Grand excursion

"In June 1854, to celebrate completion of the first railroad to reach the Mississippi River, the owners of the Chicago & Rock Island invited hundreds of shareholders, bondholders, notables, and fashionables to travel by rail to Rock Island, Illinois, and from there by steamboat to St. Anthony Falls in fledgling Minnesota Territory, all at the railroad's expense." "Relying largely on the excursionists' own accounts of the roundtrip journey, Steven Keillor's engaging portrait of a week in the lives of this microcosm of antebellum society captures the prevailing sectionalism, the railroad-driven…