Beginnings…One Sunday in Ghirardelli Square
Twenty-five or so years ago, I found myself in San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon with time to kill. I’d flown into the city that morning from Boston, travelling 2700 miles from one edge of the continent to the other in six-and-one-half hours for several days of business meetings and conferences. Thanks to the miracle of time zones, I still had a full afternoon to relax.
Bored with the tourist distractions of Ghirardelli Square, I stepped into an antique book and print shop to browse. In a bin of shrink-wrapped prints, I found a colored lithograph showing a mountain pass leading into a valley somewhere in the western United States. While I no longer remember the title, the legend on the back identified the print as one of the lithographs from the Pacific Railroad Surveys of 1853 – 1854 (PRRS), a moniker unfamiliar to me at the time.
The proprietor explained that the lithographs were included in government reports following a series of expeditions to find a path for a transcontinental railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific. With that background, I pawed through the bin, finding several more Railroad Survey prints. They were all the same size, obviously cut from an oversized book. The colors were pale and the drawings, while skillfully drawn, they were not particularly masterful artworks; they were pre-photography illustrations of western landscapes.
Of course these were not pre-Columbian visions of a mythical American Eden, but depictions of what existed on the ground in 1853 – 1854, including Army forts, settlements, pueblos, Native American encampments, and the wilderness in between.
As I stood looking at those lithographs in Ghirardelli Square, I became haunted by the notion that I was looking through the eyes of an artist on scenes of the American West that simply no longer exist, a landscape on the cusp of change with the eventual coming of railroads and large-scale white settlement. I also felt I was looking at a world unknowingly hurtling toward the catastrophe of the Civil War.
As these explorers searched for a path to the Pacific, I wondered how they imagined the future of the world in front of them.
I have long regretted that I walked out of that San Francisco print shop 25 years ago without taking possession of even one print. But, no matter, because the images possessed me and led me onto a path of inquiry and research into a largely forgotten piece of our history.