The Trans Continental Route Illustrated. Rand, McNally & Co., 1876, Chicago. MC39876
The East And The West, in Crofutts New Overland Tourist and Pacific Coast Guide. George A. Crofutt, The Overland Publishing Company, Omaha, Nebraska, 1880. p. 134. MC1582
ABSTRACT
The Trans Continental Route Illustrated Crossing the Switzerland of America, Panoramic Map of the Great Overland Route From Occident to Orient, is a long form map that is preoccupied with connecting the transcontinental to the global. Published in 1876 its precedents are rooted in prior experiences of westward travel while also carrying details that are informed by older European landscape sensibilities – Grand Tour experiences where rhetorics of nationality and empire are equated with antiquity and landscape monumentality. The role of the traveler was to cultivate encounters, framed through the windows of their transportation, and that safely offered up the landscape as an array of sublime and beautiful views.
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The Trans Continental Route Illustrated displays a series of assumptions that leverage the familiarity of its audience with such landscape sensibilities. It first calls upon Switzerland as a benchmark of monumental beauty. And then between the maps panoramic format and its narration of traveling a representational equation is established, evoking a range of immersive viewing media that were immensely popular throughout the mid nineteenth century. Panorama rotundas and moving panorama performances were prominently understood for their visual and narrative evocations of landscape, and by the 1870’s alongside stereo-optic viewers and other peep-view devices these forms had become an established feature of urban museological and entertainment displays.
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The Trans Continental Route Illustrated was ostensibly produced to promote and celebrate the Transcontinental Chicago and Rock Island Railway. It aims to build upon information and experiences of travel across the North American continent while seeking also to dispel a great deal of misinformation. Most importantly it sets forth a new narrative of global connectivity with the American Midwest at its center. In order to secure its place in these respects it crafts a series of comparisons between the old and the new. It implies how travel across the continent has changed, before and after the railway, it infers that the older European landscapes are now surpassed by the opening North American interior. It proposes a global directional re-orientation, traveling to the east by taking passage to the west. It describes a comfortable affordable opportunity for a new American leisure seeking public and aims to set itself apart from old-world European traveling elites. The series of reflection offered here demonstrate some of the precedents seen in tourist guidebooks from the period while pointing at many of their ongoing echoes.
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• Across The Continent
• Old World – New World
• Panoramic Map
• Switzerland Of America
• Around the World
Details; Left: Cover; Right: (detail) Annex No. 1 p251. In Crofutt’s New Overland Tourist and Pacific Coast Guide. George A. Crofutt. The Overland Publishing Company, Omaha, Nebraska, 1880. MC1582.
ACROSS THE CONTINENT
A prominent feature of Samuel Bowles’s 1865 publication, Across The Continent: A Summers Journey to the Rocky Mountains, The Mormons and The Pacific Ocean, is its optimism. Bowles writes with a sense of certainty and with a self-awareness as being an innovator of leisure tourism in North America. The book anticipates the forthcoming trans-continental rail connections further west. At the time of writing connections were in operation across the Missouri River into Kansas and Nebraska. The tone of writing in this and many other guide books across the preceding decades covers a range of tones and voices, from aspirational and boosterish to poetic and fanciful. These guide books usually promulgate their honesty and accuracy, and many lament the poor quality of their rivals for good reason.
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Bowles in his 1865 book writes via a series of letters to Schuyler Colfax (1823–1885, Colfax was the 25th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives) with whom he had traveled by stage coach across the continent the previous year. His awareness of the purpose of his text is adamantly clear. His aim being – “…to give, with compactness and comprehensiveness, the distinctive experiences of the Overland Journey”. In this sense Bowles confirms his role as an active agent for the promotion of travel as a pleasure driven pursuit and in his interests for the establishment of tourism in North America. He continues; “You know how strange it seemed to us that our party were almost the first who had ever traveled Across the Continent simply to see the country, to study its resources, to learn its people and their wants, and to acquit ourselves more intelligently, thereby, each in our duties to the public,—you in the Government, and we as journalists.” Bowles writes to Colfax as an insider, but he does this in a public forum, the implication here being that their shared experience is authentic.
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In this introductory letter too he sets up a tonal counterpoint between North America and Europe, an idea that gains momentum in this and other subsequent guide books. Over a decade later Bowles influences can be felt in The Trans Continental Route Illustrated, which includes an equally purposeful text. In the text panels running along the top of the panoramic map is a rationale for why the new route by Rail Road across North America is so much better than anything else that preceded it, anywhere else in the World. Traveling to the east, to Asia by traveling west is the key idea. Its claims, based on comfort and convenience are circumstantial. The idea is offered of a more widely accessible option. The availability of transcontinental travel is articulated here, very much as it is in Bowles’s books, in a mass market context. It speaks with the certainty that travel is no longer only in the purview of either the very rich or the well-educated.
Inset map and Front page, p. ii. in, Across the Continent: A Summers Journey to the Rocky Mountains, The Mormons and The Pacific Ocean. Samuel Bowles. Hurd & Houghton, New York, 1865. MC25778.
Luxury Of Modern Railway Travel. Pullman Palace Dining Car. in, Trans-Continental Tourist’s Guide, George A. Crofutt & Co. Publishers, New York., 1870. MC27962
OLD WORLD – NEW WORLD
The Trans Continental Route Illustrated sets up a series of comparisons between what travel was like in the past, against what the new rail link will bring. The future is presented in every sense as an American prospect. The rhetorical tone in the descriptive text establishes its global context with an immediate certainty. In its opening lines the idea is presented that travel to Asia from Europe is a three-hundred-year-old problem. Rather than traveling to the east by traveling east the text launches into its rationale based upon the opposite. “The course of travel for obvious reasons seeks the parallel line of transit; the line of travel traverses nearly the same latitude …” which makes for a more even and more comfortable temperate than the “Red Sea route,” which will be fully appreciated by Europeans.
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When stated in such “obvious” terms the old-world/new-world rhetoric is picked up visually, it is evident in the maps design. The map is arranged to be read from left to right and while it can be read in a single stretch as a single coast-to-coast map image it is folded leporello style, which invites being read like a book. Following along the route from San Francisco to Omaha and Chicago a series of vignette like images pepper the landscape, there are 31 in all. These images deliver a related meta-narrative which reinforces the old-world/new-world conditions more knowingly. The images assume a high level of knowledge about settler experiences and offers illustrations of the new railway as a series of technological advancements. In very straightforward ways, the Pullman Palace rail cars are pitched visually against the eating and sleeping conditions of emigrants a decade previously on the overland trail. There is an additional and perhaps more subtle comparison being made about the safety of the mountain route through the Sierra Nevada. A calm picturesque view of Donner Lake is presented immediately adjacent to an illustration that is titled ‘Exterior of Snow Sheds’. The proximity of these images both recalls and dispels the fate of the Donner Reed party in the winter of 1846–1847. The snow sheds were an important innovation of the trans-continental railway, built from robust lumbar to shield the railway lines in mountain passes where snow fall and avalanches were most likely to bury the rail tracks. The message in the vignette images appear set on dispelling any misgivings potential passengers may have about the safety and comfort of the new route.
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The rhetoric of old and new continues by implication in cultural and political terms too. The old-world problems are evidently pitched as having been largely solved by new American solutions. The newness entering the world by means of the trans-continental route is confirmed in this map as an avowedly American national project that is being realized through a Republican meritocracy. American democracy is placed in an unspoken counterpoint with the European monarchism and the class-based order of the old world. The implications are that the landscapes west of the Mississippi river are now accessible and the journey across the mountains, that was previously unsettlingly arduous is now refined and edifying. The kind of first class luxuries that were previously reserved for a European and east coast elite now available in the Pullman Palace dining and sleeping cars, or more correctly, to anyone who could afford to pay the fare.
Front cover. Trans-Continental Tourist’s Guide, George A. Crofutt & Co. Publishers, New York., 1870. MC27962
PANORAMIC MAP
The panoramic format of The Trans Continental Route Illustrated is one of its key features. Not only in it’s format as a long-form map but also as a carrier of a number of panoramic attributes. The title, which extends across both its front and back covers, offers one indication of its embedded panoramic heritage. Maps that employ a long format are not uncommon, but the Trans Continental Route Illustrated seems more of an anomaly and its intent, to promote and celebrate the trans-continental railway, follows in the wake of a great deal of overland travel experiences and boosterism. Within the map the thirty vignettes along its length offer a series of views each with its own short caption. While their placement might suggest a narrative flow, from west to east, there is no apparent narrative connection across the map. It is incumbent upon the viewer to know what is depicted to make something of their content and context. All the vignettes function rather more like views in passing, like things seen from a train window while traveling. They appear to be concerned with three broad subjects. A number of the vignettes show real places, cities and townships, homesteads and farms. Then there are depictions of the railway infrastructure, bridges etc. and the famed snow-sheds in the Sierra Nevada mountains. As a sub-category to this group the Pullman palace cars are detailed. Finally there is a group of views showing scenes from the past. The captions in this group confirm a date range from 1849 to 1851. The inclusion of such specific information indicates and affirms the assumption of a tacit knowledge, and a connection with panoramic media.
Details from The Trans Continental Route Illustrated. Rand, McNally & Co., 1876, Chicago. MC39876
Right: A portion of the playbill for, The Immense Moving Mirror of the Land Route to California, by James F Wilkins. 1851 The State Historical Society of Missouri Columbia, Missouri.
While these vignette images don’t receive direct comment in the text above the map they do comport with popular trail narratives of the day. Their content and compositional structure are prefigured by the images included in a number of George Crofutt’s publications. For example the front piece on The Tourist’s Guide and the plate, (Annex No.1.) American Progress, both show the same range of elements as are included in the vignettes. And like the vignettes the Crofutt illustrations appear to be informed by a certain theatricality. A sense of time and space is collapsed into a single image a characteristics of landscape representation that owes much to moving panoramas a form of theatrical entertainment that was in the height of its popularity in the Eastern United States and Europe in the mid-1800’s. With precedents in much older tableaux-vivant and theatrical-set making, a moving panorama can be understood as a kind of landscape performance. It consisted of a painted canvas depicting a series of landscape views as a continuous but episodic flow of picturesque places, dramatic incidents and localized encounters. Each journey was presented on two or three reels each measuring around fifty meters long by two-and-a-half meters high. A moving panorama would be unrolled before a seated audience, as a narrated journey in the form of an animated lecture, with music, lighting and sound effects. Many news articles describe feelings of immersion and of having actually traveled to distant landscapes.
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Notable amongst many overland trail panoramas for its accuracy and drama was The Immense Moving Mirror of the Land Route to California, by James F Wilkins. Created in 1850 from drawings made while traveling on the overland trail from St Louis to California in 1849, Wilkins presented his panorama to much acclaim in cities east of the Mississippi throughout the 1850’s. The overland panoramas followed the format and approaches of earlier river panoramas, and amongst these one of the only surviving examples is The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (c. 1850) painted by the artist John Egan. There seems to be little doubt that the makers of The Trans Continental Route Illustrated understood these panoramic precedents and likewise that this would be true for its intended audiences. The title, Panoramic Map of the Overland Route, would have carried with it a ring of familiarity. Viewing this map would have been understood in relation to the feelings of immersion common in panorama viewing, bringing an embodied quality to handling the map and an added enhancement to the desire for travel.
Fours scenes from Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley. ca.1850. John J. Egan. St Louis Art Museum. SLAM24:1953.
SWITZERLAND OF AMERICA
In the opening pages of Samuel Bowles’s 1865 book Across The Continent there is an enthusiasm for the coming rail-road and for the promises of expanded access to the landscapes west of the Mississippi. Drawn to Colorado specifically it seems that Bowles single handedly coined the comparison between American mountains and Switzerland. Based on having seen both for himself he does this in very personal terms. so much detail. Aside from being a justification for the extended competitive investments of resources in building the railroad –the ends being very much a justification of the means– the comparison articulates a vision of mass tourism. Bowles writes with a somewhat zealous nationalistic candor: “When the Pacific Railroad is done, our Switzerland will be at our very doors. All my many and various wanderings in the European Switzerland, three summers ago, spread before my eye no panorama of mountain beauty surpassing, nay none equaling, that which burst upon my sight at sunrise upon the Plains, when fifty miles away from Denver.” (Samuel Bowles, 1866, pp.31–32) The comparison between “our Switzerland” and their Switzerland becomes reiterated elsewhere in Bowles books, and in subsequent publications by others, George Crofutt included.
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The push to see the landscape by rail, became connected to a post-Civil War demonstration of national unity. Traveling overland for pleasure, of seeing the land that had been so hard fought for, and fought over, was understood as a right and a duty in the newly re-formed nation. This was an idea that stood in a marked difference with European nationhood and notions of landscape access. A European idea of touring for pleasure and edification was an upper-class endeavor, and taking the Grand Tour a right-of-passage for the sons of the privileged and wealthy. A burgeoning tourist market presented itself in the new North America, and again Samuel Bowles and his traveling companion Tyler Colfax appear to have understood this and lead the field. In 1869, the same year the Transcontinental Railway was completed, Bowles published two books, The Switzerland Of America. A summer vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado, and Our New West. In The Switzerland Of Americahe wrote; “It is to them [the parks and mountains] that America will go, as Europe to Switzerland, for rest and recreation, for new and exhilarating scenes, for pure and bracing air, for pleasure and for health.” (p.165. 1869) and then in Our New West, as a preface, he included a letter dated Feb 10 1869 from Tyler Colfax where patriotism and tourism are articulated as one idea. “If our people, who go to Europe for pleasure, travel and observation, knew a tithe of the enjoyment we experienced in our travel under our own flag, far more of them would turn their faces toward the setting sun; and after exploring that Switzerland of America, the Rocky Mountains, with their remarkable Parks and Passes, go onward to that realm which fronts upon the Pacific, whose history is so romantic, and whose destiny is so sure; and which that great highway of Nations, the Pacific Railroad, will, this Spring, bring so near to all of us on the Atlantic slope.” (Colfax, pp.IX – X, 1869.) The assertion of an American Switzerland exceeded itself as a simple simile and Bowles, in full awareness of the implications, is clear – ‘this’ Switzerland would be available to everyone with the means to take the train.
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In 1876, ten years after Bowles’s Across the Continent the appearance of Switzerland in the title of the Rand McNally Panoramic Map should then come as no surprise. The Trans Continental Route Illustrated Crossing the Switzerland of America, shows itself to be just one of a number of references to Switzerland’s in America. The White Mountains of Connecticut, and the Sierra Nevada evidently joined the Colorado Rockies shortly thereafter. One more echo that seems pertinent to mention here is on the cover of Crofutt’s Gripsack Guide of Colorado. The visual motif of grip sack, rod and gun appears to strike an American equivalence with a case-map cover from 1820 of a map published in Lucerne for travelers seeking the sublime overview from Rigi Kulm. The Guide des Voyageurs sur le Mont Rigi, by contrast to Crofutt’s cover includes a gentlemanly artists’ shoulder bag, with spy-glass and walking cane.
Above and right:
The Switzerland Of America. A summer vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado. Samual Bowles. The American News Company, Boston. 1869.
Front cover. The Trans Continental Route Illustrated. Rand, McNally & Co., 1876, Chicago. MC39876
AROUND THE WORLD
If there is a single message in the production of this map, it is that the worlds center has changed. The Trans Continental Route Illustrated Crossing the Switzerland of America, Panoramic Map of the Great Overland Route From Occident to Orient was designed and printed in Chicago in 1876 with the expressed intention of meeting global distribution. Its intentional scope is to gather the new communicative conditions in one place, in proximity with the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. It tacitly draws upon the histories of settlement and the West to make its points, and it articulates landscape experience from a theatrical panoramic viewpoint. Amongst all its storytelling threads it curiously neglects to mention the consequential event at Promontory point Utah when on May 10th 1869 railways were connected. George Crofutt was there, and was so inspired by the experience that he created his first Trans-Continental Tourist’s Guide, in 1870. His predecessor Samuel Bowles was similarly inspired and moved to publish following his visionary experience a decade before of a new American Switzerland. Between them Bowles and Crofutt dreamed of tourism on an industrial scale, and it came to pass.
Right and below: Chicago Rock Island & Pacific R.R. Map of the Great International Railway and Steamer Routes Around The World. Rand McNally, Chicago. 1870. MC22583
The world in which the Trans Continental Route Illustrated was made had been in flux for some time. The global ambitions of the British Empire had identified the benefits of a connected trade network, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 was arguably a zenith of that Empire. The Great Exhibition in London served to meet and exceed expectations in every respect in that time, and the trans-continental railways in North America took on those expectations and made new strides that arguably changed everything. Up until the 1869, manufacturing and trade had only been possible by connecting to Asia in an eastward global direction–from New York via London and all points eastward to Singapore and Hong Kong. Connections via the new Union Pacific Railroad across the great plains meant traveling west–from Chicago via Omaha to San Francisco–and so the directional flow of global communication was shifted dramatically in the opposite direction.
With the points of exchange greatly reduced, the conceit of The Trans Continental Route Illustrated is that communications with the East were possible by traveling in any direction. A previous Chicago, Rand McNally publication boldly articulated as much in 1870; Chicago Rock Island & Pacific R.R. Map of the Great International Railway and Steamer Routes Around The World. The shared ambitions of these two publications not only change directional flow of global trade but they also position Chicago as its new center, as the axis around which all things (at least in 1876) must now orient themselves.
Detail of the Map vignette from the back cover of The Trans Continental Route Illustrated. Rand, McNally & Co., 1876, Chicago. MC39876
SOURCES
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BOOKS
Alanen, A. R. And Melnick R. Z. (edited)
Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 2000.
Boorstin, Daniel J.
The Image. A guide to pseudo-events in America. Vintage/Random House, New York, (1961) 2012.
Bowles. Samuel.
The Switzerland Of America. A summer vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado. The American News Company, Boston. 1869.
Our New West. The American News Company, Boston. 1869.
Defoe, Daniel.
A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain. [Edited by Pat Rogers] Michael Joseph, London. 1989.
Gaddis , John Lewis.
The Landscape of History. How Historians Map The Past. Oxford University Press. 2002.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von,
Italian Journey. [Translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer] Penguin Classics, London. 1960.
Humboldt, Alexander von.
Cosmos. A sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. Volume 1. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 1979.
Cosmos. A sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. Volume 2. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 1979.
Olivier, Laurent.
The Dark Abyss of Time. Archeology and Memory. [Translated by Arthur Greenspan. Rowman and Litterfield, Maryland, 2015.
Lowenthal, David.
The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge 2015.
Sears John F.
Sacred Places. American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. 1989.
Shaffer, Marquerite S.
See America First. Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Smithsonian Books, Washington DC, 2001.​
ITEMS FROM THE MACLEAN COLLECTION
BOOKS
Bowles, Samuel.
Across the Continent: A Summers Journey to the Rocky Mountains, The Mormons and The Pacific Ocean. Hurd & Houghton, New York, 1865. MC25778.
Crofutt, George A.
Great Transcontinental Tourist’s Guide, George A. Crofutt & Co. Publishers, New York., 1870. MC27962
Crofutt’s Gripsack Guide of Colorado. Vol.1. 1881. The Overland Publishing Company, Omaha Nebraska. MC929111
Crofutts New Overland Tourist and Pacific Coast Guide. Volume 1. The Overland Publishing Company, Chicago, Illinois 1878–9. MC25760
Crofutts New Overland Tourist and Pacific Coast Guide. The Overland Publishing Company, Omaha, Nebraska, 1880. MC1582
MAPS and EPHEMERA
Chicago Rock Island & Pacific R.R. Map of the Great International Railway and Steamer Routes Around The World. Rand McNally, Chicago. 1870. MC22583
From Ocean to Ocean! Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. The New York Printing Company, New York. Circa 1869. MC 14939
Guide des Voyageurs sur le Mont Rigi. Lucerne chez X. Meyer. Panorama oder Zirkel-Aussicht vom Rigi Berg . 1820. MC27544
Little Switzerland Of America, Where Natural Beauty Abounds. McGregor Iowa, and Prairie du Chien Wisconsin. 1930’s. MC35112
The Switzerland Of America. Theo. L. Mumford. American Bank Note Co. New York. Late 19th Century MC34350
The Trans Continental Route Illustrated Crossing the Switzerland of America, Panoramic Map of the Great Overland Route From Occident to Orient. Rand, McNally & Co., 1876, Chicago. MC39876
The White MTS. Of N.H. The Switzerland of America. Hartman Card & Souvenir Co. Portland, Maine. Early 20th Century. MC34070
OTHER SOURCES
The Immense Moving Mirror of the Land Route to California, by James F Wilkins. 1851. The State Historical Society of Missouri Columbia, Missouri.
Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley. ca.1850. John J. Egan. St Louis Art Museum. SLAM24:1953.
The Switzerland Of America - Songo River Line. Bay of Naples Steam Boat Company, Portland Maine. 1904. Collection of Curtis Wright.
