ABSTRACT
In the American interior a nineteenth-century traveler experienced at the time the best trains in the world. When in 1857 the Russian traveler Aleksandr Lakier stepped up to the ticket window to buy his first American day-coach ticket, he was dazzled by the number of routes and lines displayed on the railroad map and "amazed that the schedule showed but one price for everyone". Catherine Bates was at times one of those day-coach passengers, seated among persons who might well be carrying sack lunches—a practice sternly proscribed for parlor-car travelers by Charles Nordhoff—and who sat up all night. Only on the level of emigrant travel were rail travelers required to cooperate with strangers. In travelers' end-of-the-century rewriting of the history of settlement, such terms as pioneer and frontier made their first appearances in travel literature about the interior. First-class travelers fell into absorption with the vehicle itself.
