In “Gods of War, Gods of Peace: How the Meeting of Native and Colonial Religions Shaped Early America,” this former editor of American Heritage magazine offers a dense but accessible overview of the era’s spiritual and cultural exchange. And, it turns out, that exchange was deep-seated, nuanced and kinetic. Bourne cites historian Francis Jennings, who puts things thus: “Interaction caused constant transformation on both sides.” Transformation would ultimately be eclipsed by the near-ruination of the Native side, yes. And Bourne doesn’t fully succeed at sticking, um, religiously to the religious theme — you’ll find tangents upon tangents — but his chronicle is transfixing, blasted with ironies and heartache, and colored with towering figures both known and (undeservedly) obscure.

The bulk of the book takes place in New England, particularly Massachusetts, beginning in 1620, when the Pilgrims arrived. English settlements in Massachusetts still resonate as a touchstone of the American identity, the geographic showcases of the quest for religious freedom. Plymouth’s Protestant Pilgrims (or Separatists, because of their pronounced break with Anglican hierarchy and pomp) exerted a fierce independence, mistrusting any clerical elite. Given their debt to the local tribesmen — the area’s Native Americans shared food through the notoriously harsh first winter and coached the Pilgrims in the ways of their new environment — the Pilgrims became a bit more easygoing in their interactions with the indigenous culture than their stiffer-than-stiff Boston counterparts, the Puritans. The Bostonians were later arrivals who retained a healthy respect for English-style hierarchy and a decidedly earthly lust for land and power.

The Pilgrims’ unexpectedly tolerant attitude reached its highest point, perhaps, in their relationship with Squanto, a Patuxet Wampanoag Indian, whose people had been wiped out by plague. He had been enslaved first by the English and then by the Spanish, from whom he escaped. Squanto’s intelligence and fluent English would ensure the Pilgrims’ very survival. Indeed, they would eventually declare him a “saint,” accepted as a true member of the Separatist religious world. Pilgrims referred to him as “a spetiall instrumente sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”

Squanto and other Wampanoag tribesmen were receptive to the English. But Massasoit, who outranked Squanto as an overlord of the Wampanoags of the whole region, possessed the greater clarity — for he perceived that receptivity was a slippery slope. (“Massasoit” is a title, a kind of grander order of sachem, or tribal chief. Massasoit’s real name was Ousamequin, or Yellow Feather.) Massasoit would never accept the English god or English ways. Indeed, soon after the Pilgrims arrived, the local tribes organized a three-day religious ritual that attempted to exorcise the Pilgrims from Massachusetts altogether.

It obviously failed, and both natives and settlers began the hard work of hard diplomacy, to figure out how to coexist. As Bourne puts it, “Friendship of a certain sort might be possible, even a working brotherhood, but acceptance of the English settlers’ unnatural, biblically ordered life was out of the question … [the Wampanoags'] choice was between hostility toward the English dominion or assimilation within it.”

Massasoit’s response at once addresses a practical dilemma and reflects the religious, economic and cultural ways of the Algonquin — the loosely unified family of all northeastern tribes. (The Wampanoags were part of the Algonquin world.) “What is this thing you call property?” he declared. “It cannot be the earth. For the earth is our mother, nourishing all her children, bears, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs to him only?”

Parse a quotation like that, and you don’t wonder why these spheres collided, but how they were ever able to coexist at all. But somehow they did, at least for some 50 years. And it was mostly on the power of individual bonds between influential figures. This is the good news and bad news of “Gods of War”: Bourne’s strong suit is character development — people really come alive — but his weakness is a confusing grasp of chronology.

Still, all that character development offers up fascinating pairings. Take, for instance, Hobomock and Myles Standish. Hobomock (Algonquin for “devil”) was a member of Massasoit’s court and the tribe’s political representative to Plymouth. He was a recognized spiritual leader as well, having survived a ritual poisoning that proved his holy power. Standish was the military commander in chief of Plymouth colony, and forged a friendship with Hobomock when they mounted a joint expedition to punish one of Plymouth’s nearby rivals in the beaver trade (such cooperative ventures were unusual, but not unheard of). Perhaps Standish felt a kinship with Hobomock, since Standish himself was an odd man out in the Pilgrims’ tight-knit world: As a Roman Catholic, the highly talented commander was certainly unique in Plymouth, having been voted into a leadership position, in spite of a decree barring non-Separatists from office.

Massasoit feared the religious conversion of his people so much that he tried to insert a clause in the peace treaty with the Plymouth settlers forbidding the colonists from even attempting it. Hobomock, on the other hand, became much more welcoming of the Pilgrims’ ways. After witnessing the successful medical treatment of Massasoit by Plymouth healer Edward Winslow and the apparently successful easing of a drought through a “solmne day of humiliation” (the Pilgrims’ community-wide day of reflection and prayer), Hobomock began to see power in the Pilgrim god. He eventually went to live in the Standish household, “religiously open,” according to Bourne, until his death.

Which brings us to the least “religiously open” residents of Massachusetts, the Puritans of Boston and Massachusetts Bay. They dwelt in the “City on a Hill,” Gov. John Winthrop’s phrase capturing their menacing mix of arrogance and deep piety. This too was a theocracy, one of the bleakest ideological flowerings of Calvinist predestination, evolved from decades of theological debate, persecution and brutal religious warfare. Their god was wrathful, dispensing salvation only to a few. Boston firebrand religious leader John Cotton personified the contradictions of the Puritan way: a near-tyrannical religious fanaticism that quickly turned to fear as a means of warding off the wilderness of temptations in the new world.

Bourne points out: “As the Puritan leaders made further (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to control their increasingly trade-oriented and decentralized society, they emphasized the alien nature of Native Americans.” Local tribesmen personified a demonic threat. It didn’t take long for Cotton to move from embracing the idea of Christianizing Native Americans to saying they should be “blasted in all their green groves and arbors.” He and other religious leaders even contorted themselves to produce the doctrine that Native Americans were one of the lost tribes of Israel, brought to the new world by Satan!

Needless to say, this view didn’t indicate fertile ground for understanding or a peaceful religious commingling. For the Puritans, faith was a tool to isolate, control and retain power. Wars of conquest against the natives of southern New England were cast as holy wars, with Christian soldiers led into battle by a pillar of fire against the armies of Satan, in an arena where no quarter would be given.

Incredibly, Bourne finds an example of hope for coexistence and deeply layered interaction in this most unlikely spot. For this paranoid, violent world of Massachusetts Bay spawned John Eliot, one of the most innovative and successful missionaries in America. His is a name many associate with the first book published in America, the Bay Psalm Book. “Innovative” doesn’t sound like an adjective you’d be likely to apply to any Puritan, but Eliot possessed both common sense and shrewd flexibility, plus a deep moral conviction that was capable of transcending doctrine.

He had the smarts, for instance, to toe the party line in terms of public support for orthodoxy, especially in the matter of just who was destined for heaven. However, he bravely opposed the outrage that was the Pequot War of the 1630s, rightly citing Puritan massacres of native women and children as a serious moral issue, and expressed real compassion for the “perishing, forlorne outcasts” who survived.

Eliot intuitively grasped that learning the Algonquin language was one obvious key to success. The Puritan hierarchy lurched from its policy of persecution back to one of supporting missionary work in 1646, a pattern that would be continuously repeated (often the motivation was to vie with the growing sway of French missionaries). The timing was right for Eliot to take to the road, armed with his knowledge of Algonquin (which he’d learned from a native tutor).

The depth of Bourne’s research and his ear for the right detail make his account of Eliot’s early sojourn both a delight to read and insightful history. We see him toting a fruit basket and a Bible, dressed in a practical brown leather outfit, not the black of a preacher. He is mocked for his stumbling Algonquin by one group of Native Americans but shrugs it off, finding a more receptive audience in the person of Waban, a sachem just outside of today’s Boston who had already enrolled a son in an English school.

Significantly, Bourne mines the subtext that, while Eliot “had a talent for reaching into people’s souls … his proselytizing must be seen in the light of other economic and political factors, including the [Native Americans'] dispirited condition … they had lost confidence in their own culture and its reigning divinities … why not make a canny move toward survival?” In other words, Waban didn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blew. It may have been some consolation that Eliot seemed earnest in his efforts to understand a culture that seemed on the road to extinction.

Clearly, he took pains to find common ground between native and colonial spiritual beliefs. Bourne writes that, as Eliot saw it, “The biblical angels might be compared to woodland spirits; the villagers practiced family prayer as a respected tradition. Furthermore, there was the concept of manitowuk — the holiness that dwells within certain forms and practices. Where there was holiness, there might be God.”

Eliot wrestled to find a way through the maze of Puritan doctrine that had to be mastered by the Algonquins before any recognized conversion could occur. By 1663 he would produce the Up-Biblum God, an Algonquin version of the Bible, which, as Bourne writes, would enable Massachusetts natives “to name and thus grasp the workings of God; they would remain their own people, with their own preserved language, even as they approached the Christian religion and the church.” A direct solution to a practical problem.

His work attracted attention and financial support from England, to the Bay Colony’s horror until they siphoned some of the funds; the Puritans had grown increasingly uneasy with Eliot’s brand of inclusiveness. They worried that he might admit members into the church on too liberal terms. Some wanted him stopped, but Eliot had become too famous in England — he had the backing of aristocrats and royalty — to be eliminated.

Meanwhile, Eliot would champion the flowering of a remarkable community removed from the neurotic, prying eyes of the Puritan leadership and the relentless push for new land for settlers. The community of (vaguely Christianized) Native Americans was called Natick, after the Algonquin for “my land” and now the name of a Boston suburb. Flourishing from the 1650s to the 1670s, it represents a turning point in the relationship between settlers and the natives they systematically dispossessed. Again, an individual vision and initiative were responsible for establishing something like cooperative interaction. Eliot had the wisdom to remove himself and his “praying Indians,” as they were known, from the fervid swirl of Boston policy. He also had the good sense to tread lightly in his attempts to inculcate “civilitie,” the bedrock of English Puritan mores, that would precede acceptance of the Indians within the church.

In Natick, polygamy became an official no-no, as was this decidedly unappetizing practice: “If any shall kill their lice between their teeth, they shall pay five shillings.” English-style street plans alternated with a preference for wigwams and bold architectural achievement (the Natick residents built a large bridge over the Charles River, connecting two parts of town). A new, self-sufficient economy also reflected the new order, with men farming instead of hunting and women spinning fabric instead of farming. The context is heartbreaking, but this was truly a matter of survival: “The villages sounded Algonquin in language and laughter, they smelled Algonquin in cookery and curing, they looked Algonquin in their wigwams and their day-to-day leadership … they were a visionary attempt to preserve a culture by helping it to adapt,” writes Bourne.

The success of Natick became a model for more than a dozen other similar towns, but few would last; Natick itself would be abandoned in the conflagration of King Philip’s War in the 1670s. (King Philip was the somewhat mocking name given by colonists to Metacom, one of Massasoit’s sons. They said he reminded them of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father. Upon Massasoit’s death, King Philip abandoned his father’s hard-won if shaky peace, and pursued a full-out attempt to eradicate English presence in New England, burning many settlements across the region.)

Eliot was an extraordinary figure. An equally astonishing presence, akin to Eliot, but this time on the Native American side, was William Appess. Appess was a Pequot, an ordained Methodist preacher and leader of the “Mashpee Revolt” of 1833, set off when the Massachusetts government, under President Andrew Jackson’s orders, attempted to oust the Indians from the area. Appess embodies the themes of adaptation, interaction and survival, representing a living bridge between religions and cultures. He would use his spreading fame as a bully pulpit, arguing for the equality of Native Americans and Christians. “I felt convinced that Christ had died for all mankind,” as he put it. Having lived among the Mohawk, Appess apprehended a commonality among various Native American peoples, referring to them as “my brethren.”

What Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act meant for the Cherokee is comparatively well known; for the residents of Mashpee, on Cape Cod, a lonely bastion of “praying Indians,” it looked like the tragic denouement of 200 years of adaptation and scrambling for survival. Appess, sent by the Methodist Church leadership, arrived in the nick of time to organize a military defense. After establishing that the Mashpee were not to be trifled with, and correctly reading Massachusetts sensibilities as more tolerant than Jackson’s (which is not saying much), Appess combined civil disobedience with due process, eventually achieving his reinstatement as minister over a white outsider. More significantly, he was able to secure self-governance and a measure of dignity for the Mashpee.

What does Mashpee’s example teach us? Appess knew that for Native Americans the real definition of the terms of interaction usually boiled down to some form of compromise vs. absolute destruction. The miracle is that he triumphed, even on a small scale. At the time, that was a radical achievement. However, Appess was not able to forestall the specter of death and destruction for Native Americans as it marched in tandem with Manifest Destiny. As Bourne points out: “The revolt should not be seen as a victory beacon flashing eternally against the dark but as a light blinking from near obscurity for future inquirers into Indian nationalism.” “Gods of War” is full of such blinking lights. It is a sad but real thrill to see them flicker in such vast, vast darkness.

So who was this wonder, whom the New York Times once called “the most fascinating man in America” and who was consulted by, for starters, Thomas Edison, George Gershwin, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman?

Born in 1877 in Kentucky tobacco country, he was the son of a hard-drinking, philandering, failed businessman. Young Edgar came to his calling early. Some ascribe his talent to a fall on a nail that pierced his brain at the age of 3. Who knows what unfathomable calculus of reramped brain waves and access to — oh, I’ll just say it — the collective unconscious made this theological prodigy what he was? This much is true: From childhood on, Cayce was subject to visions and could perform extraordinary feats of memory. At 14, he memorized a 110-page congressional speech in one night, purportedly by simply sleeping on the document. Later, his powers leaned toward the medical. Indeed, he developed a singular ability to “enter” the body of a sick person who was hundreds of miles away and provide a pinpoint diagnosis and treatment, though he had no medical training. I know what you’re thinking: big scam. But a parade of would-be debunkers — doctors, scholars and celebrities (including Houdini), plus hundreds of patients — poured out astonished, grateful testimonials to Cayce’s veracity.

Medical diagnoses segued into general predictions of the future. Cayce learned to harness his psychic abilities by recording his trance readings: This slight, unassuming man predicted the onset of World Wars I and II, the stock market crash of 1929 and hundreds of individual events. He didn’t just deal in futures. He also came to embrace reincarnation and gave insights into past lives. Lest you think “Holy Shirley MacLaine!” know this: Cayce’s readings took their cues less from gossip and more from scholarship, including a fascinating series on Jesus, elucidating details that would be borne out by the later discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Cayce would remember nothing when he awoke from the trances, which delivered the streams of often cryptic information from what he called “the Source.” He also frequently served as a conduit for specific people or (as if that weren’t eerie enough) angels. The subtext of all this is at once darkly problematic, fascinating reading and — if you let yourself roll with it — inspirational. One would think Cayce’s extraordinary abilities would have placed him in some lead-lined, subterranean government vault, or at least in the center of a hugely popular radio show. But while Cayce begat controversy and became a minor celebrity, his bizarre talents forced him and his family into seminomadic penury. His dream was to use his abilities in the service of his mystical Christianity. In 1929, the dream came true in the form of an endowed hospital in Virginia Beach, Va., that would solicit medical advice from the Source.

But fundraising ran afoul in fruitless searches for oil, buried treasure (!), hot stock tips and the psychic medical business. We watch helplessly as “friends” are won over by Cayce’s gifts and guileless love of God, then become confidants and finally custodians of Cayce’s hospital vision before appropriating it for their own material ends. Lawsuits abound. Illusions are shattered. As Cayce laconically understated, “I’m just not that good a businessman.”

With his perceived dream in ruins about him, Cayce begins again. It was not, he realizes, about money, oil or even a hospital to help the sick. It was about a return to God after lifetimes of preparation. As the Source stated: “The primary object of all human experience was to become a worthy companion to God.” It’s sobering and compelling to watch Cayce accept the challenge of the faith that underscores his legitimacy as a psychic. There is no 900 number flashing beneath a grainy TV image. This was a prophet without profit.

Other biographers have had a go at this rich material, but Kirkpatrick, award-winning filmmaker and author of the acclaimed “A Cast of Killers,” was allowed the first (and possibly the last) comprehensive access to the Cayce archives. His prose can be workmanlike, and the sheer volume of psychic transcriptions (the Cayce Archives number 170,000 pages!) can wear. But the meticulousness of Kirkpatrick’s method can’t help providing fresh insights. As if suffused with the significance of his subject, he carefully reassembles the quotidian mosaic of Cayce’s world, from Kentucky tobacco farm life to the minutiae of running an early-20th century photography business (one of Cayce’s first professions). There are even touches of inadvertent comedy: You’ve got to love, for instance, the dream in which Cayce dines out with the Duke of Windsor, Mrs. Simpson and an ebullient Jesus Christ, resplendent in evening wear. I could have lived without Kirkpatrick’s windbag descriptions of the lost continent of Atlantis and even some of the more discursive of the Source’s pearls. But in the end, Kirkpatrick seems a mere conduit; it’s Cayce himself — soft-spoken, courageous, honorable, transcendent — who matters.

Daunting words for a non-Indian reviewer: three minutes. One-twentieth is off-limits, then. And the rest? At times, you feel you’re getting it, humming along, borne on Alexie’s white-water prose, so colloquial, so funny, driftwoods of poetry spinning smart and fine — then he throws the oars away: “Suddenly, everything looked dangerous … morning dew boiled and cooked green leaves … the vanishing point was the tip of a needle.”

So Alexie writes in “The Sin Eaters,” the angriest and most apocalyptic story of the bunch. It’s as bitter as chicory, reminiscent of his 1996 novel “Indian Killer,” in which an Indian serial killer not only slays whites but scalps them, too. “The Sin Eaters” also plays kid brother to Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” with, in this case, Indian purebreds corralled into a terrifying Aldous Huxley-ish facility and forced to reproduce. “They wanted our blood. They would always want our blood,” explains Jonah, the boy who is damned into a sort of fertility slavery. A metaphor for America’s history of genocide? A slap at how p.c. whites lionize the “pure” Indians of today?

Who knows? But what fuels these stories is rage — rage decanted through black humor. (“Crazy Horse didn’t need Tums,” cracks one character. “Native American,” says another, “there’s an oxymoron for you.”) Rage, black humor and lots of sex. Straight, gay and combo platter, but usually somehow pointing toward communion.

The most breathtaking use of carnality-as-connection occurs in the title story, which was the best entry in the New Yorker’s “Writers for the 21st Century” special issue last year. A citified Spokane Indian (Alexie is both Spokane and Coeur d’Alene) picks up a hitchhiker, a scarred Lummi boxer, and through their interaction feels his soul ache and swoon back to his tribal past. “I watched him rise from earth to sky and become a new constellation,” Alexie writes. “I travelled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die.” To grasp the context of the “travelling upriver” line, you need to know how much of a role salmon plays in Alexie’s work — salmon as Northwest Indian tribal totem, as symbol of birth and death, as archetype of impossible odds. As the father in “Toughest Indian” tells his son: “Love you or hate you, white people will shoot you in the heart. Even after all these years, they’ll still smell the salmon on you, the dead salmon, and that will make white people dangerous.”

OK, this must be said: Alexie’s prose can get fishy. The puns and fables and wildness work when he sticks to the voice of Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the beautifully blithe creation in his 1993 story collection “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and in his acclaimed 1998 film “Smoke Signals.” But overstress that tone and the only Tom left is Robbins — or Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut. In other words, things get cloying. In “The Sin Eaters,” for instance, a guard says to the boy, “Jonah, you can call me Ishmael. You see, we all have our whales.” And in “South by Southwest,” a flat joke about a bank robber, did Alexie really have to dub the love interest Salmon Boy?

But once you know that in real life Alexie is a poetry-slam champion and a veritable performance artist on his book tours (he’s renowned for pretending to be a drunken Indian heckler), the excess makes sense. Some of this stuff probably works better live. Indeed, you can almost hear the laugh track — that’s a compliment — in the tour de force “Dear John Wayne.” In that story we learn, via the transcript of the interview Etta Joseph gives her scandalized interlocutor, that not only was she an extra in John Ford’s 1956 movie “The Searchers” but she also slept with the Duke. It’s all curiously healing and hilarious, seeing as the off-screen Wayne is a kind, sensitive sort, while his on-screen character, Ethan Edwards, was perhaps the most anti-Indian racist in cinema history. Alexie takes every chance and then some: “‘My real name is Marion,’” said John Wayne as he slid the condom over his erect penis. His hands were shaking.”

Oh my. Thing is, Alexie manages to make their lovemaking touching in spite of the lampoon. And that’s because he has such a radiant grasp of the meaning of ceremony; watch how he repeats certain phrases (“I’m back”) and various images (salmon, stars) like dance steps at a powwow. In one of his most affecting stories, “Saint Junior,” he gives us a retired pro basketball player named, pricelessly, Roman Gabriel Fury: “Given a choice, he’d rather have been a buffalo hunter and soldier killer than the point guard for the Lakers, but there was no such choice, of course.” So Fury pursues his humanness, his Indianness, as fiercely and creatively as he can. Just like Alexie.

Nice. Indeed, “petty popinjay” is alliteratively worthy of the former Nixon administration speech writer’s famous “nattering nabobs of negativism.” But these sundry vocabulary builders do not make up for the patchwork feel of “Scandalmonger.” Safire is no Patrick O’Brian — this is not a seamless immersion into a bygone era. It’s more a sort of subpar George Bernard Shaw play, in which the characters exist mostly to advance the era’s ideologies and debates. That’s not a bad thing; the book compels, but less as a polished work and more as really fine scaffolding.

And what are those ideologies and debates? Republicans vs. Federalists and Freedom of the Press vs. the Alien and Sedition Acts, as prismed through four scandals spanning the years 1792 to 1803. This quartet leads off with Hamilton’s sexual and fiduciary shenanigans, then moves to the unconstitutional imprisonments under the Sedition Act, revs up to the rumors of a liaison between President Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings (one tabloid subject crows that her son Tom bears a “sable resemblance” to the other Tom) and caps it all off with the trial that established the concept of malice as the cornerstone of libel law. The players? Hamilton, Adams, Burr, Madison, Monroe and Jefferson, plus such lesser-known luminaries as Vermont congressman and newsman Matthew Lyon — dubbed Spittin’ Lyon after he hawked one in the face of Connecticut Rep. Roger Griswold.

Is there a Deep Throat in all this? Indeed: The novel’s prime leaker is a congressional clerk named John Beckley, whose job of copying sensitive papers allowed him to unsettle lots of muck for the raking. (If not for Beckley, Hamilton might have been our third president.) All these characters are diverting, but “Scandalmonger” is most taken up with two men eminently gifted in, as Safire puts it, “the poetry of slander”: William Cobbett, a Federalist pamphleteer pseudonymously known as Peter Porcupine, and James Thomas Callendar, a Scots-born ink-stained republican gadfly, aka Timothy Thunderproof. Callendar is the eponymous one, “a dark spirit who chews the cud of his rejection,” as Safire writes. A pre-presidential Jefferson, it seems, used Callendar as his attack dog; the Virginian even sanctioned the Scot to strew “papershot,” as Safire artfully calls invective, against George Washington, something no politician could do in public and expect to survive. Callendar’s reward? Upon gaining office, Jefferson disavowed him — only to have Thunderproof storm his revenge in print. (He was a prime spreader of the Sally Hemings story.)

Oh, yes — there’s another girl in the book. Quite a girl. She’s the beguiling Maria Reynolds, the “statuesque” and “near-violet-eyed” mistress of both Hamilton and Burr and the Monica of the 1790s. Safire even winkingly calls her “that Reynolds woman.” The Maria stuff is quite fun in both a laugh-with and laugh-at kind of way; let’s just say Safire is no Jacqueline Susann when it comes to boudoir prose. Burr, for instance, is “discreet and controlled, taking his time, with incredible stamina in his lovemaking, watching in the long looking-glass.” Hoo!

Things go better when Safire cites primary sources (which, to his credit, he does often). For example, Adams on the ever-randy Hamilton: “A superabundance of excretions.” We’ve acknowledged Safire the wordsmith. What of the amateur historian who wrote a novel on Lincoln called “Freedom”? At its best, “Scandalmonger” shows off this Safire’s gusto for research; we learn, for example, that no one shook hands then, in the belief that the act transferred yellow fever. In addition, we’re afforded “The Underbook,” a 43-page afterword that spells out what’s fact (the bulk of the story) and what’s fiction (the often ill-advised plot devices, especially a goofy affair between Callendar and Maria Reynolds).

In the end, the Safire who is most in evidence is the Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist. “Scandalmonger” pretty much fails in character development and pace. But it redeems itself through the author’s greatest strength: his ace powers of synthesis. The quandaries of the day are crisply laid out. “Hamilton thinks that man’s nature is evil and that he needs strong government to control his passions,” Safire writes. “Jefferson sees man as essentially good and needs to protect his freedom from the monarch’s domination. From that flows all the dissension of our time.” Well said.

Think of the money to be made! Oh — and the accompanying moral beneficence: Hundreds of new towns would spring up along the railroad, civilization thus conquering the Western wilderness; and faraway Asian lands could be missionized as well. As David Haward Bain writes in “Empire Express,” Whitney “would annihilate distance, yes — and with it, ignorance, want, and barbarism — through the ineffably promising devices of American trade and American Christianity.”

In the event, the building of the railroad — which didn’t commence until the Civil War had begun and wouldn’t end until Grant was in office, by which time Whitney was all but forgotten — was sooted through with corruption, shoddy workmanship, political maliciousness and such horrific catastrophes as frostbite, lethal sunburns, avalanches, misapplied explosives, Indian raids, snow blindness, smallpox and the viciousness of the new towns themselves. (The Cheyenne Leader ran a daily column titled “Last Night’s Shootings.”) Still, the completion of the railroad remains, after the saving of the Union, the great American triumph of the 19th century.

At its best, the sprawling “Empire Express” is a stunningly researched, prismatically written mix of Robert Caro, David McCullough, Shelby Foote and Connie Bruck. At its worst, it’s a litany of dry documents and dull transactions that caves in upon itself; Bain, a Middlebury College historian and the author of numerous essays for Smithsonian and American Heritage, took 14 years to finish the tome, and at times he is clearly overwhelmed. The “Nicholas Nickleby”-size cast is impossible to keep straight. And do we need really to know the details of every bond offering?

But if you can make your way back from the spur lines, the main tracks of the narrative are fascinating. For instance, we learn that the Civil War both enabled construction to begin (the South, which had insisted that the new line cross through the slave states, had no say after secession) and impeded it (building materials were relegated to the war effort). Lincoln, once a lawyer for an Illinois rail line, comes off as shrewd and instrumental. (Bain’s set piece on the Great Emancipator’s railroad funeral procession is one of the highlights of his book — so many flowers littered the tracks that the train had to stop repeatedly while the rails were brushed clean.)

The story shuttles between the Central Pacific line — whose construction started in Sacramento and battled through the impossible Sierra Nevadas (there was no choice but to follow the Donner Party’s route in reverse) on toward the Nevada and Utah territories — and the decidedly more venal Union Pacific line (whose rococo record of corruption inspired Mark Twain’s scathing “The Gilded Age”), which launched in Omaha, Neb., and had to cross voluminous Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho lands to meet up with the Central Pacific in Utah. Both companies were guilty of “bending truth and geography for years,” as Bain cleverly puts it. The Central Pacific helmsmen (the famed old-money names of California: Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, who had “no more soul than a shark”) weren’t as egregious as their Eastern brethren, but they cut their share of corners. Trestles were hastily built on unstable gravel; cottonwood ties were substituted for iron and rotted accordingly.

I wish Bain had spent as much time on his proletarians as on his capitalists, but great details abound nonetheless. Just as the transcontinental railroad represented a grand link to vast Asia, so, too, did it bring Asia to America: By 1865, some 90 percent of C.P.’s workers were Chinese men, mostly from the famine-struck Kwantung province. Unlike their better-paid Irish coworkers, who drank cold water, the Chinese preferred boiled tea; thus they contracted much less illness and came to dominate the work force.

If Chinese workers and slipshod construction mark the tale of the Central Pacific, “wholesale robbery” and Indian battles stain the chronicle of the Union Pacific. The U.P. lends the book its biggest villain, the “inscrutable corsair” Thomas Durant, who cooked so many books, advanced so many unnecessary detours and bribed so many politicians that it’s still impossible to fully trace his roundelay of felonies. But the passages on Indian battles make you far more heartsick. The U.P.’s lines bisected the hunting grounds of many tribes, and Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux, threatened by starvation, began raiding the new railroad towns, sabotaging the tracks, stopping the trains to steal food and supplies and scalping and killing passengers and settlers. Atrocities and reprisals proliferated on both sides.

Yet on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were finally joined in a “Mountain Wedding” in the tiny Gentile settlement of Promontory Summit, Utah. The site was a terrific snub to Brigham Young, a substantial railroad backer, whose Mormon followers had endured two years of drought and locusts while they wholeheartedly helped build the railroad, in the vain hope that it would cross through a strategic Mormon town.

Synchronized by Morse code messages tapped across the nation’s by-then-unbroken set of “eloquent wires” (as Whitman rhapsodized), the signal went out after the final hammer of the final, golden spike. Church bells peeled across the country; cannons boomed. At Promontory Summit, numerous dignitaries waxed lyrical. One of them cited a prophecy that “a granite statue of Columbus would be erected on the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains,” then nodded to the great throng of workers gathered to celebrate their unparalleled accomplishment: “You have made the prophecy today a fact,” he roared. “This is the way to India.”