Empire Builder

The Empire Builder was the Great Northern train that carried the University of Washington’s freshman and varsity crews east to Poughkeepsie for the national championship in June 1934. More than a means of crossing the continent, it became a moving, shared space where the freshmen’s exuberance and camaraderie gave way, for Joe Rantz, to a sudden experience of ridicule and exclusion.

Departure and Route

On the evening of June 1, 1934, the crews boarded the train at King Street railroad station as the university’s marching band and more than a thousand fans crowded the ornate marble lobby, cheering and singing fight songs. Many of the freshmen had never traveled beyond western Washington; most had never ridden a train. For boys accustomed to milking cows, swinging axes, and stacking lumber in small towns, the prospect of crossing the continent made the journey feel momentous even before the train left.

The Empire Builder climbed over the Cascades at Stevens Pass and crossed the arid wheat country of eastern Washington. As it rolled through Montana and into North Dakota, the boys’ attention shifted from the landscape outside to the playful commotion inside the coaches. The route made the scale of their trip tangible: these young rowers were traveling far beyond the familiar places from which they had come.

A Moving Space for the Crew

The Pullman coach offered room for a journey that quickly became a lark. The boys played cards, traded off-color jokes, raced up and down the aisles, and tossed a football until they were exhausted and tumbled into their berths. Their behavior turned the train’s confined interior into a temporary arena for youthful energy and group mischief.

The next day, someone produced balloons, which the boys filled with water in a lavatory. They took positions on the clattering platforms between coaches and lobbed the balloons at cows in fields, dusty cars waiting at railroad crossings, and sleeping dogs at small-town stations. As the train carried them onward, they sang “Bow Down to Washington” to the astonished people and animals left behind. The episode captures the journey’s comic, collective mood: the freshmen were not only passengers moving across the country, but a noisy group making a game of the passing world.

Joe Rantz’s Reversal

The same shared journey also exposed how precarious Joe Rantz’s new sense of acceptance could be. Seated in a plush Pullman seat and looking through its green-tinted window, he struggled to believe that the cheering crowd at the station had celebrated a crew of which he was part. The attention filled him with pride, but also with unease and thoughts he had been trying not to revisit.

Later, encouraged by the balloon escapade, Joe took out the guitar he had brought along. Older boys gathered as he tuned it; he concentrated on the frets and began playing the camp and cowboy songs he had learned in high school, at the Gold and Ruby mine, or from the radio back in Sequim. At first they watched, then snickered and jeered, calling him “Cowboy Joe” and a “rowing troubadour.” He stopped in the middle of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” put the guitar away, and retreated to another coach.

The incident sharply reversed the promise of the departure. Music had been a source of pride and companionship in Joe’s earlier life, but aboard the Empire Builder it became the occasion for mockery over his lack of sophistication. The train carried him toward a national championship with his teammates, yet this brief episode made him feel cast out just as he had begun to imagine himself part of something larger. In the book’s account, the journey holds both possibilities at once: the crew’s shared adventure and Joe’s renewed vulnerability within it.