Traveling the West

Panoramas were a popular form of entertainment in the 19^th century. Sometimes in wagons and thus portable, movable from town to town; other times large enough to be mounted in a theater, panoramas were sometimes moving pictures, but on occasion the audience itself had to do the moving, walking around the panoramic scene. Famous panoramas were made of the gardens and palaces of Versailles (one of these is now in New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art), of the burning of Atlanta, and of Civil War battlefields (Chicago alone had three different such panoramas). This 1880 flier accompanied Gillard's 40-by-80-foot panorama "Over the Pacific Railway to California," and offered a key to 36 numbered items on the room-size display, among them the steamship Oceanic, a Pullman dining car, farming in Nebraska, the Brigham Young house in Salt Lake City, Donner Lake, gold mining in California, and the Golden Gate harbor entrance in San Francisco.

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