General literature on the history of American railroads is surprisingly scarce. While numerous volumes have been written in recent years on special phases of the railroad question, few histories of any real value are available. Probably the best outline history of American railroad development as a whole is still Arthur T. Hadley's "Railroad Transportation, its History and its Laws" (1885), but this necessarily covers only the earlier periods of railroad growth and its discussions are limited to the problems which confronted the carriers many years ago. An extremely valuable book (now out of print) giving a very complete picture of railroad building and expansion in the pre-Civil War period is "The Book of the Great Railway Celebration of 1857", by William Prescott Smith. This is primarily a description of the opening of the Ohio and Mississippi Railway, which connected the Mississippi Valley for the first time with the Eastern seaboard. A volume of real value, but somewhat technical, giving a complete and accurate view of the reorganization period of the great railroad systems, from 1885 to 1900, is "Railroad Reorganization", by Stewart Daggett (1910). This book contains outline sketches of the histories of nearly all of the large systems, as well as very accurate details of the financial reorganizations of all of the defaulted properties. The most comprehensive history of any American railroad system is "The Story of Erie", by H. S. Mott (1900), but even this is partially unreliable and much of it is compiled from unofficial sources. On the financial history of the Erie Railroad, the really valuable authority is Charles Francis Adams in his "Chapters of Erie" (1871). This book furnishes a full and accurate account of the regime of Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, James Fisk, Jr., and the famous "Erie ring," including "Boss" Tweed, and also throws side lights on the character and career of Commodore Vanderbilt. Among other important histories of particular railroad systems may be mentioned "The Union Pacific Railway", by John P. Davis (1894) and "History of the Northern Pacific Railroad", by Eugene V. Smalley (1883); but neither of these volumes covers the recent and more interesting periods in the development of these properties. To get a complete and satisfactory view of the later development of the Northern Pacific system, one must turn to modern biographical works, such as the "Life of Jay Cooke", by E. P. Oberholtzer (1910), the "Memoirs of Henry Villard" (1909), and the "Life of James J. Hill", by Joseph Gilpin Pyle (1916), which also recounts at length the rise and development of the Great Northern Railway system. But in these volumes, as in many biographies of great men, the authors often betray a bias and misrepresent facts vital to an understanding of the development of both of these railroad systems. A recent volume entitled the "Life Story of J. P. Morgan", by Carl Hovey, although extremely laudatory and therefore in many ways