In May of 1876 three men took a private Santa Fe railroad car from Topeka, Kansas, to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. One was the Santa Fe land commissioner and the director of the railroad's exhibit, another was secretary of state for the Kansas Board of Agriculture, and the third was a self-trained artist in the railroad's employ and the designer of both the Kansas and Santa Fe exhibits. Fifty-one-year-old Henry Worrall had lifted himself from a boyhood in the back streets of Liverpool to a comfortable life and this journey in a company car, through artistic endeavors that helped support mainstream social and political ideology. Worrall's art represented the views of the ruling stratum and aimed to promote and sustain existing power relationships. The importance of the graphic image was clearly understood by American railroad companies of the time, some of which laid thousands of miles of track across the frontier, based on the promised receipt of millions of acres in federal land grants.