Santa Fe: The Railroad that Built an Empire

xvi, 465 pp. "It is a thrilling story of American adventure and empire building. In it the reader meets characters who were famous in those roaring days of the Southwest : Kit Carson, the scout; Bat Masterson, gunfighting marshal of wicked Dodge City; old Jesse Chisholm of the Chisholm Trail; Jesse James; Death Valley Scotty; the builders, Col. Holliday, A.A. Robinson, Ray Morley, Lew Kingman, William Strong; the provider, Fred Harvey. Here is an exciting story of the Indian Territory land run and the opening up of Oklahoma. Here are the good times and the bad, right down to the present, with a great transportation system dedicated to the task of war and the peacetime years ahead. It is chatty, anecdotal, breezy, but packed into its a vast amount of fascinating history, not only of a railroad, but of the whole Southwest."