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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.4 | The History Cooperative
103.4  
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December, 2007
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REVIEWS

Robber Baron
The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes

By John Franch
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 374. Illustrations, notes, index. $45.00.)

Anyone who has read about Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century has encountered Charles Tyson Yerkes. Street railway magnate, swindler, philandering husband, freewheeling businessman at a time when few laws prevented corruption, Yerkes would seem to be one of those larger-than-life figures about whom a biography would make scintillating reading. 1
      Born in 1837 to a well-off Quaker Philadelphia family, Yerkes opened his own brokerage firm while in his early twenties. By the time he was thirty-four he had amassed a great deal of money through a series of shady business maneuvers that landed him in prison for larceny in 1872. Pardoned quickly through political maneuvering, Yerkes began to rebuild his fortune in street railway construction. He left Philadelphia in the mid-1880s to avoid the social scandal of his divorce and remarriage to a much younger woman, and to seek better business opportunities in the rapidly expanding city of Chicago. There he built several traction lines on the city's north and west sides and was highly instrumental in constructing the Loop elevated railway. . . .
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