building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

job of Pony Express. They confirmed once and for all America’s numerous
technological potentials and prepared the way for California’s economic success.
The first experimental telegraph line was constructed by Samuel Morse (1791‐1872)
between Washington and Baltimore in 1844. By 1861, the first transcontinental
telegraph line had been constructed by the Western Union Company in association
with the Californian telegraph companies to found the Overland Telegraph
Company. Private competition was also considerable in this field as it had been for
the railroads. The railroads played an incredible role in the cultural unification of
the United States and showed considerable effort of engineering linked to the
colonisation of the West. If the railroads were to create a scenario linked with
transport speed by bringing the power of the machine into the wilderness, it has to
be remembered that they destroyed some of the more genuine prairie landscapes
[Figure 128]. We are not going to mention the direct consequences of railroad
construction, but we will be referring to the indirect results that construction
brought about. The buffalo hunt from a moving train is among the most moving
scenes and was portrayed in various pictures of the period [Figures 133‐134].
Episodes of this type symbolised a culture clash, that of the people, who killed for a
hunting trophy and the Indian culture of the prairies, which depended on the
buffalos for food and a great number of their possessions. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the American Fur Company traded furs with the Indians and
from the 1830s onwards many furs were transported by steamboat. Immediately
after the war, that is to say with the large expansion of the railroads, the turnover
on furs made it one of the most important trades. The historian, Frederick Jackson
Turner (1861‐1932) himself, wrote his doctorate thesis on this very topic and began
the first lines of argument, which led him to his fundamental study on The
Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893). A mass of dedicated hunters
were rendered fearless by the first appearance and diffusion of a new concept of
arms, such as the Colt pistol and the Winchester rifle and increased their arrogance
towards the Indians.
Daniel Headrick dedicates some pages of his previously mentioned book, Power
over Peoples. Technology, Environment, and Western Imperialism, to these
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