Stagecoach:  Wells Fargo And The American West, by Philip L. Fradkin

I wonder if the author got any discount off of his mortgage with Norwest and Wells Fargo for writing this book.  I found it interesting that before this work of corporate history that the author had to write about the mundane relationship he had with the company beforehand, because although the corporate history is a generally positive one, it is not a flattering or servile sort of account.  The author is really trying to write a compelling corporate history here and he generally succeeds.  To be sure, this book felt like the historical equivalent of an electronic press kit, but all the same the history of Wells Fargo as a company (or at least as a family of companies) is compelling and interesting and the author does a god job at demonstrating the importance of the West to Wells Fargo and the importance of the company to the growth of the trans-Mississippi West from the middle of the 19th century to contemporary times.  Not everyone will be interested in reading a corporate history of Wells Fargo, but for those who are, the book contains some very interesting cameo appearances from the founder of Bank of America as well as the colorful Wyatt Earp and his associates.

The large print version of this book (which I happened to read, since that is the version that my local library system had) runs to over 400 pages and is divided into three parts after a foreword, acknowledgments, and preface, where the author (as noted above) states his minimal relationship with the company except as a historian of them in this particular project.  The first part of the book examines the beginnings of Wells Fargo as a stagecoach company and as a bank within  family of companies that includes American Express (with which it was a sometime rival in one of its lines of business until the period of World War I when the express portion of Wells Fargo’s business was forcibly merged into American Express), which ends with the rise of Western leaders of the company in the wake of the failed attempt by Wells Fargo to fight against the corrupt thieves of the Central Pacific (led by Leland Stanford and his associates).  The second part of the book then looks at the new regime these robber barons established over Wells Fargo, before the third part of the book examines Wells Fargo in its attempts to re-brand itself as a financial services company in the 20th century and its efforts to help feed the nation.

To be sure, this book is an entertaining account and it demonstrates the moral flexibility of companies and their employers and executives over the course of America’s history.  Wells Fargo has shown itself to be a resilient company in the face of changing legal regimes as well as technologies, and always willing to expand its geographical scope as well as its lines of business, all while maintaining a commitment to brand itself according to the express line of business (whether its stagecoach or its railroad interests).  And as the author of the foreword states, the story of Wells Fargo could only have happened in the American West, where the need for capitalization and the combination of various lines of business has marked the behavior of companies from the beginning, and not always for the better.  The author spends a lot of time talking about thieves, both internal and external, without noting that some of the biggest thieves were in fact the directors of the company at the time, which is perhaps an uncharitable thing to say in an officially sanctioned history, I imagine.