Stephen William Shaw
Stephen William Shaw was a California'49er and portrait painter who helped discover and name Humboldt Bay and introduced viticulture to Sonoma County by 1864. Stephen W. Shaw was born December 15, 1817 at Windsor, Vermont, to Seth and Elizabeth Barrett Shaw, descendants of Puritans and American Revolutionaries; as a young adult, Shaw taught drawing and penmanship at Norwich Military Academy became an art teacher and director of the Boston Athenaeum before moving to the American South and making his living as an itinerant portraitist. In 1845, shortly after opening a studio in Lexington, Shaw painted his first known oil portrait. A year in Baton Rouge, Shaw painted a portrait of General Zachary Taylor which won a silver medal at the American Institute. In 1848, Shaw was commissioned for $1,000 by the City of New Orleans for a portrait of native son Persifer F. Smith. Shaw traveled to Mexico City, painting the portrait on his return to New Orleans. Joining the California Gold Rush, Shaw left New Orleans aboard the merchant steamer Isthmus, on April 21, 1849.
After crossing the Isthmus of Panama, he booked passage on the Dutch bark, Alexander von Humboldt, which left Panama on May 20, 1849. Becalmed for five weeks, they reached Acapulco July 6 where the passengers forced the owners off the boat due to poor provisioning and overcrowding. After more than three months voyage, the ship arrived in San Francisco, August 30, 1849 and was sold for $17,000 to satisfy the passengers' lien against the owners. One of the other passengers, Collis P. Huntington, formed an association of the 365 survivors of the 102-day passage, called "The Society of the Humboldter." Huntington sponsored reunions and at least one commemorative poster. Contrary to at least one published report, neither ships' manifest lists Shaw's brother Seth Shaw, elsewhere reported to have crossed the country overland in 1850. Huntington, a large group of fellow passengers, Stephen Shaw went to the gold mines at Mormon Island for about six months Shaw moved to Sacramento for February and March 1850, where he met future judge Edwin B.
Crocker, brother of railroad baron Charles Crocker, for whom he would paint more than 25 portraits of notable Californians. In the early part of March 1850, Shaw left San Francisco on the schooner Laura Virginia, under Captain Douglas Ottenger. At anchor near Trinidad on April 7, expedition director E. H. Howard selected Shaw and four others to go ashore at Trinidad Bay to locate the entrance to Humboldt Bay from shore; the six men walked down the beach, were ferried across the Mad River by Indians, camped for the night on the spit north of the entrance to Humboldt Bay. The next day, the shore party was picked up by the Laura Virginia. On April 9, 1850, second mate Hans Henry Buhne piloted the first landing craft over the bar and into Humboldt Bay; that same day, two more boatloads of passengers and supplies were landed. On April 14, Buhne piloted the Laura Virginia over the bar and into the bay near the tents of the shore party. Shaw sketched the first views of the bay and insisted the bay be named honoring Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
On April 26, 1850, the San Francisco Daily Journal of Commerce published a wood engraving based on his sketches of Humboldt Bay. Shaw returned to San Francisco on the steamer Sea Gull April 5, 1851. In 1851, Shaw spent much of the year with John Augustus Sutter at Hock Farm on the Feather River as the family portrait painter and general business agent. Following a brief engagement to Sutter's daughter, Ann "Eliza" Sutter, Shaw returned to San Francisco, that year, with his brother Seth Shaw and Willard Allen, settled on Table Bluff, near Loleta. In summer 1852, they moved across the Eel River and began clearing the area where the town of Ferndale, California would be incorporated. In the rainy winter of 1852-1853, twelve men, including Seth Kinman, stayed with the Shaws because theirs was the most finished cabin. Shaw spent the next two years. Around 1852, he painted the portrait of Wiyot elder Kiwelattah. With little to show for his labors, Shaw returned to San Francisco in 1854 and sold his claim to Ferndale settler Francis Francis, in 1856.
Shaw moved in the big city, setting up studio, joining the Mason's California Lodge No. 1 in San Francisco June 1, 1854 and painting more than 200 portraits of Masonic Officers from photographs. Shaw took first prize for best portrait in oils at the 1860 California State Fair. On April 18, 1861 Shaw married Mary Frances Meacham at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. Shaw is credited with introducing wine grape cultivation to the Sonoma County; the Shaws had two children before Mary died October 2, 1866. Shaw spent 1871 abroad and married Lucretia Swain of Nantucket, Massachusetts August 12, 1873 on his return to San Francisco. Shaw died February 14, 1900 in San Francisco, memorialized in an obituary in the San Francisco Examiner, 16 February 1900. Shaw was a member of the Masons, the Society of California Pioneers, The Bohemian Club, the Mechanics' Institute and the San Francisco Art Association. Many of Shaw's paintings were lost to the fires of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, those remaining are known to be in collections of the Bancroft Library, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum, City of New Orleans, Nantucket Historical Society, the Crocker Art Museum of Sacramento, The Ferndale Museum, The Clarke Historical Museum, the Society of California Pioneers.
Shaw painted several family portraits in
Troy, New York
Troy is a city in the U. S. state of New York and the seat of Rensselaer County. The city is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany and Schenectady, forming a region popularly called the Capital District; the city is one of the three major centers for the Albany Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a population of 1,170,483. At the 2010 census, the population of Troy was 50,129. Troy's motto is Ilium fuit. Troja est, which means "Ilium was, Troy is". Today, Troy is home to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest private engineering and technical university in the US, founded in 1824. Due to the confluence of major waterways and a geography that supported water power, the American industrial revolution took hold in this area making Troy reputedly the fourth wealthiest city in America around the turn of the 20th century. Troy, therefore, is noted for a wealth of Victorian architecture downtown and elaborate private homes in various neighborhoods.
Several churches boast a concentrated collection of stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Troy is home to the world renowned "Troy Music Hall" the "Troy Savings Bank Music Hall" dating from the 1870s, said to have superb acoustics in a combination of restored and well preserved performance space; the area had long been occupied by the Mahican Indian tribe, but Dutch settlement began in the mid 17th century. The patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer called the region Pafraets Dael, after his mother; the Dutch colony was conquered by the English in 1664, in 1707 Derick Van der Heyden purchased a farm near today's downtown area. In 1771, Abraham Lansing had his farm in today's Lansingburgh laid out into lots. Sixteen years Van der Heyden's grandson Jacob had his extensive holdings surveyed and laid out into lots, naming the new village Vanderheyden. In 1789, Troy adopted its present name following a vote of the people. Troy was incorporated as a town two years and extended east across the county to the Vermont line, including Petersburgh.
In 1796, Troy became a village and in 1816, it became a city. Lansingburgh, to the north, became part of Troy in 1900. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Mohican Indians had a number of settlements along the Hudson River near the confluence with the Mohawk River; the land comprising the Poesten Kill and Wynants Kill areas were owned by two Mohican groups. The land around the Poesten Kill was called Panhooseck; the area around the Wynants Kill, was known as Paanpack, was owned by Peyhaunet. The land between the creeks, which makes up most of downtown and South Troy, was owned by Annape. South of the Wynants Kill and into present-day North Greenbush, the land was owned by Pachquolapiet; these parcels of land were sold to the Dutch between 1630 and 1657 and each purchase was overseen and signed by Skiwias, the sachem at the time. In total, more than 75 individual Mohicans were involved in deed signings in the 17th century; the site of the city was a part of Rensselaerswyck, a patroonship created by Kiliaen van Rensselaer.
Dirck Van der Heyden was one of the first settlers. In 1707, he purchased a farm of 65 acres. An early local legend that a Dutch girl had been kidnapped by an Indian male who did not want her to marry someone else gained some credence when two skeletons were found in a cave under Poestenkill Falls in the 1950s. One skeleton was Caucasian with an iron ring; the other was male. The name Troy was adopted in 1789 before which it had been known as Ashley's Ferry, the region was formed into the Town of Troy in 1791 from part of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck; the township included Grafton. Troy became a village in 1801 and was chartered as a city in 1816. In 1900, the city of Lansingburgh was merged into Troy. In the post-Revolutionary War years, as central New York was first settled, there was a strong trend to classical names, Troy's naming fits the same pattern as the New York cities of Syracuse, Utica, Ithaca, or the towns of Sempronius, Manlius, or dozens of other classically named towns to the west of Troy.
Northern and Western New York was a theater of the War of 1812, militia and regular army forces were led by Stephen Van Rensselaer of Troy. Quartermaster supplies were shipped through Troy. A local butcher and meat-packer named Samuel Wilson supplied the military, according to an unprovable legend, barrels stamped "U. S." were jokingly taken by the troops to stand for "Uncle Sam" meaning Wilson. Troy has since claimed to be the historical home of Uncle Sam. Through much of the 19th and into the early 20th century, Troy was not only one of the most prosperous cities in New York State, but one of the most prosperous cities in the entire country. Prior to its rise as an industrial center, Troy was the transshipment point for meat and vegetables from Vermont, which were sent by the Hudson River to New York City; the Federal Dam at Troy is the head of the tides in the Hudson River and Hudson River sloops and steamboats plied the river on a regular basis. This trade was vastly increased after the construction of the Erie Canal, with its eastern terminus directly across the Hudson from Troy at Cohoes in 1825.
Troy's one-time great wealth was produced in the steel industry, with the first American Bessemer converter erected on the Wyantskill, a stream with a falls in a small valley at the south end of the city. The industry first used iron ore from the Adirondacks. On, ore and coal from the Midwest was shipped on the Erie Canal to Troy, there processed before being sent on down the Hudson to New York City; the iron an
William Henry Crocker
William Henry Crocker I was the president of Crocker National Bank and a prominent member of the Republican Party. He was born on 19 January 1861 in California, he attended Phillips Academy and Yale University, where he was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. After the 1906 earthquake and fire had left the Crocker mansions in ruins, in 1907 he donated the Crocker family's 2.6-acre Nob Hill block for Grace Cathedral. He was a member of the University of California Board of Regents for nearly thirty years and funded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's million-volt x-ray tube at the UC hospital and the "medical" Crocker cyclotron used for neutron therapy at the Berkeley. Crocker chaired the Panama-Pacific Exposition Committee and SE Community Chest, was a key member of the committee that built the San Francisco Opera House and Veterans Building. Crocker was the founder of Crocker Middle School located in California; when much of the city of San Francisco was destroyed by the fire from the 1906 earthquake, William Crocker and his bank were major forces in financing reconstruction.
His father, Charles Crocker, had been a builder of the Central Pacific Railroad. Crocker's wife Ethel was the leading patron of French Impressionist art in California at that time. In the 1890s, Crocker's wife, California Impressionist Lucy Bacon, who studied in France under Pissarro, lent William Kingston Vickery, owner of the San Francisco art gallery Vickery, Atkins & Torrey, a number of French Impressionist paintings. Vickery supervised a series of these loan exhibitions in San Francisco and introduced Impressionism to California in the form of paintings by Monet, Eugène Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas. Mrs. Crocker sponsored the studies of the Zoellner Quartet with César Thomson in Belgium. After six years in Europe, the quartet returned to the United States, became a tireless force promoting classical music outside established centers and in Southern California. In 1936, Crocker contributed $75,000 toward the building of a laboratory for Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California, subsequently named "Crocker Radiation Laboratory" in his honor.
This laboratory became home to the Berkeley 60" cyclotron. In the 1960s, parts of this cyclotron were moved to the University of California, where they served as the basis for the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, which inherited its name from the original. Crocker was a noted philatelist and the owner of the unique block of four of the 1869 24c United States stamps with inverted centre the property of William Thorne. William and Ethel Crocker had four children: Charles, William Willard and Ethel Mary. William Crocker died on 25 September 1937 at his home in California, his uncle's home in Sacramento, was converted into the Crocker Art Museum and was the first art museum to open in the West. His nephew, Harry Crocker, was a movie star in the 1920s and, at one time, the personal assistant of Charlie Chaplin, his cousin, Aimee Crocker, was a Bohemian mystic who garnered publicity for her extravagant parties in New York, San Francisco and Paris, for her five husbands and many lovers, for her tattoos, for living 10 years in the Far East, not as a tourist, but as if a native.
His grandson named William, is a retired anthropologist who worked at the Smithsonian Institution specializing in Canela Indians of Brazil. The public middle school in Hillsborough, California is named after Crocker Middle School, his Skyfarm mansion was purchased by W Clement Stone, was donated to the Nueva School in 1971. The Political Graveyard: Index to Politicians: Crocker to Crocket at politicalgraveyard.com Cypress Lawn image
Oakland, California
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, United States. A major West Coast port city, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the San Francisco Bay Area, the eighth most populated city in California, the 45th largest city in the United States. With a population of 425,195 as of 2017, it serves as a trade center for the San Francisco Bay Area. An act to incorporate the city was passed on May 4, 1852, incorporation was approved on March 25, 1854, which made Oakland a city. Oakland is a charter city. Oakland's territory covers what was once a mosaic of California coastal terrace prairie, oak woodland, north coastal scrub, its land served as a rich resource when its hillside oak and redwood timber were logged to build San Francisco. Oakland's fertile flatland soils helped. In the late 1860s, Oakland was selected as the western terminal of the Transcontinental Railroad. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many San Francisco citizens moved to Oakland, enlarging the city's population, increasing its housing stock and improving its infrastructure.
It continued to grow in the 20th century with its busy port, a thriving automobile manufacturing industry. The earliest known inhabitants were the Huchiun Indians; the Huchiun belonged to a linguistic grouping called the Ohlone. In Oakland, they were concentrated around Lake Merritt and Temescal Creek, a stream that enters the San Francisco Bay at Emeryville. In 1772, the area that became Oakland was colonized, with the rest of California, by Spanish settlers for the King of Spain. In the early 19th century, the Spanish crown granted the East Bay area to Luis María Peralta for his Rancho San Antonio; the grant was confirmed by the successor Mexican republic upon its independence from Spain. Upon his death in 1842, Peralta divided his land among his four sons. Most of Oakland fell within the shares given to Antonio Vicente; the portion of the parcel, now Oakland was called Encinal—Spanish for "oak grove"—due to the large oak forest that covered the area, which led to the city's name. During the 1850s—just as gold was discovered in California—Oakland started growing and developing because land was becoming too expensive in San Francisco.
The Chinese were struggling financially, as a result of the First Opium War, the Second Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, so they began migrating to Oakland in an effort to provide for their families in China. However, the Chinese struggled to settle because they were discriminated against by the white community and their living quarters were burned down on several occasions; the majority of the Chinese migrants lived in unhealthy conditions in China and they had diseases, so plague spread into San Francisco though the Chinese were inspected for diseases upon their arrival to San Francisco. In 1851, three men—Horace Carpentier, Edson Adams, Andrew Moon—began developing what is now downtown Oakland. In 1852, the Town of Oakland became incorporated by the state legislature. During this time, Oakland had 75-100 inhabitants, two hotels, a wharf, two warehouses, only cattle trails. Two years on March 25, 1854, Oakland re-incorporated as the City of Oakland, with Horace Carpentier elected the first mayor, though a scandal ended his mayorship in less than a year.
The city and its environs grew with the railroads, becoming a major rail terminal in the late 1860s and 1870s. In 1868, the Central Pacific constructed the Oakland Long Wharf at Oakland Point, the site of today's Port of Oakland. A number of horsecar and cable car lines were constructed in Oakland during the latter half of the 19th century; the first electric streetcar set out from Oakland to Berkeley in 1891, other lines were converted and added over the course of the 1890s. The various streetcar companies operating in Oakland were acquired by Francis "Borax" Smith and consolidated into what became known as the Key System, the predecessor of today's publicly owned AC Transit. Oakland was one of the worst affected cities in California, impacted by the plague epidemic. Quarantine measures were set in place at the Oakland ports requiring the authorities at the port to inspect the arriving vessels for the presence of infected rats. Quarantine authorities at these ports inspected over a thousand vessels per year for plague and yellow fever.
By 1908, over 5,000 people were detained in quarantine. Hunters were sent to poison the affected areas in Oakland and shoot the squirrels, but the eradication work was limited in its range because the State Board of Health and the United States Public Health Service were only allotted about $60,000 a year to eradicate the disease. During this period Oakland did not have sufficient health facilities, so some of the infected patients were treated at home; the State Board of Health along with Oakland advised physicians to promptly report any cases of infected patients. Yet, in 1919 it still resulted in a small epidemic of Pneumonic plague which killed a dozen people in Oakland; this started when a man killed a squirrel. After eating the squirrel, he fell ill four days and another household member contracted the plague; this in turn was passed on either indirectly to about a dozen others. The officials in Oakland acted by issuing death certificates to monitor the spread of plague. At the time of incorporation in 1852, Oaklan
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California; the news of gold brought 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy, the sudden population increase allowed California to go to statehood, in the Compromise of 1850; the Gold Rush had severe effects on Native Californians and resulted in a precipitous population decline from disease and starvation. By the time it ended, California had gone from a thinly populated ex-Mexican territory, to having one of its first two U. S. Senators, John C. Frémont, selected to be the first presidential nominee for the new Republican Party, in 1856; the effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. Whole indigenous societies were attacked and pushed off their lands by the gold-seekers, called "forty-niners". Outside of California, the first to arrive were from Oregon, the Sandwich Islands, Latin America in late 1848.
Of the 300,000 people who came to California during the Gold Rush, about half arrived by sea and half came overland on the California Trail and the Gila River trail. While most of the newly arrived were Americans, the gold rush attracted thousands from Latin America, Europe and China. Agriculture and ranching expanded throughout the state to meet the needs of the settlers. San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of about 36,000 by 1852. Roads, churches and other towns were built throughout California. In 1849 a state constitution was written; the new constitution was adopted by referendum vote, the future state's interim first governor and legislature were chosen. In September 1850, California became a state. At the beginning of the Gold Rush, there was no law regarding property rights in the goldfields and a system of "staking claims" was developed. Prospectors retrieved the gold from riverbeds using simple techniques, such as panning. Although the mining caused environmental harm, more sophisticated methods of gold recovery were developed and adopted around the world.
New methods of transportation developed. By 1869, railroads were built from California to the eastern United States. At its peak, technological advances reached a point where significant financing was required, increasing the proportion of gold companies to individual miners. Gold worth tens of billions of today's US dollars was recovered, which led to great wealth for a few, though many who participated in the California Gold Rush earned little more than they had started with; the Mexican–American War ended on February 3, 1848, although California was a de facto American possession before that. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided for, among other things, the formal transfer of Upper California to the United States; the California Gold Rush began near Coloma. On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall, a foreman working for Sacramento pioneer John Sutter, found shiny metal in the tailrace of a lumber mill Marshall was building for Sutter on the American River. Marshall brought what he found to John Sutter, the two tested the metal.
After the tests showed that it was gold, Sutter expressed dismay: he wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if there were a mass search for gold. Rumors of the discovery of gold were confirmed in March 1848 by San Francisco newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan. Brannan hurriedly set up a store to sell gold prospecting supplies, walked through the streets of San Francisco, holding aloft a vial of gold, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"On August 19, 1848, the New York Herald was the first major newspaper on the East Coast to report the discovery of gold. On December 5, 1848, US President James Polk confirmed the discovery of gold in an address to Congress; as a result, individuals seeking to benefit from the gold rush--later called the "forty-niners"--began moving to the Gold Country of California or "Mother Lode" from other countries and from other parts of the United States. As Sutter had feared, his business plans were ruined after his workers left in search of gold, squatters took over his land and stole his crops and cattle.
San Francisco had been a tiny settlement. When residents learned about the discovery, it at first became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses, but boomed as merchants and new people arrived; the population of San Francisco increased from about 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 full-time residents by 1850. Miners lived in wood shanties, or deck cabins removed from abandoned ships. In what has been referred to as the "first world-class gold rush," there was no easy way to get to California. At first, most Argonauts, as they were known, traveled by sea. From the East Coast, a sailing voyage around the tip of South America would take four to five months, cover 18,000 nautical miles. An alternative was to sail to the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama, take canoes and mules for a week through the jungle, on the Pacific side, wait for a ship sailing for San Francisco. There was a route across Mexico starting at Veracruz; the companies providing such transportation created vast wealth among their owners and included the U.
S. Mail Steamship Company, the federally subsidized Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the Accessory Tra
First Transcontinental Railroad
The First Transcontinental Railroad was a 1,912-mile continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U. S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay. The rail line was built by three private companies over public lands provided by extensive US land grants. Construction was financed by both state and US government subsidy bonds as well as by company issued mortgage bonds; the Western Pacific Railroad Company built 132 mi of track from Oakland/Alameda to Sacramento, California. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California constructed 690 mi eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory; the Union Pacific built 1,085 mi from the road's eastern terminus at Council Bluffs near Omaha, Nebraska westward to Promontory Summit. The railroad opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869 when CPRR President Leland Stanford ceremonially drove the gold "Last Spike" with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit.
The coast-to-coast railroad connection revolutionized the settlement and economy of the American West. It brought the western states and territories into alignment with the northern Union states and made transporting passengers and goods coast-to-coast quicker and less expensive. Paddle steamers linked Sacramento to the cities and their harbor facilities in the San Francisco Bay until 1869, when the CPRR completed and opened the Western Pacific grade to Alameda and Oakland; the first transcontinental rail passengers arrived at the Pacific Railroad's original western terminus at the Alameda Mole on September 6, 1869 where they transferred to the steamer Alameda for transport across the Bay to San Francisco. The road's rail terminus was moved two months to the Oakland Long Wharf about a mile to the north. Service between San Francisco and Oakland Pier continued to be provided by ferry; the CPRR purchased 53 miles of UPRR-built grade from Promontory Summit to Ogden, Utah Territory, which became the interchange point between trains of the two roads.
The transcontinental line was popularly known as the Overland Route after the principal passenger rail service that operated over the length of the line until 1962. Building a railroad line that connected the United States coast-to-coast was advocated in 1832 when Dr. Hartwell Carver published an article in the New York Courier & Enquirer advocating building a transcontinental railroad from Lake Michigan to Oregon. In 1847 he submitted to the U. S. Congress a "Proposal for a Charter to Build a Railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean", seeking a congressional charter to support his idea. Congress agreed to support the idea. Under the direction of the Department of War, the Pacific Railroad Surveys were conducted from 1853 through 1855; these included an extensive series of expeditions of the American West seeking possible routes. A report on the explorations described alternative routes and included an immense amount of information about the American West, covering at least 400,000 sq mi.
It included the region's natural history and illustrations of reptiles, amphibians and mammals. The report failed however to include detailed topographic maps of potential routes needed to estimate the feasibility and select the best route; the survey was detailed enough to determine that the best southern route lay south of the Gila River boundary with Mexico in vacant desert, through the future territories of Arizona and New Mexico. This in part motivated the United States to complete the Gadsden Purchase. In 1856 the Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph of the US House of Representatives published a report recommending support for a proposed Pacific railroad bill: The necessity that now exists for constructing lines of railroad and telegraphic communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of this continent is no longer a question for argument. In order to maintain our present position on the Pacific, we must have some more speedy and direct means of intercourse than is at present afforded by the route through the possessions of a foreign power.
The U. S. Congress was divided on where the eastern terminus of the railroad should be—in a southern or northern city. Three routes were considered: A northern route along the Missouri River through present-day northern Montana to Oregon Territory; this was considered impractical due to extensive winter snows. A central route following the Platte River in Nebraska through to the South Pass in Wyoming, following most of the Oregon Trail. Snow on this route remained a concern. A southern route across Texas, New Mexico Territory, the Sonora desert, connecting to Los Angeles, California. Surveyors found during an 1848 survey that the best route lay south of the border between the United States and Mexico; this was resolved by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Once the central route was chosen, it was obvious that the western terminus should be Sacramento, but there was considerable difference of opinion about the eastern terminus. Three locations along 250 miles of Missouri River were considered: St. Joseph, accessed via the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad.
Kansas City, Kansas / Leavenworth, Kansas accessed via the Leavenworth and Western Railroad, controlled by Thomas Ewing Jr. and by John C. Fremont. Council Bluffs, Iowa / Omaha, accessed via an extension of Union Pacific financier Thomas C. Durant's proposed Mississippi and
Giovanni Boldini
Giovanni Boldini was an Italian genre and portrait painter who lived and worked in Paris for most of his career. According to a 1933 article in Time magazine, he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting. Boldini was born in Ferrara, the son of a painter of religious subjects, in 1862 went to Florence for six years to study and pursue painting, he only infrequently attended classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, but in Florence, met other realist painters known as the Macchiaioli, who were Italian precursors to Impressionism. Their influence is seen in Boldini's landscapes which show his spontaneous response to nature, although it is for his portraits that he became best known. Moving to London, Boldini attained success as a portraitist, he completed portraits of premier members of society including Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster. From 1872 he lived in Paris, he became the most fashionable portrait painter in Paris in the late 19th century, with a dashing style of painting which shows some Macchiaioli influence and a brio reminiscent of the work of younger artists, such as John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu.
He was nominated commissioner of the Italian section of the Paris Exposition in 1889, received the Légion d'honneur for this appointment. In 1897 he had a solo exhibition in New York, he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1895, 1903, 1905, 1912. He died in Paris on 11 July 1931. Giovanni Boldini is a character in the ballet Franca Florio, regina di Palermo, written in 2007 by the Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, which depicts the story of Donna Franca, a famous Sicilian aristocrat whose exceptional beauty inspired him and many other artists, musicians and emperors during the Belle Époque. A Boldini portrait of his former muse Marthe de Florian, a French actress, was discovered in a Paris flat in late 2010, hidden away from view on the premises that were unvisited for over 50 years; the portrait has never been listed, exhibited or published and the flat belonged to de Florian's granddaughter, who inherited the flat after her fathers death in 1966 and lived in the South of France after the outbreak of the Second World War and never returned to Paris.
A love-note and a biographical reference to the work painted in 1888, when the actress was 24, cemented its authenticity. A full-length portrait of the lady in the same clothing and accessories, but less provocative, hangs in the New Orleans Museum of Art; the discovery of his painting in the 70-years-empty apartment forms the background to Michelle Gable's 2014 novel A Paris Apartment. T. Panconi, Boldini, L'uomo e la pittura, Pisa 1998 E. Savoia, Giovanni Boldini. Il dinamismo straordinario delle linee, Bologna 1999 E. Savoia, Omaggio a Giovanni Boldini, Bologna 2001 T. Panconi, Giovanni Boldini, L'opera completa, Firenze 2002 P. Dini e F. Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931. Catalogo ragionato, Torino, 2002 E. Savoia, G. Boldini. Dalla macchia alla sperimentazione dinamica, Bologna 2003 T. Panconi, Boldini Mon Amour, Pisa 2008 E. Savoia, Giovanni Boldini. Capolavori e opere inedite dall'atelier dell'artista, Milano 2011 S. Bosi, E. Savoia, Giovanni Boldini. Il Narratore della "dolce vita" parigina, Antiga Edizioni, 2011 T. Panconi, S. Gaddi, Boldini e la Belle Epoque, Milano 2011 S. Bosi, E. Savoia, La mostra di Giovanni Boldini del 1963 al Musée Jacquemart-André di Parigi da un album fotografico inedito, Milano 2011 Boldini, Enzo Savoia, Stefano Bosi.
Giovanni Boldini. Capolavori e opere inedite dall'atelier dell'artista. Crocetta del Montello: Antiga. 2011. ISBN 9788888997520 T. Panconi, S. Gaddi, Giovanni Boldini, Skira editore, Milano, 2017 Media related to Giovanni Boldini at Wikimedia Commons Virtual Gallery and reference Giovanni Boldini Macchiaioli museum, archive and reference 77 works by Giovanni Boldini Giovanni Boldini. Capolavori e opere inedite dall'atelier dell'artista Giovanni Boldini at the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery Giovanni Boldini at ArtCyclopedia Giovanni Boldini Gallery The photo gallery with the best female portraits by Boldini wikiart.org Growing public domain of Boldini's paintings Video excerpt from the ballet Franca Florio, regina di Palermo on YouTube
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This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the 
