I think this whole thing is interesting to me, it almost reminds me today of todays political climate. I feel like there are times in which the different news sources all argue and disagree in similarly childish ways, and where people will manipulate the information that is disseminated to the public for their own personal gain. This is an interesting social facet to the interaction/connection of nature and commerce; which I find interesting because commerce is a largely social construct and innovation in many ways is as well. Social facets may be more important than we think in these analyses; it almost reminds me of Solnits designation of the ghost dance as technology and the amount of social/group emotional factors that unexpectedly need to be considered in that thought.

I wasn't quite sure whether or not I agreed with the idea that this dance was a technology until this sentence. I think technology almost needs to be directly connected from start to finish, from action to effect for it to be considered technology. In this way, I think it is only faith that connects the action to their hoped-for outcome. I do wonder whether or not it is fair of me to discredit this faith as a direct connection between cause and effect; and its not quite anything more than dependent on what you decide to define technology as. I personally link some sense of scientific involvement in technology and I find this to be why I fail to imagine religious practices as a form of technology. I think both religion and technology/science are rather both by-products of the human mind's innate logic of cause/effect and desire/hope. Human mortality almost forces the species into a constant state of working to survive, and it makes sense for us to reach for things that will make that easier, whether it be technology to assist in that physically or religion and faith to assist emotionally.

I think this is an interesting quote, to see how the East and West functioned a little differently with the East being more locally based and the West more Federally supported. I wonder how this may have affected the ways of life for the two and how they would interact with one another. I could see this perhaps causing a difference in sense of nationalism/difference in perspectives between coasts, interacting with federal government often or interacting with mainly local government. As pointed out by the earlier quote by Richard White (57), the west was historically dependent on the federal government, an almost still-developing area politically and economically when compared to the East coast. It'll be interesting how the railroad and resulting connection and exchange may even this out.