Manifest Destiny on Paper: How 19th Century US Currency Depicted Westward Expansion from Covered Wagons to Pacific Railroads

Pick up an original 1869 United States Note and hold it to the light. Beyond the red Treasury seal and the bold denomination, you are holding a piece of deliberate propaganda, a government-issued artifact that told every farmer, merchant, and railroad worker who touched it exactly what kind of nation America believed itself to be. The imagery stamped, engraved, and printed onto 19th century paper currency was not decorative filler. It was a carefully curated visual argument for Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that American civilization was divinely ordained to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and before it the private bank note companies that produced early federal currency, recruited master engravers to translate that ideology into steel-engraved vignettes of breathtaking detail and unmistakable political intent.

The Political Context Behind the Vignettes

To understand why westward expansion imagery dominated 19th century federal currency, you have to appreciate the moment in which that currency was born. The first Demand Notes of 1861 appeared as the Union was fracturing. Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase understood that paper money issued directly by the federal government had to do more than facilitate commerce. It had to assert the legitimacy, permanence, and ambition of the United States itself. The imagery chosen for these notes was therefore freighted with meaning from the very beginning.

The Homestead Act passed in 1862, the same year the BEP began operations. The Pacific Railroad Act also passed in 1862, authorizing the transcontinental line that would be completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, coincidentally the same year Treasury issued the magnificent Series of 1869 Legal Tender Notes, now known among collectors as the “Rainbow Notes” for their vivid color schemes. That timing was not accidental. Currency designers and Treasury officials moved in the same ideological current as Congress, and the notes they produced reflected the national conversation about land, labor, and continental empire.

The 1869 Rainbow Notes: A Gallery of Expansion

No series better encapsulates the marriage of monetary policy and Manifest Destiny imagery than the Series of 1869 United States Notes. Printed by the National Bank Note Company before BEP took full control of production, these notes deployed an astonishing range of vignettes that read almost like a pictorial syllabus of westward expansion doctrine.

The $1 note (Fr. 18) features a portrait of Columbus sighting land on the left, paired with a small medallion portrait of George Washington at center. The juxtaposition was intentional: Columbus represents the first act of European conquest of the Western Hemisphere, while Washington anchors that tradition in American republican destiny. The $2 note (Fr. 42) carries Thomas Jefferson on the left and a scene identified as “The Capitol” at right, but the engraving surrounding the central design includes agricultural vignettes that evoke the yeoman farmer ideal central to Jeffersonian expansion ideology.

The most celebrated note in the series for expansion imagery is the $10 (Fr. 95), which features Daniel Webster on the left and a vignette known as “Presentation of an Indian Chief” at center-right. This scene, engraved with extraordinary delicacy by Charles Burt, depicts a formal encounter between a United States government representative and a Native American leader, a recurring motif on 19th century notes that encoded the dispossession of Indigenous peoples as a dignified, even benevolent, diplomatic transaction.

Covered Wagons, Pioneers, and the Myth of Empty Land

Among the most visually striking westward expansion vignettes on 19th century currency are those depicting overland migration. The image of the covered wagon, or “prairie schooner,” appeared in various forms on both federal notes and the National Bank Notes issued to hundreds of frontier banks between 1863 and 1882 under the Original Series and Series of 1875 designs.

The vignette most commonly referenced by numismatic historians is the “Settlers Crossing the Plains” engraving used on several denomination backs of National Bank Notes. Engraved by Frederick Girsch, who trained under James Smillie and became one of the most prolific vignette engravers of the period, this image shows an ox-drawn wagon train moving left to right across an open prairie, a compositional direction that was deliberate. In 19th century visual convention, movement from left to right signified progress, advancement, and futurity. The wagon train moving westward was, literally, moving toward the viewer’s future.

These scenes also perform a crucial ideological function that modern collectors and historians must reckon with honestly: they depict the landscape as empty. No Indigenous villages, no established trade routes, no existing civilization appears in the frame. The land is presented as virgin territory awaiting settlement, a visual argument for the legal fiction of terra nullius that underpinned the dispossession of millions of Native Americans.

The Transcontinental Railroad and the $50 Legal Tender

If the covered wagon represented the first wave of westward expansion, the railroad represented its industrial consummation. The completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 was arguably the single most significant economic event in 19th century America, and it left clear marks on the currency of the period.

The most direct numismatic expression of railroad imagery in federal currency appears on the Series of 1869 $50 Legal Tender Note (Fr. 151). The back design incorporates an elaborate allegorical vignette sometimes called “The Progress of Civilization” or “Westward Ho,” featuring a female allegorical figure representing the United States or Civilization herself, moving westward and gesturing toward an unseen horizon. Below and behind her, a steam locomotive crosses a trestle bridge while settlers with wagons and cattle follow its path. This single vignette compresses the entire Manifest Destiny narrative into a steel-engraved image roughly 2.5 inches wide.

The engraving is attributed to James Smillie’s workshop and represents the absolute pinnacle of 19th century American bank note engraving. Smillie, who had trained in Edinburgh before immigrating to New York, brought a European tradition of allegorical engraving to American currency design. His figures have the musculature and gravitas of classical sculpture, which was precisely the effect Treasury wanted: American expansion rendered as epic, timeless, inevitable.

Finding an original Fr. 151 in collectible condition is genuinely difficult. The $50 denomination circulated hard in the commercial economy of the 1870s and 1880s, and most surviving examples grade between Good-4 and Very Fine-20. A certified Very Fine example in a PCGS or PMG holder has realized prices between $4,500 and $9,000 at major auction houses in recent sales.

Silver Certificates and the Agricultural West

The Silver Certificate series introduced in 1878 brought a new dimension to westward expansion imagery by explicitly connecting the currency to the agricultural and mining economies of the western territories. The political backdrop was the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which required the Treasury to purchase and coin silver mined primarily from western states, particularly Nevada, Colorado, and later Idaho and Montana. Silver Certificates were the paper complement to those silver dollars, and their imagery reflected the western constituency that had lobbied so hard for silver coinage.

The Series of 1880 $1 Silver Certificate (Fr. 218 through Fr. 223, varying by signature combination) features an allegorical back design that includes agricultural implements, wheat sheaves, and a distant landscape suggesting the Great Plains. The Silas Colgrove-James Gilfillan signature combination (Fr. 218) is the earliest and scarcest of the $1 1880 series, with surviving populations in the hundreds rather than thousands.

Later Silver Certificate series, particularly the 1886 and 1891 issues, moved toward portraiture over landscape imagery, but the agricultural and pastoral vignettes of the 1878 to 1880 series remain among the most evocative expressions of the western land ideal on American paper money.

The National Bank Note Vignette Library

National Bank Notes issued between 1863 and 1882 under the Original Series, Series of 1875, and transitional designs represent perhaps the richest repository of westward expansion imagery on 19th century American currency, precisely because the vignette library used by the American Bank Note Company and Continental Bank Note Company drew on dozens of individual scenes that could be mixed and matched across denominations and issuing banks.

The “Landing of the Pilgrims” vignette that appears on the $1 Original Series is a foundational origin myth, placing the first European settlers in a posture of discovery and possession that echoes forward to the 19th century frontier. The “Mechanics” vignette on the $2, showing industrial workers with hammers and gears, links the mechanical energy of the railroad to the broader project of civilizational advancement. On the $5, the “Pioneer Family” vignette, sometimes listed in period bank note catalogs simply as “Settlement,” shows a nuclear family pausing before a half-built log cabin with forest behind them and open prairie ahead. It is the complete Manifest Destiny narrative compressed into a two-inch engraving.

For collectors, the appeal of National Bank Notes with strong westward imagery is amplified when the issuing bank itself was located in a frontier state or territory. A $5 Original Series from the First National Bank of Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory (chartered 1873) carrying the “Pioneer Family” vignette is simultaneously a piece of currency history, frontier history, and Manifest Destiny iconography.

Rarity Among the Imagery: What to Look For

Not all westward-themed 19th century notes are equally scarce. The rarity of any individual note depends on the issuing bank’s charter number and survival rate (for National Bank Notes), the denomination (higher denominations generally survive in smaller numbers due to more careful handling and eventual redemption), the series date, and the specific signature combination. The following guide summarizes key issues for collectors focused on this area.

Building a Thematic Collection Around Expansion Imagery

One of the most intellectually satisfying approaches to 19th century currency collecting is assembling a thematic set organized around westward expansion imagery rather than by series or denomination. Such a collection might anchor on the 1869 Rainbow Note series for federal issues, include a selection of Original Series and 1875 Series National Bank Notes from frontier states and territories, and incorporate Silver Certificates from the 1878 and 1880 series that reflect the silver mining economy of the Mountain West.

Budget collectors can find genuine entry points in this area. A circulated 1869 $1 Legal Tender Note (Fr. 18) in Good to Very Good condition can be acquired for $200 to $400, and in that grade the Columbus vignette is still clearly legible and visually compelling. Frontier National Bank Notes in lower grades are harder to find at any price but occasionally surface at regional currency shows and specialized auction houses like Heritage Auctions, Stack’s Bowers, and Lyn Knight Currency Auctions.

For collectors with deeper budgets, the Holy Grail pieces in this thematic area are uncirculated or near-uncirculated examples of the 1869 $50 Legal Tender Note and high-grade Original Series National Bank Notes from Wyoming Territory or Dakota Territory. These notes combine extreme rarity with the most powerful expansion imagery in the entire 19th century currency canon. When they appear at auction, typically once every several years, they draw intense competition from both currency specialists and western Americana collectors, creating crossover demand that pushes prices well above standard catalog values.

A Note on Historiography and Collecting Ethics

Engaging seriously with westward expansion imagery on 19th century currency requires acknowledging what those images justified as well as what they celebrated. The vignettes of dignified treaty negotiations, empty prairies, and civilizing locomotives were produced during decades of violent dispossession, forced removal, and cultural destruction visited upon Native American peoples. Collecting these notes as historical artifacts is entirely legitimate, but understanding them fully means reading the propaganda critically rather than simply aesthetically.

The most sophisticated numismatists in this collecting area combine genuine connoisseurship of the engraving art with historical literacy about what that art was doing politically. That combination produces not just a better collection but a richer understanding of how the United States represented itself to its own citizens during one of the most consequential periods in American history. Every time a settler, merchant, or banker in 1870 pulled a $10 Legal Tender Note from a pocket and looked at the Indian chief vignette, they were receiving a message about the kind of nation they lived in. Holding that note today, you can still read that message with extraordinary clarity.

The engravers who created these images were craftsmen of the highest order, working at the intersection of art, technology, and ideology. Their steel-engraved vignettes remain among the finest examples of the intaglio printing art ever produced in America. For collectors who want to hold history in their hands, literally and figuratively, 19th century currency depicting westward expansion offers something no other collecting field quite matches: a government-issued artifact that tells the complete story of a nation’s self-image at its most ambitious, contradictory, and consequential moment.