The bright colors and hand-craft of this stagecoach recall the rosemaling of the Norwegian immigrants, and for me, the artistry of the self-taught Swedish craftsmen who built the trolley cars for the Minneapolis and St. Paul transit company. Those cars, that mass transit conceived in the 19th Century as a complete public transportation, are all gone. We have put the craft of a half-imagined era on display. We have created a distance between the idea of personal fulfillment, and the reality of our mass produced autos. That distance is not bridged by the sentimentality of a romanticized West.
