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The two most powerful men in the nation’s dominant industry, Edward H. Harriman and James J. Hill, got into a fight in 1901 for control of the nation’s western railroads. The battle also pitted the Rockefellers versus J. P. Morgan, “Big Oil versus Big Steel,” and the nation’s two largest banks, First National and City National. The two sides fought over a government-chartered northern “transcontinental” railroad that became the key to control of Chicago and Pacific trade with emerging markets in Asia. In the span of only seventeen hours in four days in May 1901 its stock rocketed from $110 a share to $1,000, the result of an inadvertent “corner” in its shares by the opposing forces. It resulted in a calamity for the “shorts” before a compromise was reached, the near collapse of Wall Street, the most precipitous decline ever in American stock values, and the fastest recovery. The stalemate led to the creation of a holding company, briefly the largest railroad combine in American history, which the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly declared unconstitutional. The ruling launched the reputations of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as the “great dissenter” and President Theodore Roosevelt as the “trust buster.” The court ruling energized the so-called “progressive’ movement, strengthened enforcement of the Sherman Act as the “first effort to control the economy at large,” and led to stifling government regulation that crippled America’s railroads for seven decades.

Taconite Dreams describes a century-long struggle to preserve the iron ore mining in Minnesota's Iron Range region. Once among the world's richest iron ore mining districts, the Iron Range propelled the U. S. steel industry in the late nineteenth century. Yet in the twentieth century the Iron Range struggled in the face of deeply entrenched challenges from globalization, automation, and depletion. Taconite Dreams describes the key moments in the Iron Range's modern history, including the development of taconite mining as a technological fix for declining hematite mines, the 1964 taconite amendment to Minnesota's constitution, the bruising federal pollution lawsuit that closed a taconite plant, the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board's economic development policy, and battles over mining's memory and legacy. Taconite Dreams offers the first critical history of this important yet largely overlooked mining region during the twentieth century.