The literature on this is enormous and starts with Leo Marx's classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).

John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (1976; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1977), 166, 174.

David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

Thomas Andrews, "Made by Toile: Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917," Journal of American History 92 (Dec. 2005): 837-63.

For a nuanced view of this literature, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, "Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden," Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 147-59.

Such pictures were a staple of popular consumption;

see, e.g., the Currier and Ives prints The Great West, American Express Train, Snowbound, Across the Continent.