And also, this past spring and summer, a historically accurate reconstruction of a frontier railroad camp, circa 1865, a mud-caked canvas metropolis with brothels and saloons, butcher shops, saw mills and a church, the wagons and tents of merchants and hangers-on who followed the newly laid tracks for the Union Pacific Railroad through the Platte River Valley in Nebraska and beyond.
The "People of the Springs" exhibit traces the city's obscure history, from Native American dwellings to the arrival of the railroad on the Western frontier and the construction of Hoover Dam.
The accompanying hand-scrawled or press-on-letters signage which delves into such topics as the "prairie loneliness" of frontier wives or how the Chinese railroad workers of the era enjoyed blasting tunnels through mountains due to "their natural love of fireworks"—help fill in the blanks for the automatons who can no longer speak or move due to various circuitry snafus.
In "Page One: Inside The New York Times," a feature documentary that opens on June 17 (I saw a preview and was mesmerized), Keller, who has the square-jawed, silver-haired, rough-hewn handsomeness of a Western-movie frontier judge (or could he be a railroad baron?), is a thoughtful, slightly melancholy presence.
And so we also have some business about a hidden silver mine, a plan to start a war with the Comanche nation, and the arrival of the railroad into the great, unexplored frontier.
Non-Mormon settlements, in contrast, illustrate the influences of mining and railroad-building across a broader Western frontier.
Starting with a grain storage warehouse set at the end of an Iowa railroad line, W.W. Cargill, the son of a Scottish sea captain, got rich as railroads expanded west and opened up the frontier.
Despite the civilizing effect of the railroad, which began to transform New Mexico from a frontier into a marketplace, Jews were not immune from the lawlessness that was part and parcel of Western society.
First it was the end of the local steam railroad to the Grand Canyon that almost did in this frontier town in the 1960s.
