by Edward Ball
Stanford assembled a monopoly on train tracks throughout the rest of California. Since the start of the Central Pacific, many short train lines had grown up around the state. The Yuba Railroad had twenty-five miles of rail running north from Sacramento, the California and Oregon line was building from San Francisco toward Oregon Territory, and the San Francisco and Oakland Railroad went around San Francisco Bay. Stanford picked them up, one by one. Four others—the San Francisco and Alameda line, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, the California Central line, and the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad—had combined track running three hundred miles. All fell under Stanford’s control, typically without a transfer of capital. The associates used a promise of stock, on the one hand, and threats, on the other.
The most important section of rail was a line from San Francisco to Sacramento, the mid-state hub of the Central Pacific, in the plains. Without it, the biggest revenue would escape, and the “transcontinental” label itself would be a fiction. The Western Pacific Railroad controlled the 121-mile route, and in 1867, Stanford made that company an offer it could not refuse. Give us control, or we will build track parallel to yours. The smaller company acquiesced, and Stanford’s company ingested it, promising stock for its owners, only some of which materialized.15
If you take the long view, the Central Pacific does not look uniquely voracious but appears to be part of a trend. In the five years between 1868 and 1873, around America, more than twenty-eight thousand miles of track were laid, according to Poor’s Manual of Railroads, nine times the width of the continent, amounting to an orgy of railroad building after the Civil War. For every short line Stanford added to the company, revenues went up, until the Central Pacific counted 293,880 passengers and 276,324 tons of freight traveling its tracks in 1869, quadrupling its income in five years.16
Despite rivers of money that washed over the associates, relations between the men cracked. Charles Crocker, the contractor among the four, described Stanford as lazy. In a letter to a friend, Crocker complained, “As to work, Stanford absolutely succeeds in doing nothing, as near a man can. He spends an hour or two per day at the office if we send for him.” It was spring 1869. Crocker wanted Stanford to go to Utah to help cut deals for the end of the train line, near Salt Lake City, but Stanford had resisted. “If it was Washington, N.Y., London or Paris,” Crocker wrote, “all would be right, he would go immediately and stay indefinitely.”
Notwithstanding his personal flood of cash, Stanford was sullen. Under pressure, he went to Utah in January 1869 to meet with Mormon politicians in Salt Lake City in an attempt to arrange better terms. By this time Stanford had done a thousand deals, and, with Huntington in the lead, made a thousand payoffs. So much money had passed through his hands that gold in the palm no longer served to comfort. From his hotel room Stanford wrote his friend and partner Mark Hopkins. “I have no pleasure in the thought of the Railroad,” Stanford said. “It is mortification. I tell you Hopkins the thought makes me feel like a dog.”
In early 1868 Helios reappeared in San Francisco—he took his Yosemite negatives and went to work printing and editing the photographs. Helios had not seen the newspapers for months, and they were full of stories about Stanford, his train, and the Chinese who crossed the mountains. The way the newspapers treated the ex-governor, as though he was a miracle worker, might have surprised Helios. The photographer was at the bottom of his work life, starting a new profession, while Stanford stood at the top. At some point they might have equal footing. Did the photographer let himself imagine it?
He printed a brochure and stacked it around the city: “Helios is prepared to accept commissions to photograph private residences, ranches, mills, views, animals, ships, etc., anywhere in the city, or any portion of the Pacific coast.” Let me photograph anything, he meant—or at any rate, anything but people.
Helios thought some day he might photograph the train, the new landscape machine. To ride the train and look out the window was to be a spectator on the western sprawl. To ride the train was to put the eye in motion in a way that it had never before been—mobile, continuous, smooth. He knew the Central Pacific had a staff photographer, Alfred Hart. He also knew that Hart did not possess a franchise on the trestles and machines, the shocks and speed of the rail, the land it crossed and penetrated. Helios knew that anyone could make them a subject.
In the back room at Silas Selleck’s studio, the photographer bent to his printing and touching up.
* * *
a Helios looked on Chinese immigration as a photography subject—nonwhites were California’s exotics, whose pictures might sell like landscapes. He photographed the temples, or joss houses, where ancestors and deities shared an altar, and he photographed people—Chinese miners, priests, and performers.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Helios floated from one assignment to another and one address to the next for five years. He became the cameraman who went anywhere, running from the bottom of Yosemite to the coast of Alaska, five hundred miles this way, five hundred miles that, from the lighthouses on the Pacific coast to the train tracks in Utah. His output grew from a dribble to a gush of thousands of images. Around San Francisco, he could hardly keep sheets on the same bed, changing rooms every six to ten months, his signature never drying on a lease. As an artist, Helios could not stay put with one gallery; he moved from dealer to dealer. He made himself into a commercial machine, working for any client and putting his lens in front of anything. Except people—he disliked photographing people.
He wanted a portable life, and he built one with a darkroom. “The Flying Studio,” he called it. It consisted of a four-wheeled cargo wagon, about five by eight feet, framed with walls and covered with a black canvas roof—the covered wagon of the settlers, retooled as a machine to produce images.a The black tent of canvas made a dark closet where the photographer could prepare wet plates and develop them. Inside the wagon were a tripod, cameras, lenses, chemicals, glass plates, light screens, miscellany (notebooks, food, a gun?). A single horse pulled the thing around town. A painted sign, THE FLYING STUDIO, appeared on the back, accompanied by the Helios logo—the camera with wings sprouting from its sides and light beams shooting out. The man with the flying, radiant camera rode through San Francisco in his strange wagon, his studio itself rattling for attention, an advertisement for the abnormally skilled location artist you should hire.
Without waiting for commissions, Helios took the Flying Studio and made another series, “San Francisco Views,” documenting what one might see of the city if, like him, you were a person who could not stay put. He photographed houses, schools, ships, prisons, gardens, banks, military forts, hotels, stores, orphanages, and the water. He photographed the rich sections on Rincon Hill, squalor on Russian Hill, the water view streets on Telegraph Hill. The new series numbered about four hundred images, many of them in stereo prints, easy to sell in bookstores, gift shops, and at Selleck’s. He printed “Helios” on the back, added the winged camera, and copyrighted them.
At one time, after years of failures in business, he might have felt like a mediocrity. Now he made a living, and good money. Who said life as an artist was impossible?
The Flying Studio wagon, the photographer’s portable darkroom, parked on Clay Street in San Francisco, 1869 (Illustration Credit 5.1)
San Francisco, twenty years old, population almost 150,000, was the tenth-largest city in the country. In 1868 Helios took the Flying Studio up Rincon Hill, at the southern edge of town, to make a panorama of the city. A panorama—a cityscape in multiple images, what in filmmaking became the “pan”—swept the camera from left to right. Other photographers had made panoramas of San Francisco; the hilltops made them practical. This one looked different. Where other panorama artists raced against time, shooting as quickly as possible, Helios took a day, his camera lingering through an elapsing afternoon, the shadows creeping, turning out a twisted, impossible, simultaneous view of many hours. He planted the tripod, pointed the stereo camera
north, and took seven images, left to right, 180 degrees of the streets and hills and waterfront. (His later panoramas would run all the way round, 360 degrees.) The subject was not only space, but once again, time. A panorama made a piece of time-lapse photography, the eyes slowly panning over the scene.b
Looking for a fresh market, Helios made his panorama to suit a tabletop device that itself showed the passage of time, the Alexander Beckers Viewer. The machine, made in New York, occupied an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch cabinet, plopped on a table, and held between thirty and fifty stereo cards. The viewer peered into it through a pair of eyepieces and turned a knob to flip between views. The Beckers Viewer gave the impression of panning, the smooth movement of the eye through space, like a railroad through landscape.1
Wherever he photographed, Helios seemed to aim for time. He went to San Quentin State Prison, twenty miles north of the city by ferry, where a thousand prisoners sweated for no wages in factories, and returned with pictures that made the inmates look like cogs on a wheel. He went to the Napa Valley vineyards, now five or six years old, and photographed workers bottling the harvest. He went to Cliff House, a hotel on a Pacific bluff, and made pictures of the waves and bathers.
Helios became known for time, especially for his speed to the job and fast turnaround. Just before 8:00 a.m. on October 21, 1868, the city shook with an earthquake. This was a time before seismometers recorded things, but the papers called the quake the worst the city had experienced—“it continued nearly one minute, being the longest ever known,” said one paper. “Men, women, and children rushed into the streets—some in a state of semi-nudity—and all in the wildest state of excitement.” The temblor destroyed City Hall and wrecked and tilted dozens of wooden storefronts and brick warehouses. By midday Helios was out with the Flying Studio to photograph the broken buildings and cracked streets. No doubt the earthquake was an event Californians and people in the eastern states would pay to see, but there’s an added detail. Is an earthquake not also a signature of some kind, a marker of time? A cracked building captures in one image the three dimensions of space—and the fourth, time. Within a week Helios had printed an earthquake series and had his stereographs of the broken and devolved city in stores around town.2
Muybridge photographed the streets of San Francisco…(Illustration Credit 5.2)
…after the earthquake of October 21, 1868. (Illustration Credit 5.3)
Helios printed the Yosemite negatives and from Selleck’s gallery offered 260 of the pictures for sale. You notice, if you browse them, that when he gave his pictures titles the photographer used native place names. The stringlike waterfalls and naked rock shelves of Yosemite, with their idiosyncratic shapes and sprays, had acquired English names, but Helios preferred the Indian labels. When most people visited Yosemite they saw Bridal Veil Fall, a 940-foot waterfall that emerged from a crease in the mountain, or they encountered Sentinel Rock and Half-Dome. But Helios’s stereograph #1173 was the 3,300-foot stone forehead called Tulochahnulah (“the great chief”) instead of its English name, the Captain, and his stereo #1147 was Pohono (“spirit of the wind”), not Bridal Veil. Other shots depicted Pompompasus (“leaping frogs”) instead of Three Brothers; Poosenachucka (“large acorn cache”), not Cathedral Rocks; Kekootoyem (“water asleep”) versus Mirror Lake; and Tocoya (“baby basket shade”), not North Dome. It was as though Helios thought the tribes had not been vanquished, or at least not yet.3
America might be a giant but its photographic life remained small. California had did not have any magazines for people with cameras, and taste in art remained in the hands of people back east. Helios wanted press, so he sent some prints to The Philadelphia Photographer, the journal that led the field. An endorsement came back when the editor of that tiny but influential journal tipped four of the pictures into the magazine and told readers, “ ‘Helios’ has outdone all competitors. As a photographer, he might vie with the great Wilson of Scotland.”4 The Scottish photographer George W. Wilson was best known for his images of lakes, in which he sometimes aimed the lens into the sun behind a cloud, rather than away from it. Helios also shot with the sun behind a cloud curtain, creating a burning orb whose light fell on water and splashed up a mirror.
Muybridge, Pom-pom-pa-sus (Leaping Frogs), 1868. Most whites labeled this mountain at Yosemite “Three Brothers,” while Muybridge often held to native names. (Illustration Credit 5.4)
Muybridge, Tu-loch-ah-nu-lah (The Great Chief), 1868 (Illustration Credit 5.5)
From other pictures in the series, it looked as though Helios had also seen images by the English landscape photographer Roger Fenton. Fenton had shown his pictures in London in 1862, when Helios was living there; he treated nature like a painter, composing a scene with trees and hedgerows, shooting down a river to create a vanishing point. Like Fenton, Helios used atmospherics that wrapped cliffs in haze and the device of a single figure in the frame to mark scale.
The photographer looked to the newspapers to push his work. In the past he had been a book publisher, and from his previous dealings with the city’s journalists he knew some of the writers at the three daily papers, the San Francisco Bulletin, the Call, and the Alta California. Helios apparently took a folio of his Yosemite prints from newspaper office to newspaper office, because the city’s press ran similar items during the same week. On February 12, the Bulletin said, “The plunging movement and half vapory look of cataracts leaping 1000 or 1500 feet at a bound, are wonderfully realized.” The Call, on February 17: “The views surpass, in artistic excellence, anything that has yet been published in San Francisco.”5 The Alta California: “The view of the Yu-wi-hah or Nevada Fall is a fine piece of instantaneous photographing. It seems as though the artist had arrested the descending sheet of water until its mottled and foamy surface had paid tribute to his genius.”
Muybridge, Yo-wi-ye (Nevada Fall), 600 Feet Fall, 1868 (Illustration Credit 5.6)
Instantaneous photographing.
In 1868, “instantaneous photography” meant the avant-garde of the profession. It involved just a few dozen people who made attempts to arrest motion: these photographers of the instant tried to freeze a sneeze in a split second, or a crashing wave. They often failed because exposure times ran too long, resulting in image blur. The earliest photographs of city streets showed empty avenues in the middle of the day because slow-to-react emulsions could not register people in motion. Yet Helios had grabbed a frame of the waterfall, like stopping a running man. It was not twenty-four pictures in a second, his later threshold, but it was a gesture. Was this the beginning of Helios’s obsession with speed, with capturing time?
A writer passing through San Francisco, Helen Hunt Jackson, saw the Yosemite photos, and in her book Bits of Travel at Home, she made a recommendation to tourists. “Go and see Mr. Muybridge’s photographs.…I am not sure, after all, that there is anything so good to do as to spend a forenoon in Mr. Muybridge’s little upper chamber, looking over his marvelous pictures.”6 She declined to call him by his stage name.
Helios finished the assignment for John Hittell, the publisher who had hired him to illustrate a guidebook, and Hittell had a batch of the photographs pasted into copies of Yosemite: Its Wonders and Its Beauties. The book fueled the Romantic aura of the American West. Helios’s America was noble and savage, with racks of dead trees strewn in the rivers and rashes of waterfalls. The rawness of the pictures made them sell. America was ingesting the new machines—awful beasts like the locomotive, telegraph systems with their drapery of wires, production lines at factories, and the camera itself. Helios’s pictures provided an antidote to this alien clatter—his Yosemite was a Xanadu with no intruders, no human presence at all. The stereographs sold and sold. From California to New York to Europe, people bought them up, and the pictures won prizes at shows in Paris and Vienna, cities where nature lived in domestic chains. The landscapes pulled him into his life in photography, and the wager he had made to throw away business and become Helios, the artist, paid a
nd paid, like a criminal gamble.
He looked for more wilderness to shoot, a follow-up to Yosemite, and found it in the growing American empire. The United States grew by war, but also by cash purchase; in 1867 Secretary of State William Seward made a deal with the Russian Empire to buy Alaska. For $7.3 million, or two cents an acre, Alaska added 663,000 square miles to the swollen column of the national mass, which released a flood of derision in the papers. While the absorption of Sioux land might promise valleys and contented farmland soon peopled with voters, and while the taking of mountains from Mexico suggested a fountain of minerals from mines, the newspapers called frigid Alaska “Seward’s folly,” an ice-hard nothing “not worth taking as a gift,” in the words of Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. The executive branch in Washington, D.C., saw a public relations problem, and to answer it, the White House assigned the case to an army man named Henry Halleck. General Henry Halleck was a former Civil War soldier and old rival of Ulysses Grant who had been sent to the West and named Military Director of the Pacific, where he was now tasked with responding to the mockery that met the new territory. Halleck searched for a photographer who could make Alaska appear worth the price, or at least interesting, settled on Helios, and gave him the assignment.