Jay Cooke's gamble : the Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873
"In 1869 Jay Cooke, the country's leading banker, was revered as "the Financier of the Civil War" and was, at age 48, bored with just making money. After being rejected as secretary of the treasury, the brilliant but idiosyncratic Cooke again decided to do something challenging: finance the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental railroad planned from Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle." "M. John Lubetkin tells how Jay Cooke's gamble reignited war with the Sioux, rescused George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, set off a wave of Northern European immigration, pushed frontier settlement 400 miles westward, halted western Canada's drift into the U.S. orbit, triggered the Panic of 1873, and spurred J.P. Morgan's rise." "Lubetkin's narrative describes events played out from Wall Street to the Yellowstone and portrays the soldiers, engineers, businessmen, politicians, and Native Americans who tried to build or block the Northern Pacific."--BOOK JACKET
eBook, English, ©2006
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, ©2006