In the latest entry in our occasional feature, The BTQ Review, I present Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean, by Les Standiford. I got to watching a lot of weather coverage with all the hurricania of the past few weeks, and I heard lots of references to the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, the most powerful hurricane to hit the United States in the 20th Century (although not as deadly as the 1901 Galveston hurricane). Anyway, my Mom and Stepdad are thinking of retiring to Florida, and spend a lot of time down there, and after one trip she brought me this book. So I pulled it out and read it with the Weather Channel going in the background.

Henry Flagler co-founded Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller, so he had buckets of money. He got into the railroad business, and when the tracks ended he decided to build some more. He went south to Jacksonville, then St. Augustine, Daytona, West Palm Beach, and Miami, laying tracks and building luxury resorts to give people a reason to ride the rails. It's probably not much of an overstatement to say that Flagler darn near founded most of the big cities in Florida. There might have been little outposts of civilization there before he arrived, but consider this. When Flagler started building his railroad empire (the Florida East Coast Railway, FEC), Key West was the biggest city in the state, largely because of its location in the shipping lanes and proximity to Cuba. So you know there couldn't have been much to cities like Jacksonville and Miami before Flagler started erecting hotels and railroads.

Eventually, Flagler decided to extend the line to Key West by hop-scotching from the mainland across a few rocky points and a lot of open water. His vision was decried as "Flagler's Folly." The money he had spent just getting to the ocean was staggerring, and no one really knew what it would cost to build a railroad that would appear to "cross an ocean." Flagler was undeterred. Or, if he was, he didn't show it. He was a pretty resolute and introverted man who didn't display a lot of the fire that must have been stoking his dreams. This was what he did with his retirement years. He could have very easily coasted on the Standard Oil stock and lived the life of one of the world's wealthiest men, but he wanted to leave something behind. And he decided it would be one of the modern marvels of engineering.

So Flagler built his railroad extension from Miami to Key West. The bulk of Standiford's book tells the story of the building of the railroad line -- the challenges, the successes, the cataclysmic failures when hurricanes hit the construction site in 1908 and 1910. Standiford is a novelist, and the book reads like a novel. In some ways this is good, and Standiford can tell a gripping tale. But I was hoping for more details, something more like a history book, and didn't get it. I think the book could be improved -- even without losing its novelistic character -- with nothing more than detailed maps of the site (I've never been down there and have no familiarity with it) and some renderings of the innovative tools the engineers used to build the massively long bridges between the keys. I'm not asking for Melville-on-whaling level of detail, but a little less gloss would have been nice.

It's not giving anything away to reveal that Flagler is able to realize his dream to "ride his own iron" to Key West. He starts an Havana Express service, so tourists could get on the train in New York and the next day pull up to the depot in Key West next to a boat ready to steam to Cuba. As a money-making endeavor, though, the FEC wasn't doing as well as Standard Oil, to say the least. Flagler thought that he was in prime position to take advantage of the building of the Panama Canal and the annexation of Cuba after the Spanish-American War. Key West was hundreds of miles closer to the Canal than the next-closest port, and Flagler thought it would become a major international shipping center. However, difficulties with building a deep-water port in Key West prevented this from ever happening. Also, while the FEC did decent business with the tourists, there wasn't enough shipping in or out of Key West for the line to turn a profit.

Standiford doesn't think that the failure of the FEC was evidence that Flagler's golden touch had tarnished, or that Flagler never had a touch to begin with (certainly the public remembers Rockefeller's role in Standard Oil more than Flagler's). Standiford's theory is that Flagler wasn't in it to make money, but to make history. Maybe so. I'll leave that for readers to discuss. I think that, regardless of whatever other benefits Flagler got from the FEC, he wouldn't have minded if it made him some more scratch.

Anyway, Flagler died in 1912 and the railroad line teetered for a few more decades. During the Depression, FDR put a bunch of indigent World War One veterans to work building a highway over the Key West extension route. The workers were housed in flimsy shacks and in some cases tents. We all know where this is going. Over Labor Day weekend, 1935, the storm hit. Modern storm-tracking was, of course, non-existent. Keys residents, including Ernest Hemingway, only had a day or so to prepare, and no one really knew how bad the storm would be. As it turned out, very bad. Wind speeds were estimated at over 200 mph. The hurricane slammed into the Keys and the devastation was massive. There's no such thing as higher ground when the average elevation is about ten feet above sea level.

In the most harrowing points of the book, Standiford tells the tale of the storm. Again, because the work isn't a standard history text, we don't get a lot of sourcing for this, but a bibliography indicates it comes from contemporary news accounts and later oral histories of survivors. When the strength of the storm became clear, a rescue train was dispatched from the mainland. But a giant tidal wave washed it off the tracks. Standiford's description of the storm is compelling. The hurricane looks just as bent on wiping out the road as Flagler was in building the line. In the end, hundreds died and many were never recovered, no doubt swept out to sea.

Last Train to Paradise is well-written and a page-turner. I do wish it had a little more detail, but it's not Standiford's fault I picked up the wrong book. Seeing that I was interested in the storm more than the railroad, I should probably have gotten Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, but my Mom didn't get that one for me. But, Standiford's book certainly piqued my interest in reading more about the storm, and it gave me an idea of some of what was lost. Knowing all that Flagler put into building the Key West extension makes the storm's destruction seem even more tragic. I'll follow up if I ever read the more detailed history of the storm. This book is probably more like, say, The Fountainhead than a disaster epic. For what it is, it's good. I just have to admit that I was a little disappointed because I was looking for something else. All in all, though, not bad. I certainly recommend it if you like tales of people struggling to realize the seemingly impossible. You can read it as quickly and easily as a novel, and still have plenty of facts to bore your companions if you ever find yourself barrelling down the big highway that now connects Key West to the rest of America. You'll know what used to be there, and what it took to build it, and what it took to tear it down. I give it four cans out of a possible six-pack.