The Golden Spike: How a Photograph Celebrated the Transcontinental Railroad
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
Railroad foreman Jack Casement walks by Russell’s field darkroom wagon near the tracks in Utah In the darkroom the photographer sensitized the plate in a bath of silver nitrate for several minutes before placing it in a lightproof wooden plate holder The next steps were to insert the plate holder into a slot in the camera box and while the plate was still wet to aim the camera at the scene to be photographed Then the photographer removed a dark slide from the plate holder to expose the plate to the still-covered camera lens There was no shutter so the photographer took off the lens cap to expose the plate to the light for several seconds The photographer then replaced the lens cap reinserted the dark slide removed the plate holder and took it inside the dark tent or wagon He or she then took the plate out of the holder and developed it in the dim orange light coming through the small safe light window in the tent Despite the difficulties and awkwardness of photography at the time everyone involved agreed that it had to be used to document the historic venture And in addition to the historical significance of the railroad photos there was money to be made when photographers sold their images It was
becoming obvious that simple words and drawings were no longer enough to portray major news events The photographic medium which had been invented earlier in the century also had to play its part In 1867 two years before the completion of the first transcontinental railroad a Philadelphia magazine declared Nothing seems beyond the reach of photography It is the railway and the telegraph of art The telegraph detects and catches the thief and so does photography The railways carry us to points afar and so does photography in fact it does more As late as March 1869 no meeting place had been established So the two track-laying operations kept going Finally they passed right by each other in the Utah wilderness Both companies made a lot of money for each mile of track they laid So their directors decided to keep construction going until Congress chose the place where the two lines of track would connect In the words of Grenville M Dodge the Union Pacific’s chief engineer the two lines were now running side by side and in some places one line was on a raised embankment right above the other THE RAILROAD AND AMERICAN INDIANS As the Union Pacific wound its way westward in the 1860s it helped to bring more and more whites into the Indian-inhabited lands lying west of the Mississippi River It disrupted and forever changed the way American Indians had lived for thousands of years At first Plains tribes mostly left the railroad workers alone But a series of battles between U S soldiers and Plains tribes began in the mid-1860s And as the railroad pushed westward warriors harassed the railroad workers Small groups of Sioux and Cheyenne raided work sites and stole horses cows and other livestock They also killed some railroad surveyors who had pushed ahead of the work crews to scout out the best routes for the tracks In the meantime the Union Pacific had a tribal ally the Pawnee who were bitter enemies of the Sioux The company often hired Pawnee men for protection against other tribes In return the railroad allowed Pawnee people to ride the work trains for free Also in October 1866 company executives hired some Pawnee to stage a mock raid on a train to entertain politicians and other dignitaries riding inside
