John Gast’s famous painting American Progress (1872) shows a highly romanticized idea of the settlement of the American West. It depicts settlers advancing across the plains, driving Native Americans, deer, and buffalo before them. The settlers come in a variety of diverse ways, some on horseback, some on foot, and some in Conestoga wagons. They are followed by the technological trappings of civilization: trains, boats, bridges, and the telegraph lines. Dominating the picture is a female figure draped in white robes carrying a book and trailing the telegraph lines behind her. Gast’s picture shows the West in the process of being remade by settlers—universally white and male—who till the soil.