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Iron Wheels and Broken Men: The Railroad Barons and the Plunder of the West . By Richard O'Connor. New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973. Pp. 380. $8.95.

No doubt this book has a legitimate audience among those unfamiliar with even the rudiments of railway history and seeking an overview. It is not, however, for the serious student of railway history or the history of the West, amateur or professional, nor does it begin to accomplish the goals its author and publisher claim for it. In the Dee Brown manner, O'Connor states in the introduction that his history will look from West to East, and that rather than assuming the vantage point of the "boardrooms of Wall Street," as have standard railway histories, he will look at the process from the viewpoint of the "broken men" who suffered from railway exploitation. A worthy goal, but what follows is standard fare watered down from source material consisting of a selective survey of familiar secondary works. There is an overview of the Populist movement; a description of the Greeley, Colorado community; the Sioux uprising of 1862; Santa Fe colonization efforts in Russia; the importation of Chinese by the Central Pacific; the machinations of Jay Cooke, Jay Gould, the Big Four, Jim Hill; fragments from O'Connor books on Jack London and Ambrose Bierce; and numerous items interesting enough if the writer had established any convincing connection between them and railroad development except in the most general way. It is difficult to say that an assortment of such random musings on the West has a thesis, but O'Connor certainly makes the point several times that the railroads erred in settling the West too rapidly and too thoroughly for the region's resources. His heroes are John Wesley Powell, whose 1870s report on arid lands suggested government or corporate regulation of land taking, and the Populists, who, while ranting at railroad barons, suggested sometimes collectivist solutions. Nowhere, however, does the "point of view" of the book or its originality seem striking.