October 21, 2025 • 51 mins
Dramatic and inspirational western landscapes have been a powerful feature of western history throughout time. During and after the Civil War, a group of adventuring artists and photographers helped divert America’s gaze from the horrors of war by seeking out the most dramatic western landscapes and painting or photographing their scenery. By the 1870s most Americans and many people around the world knew about the Wind River Range, Yosemite, the Colorado Rockies, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, and other iconic features of western topography. As Dan relates, since Albert Bierstadt and other adventurers first portrayed them, all those places and many more in the West have never lost their magic and now make up some of the most famous scenery in the world.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The most dramatic landforms in the American West first came
to the attention of the world during the Civil War era,
when painters and photographers travel west to provide the American
public a respite from wartime tragedy. The enduring result has
been a set of Western landforms known and recognized around
the world. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West,
(00:27):
brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt
meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to
support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck
Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Enjoy Responsibly.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
A Western geography of hope. Landscapes are unfailing primary characters
and almost all the stories about the West, so one
of the themes of this podcast is tracking the role
the Western landscape has played in the unfolding story of
(01:17):
the region. From ten thousand year old coyote tales to
Edward Abbey's books, to a century's worth of Western movies
with the camera making love, to Monument Valley Are to
a mountain valley called Paradise.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
The Western landscape has.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Never been mere background, but a life shaping, almost living presence.
None of us ever, grows weary of seeing. The snowcapped
rockies are Sierra Nevada. The cliffs soaring up from the
bottom of Zion are the Grand Canyon. The cool forest
of giant trees touching the California sky cactus deserts with
(01:53):
many armed Suaro centuries are the calm, echoless, horizontal yellow
of the Prairies. This episode, then, is the story of
a handful of prize Western landscapes that helped rescue US
Americans from one of our deepest historical holes, then became
familiar touchstones of our national culture. In the summer of
(02:20):
eighteen fifty nine, as the political divide in the United
States was pulling the North and South ever closer to
violent conflict, a young man just twenty nine years old
was on the verge of introducing the country to the
healing possibilities of Western topography. Albert Bierstatt was seeing the
(02:40):
inspirational world of the West for the first time, fresh
from three years of study with the famous art professors
of Germany's Dusseldorf Academy, followed by a grand tour of
the Alps with artist friends Worthington, Whitridge and Sandford Gifford Beerstatt,
by the eighteen fifties was about as soaked in romance
(03:02):
for nature as anyone could get without levitating right off
the planet. People like George Catlin, James Fenmore Cooper, Henry
David Thureaux, and Herman Melville had been trying heroically to
ignore the political fractures of the time. They had Romanticism,
with its focus on adventure and nature and fashioning ones
(03:23):
original relationship to the universe, humming and vibrating in literature
and art. While the Confederacy was having its birth over
the slavery issue. The poet Walt Whitman claimed he was
looking for an American Adam. All these paved the way
for someone like Beerstein, who was in search of a
(03:44):
natural world in the West that could make people forget
politics and heal the country. Looking back now on a
time dominated by the enslavement of a whole population of
people and morbidly bloody battles wags to preserve the Union,
there's almost a tinge of unreality in this story of artists,
(04:04):
photographers and the charismatic.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Places they sought out.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Bierstadt, along with another painter named Thomas Moran, and photographers
like William Henry Jackson and Edward my Bridge abandoned battle
scenes to seek out nature, And somehow we're able to
put adventure in pursuit of America's wildest landscapes before a
historic conflict that was tearing America apart. On the surface,
(04:31):
that seems passing, strange, even shallow. The truth, though, was
that young men like these were not the first to
turn to nature at the very moment the US was
embroiled in violent wars during the American Revolution, a writer
named William Bartram traveled the South and had written America's
first famous nature book, Travels, while completely ignoring the revolution
(04:56):
that was going on all around him. Threau himself worked
NonStop on Walden, published in eighteen fifty four, throughout the
Mexican War. George Perkins Marsha's bestseller Man in Nature appeared
in eighteen sixty four, when newspapers were full of news
about the horrifically bloody Battle of the Wilderness. It turns
(05:18):
out that flight away from war and into nature is
a pattern through most of American history. So Beerstaut and
other nature adventurers weren't inventing a strategy to take the
public's mind off the horrors.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Of the Civil War.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Still, the stark visual contrast they offered up must have
been shocking. Photographs from the battlefields of the age showed
the gritty, awful reality of fragile flesh and mortality, the
futility of all human dreams. In contrast, the soaring Western
landscapes the artists and photographers were seeing fairly brimmed with
(05:56):
beauty and optimism, even reassurances of a divine spark in
the world. That contrast may be the very reason these
stories exist.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Side by side.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
An age that highlighted the disturbing battlefield photographs of Matthew
Brady and his crew of Civil War photographers must have
needed a set of contrasting scenes from the American West.
What Beerstatz, Jackson's and Moran's adventures offered to Civil War
America was a Western psychic salve for the agonies of
(06:29):
the war, a positioning.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Of life over death.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The Civil War was the first time in history a
non combatant public had confronted the unvarnished reality of warfare.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
In the year.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Eighteen sixty two, Matthew Brady shocked America when he exhibited
photographs of corpses contorted in rigor mortis from the horrific
Battle of Antietam. People who saw Brady's photographs struggled to
expunge the from their memories. The effect in the North,
where the photos were shown shocked the public in the
(07:06):
same way that television footage of battles in Vietnam, broadcast
nightly in the nineteen sixties horrified Americans a century later.
The timing was no coincidence that in the years between
eighteen fifty nine and eighteen seventy three, painters and photographers
roaming the West located and offered up stories and images
(07:27):
about American places of grand beauty, where the mind could
go for relief and reassurance about the country's mission and history.
The Civil War was a conflict in which both sides
convinced themselves that God and the Bible represented their interests
and their motives. American landscapes that could inspire and heal
(07:51):
had to spring from that same source. So it's not
surprising to find that when young Beershot first saw the
Rocky mountains and pacifically, he was looking at the Wind
River range of today's Wyoming, he lapsed into a state
of near religious rapture. The Winds, he said, were a
classically sublime landscape.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
That word had.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
A meaning in the mid eighteen hundreds, we might not
attribute to it today. A place that could affect you
with sublime feelings was a place of religious power. For
the sublime was an emotion you felt in the presence
of God. The reason a place like the wind River
Mountains could have that effect, romantics believe, was because wild
(08:36):
country was straight from the Creator's hand, fresh and unsullied
by human sin. But as German philosopher Emmanuel Kat said,
the sublime did carry a burden. The sublime, as distinct
from the merely beautiful, affords a negative pleasure because it's accompanied,
as its defining condition, by a moment of pain.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
That pain was the inability.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
To hold fast to a rapturous state, to possess it
and retain it, simultaneously with the knowledge of death and loss.
On the eve of America's Great Conflict, Bierstott's hometown newspaper
in Massachusetts reported that the young man was about to
set out for the West with reference to a series
(09:24):
of large pictures he hoped to create from the region's
most inspiring topography Beerstott was accompanying Colonel Frederick Lander, chief
engineer of a wagon road across South Pass. The group
left Saint Joe, Missouri, early in May of eighteen fifty nine,
and on June of twenty fourth, during the long days
of summer solstice, they reached South Pass. Just to the
(09:48):
north of their road lay the wind River Range Mountains
Americans had read about in the books Jesse Fremont, wife
of explorer and presidential candidate John Charles Fremont, helped her
husband publish. Person's first impressions were his own, but it's
clear he believed the journey had led him to one
of the West's shangriloss. He told the magazine Crayon that
(10:12):
his first glimpses had convinced him that the winds were
very fine as scene from the plains, they resemble very
much the Bernese Alps. He went on, Their jagged summits,
covered with snow and mingling with the clouds, present a
scene which every lover of landscape would gaze upon with
unqualified delight. Entering the first canyons into the mountains, he
(10:37):
found places that reminded him of the White Mountains and
the catskills back east. But when we look up and
measure the mighty perpendicular cliffs that rise hundreds of feet aloft,
he wrote, all capped with snow, we then realized that
we are among a different class of mountains. He also
wrote this line, which became much discussed and quoted. The
(11:01):
color of the mountains here, and of the plains, and
indeed that of the entire country, reminds one of the
color of Italy. In fact, we have here the Italy
of America in a primitive condition. After several weeks in
the wind River high country, certainly up to Island Lake
(11:22):
in the Titcom Basin, and in several other spots on
the western slope of the Winds, Beerstut returned to the
East with bags bulging with sketches and stereoscopic photographs. The
task now was translating how a high drama landscape like
the wind River Range had made him feel, with the
goal of somehow causing other Americans to experience that same
(11:46):
jolt of sublimity about Western nature. His underlying ideology was
plain enough to heal the psyche of a fractured nation.
Beerstut and those who followed him endeavored to show that
there was divine presence in the West's wildest landforms. The
puzzle for people since, though, has been trying to figure
(12:08):
out just where Beerstout was in the Winds and what
he actually saw. Not only did he appear confused about
where he had been, resulting in mislabeled ranges and peaks.
In his zeal to reproduce how Western America made one feel,
he had a disconcerting tendency to paint pictures that combine
(12:29):
scenes from different places.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
What no one has ever questioned, though, is.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That Beerstaut was doing his best to capture American places
that were enormous, grand, even melodramatic. Beerstaut's famous Civil War
era Western paintings succeeded in these intentions and admirably, but
the places he visited have never been easy to locate
on the solid Western earth.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Here's one example.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
In eighteen sixty one, Beerstott finished a painting he originally
called Wassatch Mountains.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
His party had actually been.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Nowhere near the Wassatch in Utah, and later he retitled
this painting Island Lake Wind River Range, Wyoming.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
As I said, he does appear to have visited.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Island Lake at the base of a peak Fremont had
climbed a few years before, and now bears Fremont's name,
But Bearsot's painting actually appears to be of another island lake,
one in the Wyoming Range Mountains, the lander party came
to many days after they were in the Winds. Whatever
(13:41):
this scene actually was, it was Beerstot's first attempt to
impress upon Americans that their West truly was Italy in
a primitive condition, and so he suffused the scene with
a heartbreaking wash of late afternoon yellow coloring many of
us know and love in the West. Another of his
(14:04):
attempts to show the Italian light of his newly found
special Western place was a painting called Sunset Light Wind
River Range of the Rocky Mountains. It was also from
eighteen sixty one, a year of high drama nationally, when
the Confederacy was being born in artillery fire on Fort Sumner.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Produced the first battles of the war.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Beerstott's reputation making masterpiece from his eighteen fifty nine trip, though,
was his eight foot by twelve foot Rocky Mountains landers Peak.
He finished it in eighteen sixty three, and it sold
two years later for twenty five thousand dollars, the most
(14:51):
money and artist had ever made from an American painting.
Rocky Mountains was the ultimate Western landscape of its time.
It reveled in theatrical cloud effects intended to represent stairsteps
to Heaven, and in order to create a perfect subliminal West,
Beerstot composed a scene that fused at least three different
(15:16):
places in and around the Winds. The lake and the
waterfall in the painting were from Island Lake in the
winds titkum Basin. I know this because I've solo camped
directly across Island Lake from the falls in this painting.
The added Shoshone encampment Beerstot put in at the base
(15:39):
of the peak, though, was from an Indian encounter he
had down in the sagebrush country of South Pass. As
for the paintings Towering Mountain, it was neither Lander Peak
nor Fremont Peak above Island Lake. Instead, to represent the
face of God, Beerstot added the crest of Temple Peak,
(16:02):
several miles away from Island Lake.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
To compose his mountaintop.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So the inspiring Western place Beerstot represented in Rocky Mountains
is actually not a real place, but a compilation of
at least three different scenes. Of course, you have to
admit artists, writers, philosophers, and purveyors of religion have been
tinkering with the reality.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Of the world forever.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Beerstot, nonetheless, had set something powerful in motion, calling on grand,
special places in the West topography to serve as markers
of hope and optimism in an ugly age. The public
devoured the artist's sacred mountains, clamored for more, and the
painter obliged them. The war did intervene personally, though Beerstott
(16:52):
was actually drafted into the Union Army in eighteen sixty three,
but of course he did what the wealthy and successful
did back then. He hired a substitute to serve in
his place. So Berstott did not fight, but he did
continue a career that he thought of as an antidote
to a troubled time.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Over the next thirty years.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Bierstatt went on to become one of the most famous
cultural figures in post Civil War America, along with writer
Fitzhugh Ludlow, the author of a best selling drug memoir,
The Hashish Eater. Bierstott continued to seek out the sublime,
and what the two of them regarded as a search
for the West's best places that took them to the
(17:38):
Colorado Rockies and then naturally onto the canyons of the
Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada of California, and ultimately to
the geysers, bluepools, and colossal waterfalls of the Yellowstone Plateau.
Bierstaut sought out each of those places, portraying them in
some of the most wildly romantic landscapes ever painted, and
(18:00):
in doing that, began an inventory of what still today
makes up the most famous destinations in the American West.
After stealing away fitz Hugh Ludlow's wife, Rosalie Beerstott and
his new bride went on to Hollywood like celebrity. Only
a couple dozen writers, artists, or photographers have measured up
(18:24):
to their kind of status in American culture ever since.
What see you when you get to the West?
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Creation? All creation?
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's how American poet Walt Whitman described the West. Creation
was the target in the summer of eighteen seventy two,
when a photographer and two assistants lugged nearly three hundred
pounds of gear a heavy eight x ten wet plate camera,
a tripod, fragile glass negatives, and an entire portable dark room.
(19:04):
To the ragged top of a granite peak in the
Northern Rockies, with one of the most sharply serrated ranges
in the West on the far horizon, the photographer composed
his shot in the viewfinder, inserted a dripping glass plate,
and then removed the lens cover as he counted down
the exposure. Like Beerstott when he first went west, the
(19:28):
photographer photographing the Grand Tetons was just twenty nine. His
name was William Henry Jackson, and he would soon be
the West's most famous photographer except for a crazy Californian
named Edward my Bridge, who had had himself lowered by
rope and pulley to snag vertigo inducing shots in the
(19:51):
Merced River Canyon of the Yosemite. No one had ever
taken a photograph in a place like Jackson was now,
and the name the young man gave his resulting print
reflected a certain amount of pride in that he called
it photographing in high Places, the special sublime Western landscape.
(20:11):
The photographer had sought out for this adventure, as I
said was the Grand Tetons, and Jackson was to the
postwar years what Ansel Adams would be to the twentieth
century American West. Ten years earlier, in eighteen sixty two,
right in the heart of the war, Jackson had enlisted
(20:32):
in the Union Army, where he landed the position of
staff artist. Jackson specialized during and after the war in
the visual memoir of the Young Man in Uniform. Engaged
to a woman named Katie Eastman, who, at least as
he remembered it later, was the Belle of Vermont. Jackson
(20:52):
was mortified when she broke off their engagement, so, at
the age of twenty four and out of the army,
he struck out over Montana Territory.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
After a few weeks travel.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
He wrote that we were now in new and exciting country.
The yellows were turning into reds and saffrons, while the
blues were becoming deep purples, and the air was so
clear that the highlands of the West seemed almost within grasp.
The air at eight thousand feet was exhilarating. The wind
(21:26):
River mountains, blue purple and topped with snow, were a
splendid sight. Who wanted to print endless copies of Civil
War mementos. When this kind of world, untouched by the war,
lay beyond the Mississippi River, Jackson decided to become a
photographer of this new country and committed himself to seeking
(21:47):
out its most powerful places. This was one of those
right place at the right time moments. In eighteen seventy,
a professor of geology from the East had looked over
jackson photographs, admiring a photographer with the stamina to get
heavy camera gear into the wilds of the West. He
was Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden, and Congress had given him an
(22:11):
appointment to explore the West, a task that could stretch
out over several seasons. He had a painter to Hudson River,
artist Sanford Gifford, a friend of Beerstein's. What he needed
was a photographer to bring the sublime West in black
and white form to an America still reeling from the
(22:32):
war and its aftermath. The wildest natural landscapes in the
West had an almost Eden like significance for Americans of
this generation. The West was powerful and mysterious, and Jackson
believed there were ways to portray it so that everyone
would understand what the country's most dramatic settings meant for
(22:53):
its future. In eighteen seventy one, Hayden planned to take
his team to one of the most grand eloquent, the
fabled headwaters of the Yellowstone River.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Montana.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Territorial Governor Nathaniel Langford, accompanying a party in eighteen seventy,
had gotten up on that strange plateau and had told
the national magazines that the place was an absolute wonderland.
Some in that eighteen seventy party, with the collusion of
the railroads, had floated a radical idea, maybe the government
(23:25):
ought to retain title to the plateau for public pleasure
and tourism and not let the place get privatized. Assessing
the Yellowstone Plateau in light of this odd idea under.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Lay Hayden's visit.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
This time, Jackson would work beside an almost cadaverous young
painter named Thomas Moran, who in eighteen seventy one joined
him and Beerstadt as the third of the era's adventurers
who helped turn the country's gaze away from the war.
Moran shared working class roots with Jackson. He had grown
(24:02):
up in Bolton, England, the village Karl Marx's collaborator Friedrich Ingalls,
considered the sedious, most polluted industrial.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Town ever spawned by capitalism.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Moran's father, after hearing Indian painter George Catlan speak in
London in the eighteen forties, had left for America with
wife and children in tow. But the memory of a
working class background colored Moran for the rest.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Of his life.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
America's unique genius is that it allows people with talent
and a work ethic to overcome a lack of training
or connections. Moran had no professional training in painting, but
he studied every nuance and trick employed by artists. He
admired the great European landscapist, particularly people like Claude Lorraine,
(24:51):
Salvador Rosa, and especially J. M. W.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Turner.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Moran avoided conscription in the Union Army by fleeing to
England to study. So while Picket charged and Grant sent
thousands of Union boys to their fates with their names
pinned to their uniforms so their corpses could be identified,
Moran rapturously studied Turner's art firsthand in London. His privilege
(25:20):
was being able to escape the country, so that for
him the war happened in some other world. Back in
America at war's end, fueled by Romanticism's love affair with
mystery and feeling, Moran got his main chance when Scribner's
Monthly asked him to create sketches illustrating an article called
(25:41):
the Wonders of Yellowstone. It was written by Nathaniel Langford
and was the article that led Ferdinand Hayden to lead
a government trip to Yellowstone the next summer. With loans
from Scribner's and the Northern Pacific Railroad, which hoped to
haul tourists to this new Western wonder Moran wrangled a
seat on the bus, so Moran and William Henry Jackson
(26:06):
were to spend a summer on the Yellowstone plateau that
changed history. Getting off the train at Rock Springs, Moran
was mesmerized by the nearby cliffs looming over the Green
River and did a first sketch of the West there.
But for a reality check, there is also a Jackson
photograph of that scene. By the time they were in Wyoming,
(26:29):
all signs of industrial capitalism were already in place. In
Rock Springs, there actually were railroad tracks, a bridge, and
a water tower beneath those Green River cliffs. Moran ignored
all of them and painted the Green River the way
the West was supposed to look, as a sublime wilderness.
(26:53):
In Yellowstone, the interior West's most magical place, Moran and
Jackson were challenged by one another, the photographer by the
painter's use of color to evoke feeling, the painter by
those large, crystal clear photographs that could never lie. Jackson
later insisted that their work from that summer convinced everyone
(27:13):
who saw them that the regions where such wonders existed
should be carefully preserved to the people forever. The summer
made Moran famous, and he sold his best painting, the
huge Grand Canyon of the Yellow Zone, to the US
Congress for ten thousand dollars, where it served as prize
example of the kind of magical landscape Americans now knew
(27:38):
lay in the West. The year after Hayden, Jackson and
Moran were in Yellowstone, members of Congress, who had never
seen Yellowstone themselves, gave the country and the world its
first national park. Moran and Jackson spent the next quarter
century traveling with the government surveys of the age seeking
(27:58):
out more Western magic. Moran famously sought out the Tetons
and the Grand Canyon, which he called the most magnificent
side of my life. Jackson spent nine seasons with Hayden
in the employee of the United States Geological Survey, searching
for more magic and finding such scenes in places like
(28:18):
Colorado's Garden of the Gods. Jackson left posterity some thirty
thousand negatives of Western places and inspired other fine glass
plate large format photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan to comb the
West to find its most marvelous landscapes, in O'Sullivan's case,
(28:40):
the Canyon Country of the Colorado Plateau, and notably Arizona's
Canyon to Shay. Not even committed romantics like Beerstott, Moran,
Jackson and O'Sullivan found all of the West's marvelous places.
They missed the Oregon Coasts. They didn't see Monument Valley
or the Big Country in far southwest Texas, the many
(29:02):
magical spots in the Cascades, the Glacier Park country, the
White Sands Dunes of New Mexico, nor Alaskan landmarks like Denali,
are the Arctic Plain north of the Brooks Range what
is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and none of
them bothered to portray scenes on the Great Plains, probably
(29:23):
because they were all committed to the idea that sublime
landscapes were vertical, not horizontal. But I've been committed over
a lot of my adult life to tracking these adventures
to many of the stunning Western places they sought out
and made famous around the world. And there's no doubt
they hit the mark again and again. Hiked through the
(29:46):
Titcom Basin, along the shores of Island Lake, and through
the sirk of the towers in the Wind River Range,
and you still feel today as if you could walk
on water. The height of so many of the peaks,
and the Colone Rockies, where Beerstot named a peak, Mount Rosalie,
after his traveling companion's then wife, is almost beyond comprehension.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
In Yosemite, the.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Gray cliffs soaring above the Merced River still strike one
as other worldly, something from Mars or Jupiter's moons. For
an even more profound Yosemite experience, sometime backpack from the
Pualome Meadows, down the Grand Canyon of Yosemite's Other River
to the waterfalls of Hetchhetchy Canyon, painted by Beerstott before
(30:35):
California built the infamous O'Shaughnessy Dam there. The Tetons and Yellowstone,
both still world class global destinations, have an enduring magic,
best appreciated via backpacks or climbs in the Tetons and
in Yellowstone by five am downs in the primeval Lamar Valley,
(30:56):
when grizzlies roam and gray wolves howl their greetings to
the sun. As for the Grand Canyon, to appreciate one
of the most powerful landscapes on Earth, floated for three
weeks confronting rapids ranked on a scale not applied to
any other American river, are, at the very least do
the one day twenty four mile rim to Rimpike time
(31:19):
spent in a place so amazing that, as John Mure
once said, those are hours that don't get deducted from
your allotted span on Earth. As Beerstot Moran and many
other sense have come to nowell, the West is blessed
with landscapes, an astonishing number of them, in fact, powerful
enough that they can leave you changed for life. The
(31:42):
painters and photographers of one hundred and fifty years ago
call that effect the sublime.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Good name for it.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
What year was the first camera to hit the American West.
I was familiar with La Hoffman, who has had a
photography studio out of Miles City, Montana. Yeah, and he
got there in time to photograph Buffalo, to photograph like
the Winner of eighteen eighty one. Yeah, and I thought
that was early, early, but people had you know, the
(32:27):
cameras have been around for a decade prior to Hoffman, right.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, longer than that.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
I mean, the first photographs are taken in the and
theird Gario type photographs are taken in the eighteen forties.
The first there's a Frenchman whose name I can't quite
recall right now, who took some of the very first photographs.
(32:54):
And so by I mean, so what I was described
being in this particular episode with William Henry Jackson, for example,
is he's taking photographs during the Civil War, and there
are a whole host of photographers who are working with
(33:14):
a guy named Matthew Brady who's starting in about eighteen
sixty one eighteen sixty two, start going out to the
battlefields and shooting photographs of battles in the Civil War
and particularly the aftermath of battles. So that's kind of
the setup for this particular episode is that the Civil War,
(33:35):
as a result of the invention of photography and the
ability of photographers like Matthew Brady to go out to
Civil War battle scenes and capture what the war was like,
it's the first war where non combatant members of the
public are actually seeing images of what war is like
(34:00):
people have ever had before are just you know, red
badge of courage like descriptions of what war is. And
suddenly now here are these black and white photographs, and
of course they're shocking, they're grizzly, they're human shapes lying
(34:20):
like cordwood across a battlefield and behind battlements, all twisted
into rigor mortis and things from having been dead for
a day or two. And the public is seeing this
for the first time. And so one of the things
that these photographers and painters who go west at the
(34:42):
time are trying to do, so they claim, is they're
trying to give the public, and one has to say
specifically the northern public in this case, not necessarily the
public of the Confederacy, but the northern public. They're trying
to give a kind of a psychic release from the
(35:03):
horrors of the war. Because, of course the early part
of the war does not go well for the Union.
I mean, the Confederates seemed to be winning most.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Of the battles.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The Confederate generals seem to be outsmarting the Union generals,
and so the war is looking really bleak by eighteen
sixty two and eighteen sixty three. And that's when somebody
like Albert Bersteint, this German American painter who had trained
in Europe and now goes out to the West, goes
to the wind River Range and ultimately to Colorado and
(35:35):
Yosemite and Yellowstone. And that's when they're trying to offer
the sort of the Grand God derived epic landscapes of
the West as kind of a more positive hope for
America than these battlefield scenes that people are reading about
(35:55):
and seeing. But yeah, photography is available, and so these
glass plate photographer guys like William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan,
you know, I mean, they basically have to take the
camera which is exposing the images on a big glass
(36:17):
plate like this big and it's dipped in an exposure
chemical and you drop it into the camera and the
way you expose, so you have to keep it once
it's dipped into the exposure chemical. You have to keep
it covered and you drop it into the camera. And
the way you expose it is you just remove the
(36:38):
viewfinder and you count down. You know, they ultimately learn, okay,
this is a well lit scene, I need to remove
the viewfinder for ten seconds and then, which of course
means they can't. You can't photograph motion because the camera.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Exposures are too slow.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
So every's which is why landscape tends to be the
thing that people start shooting. You know, mountains and canyons
fortunately just kind of stand there and they're nice and still,
so you can point your camera at it, remove the
the lens cover, and come out with these absolutely gorgeous
(37:20):
photographs of the West.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
In the course of a couple of days, I ran
into two references of people paying their way out of
the Civil War. I'm reading the book about Africa and
it mentions uh through too or Roosevelt's trips to Africa,
and it brings up to his father paid his way
out of the Civil War. Yeah, and then Beerstad did so,
(37:46):
he did directly paid his way out.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
He paid his way out.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
What was that system and did that did that system
carry on into into World War One or anything.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
No, it did not.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But during the the nineteenth century, I mean, you know,
and elites have always had it better than all the
rest of us. If you were wealthy enough, you could
simply and and there was a draft. Abraham Lincoln instituted
a draft in the Civil War, and so able bodied
men were called up. I remember one time reading the
(38:19):
description of what constituted an able bodied man in the
Union draft, and one of the requirements was you had
to have a tooth on the top and a tooth
on the bottom that met so that you could grab
a packet of powder and tear it apart in order
(38:40):
to load your weapon. So that was that was one
of the stipulations for being an able body Union recruit
in the draft was had you had to have two
teeth that met, one on the top and one on
the bottom.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
But if you were wealthy enough.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
You just hired somebody to go and fight in your place.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
And that's a private deal.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
That's a private deal.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
That's what beerstupn arrangement.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
He was called up in the draft, and he sent
his substitute down to the draft board to report for him.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
How many, I mean, how many these substitutes are dying, man,
absolutely dying. The money then goals of their family.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yes, the money would go to their family. I mean,
you know, the Civil War is an abysmally brutal war
because most of the military tactics for the war were
based on using muzzle loaded weaponry that had a range
of maybe could kill somebody at one hundred and twenty
five yards or something. But by the time of the
(39:44):
Civil War, weaponry had improved so that if you did
a frontal assault, like all these guys were trained to do,
you could start killing. Frontal assault attacks could kill people
at four or five hundred yards. And so that's why
it was such a bloody war, is that the weaponry
(40:06):
was not comported with the military strategies that people.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Were still using.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
And you know, that's why Pickett's charge was such an absolute,
you know, just disaster for the South. And they just
kept sending these guys out, you know, and I will
never forget. You know, the guy who was the talking head,
the primary talking head in Ken Burns' Civil War film,
(40:33):
when he was talking about she Shelby said, you know,
I think I would have said General, I don't think
I'm gonna do that you, but then he followed it
up by saying, and yet thousands of them just pinned
(40:54):
their names to their shirts so their bodies could be
identified after the battle was over, and went out and
did it.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
In this episode, you touch on sort of the weird
interconnections between Western art and the military in the nineteenth
century and science, and I think that's sort of something
that always strikes me as odd and maybe underappreciated, is
(41:30):
that so many of these artists and early naturalists are
traveling with military expeditions, and the federal government is you know,
leading the charge essentially on very different fronts in terms
of like the incorporation of the West and to American culture.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, this is something that you know, you have to
sort of understand about the early West, the nineteenth century
West in particular, or is because the native people were
out there, there was always the fear of that if
you just went out, you know, as a as a
Philip Nolan kind of character, that you might not survive.
(42:15):
So what everybody did, what these artists were obviously doing,
was traveling with the military when they could. And what
the you know, the naturalist and the scientists from an
earlier period did and I think I referred to George
Catlan in particular doing something like this, is you traveled
with the fur companies.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
You in other words, you sort.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Of attached yourself to a group that provided numerical the
kind of numbers that could keep you safe. And so
that's how you you know, and even you know the
Maximilian Bodmer Expedition. What they did was they would go
from military posts to military posts. You would go to
(42:58):
Fort Union, and if you are going to work there
and do natural history or do painting or whatever, you
would stay there in a military establishment for your safety,
because the idea was that if you just kind of
wandered out by yourself in the West, you might not survive.
Philip Nolan, that's one of the reasons Philip Nolan.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
I think that's.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Probably one of those eccentricities many and great that we
were referring to, is Philip Nolan apparently just would go
out with a couple of other guys and they somehow
would manage to survive it.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
He must have had a way that he must have
just had a way to be that just he could
make it that he wasn't threatening. I think he wasn't
He was he didn't have any affiliations made he didn't.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, I don't think he did have affiliations. And so
it's a time when the native people are looking for
because their French traders from Louisiana have now been replaced
or about to be replaced in the Louisiana purchase, and
they the Spanish will not trade them guns and ammunition,
and so they're looking for some other avenue of acquiring
(44:05):
those really essential items. And I think Nolan probably was
casting himself as I can do this for you. Yeah, this.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Is a big speculative question. How long, how long from
now will the West hold its mystique as a place
that represents space and freedom, not the people that won't
want to visit anymore. But like people's reasons for visiting
(44:37):
places evolve over time. Like you remember, Colorado was very
early and legalizing weed, so like Colorado became people had
always wanted to go to Colorado, but suddenly there's this thing,
like Colorado was known as this other thing, right, this
kind of progressive attitude toward marijuana, and people would go
there for that reason. So people will always go to
(45:00):
the West, But how much longer can it be? What
you know, how much longer can it be its current thing.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Well, that's a great question, you know, and I the
truth is, I probably don't have a good answer for it.
I think, however, based on that example and a lot
of others, I mean, you can trot out one effort another.
When I first moved to Montana, a river runs through
it was just appearing in theaters, and there was for
(45:34):
the next about five years. There were people from all
over the country coming to the University of Montana, and
I have no doubt to Montana State too. Because a
river runs through it suddenly made Montana into the place
to go and the place to be.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
And it was affiliated with the area it sat in
the area. It's very specific about the rivers.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
And I think the you know, the series Yellowstone is
doing the same thing right now. It's having the same effect.
So there are all these cultural developments that you kind
of can't really predict that are going to make one
place or another kind of suddenly the way Colorado was
when pott was legalized, there suddenly the place to go
(46:17):
and the place to be. And that's happened in the
West a lot. I mean, you know, the old classic line,
go west, young man, that's been, you know, something that's
popped up in Western history again and again and again.
And all of these people that we were talking about
in this episode, they're all from somewhere else. I mean,
(46:39):
you know, Albert Berstadt is from Massachusetts. William Henry Jackson
was from Vermont. Thomas Moran was a brit whose dad
had seen George Catlan touring Europe in the eighteen forties
and immediately packed up his family and said, that's the
place to be. I want to go to America because
(47:00):
it's got that going. So that kind of thing you
kind of can't predict. But the West, I will say,
has managed, over and over again in a way that
the other regions don't seem to have done. The West
has managed to come up with something, some sort of
cultural development that suddenly causes people to want to kind
(47:20):
of do a rush on a particular part of it.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
But the theme the spasms are different, right, like the
gold Rush, the land rush, whatever, but like the theme
of adventure, opportunity, freedom, right like that, like someday that'll
be not someday. Kids born in Michigan won't think of
(47:48):
the West that way.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah, or Louisiana, I.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Mean it'll be like it'll stand for, I don't know
what the hell it'll it'll stand for, like an oppressive atmosphere.
I don't know, it'll be like you, I mean.
Speaker 4 (47:59):
I mean you look at California, you know, like at
one point.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
They've they've not been they're not the West, yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:04):
Yeah, but I mean it was yeah, I mean, California
became the West, and then.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
It was California was the West, yeah, you know, and
then it became.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Yeah, no, California was you know, it was the faery
land of the West, where everything was perfect, the sun
always was shining and yeah, the weather was grand and yeah,
and California, of course, you know, I mean I was
just in California a couple of weeks ago. I mean,
California still has all those qualities that were there when
(48:36):
it was drawing people from all over the world. But
of course, what your reaction, at least what my reaction
to California is now is holy cow, so many people,
so many cars, so much congestion. Yeah, I mean, it's
you know, you can find parts of California that aren't
like that, but they tend to be the parts of
California that people don't really want to go to and
(48:59):
all the you know, the marvelous parts are just packed
with people these days.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
Took that observation that you know, wherever you define the South,
beginning as you travel south, you enter the South. But
then they'll point out but when you hit the Florida Peninsula,
you then leave the South as your southern journey continues.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Yeah, because so many people from the South the South end. Yeah,
I mean, you know, and going across Texas is the
same way. There's always the question and going across Texas,
so when am I in the West? Am I still
in the South. It's always a little difficult to figure
it out.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Yeah, But man, the like the West. It's just staggering,
the draw, the continuity of kind of the language and
the draw that you read about these and I think
the photographers and other people way back then, you know,
and then you're like, you're like, yeah, I can, like,
(49:58):
I can I see that, man, I understand that pool,
you know.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
Yeah, And I think you know, what they were doing
was they were searching out and finding these larger than
life landscapes that became a part of the Western mystique
for people all over the world. You know, everybody sort
of understood. Holy con Man, the Grand Canyon, you know,
the Tetons, I mean, just on and on these marvelous landscapes,
(50:26):
and that's what these guys were. They were kind of
out there finding them and then presenting them to the world.
And it was another one of these cultural moments that
we're talking about that the response of the world was, Wow,
I want to go there. I want to live right
at the foot of where that particular painting was done.
Speaker 4 (50:47):
And then you get enough of those people, you turn
into California.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Yeah, well, thanks Dan, appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
Oh, it's fun. Thanks guys.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Most today, all the
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Games playing New d to Nation
The most dramatic landforms in the American West first came
to the attention of the world during the Civil War era,
when painters and photographers travel west to provide the American
public a respite from wartime tragedy. The enduring result has
been a set of Western landforms known and recognized around
the world. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West,
(00:27):
brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt
meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to
support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck
Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Enjoy Responsibly.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
A Western geography of hope. Landscapes are unfailing primary characters
and almost all the stories about the West, so one
of the themes of this podcast is tracking the role
the Western landscape has played in the unfolding story of
(01:17):
the region. From ten thousand year old coyote tales to
Edward Abbey's books, to a century's worth of Western movies
with the camera making love, to Monument Valley Are to
a mountain valley called Paradise.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
The Western landscape has.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Never been mere background, but a life shaping, almost living presence.
None of us ever, grows weary of seeing. The snowcapped
rockies are Sierra Nevada. The cliffs soaring up from the
bottom of Zion are the Grand Canyon. The cool forest
of giant trees touching the California sky cactus deserts with
(01:53):
many armed Suaro centuries are the calm, echoless, horizontal yellow
of the Prairies. This episode, then, is the story of
a handful of prize Western landscapes that helped rescue US
Americans from one of our deepest historical holes, then became
familiar touchstones of our national culture. In the summer of
(02:20):
eighteen fifty nine, as the political divide in the United
States was pulling the North and South ever closer to
violent conflict, a young man just twenty nine years old
was on the verge of introducing the country to the
healing possibilities of Western topography. Albert Bierstatt was seeing the
(02:40):
inspirational world of the West for the first time, fresh
from three years of study with the famous art professors
of Germany's Dusseldorf Academy, followed by a grand tour of
the Alps with artist friends Worthington, Whitridge and Sandford Gifford Beerstatt,
by the eighteen fifties was about as soaked in romance
(03:02):
for nature as anyone could get without levitating right off
the planet. People like George Catlin, James Fenmore Cooper, Henry
David Thureaux, and Herman Melville had been trying heroically to
ignore the political fractures of the time. They had Romanticism,
with its focus on adventure and nature and fashioning ones
(03:23):
original relationship to the universe, humming and vibrating in literature
and art. While the Confederacy was having its birth over
the slavery issue. The poet Walt Whitman claimed he was
looking for an American Adam. All these paved the way
for someone like Beerstein, who was in search of a
(03:44):
natural world in the West that could make people forget
politics and heal the country. Looking back now on a
time dominated by the enslavement of a whole population of
people and morbidly bloody battles wags to preserve the Union,
there's almost a tinge of unreality in this story of artists,
(04:04):
photographers and the charismatic.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Places they sought out.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Bierstadt, along with another painter named Thomas Moran, and photographers
like William Henry Jackson and Edward my Bridge abandoned battle
scenes to seek out nature, And somehow we're able to
put adventure in pursuit of America's wildest landscapes before a
historic conflict that was tearing America apart. On the surface,
(04:31):
that seems passing, strange, even shallow. The truth, though, was
that young men like these were not the first to
turn to nature at the very moment the US was
embroiled in violent wars during the American Revolution, a writer
named William Bartram traveled the South and had written America's
first famous nature book, Travels, while completely ignoring the revolution
(04:56):
that was going on all around him. Threau himself worked
NonStop on Walden, published in eighteen fifty four, throughout the
Mexican War. George Perkins Marsha's bestseller Man in Nature appeared
in eighteen sixty four, when newspapers were full of news
about the horrifically bloody Battle of the Wilderness. It turns
(05:18):
out that flight away from war and into nature is
a pattern through most of American history. So Beerstaut and
other nature adventurers weren't inventing a strategy to take the
public's mind off the horrors.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Of the Civil War.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Still, the stark visual contrast they offered up must have
been shocking. Photographs from the battlefields of the age showed
the gritty, awful reality of fragile flesh and mortality, the
futility of all human dreams. In contrast, the soaring Western
landscapes the artists and photographers were seeing fairly brimmed with
(05:56):
beauty and optimism, even reassurances of a divine spark in
the world. That contrast may be the very reason these
stories exist.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Side by side.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
An age that highlighted the disturbing battlefield photographs of Matthew
Brady and his crew of Civil War photographers must have
needed a set of contrasting scenes from the American West.
What Beerstatz, Jackson's and Moran's adventures offered to Civil War
America was a Western psychic salve for the agonies of
(06:29):
the war, a positioning.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Of life over death.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The Civil War was the first time in history a
non combatant public had confronted the unvarnished reality of warfare.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
In the year.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Eighteen sixty two, Matthew Brady shocked America when he exhibited
photographs of corpses contorted in rigor mortis from the horrific
Battle of Antietam. People who saw Brady's photographs struggled to
expunge the from their memories. The effect in the North,
where the photos were shown shocked the public in the
(07:06):
same way that television footage of battles in Vietnam, broadcast
nightly in the nineteen sixties horrified Americans a century later.
The timing was no coincidence that in the years between
eighteen fifty nine and eighteen seventy three, painters and photographers
roaming the West located and offered up stories and images
(07:27):
about American places of grand beauty, where the mind could
go for relief and reassurance about the country's mission and history.
The Civil War was a conflict in which both sides
convinced themselves that God and the Bible represented their interests
and their motives. American landscapes that could inspire and heal
(07:51):
had to spring from that same source. So it's not
surprising to find that when young Beershot first saw the
Rocky mountains and pacifically, he was looking at the Wind
River range of today's Wyoming, he lapsed into a state
of near religious rapture. The Winds, he said, were a
classically sublime landscape.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
That word had.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
A meaning in the mid eighteen hundreds, we might not
attribute to it today. A place that could affect you
with sublime feelings was a place of religious power. For
the sublime was an emotion you felt in the presence
of God. The reason a place like the wind River
Mountains could have that effect, romantics believe, was because wild
(08:36):
country was straight from the Creator's hand, fresh and unsullied
by human sin. But as German philosopher Emmanuel Kat said,
the sublime did carry a burden. The sublime, as distinct
from the merely beautiful, affords a negative pleasure because it's accompanied,
as its defining condition, by a moment of pain.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
That pain was the inability.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
To hold fast to a rapturous state, to possess it
and retain it, simultaneously with the knowledge of death and loss.
On the eve of America's Great Conflict, Bierstott's hometown newspaper
in Massachusetts reported that the young man was about to
set out for the West with reference to a series
(09:24):
of large pictures he hoped to create from the region's
most inspiring topography Beerstott was accompanying Colonel Frederick Lander, chief
engineer of a wagon road across South Pass. The group
left Saint Joe, Missouri, early in May of eighteen fifty nine,
and on June of twenty fourth, during the long days
of summer solstice, they reached South Pass. Just to the
(09:48):
north of their road lay the wind River Range Mountains
Americans had read about in the books Jesse Fremont, wife
of explorer and presidential candidate John Charles Fremont, helped her
husband publish. Person's first impressions were his own, but it's
clear he believed the journey had led him to one
of the West's shangriloss. He told the magazine Crayon that
(10:12):
his first glimpses had convinced him that the winds were
very fine as scene from the plains, they resemble very
much the Bernese Alps. He went on, Their jagged summits,
covered with snow and mingling with the clouds, present a
scene which every lover of landscape would gaze upon with
unqualified delight. Entering the first canyons into the mountains, he
(10:37):
found places that reminded him of the White Mountains and
the catskills back east. But when we look up and
measure the mighty perpendicular cliffs that rise hundreds of feet aloft,
he wrote, all capped with snow, we then realized that
we are among a different class of mountains. He also
wrote this line, which became much discussed and quoted. The
(11:01):
color of the mountains here, and of the plains, and
indeed that of the entire country, reminds one of the
color of Italy. In fact, we have here the Italy
of America in a primitive condition. After several weeks in
the wind River high country, certainly up to Island Lake
(11:22):
in the Titcom Basin, and in several other spots on
the western slope of the Winds, Beerstut returned to the
East with bags bulging with sketches and stereoscopic photographs. The
task now was translating how a high drama landscape like
the wind River Range had made him feel, with the
goal of somehow causing other Americans to experience that same
(11:46):
jolt of sublimity about Western nature. His underlying ideology was
plain enough to heal the psyche of a fractured nation.
Beerstut and those who followed him endeavored to show that
there was divine presence in the West's wildest landforms. The
puzzle for people since, though, has been trying to figure
(12:08):
out just where Beerstout was in the Winds and what
he actually saw. Not only did he appear confused about
where he had been, resulting in mislabeled ranges and peaks.
In his zeal to reproduce how Western America made one feel,
he had a disconcerting tendency to paint pictures that combine
(12:29):
scenes from different places.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
What no one has ever questioned, though, is.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That Beerstaut was doing his best to capture American places
that were enormous, grand, even melodramatic. Beerstaut's famous Civil War
era Western paintings succeeded in these intentions and admirably, but
the places he visited have never been easy to locate
on the solid Western earth.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Here's one example.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
In eighteen sixty one, Beerstott finished a painting he originally
called Wassatch Mountains.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
His party had actually been.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Nowhere near the Wassatch in Utah, and later he retitled
this painting Island Lake Wind River Range, Wyoming.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
As I said, he does appear to have visited.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Island Lake at the base of a peak Fremont had
climbed a few years before, and now bears Fremont's name,
But Bearsot's painting actually appears to be of another island lake,
one in the Wyoming Range Mountains, the lander party came
to many days after they were in the Winds. Whatever
(13:41):
this scene actually was, it was Beerstot's first attempt to
impress upon Americans that their West truly was Italy in
a primitive condition, and so he suffused the scene with
a heartbreaking wash of late afternoon yellow coloring many of
us know and love in the West. Another of his
(14:04):
attempts to show the Italian light of his newly found
special Western place was a painting called Sunset Light Wind
River Range of the Rocky Mountains. It was also from
eighteen sixty one, a year of high drama nationally, when
the Confederacy was being born in artillery fire on Fort Sumner.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Produced the first battles of the war.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Beerstott's reputation making masterpiece from his eighteen fifty nine trip, though,
was his eight foot by twelve foot Rocky Mountains landers Peak.
He finished it in eighteen sixty three, and it sold
two years later for twenty five thousand dollars, the most
(14:51):
money and artist had ever made from an American painting.
Rocky Mountains was the ultimate Western landscape of its time.
It reveled in theatrical cloud effects intended to represent stairsteps
to Heaven, and in order to create a perfect subliminal West,
Beerstot composed a scene that fused at least three different
(15:16):
places in and around the Winds. The lake and the
waterfall in the painting were from Island Lake in the
winds titkum Basin. I know this because I've solo camped
directly across Island Lake from the falls in this painting.
The added Shoshone encampment Beerstot put in at the base
(15:39):
of the peak, though, was from an Indian encounter he
had down in the sagebrush country of South Pass. As
for the paintings Towering Mountain, it was neither Lander Peak
nor Fremont Peak above Island Lake. Instead, to represent the
face of God, Beerstot added the crest of Temple Peak,
(16:02):
several miles away from Island Lake.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
To compose his mountaintop.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So the inspiring Western place Beerstot represented in Rocky Mountains
is actually not a real place, but a compilation of
at least three different scenes. Of course, you have to
admit artists, writers, philosophers, and purveyors of religion have been
tinkering with the reality.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Of the world forever.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Beerstot, nonetheless, had set something powerful in motion, calling on grand,
special places in the West topography to serve as markers
of hope and optimism in an ugly age. The public
devoured the artist's sacred mountains, clamored for more, and the
painter obliged them. The war did intervene personally, though Beerstott
(16:52):
was actually drafted into the Union Army in eighteen sixty three,
but of course he did what the wealthy and successful
did back then. He hired a substitute to serve in
his place. So Berstott did not fight, but he did
continue a career that he thought of as an antidote
to a troubled time.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Over the next thirty years.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Bierstatt went on to become one of the most famous
cultural figures in post Civil War America, along with writer
Fitzhugh Ludlow, the author of a best selling drug memoir,
The Hashish Eater. Bierstott continued to seek out the sublime,
and what the two of them regarded as a search
for the West's best places that took them to the
(17:38):
Colorado Rockies and then naturally onto the canyons of the
Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada of California, and ultimately to
the geysers, bluepools, and colossal waterfalls of the Yellowstone Plateau.
Bierstaut sought out each of those places, portraying them in
some of the most wildly romantic landscapes ever painted, and
(18:00):
in doing that, began an inventory of what still today
makes up the most famous destinations in the American West.
After stealing away fitz Hugh Ludlow's wife, Rosalie Beerstott and
his new bride went on to Hollywood like celebrity. Only
a couple dozen writers, artists, or photographers have measured up
(18:24):
to their kind of status in American culture ever since.
What see you when you get to the West?
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Creation? All creation?
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's how American poet Walt Whitman described the West. Creation
was the target in the summer of eighteen seventy two,
when a photographer and two assistants lugged nearly three hundred
pounds of gear a heavy eight x ten wet plate camera,
a tripod, fragile glass negatives, and an entire portable dark room.
(19:04):
To the ragged top of a granite peak in the
Northern Rockies, with one of the most sharply serrated ranges
in the West on the far horizon, the photographer composed
his shot in the viewfinder, inserted a dripping glass plate,
and then removed the lens cover as he counted down
the exposure. Like Beerstott when he first went west, the
(19:28):
photographer photographing the Grand Tetons was just twenty nine. His
name was William Henry Jackson, and he would soon be
the West's most famous photographer except for a crazy Californian
named Edward my Bridge, who had had himself lowered by
rope and pulley to snag vertigo inducing shots in the
(19:51):
Merced River Canyon of the Yosemite. No one had ever
taken a photograph in a place like Jackson was now,
and the name the young man gave his resulting print
reflected a certain amount of pride in that he called
it photographing in high Places, the special sublime Western landscape.
(20:11):
The photographer had sought out for this adventure, as I
said was the Grand Tetons, and Jackson was to the
postwar years what Ansel Adams would be to the twentieth
century American West. Ten years earlier, in eighteen sixty two,
right in the heart of the war, Jackson had enlisted
(20:32):
in the Union Army, where he landed the position of
staff artist. Jackson specialized during and after the war in
the visual memoir of the Young Man in Uniform. Engaged
to a woman named Katie Eastman, who, at least as
he remembered it later, was the Belle of Vermont. Jackson
(20:52):
was mortified when she broke off their engagement, so, at
the age of twenty four and out of the army,
he struck out over Montana Territory.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
After a few weeks travel.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
He wrote that we were now in new and exciting country.
The yellows were turning into reds and saffrons, while the
blues were becoming deep purples, and the air was so
clear that the highlands of the West seemed almost within grasp.
The air at eight thousand feet was exhilarating. The wind
(21:26):
River mountains, blue purple and topped with snow, were a
splendid sight. Who wanted to print endless copies of Civil
War mementos. When this kind of world, untouched by the war,
lay beyond the Mississippi River, Jackson decided to become a
photographer of this new country and committed himself to seeking
(21:47):
out its most powerful places. This was one of those
right place at the right time moments. In eighteen seventy,
a professor of geology from the East had looked over
jackson photographs, admiring a photographer with the stamina to get
heavy camera gear into the wilds of the West. He
was Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden, and Congress had given him an
(22:11):
appointment to explore the West, a task that could stretch
out over several seasons. He had a painter to Hudson River,
artist Sanford Gifford, a friend of Beerstein's. What he needed
was a photographer to bring the sublime West in black
and white form to an America still reeling from the
(22:32):
war and its aftermath. The wildest natural landscapes in the
West had an almost Eden like significance for Americans of
this generation. The West was powerful and mysterious, and Jackson
believed there were ways to portray it so that everyone
would understand what the country's most dramatic settings meant for
(22:53):
its future. In eighteen seventy one, Hayden planned to take
his team to one of the most grand eloquent, the
fabled headwaters of the Yellowstone River.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Montana.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Territorial Governor Nathaniel Langford, accompanying a party in eighteen seventy,
had gotten up on that strange plateau and had told
the national magazines that the place was an absolute wonderland.
Some in that eighteen seventy party, with the collusion of
the railroads, had floated a radical idea, maybe the government
(23:25):
ought to retain title to the plateau for public pleasure
and tourism and not let the place get privatized. Assessing
the Yellowstone Plateau in light of this odd idea under.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Lay Hayden's visit.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
This time, Jackson would work beside an almost cadaverous young
painter named Thomas Moran, who in eighteen seventy one joined
him and Beerstadt as the third of the era's adventurers
who helped turn the country's gaze away from the war.
Moran shared working class roots with Jackson. He had grown
(24:02):
up in Bolton, England, the village Karl Marx's collaborator Friedrich Ingalls,
considered the sedious, most polluted industrial.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Town ever spawned by capitalism.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Moran's father, after hearing Indian painter George Catlan speak in
London in the eighteen forties, had left for America with
wife and children in tow. But the memory of a
working class background colored Moran for the rest.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Of his life.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
America's unique genius is that it allows people with talent
and a work ethic to overcome a lack of training
or connections. Moran had no professional training in painting, but
he studied every nuance and trick employed by artists. He
admired the great European landscapist, particularly people like Claude Lorraine,
(24:51):
Salvador Rosa, and especially J. M. W.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Turner.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Moran avoided conscription in the Union Army by fleeing to
England to study. So while Picket charged and Grant sent
thousands of Union boys to their fates with their names
pinned to their uniforms so their corpses could be identified,
Moran rapturously studied Turner's art firsthand in London. His privilege
(25:20):
was being able to escape the country, so that for
him the war happened in some other world. Back in
America at war's end, fueled by Romanticism's love affair with
mystery and feeling, Moran got his main chance when Scribner's
Monthly asked him to create sketches illustrating an article called
(25:41):
the Wonders of Yellowstone. It was written by Nathaniel Langford
and was the article that led Ferdinand Hayden to lead
a government trip to Yellowstone the next summer. With loans
from Scribner's and the Northern Pacific Railroad, which hoped to
haul tourists to this new Western wonder Moran wrangled a
seat on the bus, so Moran and William Henry Jackson
(26:06):
were to spend a summer on the Yellowstone plateau that
changed history. Getting off the train at Rock Springs, Moran
was mesmerized by the nearby cliffs looming over the Green
River and did a first sketch of the West there.
But for a reality check, there is also a Jackson
photograph of that scene. By the time they were in Wyoming,
(26:29):
all signs of industrial capitalism were already in place. In
Rock Springs, there actually were railroad tracks, a bridge, and
a water tower beneath those Green River cliffs. Moran ignored
all of them and painted the Green River the way
the West was supposed to look, as a sublime wilderness.
(26:53):
In Yellowstone, the interior West's most magical place, Moran and
Jackson were challenged by one another, the photographer by the
painter's use of color to evoke feeling, the painter by
those large, crystal clear photographs that could never lie. Jackson
later insisted that their work from that summer convinced everyone
(27:13):
who saw them that the regions where such wonders existed
should be carefully preserved to the people forever. The summer
made Moran famous, and he sold his best painting, the
huge Grand Canyon of the Yellow Zone, to the US
Congress for ten thousand dollars, where it served as prize
example of the kind of magical landscape Americans now knew
(27:38):
lay in the West. The year after Hayden, Jackson and
Moran were in Yellowstone, members of Congress, who had never
seen Yellowstone themselves, gave the country and the world its
first national park. Moran and Jackson spent the next quarter
century traveling with the government surveys of the age seeking
(27:58):
out more Western magic. Moran famously sought out the Tetons
and the Grand Canyon, which he called the most magnificent
side of my life. Jackson spent nine seasons with Hayden
in the employee of the United States Geological Survey, searching
for more magic and finding such scenes in places like
(28:18):
Colorado's Garden of the Gods. Jackson left posterity some thirty
thousand negatives of Western places and inspired other fine glass
plate large format photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan to comb the
West to find its most marvelous landscapes, in O'Sullivan's case,
(28:40):
the Canyon Country of the Colorado Plateau, and notably Arizona's
Canyon to Shay. Not even committed romantics like Beerstott, Moran,
Jackson and O'Sullivan found all of the West's marvelous places.
They missed the Oregon Coasts. They didn't see Monument Valley
or the Big Country in far southwest Texas, the many
(29:02):
magical spots in the Cascades, the Glacier Park country, the
White Sands Dunes of New Mexico, nor Alaskan landmarks like Denali,
are the Arctic Plain north of the Brooks Range what
is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and none of
them bothered to portray scenes on the Great Plains, probably
(29:23):
because they were all committed to the idea that sublime
landscapes were vertical, not horizontal. But I've been committed over
a lot of my adult life to tracking these adventures
to many of the stunning Western places they sought out
and made famous around the world. And there's no doubt
they hit the mark again and again. Hiked through the
(29:46):
Titcom Basin, along the shores of Island Lake, and through
the sirk of the towers in the Wind River Range,
and you still feel today as if you could walk
on water. The height of so many of the peaks,
and the Colone Rockies, where Beerstot named a peak, Mount Rosalie,
after his traveling companion's then wife, is almost beyond comprehension.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
In Yosemite, the.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Gray cliffs soaring above the Merced River still strike one
as other worldly, something from Mars or Jupiter's moons. For
an even more profound Yosemite experience, sometime backpack from the
Pualome Meadows, down the Grand Canyon of Yosemite's Other River
to the waterfalls of Hetchhetchy Canyon, painted by Beerstott before
(30:35):
California built the infamous O'Shaughnessy Dam there. The Tetons and Yellowstone,
both still world class global destinations, have an enduring magic,
best appreciated via backpacks or climbs in the Tetons and
in Yellowstone by five am downs in the primeval Lamar Valley,
(30:56):
when grizzlies roam and gray wolves howl their greetings to
the sun. As for the Grand Canyon, to appreciate one
of the most powerful landscapes on Earth, floated for three
weeks confronting rapids ranked on a scale not applied to
any other American river, are, at the very least do
the one day twenty four mile rim to Rimpike time
(31:19):
spent in a place so amazing that, as John Mure
once said, those are hours that don't get deducted from
your allotted span on Earth. As Beerstot Moran and many
other sense have come to nowell, the West is blessed
with landscapes, an astonishing number of them, in fact, powerful
enough that they can leave you changed for life. The
(31:42):
painters and photographers of one hundred and fifty years ago
call that effect the sublime.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Good name for it.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
What year was the first camera to hit the American West.
I was familiar with La Hoffman, who has had a
photography studio out of Miles City, Montana. Yeah, and he
got there in time to photograph Buffalo, to photograph like
the Winner of eighteen eighty one. Yeah, and I thought
that was early, early, but people had you know, the
(32:27):
cameras have been around for a decade prior to Hoffman, right.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah, longer than that.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
I mean, the first photographs are taken in the and
theird Gario type photographs are taken in the eighteen forties.
The first there's a Frenchman whose name I can't quite
recall right now, who took some of the very first photographs.
(32:54):
And so by I mean, so what I was described
being in this particular episode with William Henry Jackson, for example,
is he's taking photographs during the Civil War, and there
are a whole host of photographers who are working with
(33:14):
a guy named Matthew Brady who's starting in about eighteen
sixty one eighteen sixty two, start going out to the
battlefields and shooting photographs of battles in the Civil War
and particularly the aftermath of battles. So that's kind of
the setup for this particular episode is that the Civil War,
(33:35):
as a result of the invention of photography and the
ability of photographers like Matthew Brady to go out to
Civil War battle scenes and capture what the war was like,
it's the first war where non combatant members of the
public are actually seeing images of what war is like
(34:00):
people have ever had before are just you know, red
badge of courage like descriptions of what war is. And
suddenly now here are these black and white photographs, and
of course they're shocking, they're grizzly, they're human shapes lying
(34:20):
like cordwood across a battlefield and behind battlements, all twisted
into rigor mortis and things from having been dead for
a day or two. And the public is seeing this
for the first time. And so one of the things
that these photographers and painters who go west at the
(34:42):
time are trying to do, so they claim, is they're
trying to give the public, and one has to say
specifically the northern public in this case, not necessarily the
public of the Confederacy, but the northern public. They're trying
to give a kind of a psychic release from the
(35:03):
horrors of the war. Because, of course the early part
of the war does not go well for the Union.
I mean, the Confederates seemed to be winning most.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Of the battles.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The Confederate generals seem to be outsmarting the Union generals,
and so the war is looking really bleak by eighteen
sixty two and eighteen sixty three. And that's when somebody
like Albert Bersteint, this German American painter who had trained
in Europe and now goes out to the West, goes
to the wind River Range and ultimately to Colorado and
(35:35):
Yosemite and Yellowstone. And that's when they're trying to offer
the sort of the Grand God derived epic landscapes of
the West as kind of a more positive hope for
America than these battlefield scenes that people are reading about
(35:55):
and seeing. But yeah, photography is available, and so these
glass plate photographer guys like William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan,
you know, I mean, they basically have to take the
camera which is exposing the images on a big glass
(36:17):
plate like this big and it's dipped in an exposure
chemical and you drop it into the camera and the
way you expose, so you have to keep it once
it's dipped into the exposure chemical. You have to keep
it covered and you drop it into the camera. And
the way you expose it is you just remove the
(36:38):
viewfinder and you count down. You know, they ultimately learn, okay,
this is a well lit scene, I need to remove
the viewfinder for ten seconds and then, which of course
means they can't. You can't photograph motion because the camera.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Exposures are too slow.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
So every's which is why landscape tends to be the
thing that people start shooting. You know, mountains and canyons
fortunately just kind of stand there and they're nice and still,
so you can point your camera at it, remove the
the lens cover, and come out with these absolutely gorgeous
(37:20):
photographs of the West.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
In the course of a couple of days, I ran
into two references of people paying their way out of
the Civil War. I'm reading the book about Africa and
it mentions uh through too or Roosevelt's trips to Africa,
and it brings up to his father paid his way
out of the Civil War. Yeah, and then Beerstad did so,
(37:46):
he did directly paid his way out.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
He paid his way out.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
What was that system and did that did that system
carry on into into World War One or anything.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
No, it did not.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But during the the nineteenth century, I mean, you know,
and elites have always had it better than all the
rest of us. If you were wealthy enough, you could
simply and and there was a draft. Abraham Lincoln instituted
a draft in the Civil War, and so able bodied
men were called up. I remember one time reading the
(38:19):
description of what constituted an able bodied man in the
Union draft, and one of the requirements was you had
to have a tooth on the top and a tooth
on the bottom that met so that you could grab
a packet of powder and tear it apart in order
(38:40):
to load your weapon. So that was that was one
of the stipulations for being an able body Union recruit
in the draft was had you had to have two
teeth that met, one on the top and one on
the bottom.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
But if you were wealthy enough.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
You just hired somebody to go and fight in your place.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
And that's a private deal.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
That's a private deal.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
That's what beerstupn arrangement.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
He was called up in the draft, and he sent
his substitute down to the draft board to report for him.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
How many, I mean, how many these substitutes are dying, man,
absolutely dying. The money then goals of their family.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yes, the money would go to their family. I mean,
you know, the Civil War is an abysmally brutal war
because most of the military tactics for the war were
based on using muzzle loaded weaponry that had a range
of maybe could kill somebody at one hundred and twenty
five yards or something. But by the time of the
(39:44):
Civil War, weaponry had improved so that if you did
a frontal assault, like all these guys were trained to do,
you could start killing. Frontal assault attacks could kill people
at four or five hundred yards. And so that's why
it was such a bloody war, is that the weaponry
(40:06):
was not comported with the military strategies that people.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Were still using.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
And you know, that's why Pickett's charge was such an absolute,
you know, just disaster for the South. And they just
kept sending these guys out, you know, and I will
never forget. You know, the guy who was the talking head,
the primary talking head in Ken Burns' Civil War film,
(40:33):
when he was talking about she Shelby said, you know,
I think I would have said General, I don't think
I'm gonna do that you, but then he followed it
up by saying, and yet thousands of them just pinned
(40:54):
their names to their shirts so their bodies could be
identified after the battle was over, and went out and
did it.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
In this episode, you touch on sort of the weird
interconnections between Western art and the military in the nineteenth
century and science, and I think that's sort of something
that always strikes me as odd and maybe underappreciated, is
(41:30):
that so many of these artists and early naturalists are
traveling with military expeditions, and the federal government is you know,
leading the charge essentially on very different fronts in terms
of like the incorporation of the West and to American culture.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, this is something that you know, you have to
sort of understand about the early West, the nineteenth century
West in particular, or is because the native people were
out there, there was always the fear of that if
you just went out, you know, as a as a
Philip Nolan kind of character, that you might not survive.
(42:15):
So what everybody did, what these artists were obviously doing,
was traveling with the military when they could. And what
the you know, the naturalist and the scientists from an
earlier period did and I think I referred to George
Catlan in particular doing something like this, is you traveled
with the fur companies.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
You in other words, you sort.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Of attached yourself to a group that provided numerical the
kind of numbers that could keep you safe. And so
that's how you you know, and even you know the
Maximilian Bodmer Expedition. What they did was they would go
from military posts to military posts. You would go to
(42:58):
Fort Union, and if you are going to work there
and do natural history or do painting or whatever, you
would stay there in a military establishment for your safety,
because the idea was that if you just kind of
wandered out by yourself in the West, you might not survive.
Philip Nolan, that's one of the reasons Philip Nolan.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
I think that's.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Probably one of those eccentricities many and great that we
were referring to, is Philip Nolan apparently just would go
out with a couple of other guys and they somehow
would manage to survive it.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
He must have had a way that he must have
just had a way to be that just he could
make it that he wasn't threatening. I think he wasn't
He was he didn't have any affiliations made he didn't.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, I don't think he did have affiliations. And so
it's a time when the native people are looking for
because their French traders from Louisiana have now been replaced
or about to be replaced in the Louisiana purchase, and
they the Spanish will not trade them guns and ammunition,
and so they're looking for some other avenue of acquiring
(44:05):
those really essential items. And I think Nolan probably was
casting himself as I can do this for you. Yeah, this.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Is a big speculative question. How long, how long from
now will the West hold its mystique as a place
that represents space and freedom, not the people that won't
want to visit anymore. But like people's reasons for visiting
(44:37):
places evolve over time. Like you remember, Colorado was very
early and legalizing weed, so like Colorado became people had
always wanted to go to Colorado, but suddenly there's this thing,
like Colorado was known as this other thing, right, this
kind of progressive attitude toward marijuana, and people would go
there for that reason. So people will always go to
(45:00):
the West, But how much longer can it be? What
you know, how much longer can it be its current thing.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Well, that's a great question, you know, and I the
truth is, I probably don't have a good answer for it.
I think, however, based on that example and a lot
of others, I mean, you can trot out one effort another.
When I first moved to Montana, a river runs through
it was just appearing in theaters, and there was for
(45:34):
the next about five years. There were people from all
over the country coming to the University of Montana, and
I have no doubt to Montana State too. Because a
river runs through it suddenly made Montana into the place
to go and the place to be.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
And it was affiliated with the area it sat in
the area. It's very specific about the rivers.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
And I think the you know, the series Yellowstone is
doing the same thing right now. It's having the same effect.
So there are all these cultural developments that you kind
of can't really predict that are going to make one
place or another kind of suddenly the way Colorado was
when pott was legalized, there suddenly the place to go
(46:17):
and the place to be. And that's happened in the
West a lot. I mean, you know, the old classic line,
go west, young man, that's been, you know, something that's
popped up in Western history again and again and again.
And all of these people that we were talking about
in this episode, they're all from somewhere else. I mean,
(46:39):
you know, Albert Berstadt is from Massachusetts. William Henry Jackson
was from Vermont. Thomas Moran was a brit whose dad
had seen George Catlan touring Europe in the eighteen forties
and immediately packed up his family and said, that's the
place to be. I want to go to America because
(47:00):
it's got that going. So that kind of thing you
kind of can't predict. But the West, I will say,
has managed, over and over again in a way that
the other regions don't seem to have done. The West
has managed to come up with something, some sort of
cultural development that suddenly causes people to want to kind
(47:20):
of do a rush on a particular part of it.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
But the theme the spasms are different, right, like the
gold Rush, the land rush, whatever, but like the theme
of adventure, opportunity, freedom, right like that, like someday that'll
be not someday. Kids born in Michigan won't think of
(47:48):
the West that way.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah, or Louisiana, I.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Mean it'll be like it'll stand for, I don't know
what the hell it'll it'll stand for, like an oppressive atmosphere.
I don't know, it'll be like you, I mean.
Speaker 4 (47:59):
I mean you look at California, you know, like at
one point.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
They've they've not been they're not the West, yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:04):
Yeah, but I mean it was yeah, I mean, California
became the West, and then.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
It was California was the West, yeah, you know, and
then it became.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Yeah, no, California was you know, it was the faery
land of the West, where everything was perfect, the sun
always was shining and yeah, the weather was grand and yeah,
and California, of course, you know, I mean I was
just in California a couple of weeks ago. I mean,
California still has all those qualities that were there when
(48:36):
it was drawing people from all over the world. But
of course, what your reaction, at least what my reaction
to California is now is holy cow, so many people,
so many cars, so much congestion. Yeah, I mean, it's
you know, you can find parts of California that aren't
like that, but they tend to be the parts of
California that people don't really want to go to and
(48:59):
all the you know, the marvelous parts are just packed
with people these days.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
Took that observation that you know, wherever you define the South,
beginning as you travel south, you enter the South. But
then they'll point out but when you hit the Florida Peninsula,
you then leave the South as your southern journey continues.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Yeah, because so many people from the South the South end. Yeah,
I mean, you know, and going across Texas is the
same way. There's always the question and going across Texas,
so when am I in the West? Am I still
in the South. It's always a little difficult to figure
it out.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Yeah, But man, the like the West. It's just staggering,
the draw, the continuity of kind of the language and
the draw that you read about these and I think
the photographers and other people way back then, you know,
and then you're like, you're like, yeah, I can, like,
(49:58):
I can I see that, man, I understand that pool,
you know.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
Yeah, And I think you know, what they were doing
was they were searching out and finding these larger than
life landscapes that became a part of the Western mystique
for people all over the world. You know, everybody sort
of understood. Holy con Man, the Grand Canyon, you know,
the Tetons, I mean, just on and on these marvelous landscapes,
(50:26):
and that's what these guys were. They were kind of
out there finding them and then presenting them to the world.
And it was another one of these cultural moments that
we're talking about that the response of the world was, Wow,
I want to go there. I want to live right
at the foot of where that particular painting was done.
Speaker 4 (50:47):
And then you get enough of those people, you turn
into California.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Yeah, well, thanks Dan, appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
Oh, it's fun. Thanks guys.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
Most today, all the
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Games playing New d to Nation
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