Continent, catastrophe

In The Heart of the Continent (1870), Fitz Hugh Ludlow theorizes the relationship between landscape and text, the speed and texture of description, and continent and catastrophe. His accounts of mountains, prairies, and... [ view full abstract ]

In The Heart of the Continent (1870), Fitz Hugh Ludlow theorizes the relationship between landscape and text, the speed and texture of description, and continent and catastrophe. His accounts of mountains, prairies, and forests are thick and slow, as seen from a stagecoach window—an almost geologic description, in deeper time; and yet the travelogue is punctuated throughout by moments of startling violence, such as the mob hanging witnessed in Kansas in 1861 by Ludlow and Albert Bierstadt which begins the narrative. This reflects two primary sites of interest in the text: the “barbaric habitudes” inscribed in the continent which Ludlow reads as “punishment of our old national transgressions,” and how the perception of this landscape may be altered by the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Though traveling during the Civil War, Ludlow’s understanding of national culture is not structured by North and South, but instead around the continental divide: “So long as it remains a formidable undertaking to pass between New York and San Francisco, so long there will develop an independence of interest and feeling which, however gradual and imperceptible, cannot fail to result in two distinct nations.” Latent in an ambivalent anticipation of the completion of the railroad—and the maybe immediate erasure of this gradual, imperceptible distinctness—seems the possibility of a catastrophic description after Clarence King, who Henry Adams writes “paralleled the Continental Railway in geology.” I end the paper with a brief reading of the driving of the last spike at Promontory Point in 1869, and the completion of the railroad not as coherent moment but violent event, some strange reverberating of the Civil War.