Civilization Arrives

Whatever one calls what the railroad brought, it arrived with a timetable. In the West the telegraph came first: the first transcontinental line was finished on October 24, 1861, and the Pony Express shut down two days later. The railroad followed, and the rails met at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869.

The timetable changed more than travel. Before 1883, each railroad kept its own time, and towns set noon by the sun. On Sunday, November 18, 1883, the railroads moved their clocks onto standard time zones on a signal telegraphed at noon. Federal law did not make it official until 1918.

Out on the plains a train could be seen for miles, and so could its smoke, which is why a picture like this one needs so little else.

A steam locomotive with a big headlamp pulls four or five passenger cars across open grassland, its smoke boiling up and drifting back over the train in a dark column. A line of telegraph poles runs along the track toward the foothills at the right, and low mountains sit under a pale sky. The whole scene is toned sepia, like an old photograph.