Map of The Salt Lick Branch of The Pacific R.R.
- Title:
- Map of The Salt Lick Branch of The Pacific R.R.
- Alternate Title:
- Map of The Salt Lick Branch of The Pacific R.R.
- Collection:
- Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection
- Creator:
- Twain, Mark [Samuel Clemons]
- Date:
- 1873
- Posted Date:
- 2024-04-25
- ID Number:
- 2511.01
- File Name:
- PJM_2511_01.jpg
- Style/Period:
- 1870 - 1899
- Subject:
- Money & Finance
Pictorial
Politics & Government
Railroads
Other Moral & Social
Satirical
Unusual Graphics/Text - Measurement:
- 16 x 75 sheet (centimeters, height x width)
- Notes:
- This satirical map by Mark Twain takes aim at the get-rich-quick mentality of the America around him. It appeared in Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age, "a melodramatic saga of a midwestern family nearly destroyed by its faith in illusory wealth and a fierce satire about post-Civil War America." The novel - which gave its name to Twain's own times - "skewers government and politicians, big business, and America's obsession with getting rich." Rasmussen 2007, I:144.
One of the central characters is Colonel Beriah Sellers, an honest, generous, romantic, foolish promoter of get-rich quick schemes. Sellers, patterned after a cousin of Twain's mother, remains unfailingly enthusiastic and optimistic despite many failures. Ibid. 144, 163-64, 758. Midway through the novel, it becomes increasingly clear that Sellers will not receive an expected government appropriation of $200,000 to fund his latest scheme, notwithstanding his having paid to bribe a number of Senators and Representatives. When his wife Polly expresses concern about their finances, he immediately reassures her: "why, what’s $200,000? Pocket money! Mere pocket money! Look at the railroad! Did you forget the railroad?" Polly responds, "Oh, I had forgotten the railroad, dear, . . . tell me about the railroad."
Sellers responds with a tour de force of mapping, laying out on a table the route of his fantasy railroad venture. The line extends from St. Louis to and beyond the small local (fictional) village of "Stone's Landing," which he intends to develop into a major rail and river transportation center renamed "Napoleon." He builds his map quickly, using several dozen ordinary dining and household objects at hand. Cities and villages are represented by a tray (St. Louis), potato ("Slouchburg"), pepper mill ("Doodleville"), pin cushion ("Catfish"), skeins of fabric ("Columbus River"), etc. The routes between cities are shown by long, slender objects: a fork, carving knife, comb, pipe, quill, spoon, candle snuffer, etc. For each stop, he explains to Polly the local products that the railroad will haul: onions, turnips, corn, cattle, peat, tobacco, sarsaparilla, carrots, cauliflower.
Sellers' own current hometown of "Hawkeye" (sugar bowl) is left "clear out in the cold" by the rail line and "bound to die" in order to enhance the economic significance of his revitalized "Napoleon" (represented by a rat trap!). The final stop on the map is "Corruptionville" (liquor bottle), a "good missionary field . . . . There ain’t such another missionary field outside the jungles of Central Africa. And patriotic? - why they named it after Congress itself." Sellers' dreams extend far beyond the map: "if I had enough bottles and soap and boot-jacks and such things to carry it along to where it joins onto the Union Pacific, fourteen hundred miles from here, I should exhibit to you in that little internal improvement a spectacle of inconceivable sublimity. So, don’t you see? We’ve got the railroad to fall back on." (Pp. 245-49.)
This is one of the few known maps parodying the mapmaking process itself, “a small body of late-nineteenth-century satires that mocked the ideal of mapping.” Edney 2019, 9-10. There are three such maps in the collection. The other two are ID #1073, “Mark Twain's Map of Paris” (1870), and ID #1079, Lewis Carroll’s “Ocean-Chart [The Bellman’s Map]” (1873) from The Hunting of the Snark. For an extended discussion of the significance of these works, see Edney 2019, 11-26.
Although Twain wrote The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner (his only collaboration), this chapter and the map are Twain's work. Rasmussen 146, 150. The map appeared in the first edition of the work, which was published in December 1873. (Although the first printing bore the date 1874, there are many "pirated" printings dated 1873, disguised by the publisher to circumvent the rights of subscription agents. At least six states of the 1873/1874 first edition have been identified. Scharnhorst 2019, 290; Willson 1943; Woodfield 1956.) The fold-out map was not included in later editions of the work because of production costs. Staker 2003, 352.
Cornell University Library is pleased to present this digital collection of Persuasive Maps, the originals of which have been collected and described by the private collector PJ Mode. The descriptive information in the “Collector’s Notes” has been supplied by Mr. Mode and does not necessarily reflect the views of Cornell University. - Source:
- Twain, Mark [Samuel Clemons] & Charles Dudley Warner. 1874. The Gilded Age. A Tale of Today, Hartford: American Publishing Company.
- Format:
- Image
- Rights:
- For important information about copyright and use, see http://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/copyright.