In 1869, Jay Cooke, the brilliant but idiosyncratic American banker, decided to finance the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental railroad planned from Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle. M. John Lubetkin tells how Cooke’s gamble reignited war with the Sioux, rescued George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, pushed frontier settlement four hundred miles westward, and triggered the Panic of 1873. Staking his reputation and wealth on the Northern Pacific, Cooke was soon whipsawed by the railroad’s mismanagement, questionable contracts, and construction problems. Financier J. P. Morgan undermined him, and the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended congressional support. When railroad surveyors and army escorts ignored Sioux chief Sitting Bull’s warning not to enter the Yellowstone Valley, Indian attacks—combined with alcoholic commanders—led to embarrassing setbacks on the field, in the nation’s press, and among investors. Lubetkin’s suspenseful narrative describes events played out from Wall Street to the Yellowstone and vividly portrays the soldiers, engineers, businessmen, politicians, and Native Americans who tried to build or block the Northern Pacific.

Practially growing up with a camera in hand, Jim Fredrickson of Tacoma, Washington, took his first picture of a steam locomotive in 1936. In a few years, railroad men were regularly seeing the "kid with the camera" alongside the tracks and in the rail yards." "Then one day in 1943, one of the men said, "You're always hanging around here, kid, you might as well go to work."" "The chief dispatcher at Tacoma's Union Station hired the sixteen-year-old high school student to serve as a "callboy," telephoning conductors, brakemen, engineers, and firemen an hour-and-a-half in advance of when they were scheduled for duty. Thus began Fredrickson's thirty-nine year career with the Northern Pacific Railway's telegraph and dispatching departments." "Fredrickson continued to take exceptional photographs - his many pictures depict the last great glories of the steam era as coal-fired locomotives were replaced by diesel engines in the 1940s and 1950s. His photos and yarns tell of the NP's men and women as well as the steam engines, depots, diners, cabooses, sidings, yards, shops, bridges, and tunnels. Today, whether it is a BNSF freight train with containers or a silvery AMTRAK passenger train, the engineers all know Jim Fredrickson.--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The story of the men who build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's.