Review of <i>The Life and Times of the Steamboat Red Cloud,or, How Merchants, Mounties, and the MissouriTransformed the West</i> By Annalies Corbin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From St. Louis to Fort Benton, the Missouri River served as a natural highway into the vast North American West. The Life and Times of the Steamboat Red Cloud extends our understanding of the upper Missouri during the decisive period of settlement and trade in the steamboat era from 1859 to the arrival of railroads in the mid- 1880s. This important book views the development of the American and Canadian Rockies from a maritime perspective. Journalist-historian Joel Overholser earlier emphasized the importance of the Canadian trade to Fort Benton. Corbin develops that theme through the great St. Louis-Fort Benton trading company, I. G. Baker & Company, and its flagship steamer Red Cloud. Mining NorthWest Mounted Police records at the National Archives of Canada, Corbin documents and develops the earlier theories. As the Canadian West opened in the mid-1870s, I. G. Baker & Company gained approval for a bonded line for the shipment of goods from England and eastern Canada to the Northwest Territories as a way to avoid international trade tariffs. Bonded goods, North-West Mounted Police recruits, and Canadian government payrolls were all carried on Baker Line boats to Fort Benton and then freighted over the Whoop-Up Trail into western Canada. Corbin advances our understanding of the complex relationships within I. G. Baker & Company and the strategies the company employed in competing with other major trading and overland freighting companies on the upper Missouri such as T. C. Power & Brother. These companies "ferociously" pursued contracts against each other and, in the case of I. G. Baker, even between the Fort Benton and St. Louis branches of the same company.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".