The Faces Beyond the Golden Spike
Mae watched the studio owner snap her nameplate in half. A woman who wasted plates on workmen, he said, would never photograph a gentleman. Outside his Ogden shop, a wagon waited to carry away the camera she had repaired without payment. Mae had one dollar, a borrowed coat, and four days before a railway would change the country.
Yesterday she had conserved nineteenth-century photographs in a temperature-controlled laboratory. Today her hands belonged to a dismissed assistant in May 1869. A newspaper supplied the impossible date. She remembered the famous meeting of the locomotives at Promontory Summit, and something less famous: the ceremony would not happen on the originally expected day. Waiting could ruin a small business.
The owner, Brice, planned expensive commemorative portraits for prosperous visitors. Mae saw the laborers packing their belongings. Soon these men would leave the camps, sometimes without a single picture to send home. She offered a teamster her dollar and a share of future earnings for the use of his empty wagon. He demanded to see a photograph first.
She borrowed an old camera from a carpenter whose late brother had used it. Its bellows leaked light. Mae patched the folds and tested the shutter by lamplight; her conservation work had taught her exactly where age betrayed an instrument. The carpenter's portrait emerged clear enough to show a missing button. He lent her the camera for a month.
A laundress called Ruth provided a dark tent and asked to be paid as an assistant. Mae agreed. They wrote a simple offer on a board: individual portraits at a price a workman could afford, with group sittings cheaper still. Nobody paid until they saw a successful plate. Their first customers arrived laughing at the wagon's crooked curtain.
Mae arranged them in steady light and made them rest their elbows. An older laborer insisted that his scarred hands appear in the picture. She moved the camera back. When the image developed, his laughter disappeared. He held it by the edges and asked for a second portrait for his brother. By evening, Ruth had booked the next morning.
Brice found them beside the road and warned the teamster that the celebrations would finish before Mae could earn his fare. Mae booked two extra days anyway. She would not pretend to know the precise hour a train might arrive, but she knew the celebrated day was going to move. Ruth called it an expensive conviction. Then she tightened the wagon cover.
The postponement came. Brice's hired carriage left at the end of its paid term, and his visitors demanded their deposits. Mae's wagon remained. Men with unexpected free hours brought friends, cooks brought apprentices, and a railway blacksmith asked for a portrait with his wife. Their money bought fresh supplies before Mae's first stock ran out.
At the next sitting the camera slipped from its support. A hinge broke, and the watching queue began to thin. Brice, passing on foot, offered to purchase everything for five dollars. Mae knelt in the dust, asked Ruth for the carpenter's spare screws, and fitted a wooden brace. Her hands shook until she began explaining the repair aloud.
The blacksmith stayed to hold the brace. His wife held the curtain against the wind. The next plate developed cleanly. Instead of taking payment, Mae gave them the first successful portrait after the accident. The blacksmith lifted it for the departing customers to see. They came back, and Brice walked on with the same five dollars in his pocket.
On 10 May she watched the locomotives meet at Promontory Summit. She made no attempt to crowd out the photographers recording the ceremony. Her appointments waited elsewhere: a camp cook, a teamster, three friends about to take different roads. She photographed them standing together before the railway carried them apart. Ruth wrote each name on its proper wrapper.
A merchant saw the portraits while collecting his own. He supplied shops in six railway towns and wanted a traveling photographer to visit them in turn. Mae negotiated payment for each stop and kept ownership of her equipment. Ruth received a wage and a share of the profit. The first advance paid the carpenter for his camera outright.
That autumn, Brice offered Mae her former position with a better wage. She invited him to read the lettering Ruth had painted on their wagon. Beneath Mae's name stood Ruth's, both the same size. The teamster clicked his tongue, and the wagon rolled toward its next appointment. Inside, a photograph of the blacksmith's hands hung above the little repaired hinge.