Keith Shapiro © 2019
“What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities… the frontier has been to the United States.” Fredrick Jackson Turner, 1893.
The American frontier of the 19th century is as much an idea as it was an actual place; even after one hundred years, it still occupies a large place in our cultural mythology. Movies, television, and literature tell and retell tales of frontier life that act as metaphors for the triumph of humanity against the adversity. With games of cowboys and Indians, children reenact the cultural struggle for domination of the land and its resources. Photographers continue to look at the West with its mix of wilderness and urbanization as a touchstone of Americana. Examining photographic records of the West is a way of understanding the relationship between American land and culture.
The Mythic West in Popular Media
Westward expansion practically and mythically engaged much of the American psyche for much of the 19th century. The myth of the West has been a major part of our cultural story telling process. In motion pictures, the predominant modern American mythic vehicle, some of the earliest tales surrounded the trials of the western migration such as Edwin S. Porter’s 1906 film The Hold Up of the Rocky Mountain Express. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s John Ford continued the tradition with films such as Stage Coach 1939 and Rio Grande 1950. Viewers recognize his early films for majestic photography of classic western vistas, a look provided by the cinematographer Bert Glennon, which shares visually dramatic similarities to the work of Ansel Adams who was his contemporary. The American West also captured the imagination of Europeans with a distinctively surreal twist. Italian made westerns such as the 1966 Italian epic The Good the Bad and the Ugly directed by Sergio Leone defines the so-called spaghetti western genre. In the Western filmic genre, a rugged desolate yet beautiful land often serves as a backdrop for heroic struggles that pit good against evil.
Several films with plots placed in the modern era situate their story in the West for psychological effect. David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet for example situates its plot in the fictional town of Lumberton, a place Lynch substitutes for his childhood home of Spokane, Washington. Lynch describes the setting, “lumber and lumberjacks, all this kinda thing, that’s America to me like the picket fences.” He contrasts the idea of a supposedly wholesome western American town surrounded by natural wilderness with the underlying moral seediness of town’s inhabitants.
Similarly, Michael Lesy’s 1973 book, Wisconsin Death Trip chronicles the social dysfunction of the isolated 19th town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Drawing on 3000 vintage photographs taken by the town photographer, Charles Van Schaick, combined with newspaper articles for the period Lesy tells stories of illness, arson, suicide, murder, disease, and insanity that seemed to wrack the small logging town. To the inhabitants of this remote community their connection with civilization was all too tenuous. In Lesy’s story, the frontier is an unyielding psychological place that reveals its presence through the frequent the death and madness of those who seek to conform the wilderness to their notion of civilization. Wisconsin Death Trip is a 1970s interpretation of events recorded almost a century prior. With it, Lesy applied the cynical skepticism of his own time where Vietnam and Watergate dominated public discourse and soured America’s image of itself.
A generation prior, the writer Laura Ingalls Wilder popularly represented frontier life with her Little House series of children’s books published between 1932 and 1943. The best-known book of the series was Little House on the Prairie, which was adapted into a popular television series in 1974. Based on Wilder’s childhood memories of 19th century frontier life a mere five mile from the Kansas border with Indian Territories, the book has been hailed as a positive affirmation of family life and American ideals. She recounts growing up on the remote farm cleared by her father Charles “Pa” Ingall, in 1869. The story’s positive spin of frontier America fails to adequately explain that the Ingall family, along with 500 other similar families, were not official homesteaders and had no bureaucrat claim to the land they occupied. They had squatted on land that belonged to the Osage Indians yet they proceeded to treat the land as their own. Indian agent G. C. Snow described the situation, “The squatters had taken possession of [the Osages’] cornfields, and forbidden them cutting firewood on ‘their claims.’” He went on to say the Osages, “have had, to my certain knowledge, over 100 of their best horses stolen [in the past month]. I learn that scarcely a day passes that they do not lose from five to twenty horses….Not one of the horse thieves has as yet been brought to justice, or one in a hundred of the Indians’ horses returned to them.” By 1870 the Grant administration had successfully purchased the land from the Osages’ and the Ingall family surely witnessed their final migration west from Kansas to the Indian Territories as thousands of Osages passed the little house along the old Indian trail which the government later paved and named U.S. Route 75.
Photography too as a popular medium has contributed to our view of the West with eyes clouded by the various photographers’ cultural perspectives. Over the years, the West stopped being an uncontrolled wilderness and gave way to railroads, automotive highways, cities and governmental laws. With shifts similar to those seen in other media, photography shifted its emphasis away from describing remote landscapes outside of human existence, as in Timothy O’Sullivan’s geographical survey work of the 1870s, to creating social-political urbanized landscape in which people interact with each other and their environment, as in Phillip-Lorca diCorcia’s urban landscapes of the 1990s.
Creating an American Destiny
In his 1893, Frontier Thesis Fredrick Jackson Turner explained the creation of a uniquely American character came from the development of the American frontier and the struggle to advance the American settlements westward during the 19th century. The term frontier is somewhat ambiguous since in practicality it can refer to any land newly explored by a people. Turner however defined it quite narrowly as the Indian country and the outer margin of the settled area.
As the frontier moved west with development, its leading edge brought the pioneers into “continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnishing the forces dominating American character.” When he referred to the settled area, he was referring only to settlers of European heritage, not the Native Americans who had lived on the land for untold generations. Frontiersmen saw Native Americans as dangerous natural impediments to overcome, as one builds a bridge or cuts a tunnel through a mountain, just another obstacle Americans needed to surmount on the great race to the Pacific. Turner described the frontier as, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”
Turner saw the development of the frontier as an evolutionary process where pioneers receive a land grant then settle and clear the rough land. Emigrants then purchase the land and build fields, bridges, roads, mills, schoolhouses, etc all of which add value to the land, and lastly the capitalists and entrepreneurs come with railroads and factories thus giving the settlers the opportunity to sell out at a profit and move farther west to renew the process. It was common for a settler to sell out and reestablish himself further west five times, as civilization caught up with him.
Some speculated that the zeal to risk the dangers involved with pushing into the frontier was a natural part of the American character. Franz Josef Grund wrote in 1836, “It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development.”
Others speculated that America was especially unique in its character when compared to other countries. Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 suggested in his celebrated look at American life, Democracy in America that America occupied and exceptional place in world because it was both a nation of immigrants and the first modern democracy. This was an idea which found legitimacy in the Monroe Doctrine; a U.S. policy adopted in 1832 which President James Monroe ostensibly proposed to curb European interference with United States but in practice established American hegemony over the western hemisphere. As an ideology, Monroe’s declaration would evolve with the changing ideas of what made up the United States however; the America for Americans philosophy galvanized the country’s perception of itself as a regional power by securing the right to further westward expansion of the United States into land occupied by Native Americans.
Americans attributed an almost sacred attribute to land and what it represented to the nation with some believing that God ordained a westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean with some even believing the country should encompass all of North America; an idea they termed “Manifest Destiny.” However, they limited their idea of who would benefit from such destiny to Anglo-Americans, as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 made clear. Under the act, signed by President Andrew Jackson, the way was clear for forcible removal of Native Americans from land coveted by large Southern states. The Indian Removal Act opened for settlement those lands still held by Indians in states east of the Mississippi River, primarily Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina. Jackson declared that removal would “incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier.” Clearing Alabama and Mississippi of their Indian populations, he said, would “enable those states to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power.” In 1831, the Cherokee Nation sued the state of Georgia in the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent the Georgia state government from forcibly removing them from their lands. The court refused to intervene. Chief Justice Marshall wrote for the court’s majority, “If it be true, that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true, that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future. The motion for an injunction is denied.”
The most infamous of the removals took place in 1838, two years after the end of Andrew Jackson’s final term, when the Army forcibly removed Cherokee Indians from their lands. The thousands of deaths that occurred along the route moved those who made the journey to describe it as a “Trail of Tears.”
The Beginnings of Frontier Photography and Photography as a Tool for Exploration:
In 1820, the frontier was the area beyond the Mississippi River. It progressed slowly to the eastern boundary of what we now know as Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. The remoteness of the area prevented photographers from adequately depicting the frontier until after 1855. Much of the early photography of these borderlands has been unfortunately lost. Photographers did not begin to record the region in earnest until after the Civil War. One of the earliest photographers to visit the frontier area was J.H. Fitzgibbon of St. Louis who made daguerreotypes of Native Americans, landscapes, and river traffic. He also collected a great number of frontier images, which he displayed in his prominent St. Louis daguerreotype gallery.
The gold rush of 1849 captured the attention of photographers who traveled west to California and Oregon to either dig for gold or make pictures. R.H. Vance was a enterprising photographer who followed the forty-niners west to California where he made 300 large daguerreotypes depicting various tribes of Native Americans, gold miners, and California scenery including street views of of Sacramento, San Francisco, and Monterey. In 1851, he exhibited his collection in New York City. His exhibition catalog described a splendid panoramic view of San Francisco. The excitement over the exhibition was palpable, one of the first of its sort with some of his images touted as some of the best daguerreotype views ever taken. Unfortunately, he was unable to recover his costs. He returned to California, leaving his collection in the hands his solicitor who sold them for $1500, which was less that half the expense Vance incurred making them. Eventually they too ended up in the hands of Mr. Fitzgibbon. These too have been lost to history as were most of the early images of the frontier.
Photography moved west as well to document exploration and settlement. Photographs revealed open unfettered seemingly endless landscapes that tangibly symbolized the American notion of sublime freedom. Both the U.S. government and private people funded exploration surveys of the western lands. They sought information regarding the possible living conditions, resource development, and railroad routes. The photographs produced for the surveys provided visual evidence of the conditions and publicity images for proponents of western expansion.
Only a few expeditionary surveys went west before the Civil War. The photographers who accompanied them still used the difficult daguerreotype process, which produced images on silver plated copper sheets. In 1853, the first photographer to escort a governmental survey to the frontier was J.M. Stanley. His expedition acted under direction of Congress and set out from St. Paul, Minnesota to discover the best route for a railway line to the Pacific. The government was now accepting the value of photographic records as a way of understanding the events of an expedition; that same year they sent a daguerreotypist with Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan.
In addition to the photographing the landscape, the photographers made pictures of the Native Americans who lived on the lands. Governor Stevens of the Washington Territory who led the railway survey expedition recorded in his diary, “Mr. Stanley, the artist, was busily occupied during our stay at Fort Union with his daguerreotype apparatus, and the Indians were greatly pleased with their daguerreotypes.” He wrote later, “ Mr. Stanley commenced taking daguerreotypes of the Indians with his apparatus. They are delighted and astonished to see their likenesses produced by the direct action of the sun. They worship the sun, and they considered Mr. Stanley was inspired by their divinity, and he thus became in their eyes a great medicine man.”
That same year a private expeditionary party left Missouri to travel to Utah. Here again the expedition’s photographer, S.N. Carvalho, photographed the Native American population along the route. He recalled that while the expedition traveled through Kansas he made occasional daguerreotypes of Native Americans, “They wanted me to live with them, and I believe if I had remained, they would have worshipped me as possessing extraordinary powers of necromancy.”
The difficulty of the daguerreotype process and the intricacy and weight of the equipment made him extremely unpopular with the packers who accompanied the expedition. Frequent assembly and disassembly of the photography kit wore on the patience of his helpers. A typical daguerreotype required between one and two hours of intricate work to achieve one image, often under difficult conditions. Carvalho wrote about his working conditions in the Photographic Arts Journal, “I succeeded beyond my utmost expectation in producing good results and effects by the Daguerreotype process, on the summits of the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains with the thermometer at times from 20 degrees to 30 degrees below zero, often standing to my waist in snow, buffing, coating, and mercurializing plates in the open air.” After the expedition returned to New York and Carvalho contracted Mathew Brady to copy the photographs however, over the course of time both the originals and the copies have been lost.
The reader should remember that photography was a relatively new medium and the early processes were difficult to master. The official report of one 1859 expedition to the Great Basin of Utah complains of problems with the equipment that prevented them from achieving good photographs. The commanding officer wrote in his official report, “…a couple of gentleman accompanied me as photographers, but although they took a large number of views… as a general thing the project proved a failure.” He complained that the camera they carried would not focus on objects at differing distances and was ill suited for distant scenery. He writes, “On exploring expeditions the chief desideratum is to daguerreotype extensive mountain chains and other notable objects having considerable extent, the camera has to be correspondingly distant to take in the whole field. The consequence was a want of sharpness of outline and in many instances, on account of the focal distance not being the same for every object within the field of view, a blurred effect as well as a distortion of parts. In my judgment, the camera is not adapted to explorations in the field, and a good artist, who can sketch readily and accurately, is much preferred.” The government most likely burdened the frustrated army officer with poorly trained or incompetent photographers who did not know how to operate the camera’s f/stops, and did not have sufficient experience with making daguerreotypes in hazy mountainous conditions.
Despite the officer’s damning recommendation, photography continued to be included as an important aspect of frontier expeditions. A year later, in 1860, during an expedition to the region bordering the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers the photographer J.D. Hutton became the first photographer to photograph the Great Falls of the Missouri River, made famous during the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Historians believe Hutton broke with tradition and employed the new wet plate process instead of using the daguerreotype, as was common in the past. Once again, as with most of the early expeditionary photography, the images have been lost and only written records of the expeditions remain.
The start of the Civil War in 1860 put an end to the governmental expeditions to the frontier areas however, private photographers continued venturing to the slowly advancing margins of the western frontier. The best remembered of the private photographic explorers is C.E. Watkins of San Francisco who learned the photographer’s craft while working as studio manager for R.H. Vance. Watkins specialized in photographing the remote interior of California and received international recognition for his large wet plate images of Yosemite Valley. The plates sized at18 x 22 inches required him to a carry huge wooden camera (which he made himself) and large sheets of glass (for the negatives) to remote and difficult locations. He needed a twelve-mule team to carry the heavy weight of the equipment and supplies into the remote valley. The particulars of the wet plate process required him to erect a special darkroom tent so he could prepare the plate immediately before he photographed a scene. At the time there were no reliable processes for making enlarged photographs from negatives, he therefore made very large negatives from which he made “contact prints,” a print exactly the same size as the glass negative.
Watkins made a large number of stereographs of Yosemite as well, which he widely published and sold for use in stereo viewers. He was know for his painterly eye which caught the attention of Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote in an 1863 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, “One of the most interesting accessions to our collection is a series of twelve views, on glass, of scenes and objects in California, sent us with unprovoked liberality by the artist Mr. Watkins. As specimens of art, they are admirable, and some of the subjects are among the most interesting to be found in the whole realm of nature. Thus, the great tree, the ‘Grizzly Giant,’ of Mariposa, is shown in two admirable views; the might precipice of El Capita, more than three thousand feet in precipitous height, the three conical hill-tops of Yosemite, taken not as they soar into the atmosphere, but as they are reflected in the calm waters below. There and others are shown, clear, yet soft, vigorous in the foreground, delicately distinct in the distance, in a perfection of art which compares with the finest European work.”
When Watkins made his photographs, Yosemite was an almost wholly unknown valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. His photographs of the region helped convince the beleaguered President Lincoln in 1864 to create the Yosemite Grant, which designated that the land be set aside for preservation and public.
It is a great loss to photography that the 1906 San Francisco fire and earthquake destroyed many of Watkins’ negatives from the 1860s. The director of the Museum that stored Watkins’ images recounted, “The Sunday before the fire I unearthed an oaken chest from a closet. Opened it and found it filled with dozens of rare daguerreotypes, including that of Sutter at Sutter’s Mill [the place where gold was first found that started the California Gold Rush]. It was late in the afternoon, so I told him [Watkins] that I thought the best thing I could do was to take it to Palo Alto where it would be safe from fire, as I realized its great value. I also figured that if I made copies I could make prints that would be easier to describe. But the chest was to heavy for me to handle alone, so I put it near the rear door and told him I would bring one of the boys with me the next Sunday and in that way get it to the station. Wednesday came the fire and everything went up in smoke. In the box were a great many scenic views. The lost collection included work of nearly all the early daguerreotype artists of those days.”
After the War: The Great Surveys
The U.S. Government further advanced the Manifest Destiny concept with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which privatized 270 million acres or 10% of U.S. land by providing farmers with free land. This represented an economic and political redistribution of the land from the dispossessed Native American inhabitants to the Anglo-American farmers who now paid taxes, voted, and were protected by the Army.
Before the Civil War, the focus of western expeditions was to explore, map and otherwise describe and record the locations of newly discovered land features such as mountains and rivers with the goal of finding good routes west to the Pacific for settlers traveling in wagons and for the wealthy railroads. Although some photography of the indigenous Native American people occurred, it was tangential to the primary undertaking. By the completion of the Civil War however, the outstanding features of the landscape were well known, therefore the mission of the expeditions became three-fold; obtaining detailed knowledge of the land’s geography and geology, making ethnographic studies of the disappearing Native American life, and producing images that publicized the West for economic development.
In 1866, the photographer John Carbutt accompanied a publicity excursion to the end of the newly laid Union Pacific railway line to the 100th Meridian approximately 250 miles west of Omaha, Nebraska. The purpose of the “expedition” was to entice investors in railway development. Traveling with Mr. Carbutt in luxury “palace” railway cars were T.C. “Doc” Durant the vice-president of the railroad who arranged the excursion, reporters from every major newspaper, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, an English earl, “two hundred and fifty of the most distinguished citizens of America,” and two brass bands. In addition to the lavish party thrown on reaching the 100th meridian, Mr. Durant added frontier realism by staging a mock Indian raid at 4:00 am while the excursionists were “camping out” on the plains in tents. Carbutt spent much of the following year photographing the plains along the Union Pacific line.
Four of the most important frontier photographers gained experience as Civil War battlefield photographers; Alexander Gardner, A.J. Russel, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy O’Sullivan. After the war Russel, Jackson, and O’Sullivan worked as part of official governmentally funded geological surveys (now the United States Geological Survey or USGS) and Gardner photographed along the Union Pacific Railway.
By extensively photographing the Army of the Potomac, Gardner had already distinguished himself as the premier photographer of the Civil War. While photographing for the Union Pacific railroad after the war, he visited every town along the route and photographed many towns in their entirety including streets, buildings, natural geographical and geologic features, and wildlife. His work, which is intact today, represents a comprehensive photographic record of the Kansas frontier in 1867.
The photographic work generated by the post-war geological survey photographers was substantially more successful and influential than the survey photography made before the war. This was due to the high skill level and experience these photographers gathered while working four years in the field under adverse wartime conditions and the improved quality of post-war photographic supplies. The government expressed a heightened appreciation for the scientific and historical value of photographic records and provided greater funding for their use.
By 1865, survey photographers worked exclusively with the wet plate process (instead of daguerreotypes) to facilitate making unlimited copies of their photographs from individual negatives thus ensuring wide distribution of the images. Commercially prepared glass plate coating chemicals for the making of negatives removed the variable impurities that plagued homemade preparations, dramatically improving the quality of the plates and resulting images.
Photographers accompanied four “Great Surveys” that studied the geology and geography of the West. The images the survey photographers took served as both scientific records and publicity images advertising territories ready for Americans to settle. Timothy O’Sullivan who earlier in his career worked for both Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner became the most significant of the survey photographers, his simple yet dramatic photographs influenced the artistic sensibilities of several generations of future American photographers from the 1920s through the 1970s.
From 1867 to 1869, he accompanied the Fortieth Parallel Survey along the future route of the transcontinental railway, traveling north from Virginia City in western Nevada to eastern Wyoming. The survey leader, Clarence King would later become the first Director of the U.S Geological Survey. King later remarked that, “1867 marked, in the history of national geological work, a turning point, when the science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.” Today we can see clear indication of that shift in attitude; whereas most photographs of western explorations that occurred before the Civil War were neglected and lost to history, a great many of the survey images made after the war were carefully preserved and are still available today through the U.S. Geological Survey, with many available online.
Although the primary goal of the overall survey project was to study geological and natural resources, the main purpose of O’Sullivan’s photographs was to attract the settlers needed to develop the West. His powerful images acted as advertising material for the economic development of the frontier. He described the conditions in which he worked along the fortieth parallel as, “absolutely wild and unexplored, except what the Indians and fur trappers who frequent the mountains may have accomplished in the way of exploitation.”
For a short time in 1870, O’Sullivan diverged from Western exploration and joined a team making a survey for a future ship canal across the Isthmus of Panama (known at the time as the Isthmus of Darien). He returned to the West in 1871 to spend three additional years on another of the Great Surveys, which focused on land west of the One Hundredth Meridian, the line that represents the boundary between the moist east and the arid west; it extends from North Dakota through the Texas panhandle. An Army engineer, Lieutenant George Wheeler, headed the survey with the primarily military goal to find an inland passage for troops from Idaho and Utah southward to Arizona and to identify suitable places for future settlement.
Wheeler provided O’Sullivan with his own boat which he aptly named Picture, in which he explored the Colorado River. He lost a large number of his glass negative when it capsized on the Colorado River, placing him in great peril of starvation. His elegant masterpiece photograph of White House Ruins (as well as others) survived; it later inspired Ansel Adams to make a nearly identical photograph 73 years later as homage to O’Sullivan’s great contribution to photography. O’Sullivan accomplished a great deal in a rather short time; in 1892, when he died in Washington D.C. of tuberculosis, he was only 42 years old.
Then and Now
In 1977 a group of three photographers; Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester, and JoAnn Verburg set out on a photographic project that would retrace the steps of the Geographic Survey photographers of the 1870s. With grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Polaroid they began detailed research on the photographs stored in the government archives of the U.S. Geological Survey. They titled their undertaking the Rephotographic Survey Project.
Carrying copies of the original 19th century photographs made by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan, their goal was to travel to the locations and reproduce the original photographs as accurately as possible. The only visible differences between the old and new images would be the effect of man-made or environmental changes to the landscape after the most tumultuous century in human history. For this to be accomplished the attention to detail would be an important aspect of their work. Matching every detail of the photographers’ original practices required a great deal of skill, not only with making pictures, but also with looking at them.
An example of the problem is exemplified by comparing two photographs, one made by Timothy O’Sullivan in 1873, titled Cañon de Chelle, walls of the Grand Cañon about 1200 feet in height and an almost identical image made by Mark Klett in 1978 titled Monument Rock, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona. The photographic materials used by the two men varies considerably with O’Sullivan’s wet plate process being more sensitive to blue light and providing a more contrasty appearance. Klett used modern black and white camera film, which gave a smoother appearance to the tonal gradations in the rock. Determining the exact time necessary to make the second photograph so the lighting characteristics of the images would match was a bit trickier. It would not be possible to achieve identical highlight and shadow relationships unless they pinned down the exact time of year O’Sullivan made his picture. Unfortunately O’Sullivan did not keep clear records of those dates. A member Rephotographic team traveled to the remote valley and attempted to reproduce the image in August, without luck since the angle of the sun differed substantially from that O’Sullivan’s image. Views of these rock monuments with their multifaceted rock faces, the height and direction of the sun is readily apparent. While visiting a nearby location only eight miles from the canyon they found an inscription carved into the rock a century prior by a member of O’Sullivan’s group which read, “ W. Conway, September 24, 1873.” The team returned to the canyon on September 24, 1978 to make their photograph. Klett said of the light, “There are perhaps only two weeks a year, and then only three minutes a day during which the lighting in this photograph can be repeated.” With other sites, they had to return many times to match the light, and then environmental conditions such as clouds or rain were often uncooperative. It took them two years to repeat on hundred and twenty photographs.
Their work was more mechanical and less creatively artistic than was the work of the original photographers. They came to appreciate the nuance of the original photographers who still hold a place in many eyes as exceptional landscape photographers. For the first year the Rephotographic Survey focused on repeating views made by America’s most influential landscape photographer, William Henry Jackson.
W.H. Jackson’s American Landscapes
Jackson was the son of an upstate New York blacksmith. At 23 he was a Civil war veteran stuck in a nowhere job and involved unhappy romantic relationship. Frustrated, he went west in 1866 to find something more from life. Leaving with only the clothes on his back, he abandoned his fiancée, his job, and friends, swearing never to return until he made his fortune. After the long transcontinental journey, he labored hard for two years, working as a bullwhacker and driving herds of horses from California to Nebraska. As a self-taught artist, he often made sketches of the scenery he encountered along the way.
In Omaha, he sent for his brother and together, with a loan from their father, they bought out a photography studio to set up their own photo business, Jackson Brother’s Photography. Jackson was something of an entrepreneur as a youngster earning money as an artist when he was 13 by painting window screens with landscape scenes for his neighbors, which was a fad of the era. Later he worked in a photo shop retouching pictures, he learned to coat photographic plates and use a camera but had little freedom and the monotony of the work was partly responsible for his escape west.
In 1867, when Jackson acquired the Omaha photography studio, he received the previous owner’s stock of photographs. They included a great number of crude studio portraits showing members of local Indian tribes such as the Pawnee, Otoe and the Omaha whose reservations were close by and a quantity of rather mundane frontier landscape photographs. The portraits showed the somber Indians against a plain backdrop with props such as sticks and rocks. The imagery reinforced Eastern stereotypes of Indians and provided newcomers to the West with evidence of their wild and exotic new surroundings, which they could send home to delight their family and friends back east.
The sales of Indian pictures were lucrative and Jackson followed his predecessor’s example however Jackson generally photographed them in the field as part of the landscape. Since his intent was to sell the images as mementos to Eastern transplants coming west, he made the images more salable by propagating the Anglo-European stereotypical myth of the Indian as the noble savage. These reflected popular notions of proud Native Americans still living in a natural state unaffected by contact with whites, a condition that had largely disappeared as the government systematically worked to “civilize” the Native Americans by forcing them onto reservations. He sometimes included prominent props like tomahawks, theatrically presented in the photos.
In 1869, Jackson shifted his attention to primarily photographing landscapes and spent the summer photographing along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad. This project served both as a makeshift apprenticeship in landscape work by also introduced him to prominent men who would later be influential to his career, such as Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, director of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories.
With the help of a new employee, A.C. Hull, Jackson photographed hundreds of land features, natural and man made. In one magnificent landscape showing the Devils Gate Bridge in the Utah territory, he uses a wide vista to show the expansive remoteness of the locale; over one hundred men pose atop the flat cars of a railway train at rest on the newly completed bridge. The vast terrain dwarfs the men. He sold 150 of the prints to the bridge builders so that they could have a special photographic record of the work they had done. He learned that by including people in his landscapes for scale he could show the huge scale of the features in the western landscape.
Such was the public hunger for photographs of the west that Jackson was selling his images by the thousands. He finally made a national name for himself when he was offered a contract for 10,000 images made along the Union Pacific by Edward Anthony, the head of the largest photographic supplier in the United States, the editor of the popular magazine Anthony’s Journal, and a large publisher of stereo photographs of the West. The contract meant nationwide distribution of his photographs.
All the time he worked at better understanding composition and light. He sought critical input from two of the most important Western photographers of the day; C.R. Savage, the official photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad, and A.J. Russel, the former Civil War photographer and Western landscape photographer. Russell recorded the progress of the Union Pacific railroad from Laramie, TX to Promontary Summit, UT. May 10, 1869 is when he famously photographed the joining of the Central Pacific (from Sacramento, CA) railroad to the Union Pacific (from Omaha, NE) railroad.
When Jackson returned to Omaha he received an important visit from Dr. Ferdinand Hayden who was embarking on a Geological survey trip. Hayden was anxious to have Jackson along on the trip; both thought of the land in Romanticized poetic terms and seemed contradictorily to see the land as a commodity as well. Both were in their own way selling the land, Hayden’s geological survey sought ways to better exploit use of the land and Jackson’s role as photographer was to both advertise the land to the investors back east and sell his images. Hayden also invited along a landscape painter, Sanford Gilford.
Jackson signed on the Survey for expense money only, he received no salary but retained the rights to keep his negatives and sell his pictures. Jackson’s previous images were rather austere and stark but by 1870, he developed a more painterly approach to his photography, due to Gilford’s influence. During 1870, he traveled with the survey making views that reinforced the idea of sublime Western spaces that were simultaneously harsh and beautiful. The frequent inclusion of the Survey team members, camp tents, and wagons did more that just establish scale and size however, it created unequivocal evidence that they had performed the heroic act of traveling deep into the remote country for the purposes of science and the advance of the American ideal westward. This was important since Hayden intended to give the photographs as gifts to influential politicians who were responsible for making laws regarding land use and Native American relations. Hayden was a political man in Washington who often supported the needs of entrepreneurs seeking to use the land for profitable ventures; a British land speculator had once given him $10,000 in stock by for providing an optimistic report regarding livestock production on a tract of land. Jackson was essentially acting as Hayden’s publicist. Photography was still a new and electrifying medium; the exceptional quality, large size, and dramatic subject matter of Jackson’s images made them novel and unique. The experience of looking at such images in the 1870s was powerful. The value of the images for Hayden was not primarily scientific; the importance was in the emotional value of the pictures and their ability to influence.
Like the important role C.E. Watkins’ photographs played in convincing Congress to set aside Yosemite as public land, Jackson’s images were persuasive in the establishment of Yellowstone National Park. Part of their influence was due to the unique natural features of the area, which seemed far-fetched to most 19th century people who discounted the possibility they existed. When Anglo-European explorers first entered the region during the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805, they encountered the Nez Perce, Crow and Shoshone tribes who informed them of the Yellowstone region, however they did not investigate it. Over the next forty years, reports came from mountain men and trappers who told stories of boiling mud, steaming rivers and petrified trees. After an 1856 exploration, mountain man Jim Bridger (also believed to be the first or second European American to have seen the Great Salt Lake) reported seeing boiling springs, spouting water, and a mountain of glass and yellow rock. Once again, people ignored these reports, this time citing Bridger as a notorious “spinner of yarns”. Jackson’s dramatic photographs from his second Geographic Survey expedition with Hayden in 1871 provided the irrefutable evidence of the region’s grandeur and put an end to the skepticism. They helped to convince the U.S. Congress to withdraw this region from public auction; on March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed The Act of Dedication law that created Yellowstone National Park. A quote from a New York Times article of 1875 may best explain the value of photography for the Geological Survey, “While only a select few can appreciate the discoveries of the geologists or the exact measurements of the topographers, everyone can understand a picture.”
The Geographic Survey hired Jackson as an official photographer in 1871 and he continued working on the project until its close in 1878. In 1872 he explored and photographed the Grand Tetons; in 1873, the Survey moved to Colorado and he photographed the Mount of the Holy Cross; in 1874, he photographed in southwestern Colorado and on the Ute Reservation at Los Piños including the discovery of a series of cliff ruins in Mancos Cañon near Mesa Verde. The following year he returned to Mesa Verde with a massive 20 x 24 inch camera, which he packed through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. He lost all of his pictures in 1877 when he attempted a new dry photographic process that failed in the field. The following year he makes his last journey with Hayden, returning to the Grand Tetons, Wind River Mountains, and Yellowstone.
After he completed his tenure with the Geological Survey in 1889, Jackson worked for as commercial photographer for companies such for the B&O railroad and the architect Daniel Burnham who designed the Worlds Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, 1893. He photographed for the World’s Transpiration Commission in 1896, traveling through the near and far east traveling through Australia, China, Siberia and Russia. For most of the rest of his career, he worked in the publishing business.
In 1936, now in the era of the automobile, radio, and the airplane, the Government again hired Jackson as an artist, this time he was producing paintings of frontier scenes for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1940, he published his autobiography, Time Exposure; two years later, he died in New York City at the age of 99.
Questioning the Landscape
When Mark Klett published the work of the Rephotographic Survey, he raised some important questions regarding the working methodology of landscape photographers. He suggests his reasons for photographing these landscapes are significantly different than the 19th century photographers. The rephotographic photographers in his team were less interested in the shape of the land and were more interested in seeing the results of a visual experiment. The questions they hoped to answer with the experiment were philosophical not geological. He said, “they were spurred onward by questions concerning how nineteenth-century photographers have informed us about the landscape, and what a contemporary photograph that is similar but different can tell us about the same place.”
Landscape photographs are deceptively simple. Although we as viewers think we know what the pictures are about, it is nearly impossible to put ourselves in the cultural shoes of the photographer. The intended meaning of Jackson’s original images was affected by his 19th century viewpoint on the land and the politics of land usage To make his images more accessible to the elite class of people who would view them in Washington he shifted his aesthetics toward a more painterly approach during his first stint as Survey photographer. Timothy O’Sullivan did not make this same choice; his images remained starkly descriptive as though he was a cold observer, just as they had at Gettysburg. O’Sullivan’s landscapes were unforgiving places with heavy shadows and stark blank sky. Jackson on the other hand would often compose his images by prominently placing an important powerful element like a tree or rock on one side of the that gave the viewer something to hold onto and gave the rest of the image something hopeful and forgiving to play off. Sometimes Jackson would symmetrically place one mythic element in the frame so it would positively dominate the image. In Jackson’s photographs, the land was controlled and therefore accessible.
It was Jackson’s clear role to make photographs to promote the land rather than just record it. We can find in his decisions an affirmation of the political concept of Manifest Destiny. His images of Native Americans were an extension of his landscape photographs as they represented them as mythic caricatures of what American’s already believed about them. He expressed his thoughts in his diary when he recounted a situation where, “all the Indians in the neighborhood crowded in and we amused ourselves with them a good deal.” Petty meanness and practical jokes often provoked a good deal entertainment when whites dealt with Native American of the era. It is now difficult to look at his images without considering what exactly he wanted his viewer to think and why. Although he made his photographs nearly one hundred and thirty years ago, they still maintain a sophisticated ability to draw us into the beauty of his sublime landscapes without drawing attention to his role in the creation of the images.