Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883

Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883. By Jocelyn Wills. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2005. xii, 290 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-87351-510-2.)

Jocelyn Wills provides an important contribution to business history and the history of the upper Midwest. Employing an impressive set of primary sources and a Chandlerian business history template, she narrates entrepreneurs' role in using steamboats, railroads, wholesaling at St. Paul, and flour milling at St. Anthony Falls to create the Twin Cities.

These topics have been covered from an agrarian or labor perspective or in company histories, but Wills's narrative sympathetically describes an entire entrepreneurial network and comprehensively portrays its various business strategies and their results, using economic and demographic statistics as well as correspondence, account books, newspapers, and promotional literature....