The travel narratives of Frank Leslie offer a complex insight into the observations of one of the nineteenth century's most influential journalists. In 1877 this British millionaire tycoon and publisher of several popular magazines undertook a transcontinental railway journey from New York to San Francisco along with his wife, her dog, two close friends, a half dozen journalists and artists, and a host of personal servants. He and his companions relaxed in an opulent Pullman Palace Car, sipping champagne, dinning on oyster soup, and enjoying a popular touristic experience that had become readily accessible to large numbers of upper-class, genteel Easterners when the transcontinental railway was completed in 1869. Touring the West during the era of American progress and Manifest Destiny, Leslie's first-hand observations were of keen interest to Eastern audiences, and he supplied them with accounts of his year-long travels by publishing his observations in his Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
Since Leslie traveled on a prescribed route that determined specifically where and when his observations could be carried out, his view of the West was mediated by the railway. The railway car and the railway tracks themselves served as the locus of his observations, directing his gaze through the car window and delimiting his field of vision to a machine-gun-like procession of visual images outside the train. Though circumscribed by the railway, Leslie's vision of the West was empowered by his own subjective interests. An Englishman and a life-long journalist, Leslie was well aware of travel writing conventions, and he adapted them to the American West in order to make his experiences recognizable to readers, to validate his experiences as authentic, and to publicize the West as a worthy touristic attraction. By describing a walk down the streets of Cheyenne in the language often used to describe a stroll through Parisian arcades, his readers would understand, value, and possibly seek to emulate his experiences. To this end, Leslie portrayed himself in these travel narratives as a European flaneur, a disinterested, leisurely traveler who casually reported his observations with detached pretension; but, Leslie was not a detached, disinterested observer.
A wealthy member of the leisure class, Leslie held a vested interest in supporting the exploitation of labor and natural resources and the domination and oppression of non-European racial and ethnic groups. Leslie's narratives demonstrate how specific rhetorical motifs (such as negation and debasement) can be used to establish and support colonial imperatives. In this sense, Leslie's travel narratives illustrate how nineteenth-century travel writing conventions were deployed within the framework of industrial development and colonial expansion to promote the West as a commodity to be exploited by entrepreneurs and consumed by tourists. .
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