Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell by Daniel Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell by Daniel Davis Emily J. Rau Daniel Davis, Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2018. 208 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $20.00. At the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869, Union Pacific photographer A. J. Russell took the iconic photograph "East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail" of Grenville Dodge and Samuel Skerry Montague, the chief engineers of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads, shaking hands. However, as Daniel Davis traces in this study of Russell and his photographs, this famous image was quickly and repeatedly misattributed until the 1960s, when William Pattison uncovered the collection of Russell's wet-plate negatives at the New York Geographical Society. In Across the Continent, Davis expands on Pattison's work on Russell's photography and biography to provide a more complete recovery of Russell's entire life and career. Lacking extant diaries or much correspondence, Davis draws largely on primary sources surrounding Russell's life, material including newspaper accounts of Russell's work, diaries of his contemporaries, Russell's few published writings, and, most significantly, Russell's photographs. [End Page 333] Davis recounts: "I realized that my research about Russell would only get me so far. I needed to see the places that Russell saw and stand in the places where he stood" (5). To that end, Davis traveled along the original transcontinental railroad route, attempting to recreate as many of Russell's photographs as possible in order to gain as true a sense as he could of what Russell may have experienced, felt, and seen. He communicates his emerging awareness of Russell as a man and an artist not only through his narrative of Russell's life and the historical events he witnessed and photographed, but also through a wide selection of Russell's photographs. Across the Continent includes as well a complete catalog of Russell's Union Pacific, Civil War, and other collected photographs, the first single catalog of all of Russell's known work. Across the Continent's eight chapters trace Russell's life and career chronologically, from his painting moving panoramas, through his time as a Union Army photographer, and culminating in his railroad photography as the official photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad. The book also includes a description of the fate of those photographs. Russell enjoyed working in a collaborative environment, and Davis reflects this preference by interspersing Russell's story with brief biographies of his contemporaries and collaborators, such as photographers Alfred A. Hart and C. R. Savage, Union Army General Herman Haupt, Union Pacific clerk Oliver C. Smith, and surveyors F. V. Hayden and Clarence King. Russell was "part of a group of photographers who visually introduced the West to the East in the 1860s and 1870s," photographing the space of the American West in a fleeting moment when the national interest was turned westward (10). In his photographs, Russell portrayed the towns and settlements along the rails, the scenery a traveler would see through the window of the railcar, and the features of the railroad itself as beautiful. Davis positions both himself and Russell as "vicarious traveler [s]" in the West rather than its conquerors, describing and documenting the space and all of its occupants, including Native Americans, Mormons, Chinese laborers, Civil War veterans, and women (93). Davis's work calls for more intense study of the various laborers who built the transcontinental [End Page 334] railroads. Most studies of the trans-Continental railroads focus on railroad executives and corporate and political players. Although many of the people in Russell's photographs remain anonymous, Davis uses Russell's photographs as illustrations to describe how the photographer focused more on the human aspects of the transcontinental railroad than the construction itself, featuring laborers and residents of railroad towns: "His West is fundamentally a landscape that he understood through human needs. In the end, people built the railroad, and those people are all over his photographs, even if many of them remain anonymous" (10). Davis's text is addressed to...