Take the famous photograph of the driving of the ceremonial golden spike uniting the railroad companies. Union Pacific photographer Andrew J. Russell captured the celebration of handshake and champagne. This wasn’t just a union of railroads, however. Just a few years after the trauma of the Civil War, the event was portrayed as a national moment of healing. It was a unification of the Union itself, “from sea to shining sea” as Katharine Lee Bates would later phrase it in the song “America the Beautiful.” That was, of course, a Union of white people: the Chinese laborers who laid much of the track are nowhere in evidence in Russell’s crowded scene. Also absent are the inhabitants of the region.
Yet when Russell’s photograph was adapted by an artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, a popular New York-based publication that translated photographs into cheaper-to-publish engravings and lithographs, there were Indians in the scene. They, and the bison, are shown fleeing what the newspaper labeled a making of “amends” between competing corporations and the recently warring factions of the Civil War. As Link notes, there were no amends for the peoples whose lands were being overrun.
“Euro-Americans considered the few photographs of Indians that entered print media to be contributions to the salvage of Indigenous cultures destined to vanish in the looming exhaust of the locomotive.”
Link looks at photographers Russell, William Henry Jackson, and Alfred A. Hart. All either worked directly for the railroad companies or sold them many pictures. She notes that the wet-plate technology they used meant that these images were a far cry from later snapshots or the insta-ubiquity of cell phone cameras. Photographers had to transport heavy glass plates, heavy chemicals, and hooded boxes or tents for developing. Exposure times could last thirty minutes, so conscious framing and posing were the order of the day.
They actually took lots of pictures of Native people, “but many did not find their way into the photographers’ published work.” Photographs as “tangible proof of Native presence,” continues Link, didn’t go with all the talk of Indians “passing away,” with “remnants” on reservations, and with their replacement by settler colonialists. Russell, who clearly knew better, called the vast plains “unpeopled.”
In the hands of distant publishers, photographs also became the manipulated “baseline” for illustrators “to plant a particular image of Native peoples in the American imagination.” Indian portraits, too, were typically studio-based, meaning that individuals were literally removed from any landscape.