Reviews and Comments

A lovely, place-focused entry in the genre of “tech changes us”, sub-category “transportation tech changes us”. The amazing use of archival photography separates this from many other, drier, less human books of the genre, and I recommend it for that reason-the photography often evokes what mere words can’t.

Besides the pictures, the book is at its best when it sparkles with little stories and data that make this a particularly Montana book, evoking how the state’s size and emptiness made the railroad so important and it’s usage different from how people in other states may think of this. For example, from page 34: “During their
twelve-hour run between Havre and Williston, North Dakota, a distance of 309 miles, [a pair of daily local trains] stopped at up to sixty-one places, of which fifty-six were in Montana … in places ranging in size from the incorporated town of Wolf Point, with 2,098 residents, to the unincorporated rural district of Madras, with a population of 64. In 2018, representative of modern-day America, daily scheduled intercity trains, buses, and airplanes served only forty-two towns and cities in the entire state of Montana.”

I do wish it had more of these striking details and data; someone who has spent much time thinking about the general class of problems it discusses and is looking for more specific examples may leave wanting more. But to capture the flavor of what trains were in this place and time, it does a great job.

Picked up from the Bozeman Historical Museum’s little free library on a whim, because (following my reading in Lakota history) I’m interested in the 1800s West as a space of technological change. Patents came up in the first paragraph, so in that sense not disappointing.

This very slim book is extremely focused on the gun and its technical change over time—powder weights, sights, metals used in shells, production volume, etc. Discussion of its usage is restricted to analysis of what the troops liked and disliked about it. Interest in the gun itself is assumed; that the interest stems in large part from the weird hero worship of the genocidal Custer is so far out of scope that it almost seems unfair to critique the book for it.

Suspect there’s an interesting book to be written on the gun in the West (especially one that follows Pekka Hamalainen in taking indigenous agency — and therefore gun usage — seriously) but this will only be of interest to specialists.