Railroads in Art and Image
______________________________________________________
Announcements:
(1) Still have a number of the Cronon responses that need to be picked up after class.
(2) Hand in your essays on Krech to Greg H.
Art: visual arts and literary arts
Railroads as a “modern improvement,” and views of “progress”
Ambivalence about “progress”
Thoreau’s “Deep Cut” passage from Walden:
“Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation . . . .”
Thoreau’s ambivalence toward the railroads:
“The nation itself, with all its so- called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.”
II. Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the “Underground Railroad”
Fugitive Slave Act in 1850
The Underground Railroad: In 1831 the term "underground railroad" is coined when Tice Davids escapes from his master in Kentucky and disappears in the free state of Ohio. In the 1840s the term "underground railroad" first appears in print.
Thoreau’s work on the Underground Railroad
Cultural significance of the railroad
Wanderer Above the Mist, 1818
Progress, 1853
The Lackawanna Valley, 1855
The Lackawanna Valley, detail
Westward the Star of Empire
Thomas Prichard Rossiter, Opening of the Wilderness, 1858
Andrew Melrose, Westward the Star of Empire, 1867 (and a clearer view)
Jasper F. Cropsey, Starrucca Viaduct, 1865
Starrucca Viaduct in photographs today
