Jay Cooke's Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873

In 1869, Jay Cooke, the brilliant but idiosyncratic American banker, decided to finance the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental railroad planned from Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle. M. John Lubetkin tells how Cooke’s gamble reignited war with the Sioux, rescued George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, pushed frontier settlement four hundred miles westward, and triggered the Panic of 1873.

Staking his reputation and wealth on the Northern Pacific, Cooke was soon whip...