[On July 24, 1847, a weary group of about 150 migrants founded Salt Lake City. So for the city’s 175th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Utah histories, leading up to a special weekend post on that founding community!]
On
Promontory Point, propaganda photos, and the power of posterity.
On May
10th, 1869, after more than six years of extensive work from multiple
directions, the nation’s First
Transcontinental Railroad was formally completed at a
ceremony at Utah’s Promontory Point (or Summit, as apparently the Point is
a nearby but different spot; I couldn’t resist the alliteration in my topic
sentence above, natch). Located in northwestern Utah, not far from the Idaho
border, this spot was centrally located between the Central Pacific and Union
Pacific lines, which thanks to tens of thousands of workers had been throughout
these half-dozen years of construction gradually extending toward it from
Sacramento, California and Council Bluffs, Iowa, respectively. Both the
ceremony and the spot were of course far more symbolic than truly distinctive,
as the entire point of the railroad was its transcontinental span and
connection, not any one location (and certainly not any one spike or railroad tie along
those thousands of miles). But the symbolic setting came to represent this
impressive and influential achievement as a whole, and so became an important part
of the evolving history and identity of Utah as well.
That
symbolism wasn’t simply geographic, of course—it was also and most importantly
staged. Both the May 10th ceremony and the famous A.J.
Russell photograph that captured the event were extensively and elaborately
planned and choreographed. They were the brainchild of a few prominent individuals,
including San Francisco immigrant turned construction titan David
Hewes, shopkeeper and railroad magnate Leland
Stanford, and other directors of the Central Pacific Railroad in particular
(which seems to have been in charge of organizing the ceremony). They brought
together a great deal of materials and men, including two locomotives to “meet”
symbolically and thousands of railroad workers and officials to witness the
event and constitute that crowded photo opportunity. The ceremony itself
featured a number of Chinese American workers, not only because of the overall
central role they had played in the Central Pacific construction, but also
because a few handpicked workers laid the final rails for that line not long
before the ceremony. An A.J.
Russell stereoview of the laying features a few of those workers; but in
the more overtly posed and staged photograph, that Chinese American community
is significantly minimized and absent, especially compared to their white
peers.
Those
inclusions and exclusions remind us of just how much the ceremony and photo
were propaganda—not only for the railroad lines and companies, but for
particular visions of the West and the United States. But if an individual ceremony
and photograph exist at a specific moment in time, history itself is far more
evolving, reflecting our memories, narratives, and understandings at least as
much as those particular events and details. When it comes to Russell’s photograph,
for example, researchers with (ironically enough) Stanford University’s “Chinese
Railroad Workers in North America” project have identified
at least two Chinese American workers present in the photo. And when it
comes to the ceremony as a whole, there’s the
truly wonderful 2019 ceremony, right back at Promontory Summit, which
brought together descendants of Chinese American railroad workers to take
a new picture and more fully commemorate their vital role in this project
and these histories. That’s one of my favorite 21st century American
events, and one that, like its predecessor 150 years prior, took place symbolically
but significantly in Utah.
Next Utah
history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Utah histories or stories you’d highlight?
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