Born in the timber colony of New Brunswick, Maine, in 1848,
Andrew Benoni Hammond got off to an inauspicious start as a teenage
lumberjack. By his death in 1934, Hammond had built an empire of
wood that stretched from Puget Sound to Arizona--and in the process
had reshaped the American West and the nation's way of doing
business. "When Money Grew on Trees" follows Hammond from the
rough-and-tumble world of mid-nineteenth-century New Brunswick to
frontier Montana and the forests of Northern California--from lowly
lumberjack to unrivaled timber baron.
Although he began his career as a pioneer entrepreneur, Hammond,
unlike many of his associates, successfully negotiated the
transition to corporate businessman. Against the backdrop of
western expansion and nation-building, his life dramatically
demonstrates how individuals--more than the impersonal forces of
political economy--shaped capitalism in this country, and in doing
so, transformed the forests of the West from functioning natural
ecosystems into industrial landscapes. In revealing Hammond's
instrumental role in converting the nation's public domain into
private wealth, historian Greg Gordon also shows how the struggle
over natural resources gave rise to the two most pervasive forces
in modern American life: the federal government and the modern
corporation.
Combining environmental, labor, and business history with
biography, "When Money Grew on Trees" challenges the conventional
view that the development and exploitation of the western United
States was dictated from the East Coast. The West, Gordon suggests,
was perfectly capable of exploiting itself, and in his book we see
how Hammond and other regional entrepreneurs dammed rivers, logged
forests, and leveled mountains in just a few decades. Hammond and
his like also built cities, towns, and a vast transportation
network of steamships and railroads to export natural resources and
import manufactured goods. In short, they established much of the
modern American state and economy.
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