As Edison journeyed westward, the torrent of flattery and attention continued. At Omaha, where he and his entourage transferred to the Union Pacific, he was confronted by another journalist with notebook and pencil. “Well, then, begin your fusillade of conundrums, and I’ll give you all the taffy you want,” Edison offered. “I am used to it. My place at Menlo Park is headquarters for the New York reporters.” He seemed content to talk all day, until Henry Draper broke in: “Come on, Tommy, let us go down to the train.” (Some of Edison’s friends called him by a variant of his first name. Others called him “Al,” for his middle name.) Before embarking, the inventor-turned-celebrity received a perk from the railroad—a special pass that permitted him and his party “to ride on the Locomotive or where else they may desire.”

Edison’s desire, often, was to perch on the engine’s prow. He lounged on the cowcatcher, on a cushion provided by the engineer, propelled forward by iron and coal and steam as he took in the scenery “without dust or anything else to obstruct the view,” as he put it. Nebraska displayed a vast, subtly shifting panorama: Cloud shadows on the broad plains. The lazy Platte River. Clumps of cottonwoods. Prairie dog towns. Cattle, where bison recently had roamed. The hypnotic passage of the telegraph posts that stretched to infinity. Edison found his bliss marred just once, when the locomotive struck an animal—a badger, as best he could tell. He grasped the angle brace and hung on tight as the train batted the creature into the air. Finally entering the territory of Wyoming, the train panted up a long grade, past enormous outcroppings of pink granite that emerged from the prairie in jumbled, bulbous piles. Soaring mountains rose on the horizon, their tops still adorned with snow in midsummer. “Saw Pikes Peak. 160 miles away,” recorded Henry Morton, who joined Edison on the cowcatcher. Soon the track passed over the Union Pacific’s highest span, a spindly trestle that traversed a gaping ravine in the bottom of which ran a minor stream. The crossing was, in the words of a railroad construction engineer, “a big bridge for a small brook that one would easily step over,” but the dizzying view down to Dale Creek, 130 feet below, invariably elicited gasps from those onboard. The train then veered north over flat terrain to skirt the northern end of the Medicine Bows, an imposing rampart of glacier-carved peaks to the west. As night fell, high plains turned to high desert. Buffalo grass gave way to sage.