In the aftermath of the American civil war, the banker Jay Cooke became involved in controversial plans to build the USA's second transcontinental railway, the Northern Pacific. The Northern Pacific got into financial difficulties, which indirectly led to the collapse of Cooke's bank in the stock-market panic of September 1873.

One part of Lubetkin's book looks at Cooke's complicated relationship with the NP and its associated companies and the mixture of corruption and incompetence that got them into such a mess.

The other, more interesting, part of the narrative describes in detail how between 1870 and 1873 parties of NP surveyors, escorted by the US army, ventured out into the largely unexplored and unmapped Dakota and Montana territories to find a suitable line for the railway. They had to deal with natural hazards of weather and terrain, the human problems of isolation and boredom, and the active hostility of Sitting Bull, who had no illusions about what would happen to the Sioux people if the railway were built.

Lubetkin (who modestly describes himself as a retired cable TV executive) has clearly done a great deal of research in primary sources, and gives clear and vivid accounts of the surveying expeditions, with entertaining portraits of the personalities of the soldiers and engineers. There are detailed accounts of the army's skirmishes with the Sioux, well illustrated with maps. Lubetkin argues that it was the exaggerated accounts of these fights published in the press (inter alia by publicity-seeking officers like Custer) that were the most immediate cause of the collapse of investor confidence in the NP.

The financial chapters are inherently more complicated than the military, and Lubetkin doesn't seem to be able to present the full picture without a great deal of leaping backwards and forwards in time, which is both confusing and leads to excessive repetition. Here he would certainly have benefited from more ruthless use of the red pencil by his editor: he is giving us far more information than we need, much of it not strictly relevant to the story he wants to tell.

Lubetkin´s eagerness to tell us everything also leads to a few howlers, where he throws in little bits of background information that either came from unreliable sources or became distorted in the telling. For instance, he manages to suggest in the space of a few pages in chapter 3 that George Stephenson invented the steam locomotive in 1825; that the Stockton and Darlington used wooden rails; and that American engineers first discovered the effects of centrifugal force in the 1830s. None of this matters to the story of the NP, but it undermines his valuable research and detracts from what would otherwise be an excellent book. ( )