Contemporary Views Along the First Transcontinental Railroad
Abstract
While construction of the Pacific Railroad ostensibly began during the Civil War, it was not until that
great conflict was over that it really got rolling. In a race for government subsidies and land grants, the
Central Pacific built eastward from Sacramento, California, while the Union Pacific built westward
from Omaha, Nebraska. The two railroads met at Promontory Summit, just north of Great Salt Lake,
Utah Territory, on May 10
th 1869. It was a watershed moment.
I follow in the footsteps of photographers Alfred A. Hart and A. J. Russell who expertly recorded the
construction of the road. But this is not a re-photography project—it is, rather, photography as
archaeology. In making a comprehensive series of photographs along the original route, my goal is to
give the viewer as strong of a connection as possible to this 19
th century engineering marvel through
the remaining visual evidence of the human-altered landscape. And while not visible, I also hope to
evoke the various peoples involved with the railroad, as well as those affected by it.
I have always been drawn to western landscape photographs, particularly the work of Carleton
Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan. I tend to see their imagery as existing on opposite sides of an
aesthetic coin—with the former rendering the beautiful and the latter portraying the sublime. These
two 18th century linguistic terms, beautiful and sublime (usually considered in relation to one another),
were used to categorize one’s emotional response when viewing artwork. Imagery that promoted
pleasurable and familiar feelings was referred to as beautiful, while pictures that evoked feelings of
awe or terror, often brought on by the immense scale of nature, were referred to as sublime.
The story of the first transcontinental railroad is one of contradictions and oppositional forces not
unlike the conceptual interrelatedness of those two aesthetic terms. The surveyors explored an Eden,
but initiated its destruction. The road was a crown jewel of the industrial age, but the actual building,
the grading and tunneling, was done almost completely without machines. The railroad conquered time
and space, but this led quickly to the decimation of the buffalo which pushed the people who depended
upon them to the brink. This was the first transcontinental railroad in North America, or anywhere for
that matter. The pounding of the Golden Spike signaled the completion of a great human achievement,
but it must have sounded like a death knell to Native Americans. It put a bow on Manifest Destiny and
served as a primer for the questionable business practices that would follow in the Gilded Age.
In the end, I want these images to be a pictorial accompaniment to well-established textual histories of
the building of the railroad, the foremost being David Haward Bain’s Empire Express. His book tells
the complete tale, but when I’m in the field I most often think of the people who built the line with
their hands and their backs—primarily the Chinese, who performed so well for the Central Pacific, and
the Irish, who toiled proudly for the Union Pacific.
The railroad is still active over much of the route—which was preceded by pioneer trails, joined by the
Lincoln Highway, and eventually succeeded by Interstate 80 and air travel. While I have photographed
along much of the line, I tend to linger where the steel has been pulled up, those portions of the line
that has been abandoned for a less steep or curvy alignment. I enjoy the calm of those deserted areas
most—through modern absence, I find it most easy to imagine a 19
th century presence.