Hanging Rock, Foot of Echo Cañon

Andrew Joseph Russell

1867–68 · Albumen silver print from glass negative · Photographs

From mid-1868 until the driving of the golden spike on May 10, 1869, A. J. Russell photographed the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad and the landscape of the "Great American Desert" through which it ran. At Echo City, Utah, a Mormon settlement even before the arrival of the railroad, Russell made this view of the frontiersman's precarious hold on a terrain that had until then been shaped only by millennia of geological forces.

Artist

Andrew Joseph Russell

Date

1867–68

Medium

Albumen silver print from glass negative

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986