The Southern Pacific did not really sell tickets, it sold California. Through the 1890s it put photographers into the field to bring back the scenery that would make somebody on the far side of the continent pay for the journey, and Howard Clinton Tibbitts was the one who worked Yosemite. The brass plate screwed to the lower rail is the railroad's own caption, and it gives the place, then the valley, then the line, and last of all and smallest, the photographer.

Yosemite had been set aside by Lincoln in 1864, the first landscape an American government ever protected for its own sake, and made a national park in 1890, so what the railroad was advertising by then was close to a national shrine with a timetable attached. Tibbitts framed it to hold the whole thing at once, the upper fall, the cascades and the lower fall stacked down one tall picture, which is why it is the shape it is. And underneath all of it he put the road, with the wheel ruts still showing. A company selling the journey was never going to leave out the way in.