The Golden Spike: How a Photograph Celebrated the Transcontinental Railroad
Chapter One HISTORIC CONNECTION Andrew J Russell stood near a tall tree towering by itself in a canyon in the northern reaches of the Utah Territory Standing beside the Union Pacific Railroad’s still unfinished new line the aged pine marked the spot at which the tracks had come exactly 1,000 miles 1,609 kilometers Company employees wanted to commemorate making it that far from Omaha in Nebraska Territory where construction had begun four years before They made a sign that read 1000 Mile Tree and hung it from the lowest branch of the pine A group of about 40 Union Pacific workers posed beneath the tree on January 9 1869 One of them had climbed to the top At the right moment Russell signaled him to wave and with a camera mounted on a tripod he captured the scene A photographer who had made a name for himself creating visual images of the recently fought Civil War Russell 39 had been hired the year before by the Union Pacific His assignment was to document one of the largest construction projects ever attempted in the United States In 1862 Congress had passed legislation authorizing the creation of the first transcontinental railroad which would link the eastern United States to the West Coast Some far-thinking people had been calling for such a project for almost 20 years Yet at the time Congress approved it not all Americans saw the wisdom of it A few even thought that building a railway line more than 1,700 miles 2,736 km long through vast stretches of largely unexplored wilderness was impossible They continued to echo the sentiment of a Cincinnati newspaper that had ridiculed the idea To claim that the railroad link would create settlements commerce and wealth the 1846 article said was like pledging to unite neighboring planets in our solar system and make them better acquainted with each other
A railroad worker perches atop the 1000 Mile Tree in Andrew Russell’s 1869 photo The Weber Canyon Utah tree has since died but was replaced by a new pine tree But the naysayers began to fall silent as the gigantic project slowly but steadily moved forward In the mid-1860s as the Union Pacific headed westward from Omaha another company the Central Pacific Railroad Company pushed eastward from California Their goal was to meet somewhere in between forming a single railway line that would bridge much of the continent Early in 1869 it became clear that the historic meeting place would be in northern Utah
Railroad workers in 1868 remove rock and soil called digging out a cut in Echo Canyon Utah After getting his shot of the workers and the ancient tree in early January Russell moved on He and his three assistants including Stephen Sedgwick a young man with a keen interest in history did their best to keep up with the railroad crews The Union Pacific’s foremen and their many workers moved along at a furious pace often laying down 4 miles 6 4 km or more of track in a day Russell and his aides had to take photos of more than the work itself They were also expected to photograph the towns and scenic wonders through which the railway line passed That required them to travel back forth and sideways along the route looking for and documenting whatever Russell thought was most significant In the 1860s taking photos especially outdoors was a slow painstaking procedure Including the processing phase taking a single shot could consume two hours or more So it was not unusual for Russell to fall behind the work crews forcing him to catch up on his way to another camera setup
Usually he had no idea what his next subject would be so he rarely could plan ahead very far One major exception loomed on the horizon however Now that the Union Pacific tracks were nearing the spot where they would connect with those of the Central Pacific he needed to plan The ceremony marking the event was expected to engage a worldwide audience and he would be one of only a handful of photographers present To maintain his reputation he needed to be as organized and otherwise prepared as possible It would have been far easier for Russell to do his job if he could have traveled light But that was impossible for him as it had been for Mathew Brady and the other well-known Civil War photographers The typical equipment they carried included a box camera weighing up to 30 pounds 14 kilograms a second device called a stereo camera because it captured two images at the same time a collection of delicate glass plates and lenses many bottles of chemicals for sensitizing the glass plates and developing the photos and a tent that could be a mobile darkroom All of this equipment some of it fragile had to be carried by wagon And that slowed Russell and his assistants considerably particularly in the rugged terrain through which the railway passed Russell and other photographers of the times employed a complex and very time-consuming method of creating pictures Wet-plate process was only one of its many names The photographer first cut a glass plate into the desired size Often it was 10 by 13 inches 25 by 33 centimeters but there were several other sizes He or she then mixed chemicals and carefully poured a sticky mixture of collodion onto one side of the plate The photographer then went into what was called a darkroom even though for field photographers the room was often a black tent or a wagon
