Sky and Telescope - August 2016 - 36

Go West, Astronomers!

The Great American Eclipse
of the 19th Century
In the summer of 1878, astronomers and tourists were
newly ready to swarm into the Wild West.
William Sheehan
The total eclipse of the Sun that's coming on August 21,
2017, is already being called the Great American Eclipse.
Its path of totality will sweep across the continent from
Oregon to South Carolina, while all of North, Central, and
upper South America will experience a partial eclipse.
Millions will gaze in wonder at perhaps the most stunning
predictable celestial phenomenon, while taking in some of
the most majestic scenery of the continent: the best clearsky odds are for the West.
The 19th century also boasted a Great American Eclipse
- on July 29, 1878. Not only was it the last total eclipse
visible over much of the North American continent in
the 19th century, it was the ﬁrst to be widely observed by
astronomers in the western United States. And it came at
an opportune moment both in astronomy and in the history of the American West.
There was no question that it would be a spectacle.
The maximum duration of totality was 3 minutes 11
seconds. The Moon's shadow, some 116 miles wide, ﬁrst
touched land in northeastern Asia, then crossed to Alaska,
Canada near the Paciﬁc coast, and southeast across the
vast western United States and its territories. Darkness
swept over Yellowstone and the Wind River Range, down
through Medicine Bow and into Colorado, crossing Long's
Peak, then Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Oklahoma Indian Country before entering the Gulf of Mexico
between Galveston and New Orleans.
Just 30 years before, the Boston aristocrat Francis
Parkman, Jr., had set out westward in search of Indians
36

August 2016 sky & telescope

and adventure; his books helped to paint the image of the
West as it took shape in the American mind. He arrived
at Westport, Missouri, says historian Bernard de Voto, "on
the very edge of the frontier . . . that saw all the energies
of Manifest Destiny at last in vigorous motion - energies
which, before the year was out, would capture Oregon
and California and the Mexican Southwest and make the
ﬁnal destruction of the Plains Indians inevitable." Those
energies pushed westward the Oregon Trail, the Bozeman
Trail, and the Bridger Trail, the latter providing an alternate route to the Montana gold ﬁelds skirting the region
controlled by the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Then followed the transcontinental railroad, which, said poet Walt
Whitman, "joined distances like magic."
By 1878 numerous towns and settlements, in various
stages of incipient civilization, dotted the territory from
which to view the eclipse. For the ﬁrst time the region -
including the grandeurs of Yellowstone (recently painted
in epic canvases by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran,
and designated in 1872 as the world's ﬁrst National Park)
- stood wide open to astronomers.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN SPECTACLE The solar eclipse of July 29,
1878, was sketched by St. George Stanley at Snake River Pass, Colorado. "The scene was now one of surprising beauty," he wrote,
"for Pikes Peak, far away to the south, still remained in sunlight,
looming in rosy outline, while the horizon that a moment before
was ochre, now glowed with red, gold, pink, and lilac." The
corona "gleamed. . . with a pale nebulous light, and the heavens
above acquired a shade of blue that mortal can not describe."

Sky and Telescope - August 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - August 2016