OHQ vol. 113, no. 1 yes, even if the author’s pique is undisguised and his tone, often lilted with biting humor, sometimes conveys a wagging finger of reproach.The length is more justified,though, by the author’s method. It is the revelatory descriptions of individual and often quite personal actions of key actors that carry the narrative. In Railroaded, readers see the developing network of financial schemes and questionable dealings from the viewpoints of major players: Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Francis Adams, and many others. The information comes from a deep investigation in manuscript collections that offer personal and business correspondence that amounts to an eavesdropping wiretap on insider collusions. For readers of this journal, White’s portrait of HenryVillard,the German-born financier who controlled the Northern Pacific’s completion during the early 1880s, is especially revealing. White details Villard’s deceitful practices that scrambled railroad development in the Pacific Northwest and drove the Northern Pacific to the brink of collapse, calling him“a superhero of bad management — powerful, daring, able to destroy railroads at a single blow” (p. 217). Describing Villard’s ignominious fall in 1893, as the Northern Pacific went into receivership, White quotes E.L.Godkin’s appraisal of Villard: He has been kicked out of every enterprise he was connected with here, and is universally denounced as a visionary, if not worse, who has made money at the expense of other people. . . . The unfortunate truth is that of six companies of which he was forefront,every one has either gone to smash or depreciated enormously in value, and the losers naturally ask how it is that he has so much? How vain is human greatness! (p. 397). White’s emphasis on the financiers’ machinations keeps Railroaded from devolving into an institutional history, where faceless corporations elide responsibility. The players, White insists, used other people’s money, did so capriciously, and triangulated their deceits by selling an unfounded optimism to the public as they bought cooperation from a willing and aggrandizing political class.To better infuse the story with societal details, the author includes eleven vignettes, short biographies and scenes of social change. After mixing the personal and financial histories of creating the transcontinental railroads,White concludes that we can learn from a clear-eyed accounting of the consequences befalling a nation from unwise decisions,but we can perhaps learn more from contemplating the choices not made,the routes not taken. This account of the building of the transcontinental railroads genuinely alters a stock narrative of western and national history . More than that, it also is an eye-opening cautionary story about the corrosive effect of a co-generative relationship between the power of capital and the structure of government. William L. Lang Portland State University Nature’s Northwest: The North Pacific Slope in the Twentieth Century by William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2011. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. 312 pages. $55.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. This is an important book for several reasons. While several histories of the Pacific Northwest already exist, none of their authors concentrates mainly on the region’s twentieth-century history. Traditionally, in fact, the region’s nineteenth-century history received the most attention because it was during that time that its events were most clearly differentiated from those occurring in the rest of the nation. During the twentieth century, the two histories seemed to blend into one national narrative. But by using the Pacific Northwest’s noticeable affinity for nature as their principal organizing Reviews theme, William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber have given the region’s twentieth-century history the full attention it has long deserved. Even better, Robbins and Barber not only have written an excellent history of Oregon, Washington,and Idaho,the usual components of Pacific Northwest history,but they also have cast a wide net that includes western Montana and British Columbia. Their inclusion of Canadian history is of especially great significance because it involves surmounting the always-challenging task of making meaningful transnational comparisons and contrasts. Hence, their concept of a North Pacific Slope encompassing both western Canada and the American...