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Iron Wheels & Broken Men by Richard O'Connor Railroad barons & plunder of west
Iron Wheels & Broken Men by Richard OConnor Dust Jacket The Railroad barons and the plunder of the west 1973 380 pages Indexed
SEE PHOTOS FOR DUST JACKET DAMAGE
Like most myths of the American Dream, the "Winning of the West" has been nurtured on images of heroic cavalry charges defeating the red savages, dramatic shoot-outs at O.K. Corral, and the iron horse bringing "civilization" to the prairies. However ... the real heroes are the courageous settlers who attempted to subdue a wilderness of droughts and blizzards, dust bowls and waterless steppes, an inhospitable land where thousands of men -and dreams-died. More than vanquished by the land, they were exploited by the villains-the financiers, promoters, and government officials - who lured thousands from as far away as eastern Russia to fill the open spaces, and the thousands found themselves dumped-without preparation, equipment, or money -on hostile prairies whose fragile ecology could not support intensive farming or ranching.
Stripping away legend, IRON WHEELS AND BROKEN MEN discloses how and why the railroads were built, with a cast of players from exploited Chinese and Irish
Bandy dancers and dance-hall girls to the Wall Street tycoons, land barons, and presidents who conned thousands onto the sterile waterless plains.
Often in its own words, the post-Civil War generation narrates its struggle for survival amid adobe huts and starvation while enriching Russell Sage, Jay Gould, the Central Pacific's Big Four: how the "victorious" white man was almost as ruthlessly exploited as the red man; how the next generation's embittered proletariat found themselves the slum tenants of Omaha and Oakland; how the model Indian Territory of Oklahoma was eventually converted into the dust bowl of the Okies.
From years of study and observation, author Richard O'Connor cuts through the pathetic irony of "farms at $3 per acre and not a foot of waste land" and reveals how the golden spike that linked the first transcontinental railroad would ultimately become the spike driven into the very heart of the American Dream.
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