Born in Germany and trained at the Düsseldorf Academy, William Hahn traveled to California in 1871, joining a thriving artistic community in San Francisco. Following the success of his Market Scene, Sansome Street, San Francisco, of 1872 (purchased by the brother of railroad magnate Charles Crocker), Hahn painted this pendant scene of the Central Pacific Railroad’s Sacramento train station, the western terminus of the first transcontinental railway.

The Central Pacific was funded by entrepreneurs known as the Big Four—Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington,and Mark Hopkins. Stanford drove the Golden Spike that completed the transcontinental railway at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, in 1869. Hahn’s images of technological progress and economic prosperity helped to transform the perception of California as a Gold Rush frontier territory into that of a stable state.