the ‘epical turmoil,’ the labor of giants, the heroism and sacrifice of this wildest time in the opening of the West.”

Chapter One

In the early ’Sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains—westward over the undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long winding lines of cottonwoods, to a slow vast heave of rising ground, Wyoming, where the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and the campfire of the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from beside some lonely stream—on and on over the barren lands of eternal monotony, all so gray and wide and solemn and silent under the endless sky—on and ever up to the bleak black hills and into the waterless gullies and through the rocky gorges where the deer browsed and the savage lurked—slowly rising to the pass between the great bold peaks, and across the windy uplands into Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its haze-filled canyons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its pale salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks, dim, lilac-colored, austere, and isolated—and ever onward and ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California where the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered, and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes gleamed like gems—and so on to the great descent, where the mountain world ceased, and where out beyond the golden land, asleep and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand beneath the setting sun.

Chapter Two

In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the Black Hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical. They had charge of the laying of the Union Pacific Railroad.

This party, escorted by a company of U.S. troops under Colonel Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable. And now, having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of the Rockies, they were halted by a seemingly impassable barrier—a gorge too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.

General Lodge, chief engineer for the corps, gave an order to one of his assistants.

“Put young Neale on the job. If we ever survey a line through this awful place, we’ll owe it to him.”

The assistant, Baxter, told an Irishman standing by to find Neale. This individual, Casey by name, was smoking a short black pipe in the presence of his superiors. Casey was raw-boned, red-faced, hard-featured, a man inured to exposure and rough life. His expression seemed to be a fixed one of extreme good-humor, as if his face had set, mask-like, during a grin. He removed the pipe.

“Gineral, the flag I’ve bin holdin’ fer that domn’ young surveyor is the wrong color. I want a green flag.”

Baxter waved the Irishman to his errand, but General Lodge looked up from the maps and plans before him with a faint smile. He had a dark stern face and the bearing of a soldier.

“Casey, you can have any color you like,” he said. “Maybe green would change our luck.”

“Gineral, we’ll niver git no railroad built, an’ if we do, it’ll be the Irish that builds it,” responded Casey, and went his way.

Only one hope remained, and it was that the agile and daring Neale, with his eye of a mountaineer and his genius for estimating distance and grade, might run a line around the gorge. They sent for him back to the troop camp, and, while waiting, they went over the maps and drawings, again and again, with the earnestness of men who could not be beaten.

Lodge had been a major-general in the Civil War just ended, and before the war he had traveled that part of the West many times, with the mighty project of the building of the railroad fermenting in his mind. It had taken years to evolve the plan to build that road, and it came at last through many new and devious ways, plots, and counter-plots. The wonderful idea of the uniting of East and West by a railroad originated in one man’s brain and he lived for it.