train

More than six decades before the Panama Canal, a trans-Isthmian railroad carried thousands of travelers every month between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Crossing in this manner represented a third option to people (and freight) traveling to California (recently added to U.S. territory as a result of the war with Mexico) from the eastern United States. They could now avoid the perilous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope as well as the long trek across the great plains and Rocky Mountains.

The Caledonian railway, or The Caley as it was fondly named, was a Scottish railway system that connected Scotland to London from the 1840’s until its dissolution in the 1920’s. This compilation of book excerpts, articles, news clippings, and advertisements chronicles and romanticizes the waning decades of the Caledonian Railway from the turn of the century until 1923 when The Caley was absorbed into the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway by The Railways Act of 1921, an act that streamlined 120 individual British railway systems into just four.

This 1906 volume features essays written by notable travelers who visited the West, including John Wesley Powell (who was the first director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology and whom the Smithsonian's Anthropology Library is named after), artist Thomas Moran, geologist R.D. Salisbury, poet Harriet Monroe, and others. It is illustrated with many black and white photographs, showing the beauty and majesty of the Grand Canyon.