n July 1861 painter Emanuel Leutze secured a commission to render a 20-by-30-foot stereochrome mural in a stairwell of the U.S. Capitol. More adept at patriotic sentimentalism than subtle nuance, Leutze created Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, a grandiloquent portrait of Manifest Destiny—pioneers on a divine pilgrimage, emerging from cold shadows of the war-torn East to bathe in the warm light of the glowing Western horizon. Mark Twain lampooned Leutze’s schmaltz in Life on the Mississippi, appropriating the painting’s title in the line “Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way.” The satirist floated an alternative narrative: “The earliest pioneer of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper,
