The St. Louis-San Francisco Transcontinental Railroad: The Thirty-fifth Parallel Project, 1853-1890 (review)

90CIVIL WAR history and socially with white men, he must first be placed on a reservation. Then a step-by-step program based on the humanitarians' own nineteenth -century values could begin: a massive education program followed by Christianization, allotment, assimilation and citizenship. "The incorporation of many of the reform ideas into the body of Indian policy from 1869 to 1890 suggests the significance of their work," writes Mardock. Indian-rights workers helped to formulate Grant's Peace Policy and to convince several Indian delegations that its acceptance was in their best interest. They generated enough publicity and pressure to influence the appointment and the discharge of several federal bureaucrats and to defeat the proposed transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department. The capstone of their efforts, of course, was the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887. Generally, this reviewer has nothing but praise for Mardock's wellwritten and tightly organized discussion of the advances and setbacks of these dedicated humanitarians. At times he guides us along trails originally blazed by Loring Benson Priest's Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865-1889 (1942) and Henry E. Fritz. The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890 (1963), but the author's exhaustive analysis of the impact of Eastern reformers on so many facets of federal Indian policy is a unique and important contribution. His thorough research made use of personal papers and dozens of newspapers from Cambridge to Colorado. His presentation shows balance, taking into account the reformers' one-sided viewpoints, their reluctance to compromise and the use of exaggeration and half-truths. The author is also cognizant of the dichotomy between East and West in the debate over Indian rights, and judiciously documents the frontiersman's side of the story. Mardock's conclusion that the reformers "were able to realize most of their goals" is questionable, given the persistence of injustice nd inequality in the red man's world. Nor was the Dawes Severalty Act the Indian Magna Charta that humanitarians assumed. The author ought to have noted, as did the Hoover Commission in 1948, that allotment programs "proved to be chiefly a way of getting Indian land into non-Indian ownership." Edmund J. Danziger, Jr. Bowling Green State University The St. Louis-San Francisco Transcontinental Railroad: The Thirtyfifth Parallel Project, 1853-1890. By H. Craig Miner. (Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, 1972. $8.50.) The pursuit of the dream of building a railroad which followed the thirty-fifth parallel across the continent from St. Louis to San Francisco is the focal point of this book. Professor Miner details the hopes and failures of the men who were associated with this project from its outset to 1890. Involved were five efficient railroad corporations which fell BOOK REVIEWS91 "in the confrontation of the relatively ethical managers of this road with the relatively unethical managers of certain competitors. . . ." Professor Miner assesses the efficiency and ethicality of each of these corporations and their managers according to their devotion to the dream rather than evaluating the means by which they achieved it. Contrariwise, the unethical competitors are those who attack the aspiration of reaching San Francisco by way of the thirty-fifth parallel. Thus, it was this magnificent dream of the leaders of the project, such as John C. Fremont, Clinton Fisk, Joseph Seligman, Charles Rogers and General Edward Winslow which provided the inspiration to construct the railroad, even if their business acumen, which was weak at certain crucial times, allowed the corporations they led to fail. Charles Rogers was the one exception since he successfully combined superior managerial leadership with the dream of reaching the coast. However, the dream failed, when the opposition of Collis P. Huntington, Jay Gould, Russell Sage and Leland Stanford took control of the Frisco in 1882 in order to further their ambitions as well as those of the railroad corporations they represented. Just as the Frisco received the right to build through Indian territory which might have saved the dream, it was absorbed by these men who were uninterested in a St. Louis-San Francisco trunk line. This corporate history of the thirty-fifth parallel project is written in a most...