"All Hail and Farewell to the Pacific Railroad."

A Native American figure lies sprawled across the rails, knife in hand, directly in the path of a westbound steam locomotive. Towering granite spires (evoking Yosemite or the Sierra Nevada) rise behind him. The caption quotes abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who had become a vocal critic of the transcontinental railroad's displacement of Indigenous peoples. Nast inverts Phillips's argument: where Phillips mourned Native dispossession, Nast frames the prone figure as an obstacle to be swept aside by Progress. The cartoon reflects the era's equation of Manifest Destiny with civilization and modernization.