Two Tracks Across the Continent
Two defining technologies of nineteenth-century America—railroads and photography—developed largely in parallel and brought about drastic changes in how people understood time and space.
Trains bridged considerable distances with great speed. Photographs brought earlier events and far-off places to life for their viewers. Combining maps and pictures from the Library of Congress collections can deepen appreciation for the fascinating connections between the two technologies as both came into maturity during the race to construct a railroad to the Pacific in the years 1863–69.
The following chapters explore the desire for fast transcontinental travel and describe how photographers expertly told the story of the massive railroad survey and construction work:
With the ceremonial driving of the “Last Spike” connecting the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, rail lines linked Omaha and Sacramento and offered the country a reliable route over the daunting terrain of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. Over the course of construction, railroad companies contracted a number of photographers to document the progress.
The pictures they made served to document and also to influence. Published in a range of formats from stereo cards to leather bound albums of large format prints, photographs were prized tools for garnering financial backing from shareholders and government support from Congress. For the general public, the photographs enticed new settlement and travel to distant territories.
The feats pictured during the short, six-year span of constructing a railroad between Nebraska and California bolstered the narrative of Manifest Destiny—a belief that the expansion of the United States across the West was a divine right. The government encouraged new settlers by granting lands up to ten miles from the tracks to the railroad companies for resale. Photographs showing new town sites and illustrated publications advertising ample natural resources emphasized that Western lands were suitable for increased habitation.
Together, photography and the railroads gave rise to a nascent travel industry that would blossom later in the nineteenth-century. Photographers instilled the desire to see in person the wonders reproduced on a stereo card or in a print and the railroads offered the means to reach them.
The railways were a boon to photographers, as well, offering easier access to previously inaccessible areas and facilitating transport of cumbersome equipment and supplies needed to produce the images. Railroad companies would be recurrent patrons of photographers through the nineteenth-century as additional lines were built to traverse new routes across the country and connect to existing networks.