 Now, what's, of course, most interesting about this one is its title, Across the Continent, Westward, Course of Empire Takes its Way. It has all the elements, all the stereotypical elements of the sort of westward movement, which is, we actually know the engraver of Frances Flora Bond Palmer. She's a Fannie Palmer, as she was called. The most famous Currier and I's employee, and also as a painter in her own right, as a British immigrant. When I look at it, I see most of, first of all, a diagonal, cuts across the image. And what cuts it across is the railroad. The railroad moves from east to west, from one corner to the other corner. As far as the eye can see, the rails go to this sort of featureless line that is the future. On one side of the diagonal, I see a natural scene. It's a heavily constructed natural scene, but nonetheless, it is nature. It has a beautiful series of lakes or waterways that move up to a set of rockies or whatever, trees as far as one can see along with more of a prairie landscape. But right next to the railroad on the immediate foreground are two Native Americans on horses. They are part of the natural world, which again is a stereotype. Sitting on their horses with their spears pointed or lances, sort of looking somewhat forlorn. In fact, the plumes of smoke from the railway go in their direction, and pretty much sort of cover them. So there's a certain element of disrespect going on that they are being left in the traces of the railway left behind. So that is the past. On the other side of the diagonal, it's a very different scene. This is civilization. This is a cluster of log cabins in the foreground. One of the closest to us is a log cabin with a sign emblazoned on it, public school. What is more typical stands in for civilization for these pioneers is the public school, the engine of progress, the engine of civilization, whatever community wanted to set up to proclaim that they were connected to their past and to their future. Most of the railway cuts across, there are people watching, well-dressed, sort of watching the railway. There are men all the way on the left that are hacking out, cutting down trees. So again, it has this 19th century. The emblem of progress is stripping away the forest, cutting down the trees. The more stumps, the better. This is not an ecological consciousness, this is a progressive consciousness. And the fact that it's so stereotypical makes it wonderful to use because it lays out the formulas, it's expansive in its meaning, and thousands of these were made, and thousands of these went up on people's homes, on their walls, framed. So it really has the element of mass-produced, mass-marketed, even though it's made by hand in many of its elements, and distributed widely and really speaks for these tropes of American memory, what the past is, but more importantly what the future might be. The trick I think with the Fannie Palmer is, of course, to teach this as a heavily symbolic image made by an Eastern establishment rather than a representation of pioneer activity. Almost all the images we have of the West, and this goes through the 19th century, Frederick Remington or others, are made by Easterners, and that's a question itself. So it was just something that, you know, why would someone have wanted to own this? Even better yet, what would someone think about going West if they saw this? Would this make it attractive? Probably yes, actually, because the Indians are off on one side, civilizations on the other, there are public schools. This looks like, you know, real progress is going on, it's a fairly safe environment. Now when we read women's letters at the same time from the Illinois prairie or from the Oregon or whatever, we often get much more discordant notes about isolation. So instead of the social thickness of ties here that are easily reproducible and make it attractive for men and women, these women write about the fact that they've lost their friends. Their nearest settlement is, nearest farmhouse is three miles away and only maybe on Sundays or the men go into town to do business, but they stay home with their ever-increasing family.