![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, nearly forty years after his sketching voyage, Becker still bragged that he had “scored ‘beats’” for having portrayed the Chinese. In addition to scooping other periodicals with novel subject matter, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper wanted to be the first major periodical to use the transcontinental railroad to bring news to Americans on the East Coast. I reached California in due time, spent many weeks among the celestials, making drawings. Leslie planned a “scoop” on our competitors. These people were then a novel addition to our population, and Mr. Leslie commissioned me to go to California to portray the Chinese who had come over in large numbers to build the Union Pacific Railway. Actually, as he revealed in his interview, this was the principal purpose of his trip: Among the subjects he was told to illustrate were the Chinese immigrants who labored on the railroad. Using the railroad to move with due speed across the vast nation, Becker was able to send back to his editors illustrations of far-flung places. For the first time, it was possible to traverse the entire country in one fluid, industrial sweep, and the “special artist” was there to experience and transmit this watershed event on behalf of his paper. As Joseph Becker, who would later serve as head of the periodical’s art department, remembered in a 1905 interview, the illustrated “Across the Continent” series that came out of his journey turned out to be a celebrated media event. In late 1869, just months after the transcontinental railroad linkage was completed at Promontory Point, Utah, a young illustrator for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was ordered by his publisher to make a trip across the nation on a railway sketching tour. Picturing Chinese labor and industrial velocity in the Gilded Age
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