Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West

Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West. By Claire Strom. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. x + 228 pp. Photographs, illustrations, maps, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $35. ISBN: 0-295-98348-5.

Farming in the northern plains states has never been easy. Even during the "wet years" of the late nineteenth century, yields on the northern plains were relatively low compared with the harvests of their southern neighbors. If farmers on the northern plains had one advantage, it was the railroad. By the turn of the century, the Northern Pacific Railroad, the Great Northern Railway, and a host of smaller local …