| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853–1895. By William A. Dobak. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. xvi, 241 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8061-3071-7.)

William A. Dobak's Fort Riley and Its Neighbors explores the relationships among federal spending, the army, and local development in Davis (now Geary) and Riley counties, Kansas. In so doing, Dobak wants to discover "whether the army and the market it afforded helped to attract settlers" and "who got the army's money, how they spent it, and how that affected the community." He also seeks to link the Fort Riley experience to larger regional and national contexts. 1

Established in 1853 at what its founders believed to be the extreme western end of steamboat navigation on the Kansas River, Fort Riley underwent several transformations over the next half century. As it turned out, river navigation proved impracticable; rather than being an important quartermaster depot, in its early days the fort was notable for its large size (at its peak, the federal reservation encompassed twenty thousand acres) and thriving freight-hauling trade. The arrival of the Kansas Pacific Railroad in 1866 seemed a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the railroad promised cheaper transportation. But, in killing off the overland wagon business, it also caused some local residents to question whether the small supply contracts the fort generated were enough to offset the loss of so much good land to the federal government. . . .

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