The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 79, July 1975 - April, 1976 Page: 487

Book Reviews

tradition of a long line of exploiters who risked all in a headlong rush for
greater and greater wealth. The type owed its existence to a surplus of
exploitable land which could be plundered with impunity because there
was always some more over the next mountain. In this day of limited
resources and conservation awareness, people like Greene are looked on
with some scorn; but in their time they were men to be admired and
respected.
Greene's fortune was built on copper and rugged individualism, and it
was ironic that the growing importance of copper in many ways signaled
the end of that same rugged individualism. Copper was the best practical
conductor of electricity, and electricity was going to be one of the essential
ingredients in a new age in which collective effort would make obsolete the
kind of frontier individualism which was characteristic of Greene and
others like him. Greene lived on a seam in history; and by examining
Greene's career, Sonnichsen gives the reader insight into the way in which
the fabric of history on one side of that seam differed from that on the
other.
A word must be said for the fine illustrations which accompany the text.
Over fifty photographs have been included and each is a delight. Greene's
world is remote from us now, and the illustrations help significantly to give
the reader a real feel for that distant time and place. In addition to the
illustrations, a complete index and a valuable list of sources serve to round
out a thoroughly satisfactory book.
Eastern Montana College ROBERT T. SMITH
Challenge of Change. By Nelson Wolff. (San Antonio: The Naylor Press,
1975. Pp. xxiii+285. Index. $12.95.)
At I I :59 P.M. on July 30, 1974, the Texas state constitutional delegates
in Austin ended an exercise in futility. For seven months they had worked
to produce a new document which would be infinitely superior to the Con-
stitution of 1876; but they had run afoul of the membership and lobby
by trying to pass statutory provisions such as the "right to work" clause.
After the thirty-second attempt to reach a compromise agreement they fell
three votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority and President Price
M. Daniel, Jr., of Liberty, declared the convention to be at an end.
In Challenge of Change Nelson Wolff, a former legislator from San
Antonio, who was one of the originators of this convention as well as a
delegate to it, has tried to explain what happened during those seven months
during which the members spent millions of tax dollars without any tangible

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