ABSTRACT
In their fictionalized account of late nineteenth-century American business and politics titled The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner put their hero in a quandary. “To the young American,” wrote Twain and Warner, “the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.”1 Their character, Philip Sterling, heads West to reap his fortune, but doesn’t know where to begin. In the real West of the 1870s, many young men similarly headed West looking for paths to fortune. Frank Morrill Murphy followed in their footsteps.2
