Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope | The American West

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. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  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 traveled 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. 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 velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  A Western Geography of Hope.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Landscapes are unfailing primary characters in 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 the region. From 10,000-year-old coyote tales, to Edward Abbey's books, to a centuries' worth of Western movies with the camera making love to Monument Valley, or to a mountain valley called Paradise, the Western landscape has never been mere background, but a life-shaping, almost living presence. None of us ever grows weary of seeing the snow-capped Rockies or Sierra Nevada, the cliffs soaring up from the bottom of Zion or the Grand Canyon, the cool forests of

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  giant trees touching the California sky, cactus deserts with many-armed saguaro sentries, or the calm, echoless horizontal yellow of the prairies. This episode, then, is the story of a handful of prized Western landscapes that helped rescue us Americans from one of our deepest historical holes, then became familiar touchstones of our national culture.

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  In the summer of 1859, as the political divide in the United States was pulling the North and South ever closer to violent conflict, a young man just 29-years-old was on the verge of introducing the country to the healing possibilities of Western topography. Albert Bierstadt was seeing the 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 Sanford Gifford, Bierstadt by the 1850s was about as soaked in romance for nature

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  as anyone could get without levitating right off the planet. People like George Catlin, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, 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 one's original relationship to the universe, humming and vibrating in literature and art. While the Confederacy was having its berth over the slavery issue, the poet Walt Whitman claimed he was looking for "an American Adam." All these paved the way for someone like Bierstadt, who was in search of a natural

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  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 waged to preserve the Union, there's almost a tinge of unreality in this story of artists, photographers, and the charismatic places they sought out. Bierstadt, along with another painter named Thomas Moran, and photographers like William Henry Jackson and Edward Muybridge, abandoned battle scenes to seek out nature and somehow were able to put adventure in pursuit of America's wildest landscapes before a historic conflict

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  that was tearing America apart. On the surface, 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 that was going on all around him. Thoreau himself worked nonstop on Walden, published in 1854, throughout the Mexican War. George Perkins Marsh's bestseller, Man and Nature, appeared in 1864, when newspapers

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  were full of news about the horrifically bloody Battle of the Wilderness. It turns out that "fled away from war and into nature" is a pattern through most of American history. So Beirstot and other nature adventurers weren't inventing a strategy to take the public's mind off the horrors of the Civil War. 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,

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  fairly brimmed with beauty and optimism, even reassurances of a divine spark in the world. That contrast may be the very reason these stories exist side by side. 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 Beirstot's, Jackson's, and Moran's adventures offered to Civil War America was a western psychic salve for the agonies of the war, a positioning of life over death. The Civil War was the first time in history a non-combatant public had confronted the

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  unvarnished reality of warfare. In the year 1862, 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 scenes from their memories. The effect in the North, where the photos were shown, shocked the public in the same way that television footage of battles in Vietnam broadcast nightly in the 1960s horrified Americans a century later. The timing was no coincidence that in the years between 1859 and 1873,

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  painters and photographers roaming the West located and offered up stories and images 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 had to spring from that same source. So it's not surprising to find that when young Bierstadt first saw the Rocky Mountains, and specifically, he was looking at the Wind River Range of today's Wyoming, he lapsed

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  into a state of near religious rapture. "The winds," he said, "were a classically sublime landscape." That word had a meaning in the mid-1800s 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, Romanics believe, was because wild country was straight from the Creator's hand, fresh and unsullied by human sin. But as German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, "The sublime did carry a burden.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  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." That pain was the inability 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, Bierstadt's hometown newspaper in Massachusetts reported that the young man was about to set out for the West with reference to a series of large pictures he hoped to create from the region's most inspiring topography.

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  Bierstot was accompanying Colonel Frederick Lander, chief engineer of a wagon road across South Pass. The group left St. Joe, Missouri, early in May of 1859, and on June the 24th, during the long days of summer solstice, they reached South Pass. Just to the north of their road lay the Wind River Range, mountains Americans had read about in the books Jessie Fremont, Wife of Explorer, and Presidential Candidate John Charles Fremont, helped her husband publish. Bierstot's first impressions were his own, but it's clear he believed the journey had led him to one of the west's Shangri-Las. He told the magazine Crayon that his first glimpses had convinced him

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  that the winds were very fine. "As seen 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 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 realize that we are among a different class of mountains." He also wrote this line,

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  which became much discussed and quoted. "The 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 in the Titcomb Basin, and in several other spots on the western slope of the winds, Bierstot 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,

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  with the goal of somehow causing other Americans to experience that same jolt of sublimity about western nature.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  His underlying ideology was plain enough to heal the psyche of a fractured nation, Beirstot and those who followed him endeavored to show that there was a divine presence in the West's wildest landforms. The puzzle for people since, though, has been trying to figure out just where Beirstot 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 combined scenes from different places.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  What no one has ever questioned, though, is that Beirstot was doing his best to capture American places that were enormous, grand, even melodramatic. Beirstot'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. Here's one example. In 1861, Beirstot finished a painting he originally called "Wasatch Mountains." His party had actually been nowhere near the Wasatch in Utah. And later, he retitled this painting "Island Lake, Wind River Range, Wyoming."

• 14:50Speaker 03

  As I said, he does appear to have visited Island Lake, at the base of a peak Fremont had climbed a few years before and now bears Fremont's name. But Beirstot'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 this scene actually was, it was Beirstot'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.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Another of his 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 1861, a year of high drama nationally when the Confederacy was being born and artillery fire on Forsomner produced the first battles of the war. Beirstot's reputation-making masterpiece, from his 1859 trip though, was his 8-foot-by-12-foot Rocky Mountains Lander's Peak.

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  He finished it in 1863, and it sold 2 years later for $25,000, the most money an 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 stair steps to heaven. And in order to create a perfect, subliminal west, Beirstot composed a scene that fused at least 3 different places in and around the winds. The lake and the waterfall in the painting were from Island Lake in the winds Titcomb Basin.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  I know this because I've solo-camped directly across Island Lake from the falls in this painting. The added Shoshone encampment Beirstot put in at the base of the peak though was from an Indian encounter he had had down in the sagebrush country of South Pass. As for the painting's towering mountain, it was neither Lander Peak nor Fremont Peak above Island Lake. Instead, to represent the face of God, Beirstot added the crest of Temple Peak, several miles away from Island Lake, to compose his mountain top. So the inspiring western place Beirstot represented in Rocky Mountains is actually

• 17:45Speaker 03

  not a real place, but a compilation of at least 3 different scenes. Of course, you have to admit, artists, writers, philosophers, and purveyors of religion have been tinkering with the reality of the world forever. Bierstadt 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. Bierstadt was actually drafted into the Union Army in 1863.

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  But of course, he did what the wealthy and successful did back then. He hired a substitute to serve in his place. So Bierstadt did not fight, but he did continue a career that he thought of as an antidote to a troubled time. Over the next 30 years, Bierstadt 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 bestselling drug memoir, The Hashish Eater, Bierstadt continued to seek out the sublime and what the two of them regarded as a search for the West's best places.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  That took them to the Colorado Rockies, and then naturally, on to the canyons of the Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada of California, and ultimately to the geysers, blue pools, and colossal waterfalls of the Yellowstone Plateau. Bierstadt sought out each of those places, portraying them in some of the most wildly romantic landscapes ever painted, and in doing that, began an inventory of what still today makes up the most famous destinations in the American West. After stealing away Fitzhugh Ludlow's wife, Rosalie, Bierstadt and his new bride went on to Hollywood-like celebrity.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Only a couple dozen writers, artists, or photographers have measured up to their kind of status in American culture ever since.

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  What see you when you get to the West? Creation, all creation. That's how American poet Walt Whitman described the West. Creation was the target in the summer of 1872, when a photographer and two assistants lugged nearly 300 pounds of gear, a heavy 8x10 wet plate camera, a tripod, fragile glass negatives, and an entire portable darkroom 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,

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  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 Beirstock when he first went west, the photographer photographing the Grand Tetons was just 29. His name was William Henry Jackson, and he would soon be the west's most famous photographer. Except for a crazy Californian named Edward Mybridge, who had had himself lowered by rope and pulley to snag vertigo-inducing shots in the Merced River Canyon of the Yosemite, no one had ever taken a photograph in a place like Jackson was now.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  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 the photographer had sought out for this adventure, as I said, was the Grand Tetons. And Jackson was, to the post-war years, what Ansel Adams would be to the 20th-century American West. Ten years earlier, in 1862, right in the heart of the war, Jackson had enlisted 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

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  in uniform. Engaged to a woman named Katie Eastman, who, at least as he remembered it later, was "the belle of Vermont," Jackson was mortified when she broke off their engagement. So at the age of 24 and out of the Army, he struck out for Montana Territory. After a few weeks' travel, 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 8,000 feet was exhilarating.

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  The Wind River Mountains, blue-purple and topped with snow, were a splendid sight."

• 24:36Speaker 03

  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 out its most powerful places. This was one of those right place at the right time moments. In 1870, a professor of geology from the East had looked over Jackson’s photographs, admiring a photographer with the stamina to get heavy camera gear into the wilds of the West. He was Ferdinand Van de Veer Hayden, and Congress had given him an appointment to explore the West, a task that could stretch out over several seasons.

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  He had a painter, the Hudson River artist Sanford Gifford, a friend of Beirstein’s. What he needed was a photographer to bring the sublime West in black and white form to an America still reeling from the 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 its future. In 1871, Hayden planned to take his team to one of the most grand eloquent, the fabled

• 26:04Speaker 03

  headwaters of the Yellowstone River. Montana Territorial Governor Nathaniel Langford, accompanying a party in 1870, had gotten up on that strange plateau and had told the national magazines that the place was an absolute wonderland. Some in that 1870 party, with the collusion of the railroads, had floated a radical idea: maybe the government 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 underlay Hayden’s visit.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  This time, Jackson would work beside an almost cadaverous young painter named Thomas Moran, who in 1871 joined him and Beirstadt 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 up in Bolton, England, the village Karl Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels considered the seediest, most polluted, industrial town ever spawned by capitalism. Moran's father, after hearing Indian painter George Catlin speak in London in the 1840s, had left for America with wife and children in tow.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  But the memory of a working-class background colored Moran for the rest of his life. 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 landscapers particularly, people like Claude Lorrain, Salvador Rosa, and especially J.M.W. Turner. Moran avoided conscription in the Union Army by fleeing to England to study. So while Pickett charged and Grant sent thousands of Union boys to their fates with their names

• 28:13Speaker 03

  pinned to their uniforms so their corpses could be identified, Moran rapturously studied Turner's art firsthand in London. His privilege 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 "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.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  With loans from Scribners 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 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, all signs of industrial capitalism were already in place in Rock Springs. There actually were railroad tracks,

• 29:41Speaker 03

  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. 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 who saw them that the regions where such wonders existed should be carefully preserved to the people forever.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  The summer made Moran famous, and he sold his best painting, "The Huge Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone", to the US Congress for $10,000, where it served as prize example of the kind of magical landscape Americans now knew 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.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Moran and Jackson spent the next quarter century traveling with the government surveys of the age, seeking out more Western magic. Moran famously sought out the Tetons and the Grand Canyon, which he called “the most magnificent sight of my life.” Jackson spent nine seasons with Hayden in the employ of the United States Geological Survey, searching for more magic and finding such scenes in places like Colorado’s Garden of the Gods. Jackson left posterity some 30,000 negatives of Western places and inspired other fine, glass-plate, large-format photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan to comb the West to find

• 31:40Speaker 03

  its most marvelous landscapes, in O’Sullivan’s case, the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, and notably, Arizona’s Canyon du Chay. Not even committed romantics like Beirstadt, Moran, Jackson, and O’Sullivan found all of the West’s marvelous places. They missed the Oregon coast, they didn’t see Monument Valley, or the Big Bend country in far southwest Texas, the many magical spots in the Cascades, the Glacier Park country, the white sands dunes of New Mexico, nor Alaskan landmarks like Denali, or the Arctic Plain north of the Brooks Range, what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  And none of them bothered to portray scenes on the Great Plains, probably 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 Titcom Basin, along the shores of Island Lake, and through the cirque 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 in the Colorado Rockies, where Beirstadt named a

• 33:05Speaker 03

  peak “Mount Rosalie,” after his traveling companion’s then-wife, is almost beyond comprehension. In Yosemite, the gray cliffs soaring above the Merced River still strike one as otherworldly, something from Mars or Jupiter’s moons.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  For an even more profound Yosemite experience, sometime backpack from the Pu'almi Meadows down the Grand Canyon of Yosemite's other river to the waterfalls of Hetch Hetchy Canyon, painted by Beirstot before 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 5:00 a.m. dawns in the primeval Lamar Valley when grizzlies roam and gray wolves howl their greetings to the sun.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  As for the Grand Canyon, to appreciate one of the most powerful landscapes on Earth, float it for three weeks, confronting rapids ranked on a scale not applied to any other American river. Or at the very least, do the one-day, 24-mile rim-to-rim hike. Time spent in a place so amazing that, as John Muir once said, "Those are hours that don't get deducted from your allotted span on Earth." As Beirstot Moran and many others since have come to know well, the West is blessed with landscapes, an astonishing number of them in fact, powerful enough that they can leave you changed for life.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  The painters and photographers of 150 years ago call that effect "the sublime." Good name for it.

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• 37:03Speaker 01

  What year was the first camera to hit the American West? I was familiar that LA Huffman, who was had a photography studio out of Miles City, Montana, and he got there in time to

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Photograph Buffalo.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  To photograph like the winter of 1881. And I thought that was early, early, but people had, you know, the cameras have been around for a decade prior to Huffman, right?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, longer than that. I mean, the first photographs are taken in the, and they're daguerreal type photographs are taken in the 1840s. The first, there's a Frenchman whose name I can't quite recall right now, who took some of the very first photographs. And

• 37:52Speaker 03

  So by, I mean, so what I was describing 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 a guy named Matthew Brady, who's starting in about 1861, 1862, 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, as a result of the invention of photography, and the ability of photographers like Matthew Brady

• 38:36Speaker 03

  to go out to Civil War battle scenes and capture what the war was like, it's the first war where noncombatant members of the public are actually seeing images of what war is like. All 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 grisly, they're human shapes lying like cordwood across a battlefield

• 39:19Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  From the 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 of the battles. The Confederate generals seemed to be outsmarting the Union generals. And so the war is looking really bleak by 1862 and 1863. And that's when somebody like Albert Bierstadt, 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 Yosemite and Yellowstone. And that's when they're trying to offer the sort of the grand, God-derived epic landscapes

• 40:43Speaker 03

  of the West as kind of a more positive hope for America than these battlefield scenes that people are reading about and seeing.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  But yeah, photography is 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 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

• 41:34Speaker 03

  the viewfinder. And you count down, you know, they ultimately learn, okay, this is a well lit scene. I need to remove the viewfinder for 10 seconds. And then, which of course means they can't, you can't photograph motion. Because the camera exposures are too slow.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  So every, that's which is why landscape tends to be the thing that people start shooting. You know, mountains and, 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, uh, and come out with these absolutely gorgeous photographs of the West.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  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 a book about Africa and it mentions, uh, Theodore Roosevelt's trips to Africa and it brings up that his father paid his way out of the Civil War.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And then, um,

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Beerstot did.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  So he, he did directly paid his way out.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  He paid his way out, yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  What was that system and did that, did that system carry on into, into World War One or anything?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  No, it did not, but during the, the 19th 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, uh, and there was a draft. Abraham Lincoln instituted a draft in the Civil War. And so able bodied men, uh, were called up. Uh, I remember one time reading, uh, the 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

• 43:30Speaker 03

  that met so that you could grab a packet of powder and tear it apart in order to load your weapon. So that was, that was one of the, the, uh, the stipulations for being an able bodied Union recruit in the draft was you had, you had to have two teeth that met, one on the top and one on the bottom. But if you were wealthy enough, you just hired somebody to go and fight in your place.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  And that's a private deal.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  That's a private deal. That's what Beerstot did.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Arrangement.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was called up in the draft and, uh, he sent his substitute down to the draft board to report for him.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  How many, I mean, how many, these substitutes are dying, man?

• 44:15Speaker 03

  They're absolutely dying.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  I wonder if the money, the money then goes to their family?

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Yes, the money would go to their family. I mean, you know, the Civil War is, is a 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 125 yards or something. But by the time of the 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, 500 yards. And so that's

• 44:56Speaker 03

  why it was such a bloody war, is that the weaponry was not comported with the military strategies that people were still using. 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, I will never forget, you know, the, the guy who was the talking head, the primary talking head in Ken Burns' Civil War film, when he was talking about this.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Shelby Foote?

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Shelby said, you know, I think I would have said, General, I don't think I'm gonna do that.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And then they probably would have shot you.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  But then he followed it up by saying, and yet, thousands of them just pinned their names to their shirts, so their bodies could be identified after the battle was over, and went out and did it.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  In this episode, you touch on sort of the weird interconnections between Western art and the military in the 19th century.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 05

  And, and science. And I think that's sort of something that always strikes me as odd. And maybe underappreciated is that so many of these artists and early naturalists are traveling with military expeditions.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  And the federal government is, you know, leading the charge essentially on, on very different fronts in terms of like the incorporation of the West into American culture.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, this is something that, you know, you have to sort of understand about the early West, the 19th century West in particular, is because the native people were out there, there was always the fear that if you just went out, you know, as a, as a Philip Nolan kind of character, that you might not survive. So what everybody did, what these artists were obviously doing was traveling with the military when they could. And what the, you know, the naturalists and the scientists from an earlier period did, and I think I referred to George Catlin in particular, doing something like this, is you traveled with the fur companies. You, in other words, you, you sort of attached

• 47:32Speaker 03

  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 Fort Union. And if you were going to work there and do natural history or do painting or whatever, you would stay there at 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, I think, that's probably one of those

• 48:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  I think he wasn't, he was-

• 48:35Speaker 01

  You didn't have any affiliations, maybe?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  He didn't, 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 those really essential items, and I think Nolan probably was casting himself as, "I can do this for you."

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  This is a, this 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 places evolve over time. Like, you remember Colorado was very early in legalizing weed. So like, Colorado became, people always wanted to go to Colorado, but suddenly there's this thing, like, like Colorado was known as this-

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  -other thing, right? This kind of progressive attitude toward marijuana, and people would go there for that reason. So people will always go to the West, but how much longer can it be, what, you know, how, how much longer can it be its current thing?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  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 after another. When I first moved to Montana, a river runs through it, was just appearing in theaters, and there was, for 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.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  And

• 50:46Speaker 01

  The author was affiliated with the area, sat in the area, it's very specific about the rivers.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  And I, 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 pot was legalized there, suddenly the place to go and the place to be. And that's happened in the West a lot. I mean, you know, the, 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.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, Albert Bierstadt is from Massachusetts, William, Henry Jackson was from Vermont, Thomas Moran was a Brit, whose dad had seen George Catlin touring Europe in the 1840s and immediately packed up his family and said, "That's the place to be. I want to go to America," because 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 of do a rush on a particular part of it.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  But, but the theme, like, the spasms are different, right? Like, the gold rush, the land rush, whatever. But like, the theme.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Of adventure, opportunity, freedom, right? Like that, like someday that'll be not, someday kids born in Michigan won't think of the West that way.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, or Louisiana.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  I 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, I mean.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  I mean, you look at California, you know, like at, at one point.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  They've, they've not, but they're not the West. Yeah.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, at one.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  They de-wested.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, California became the West and then certain things happened.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  California was the West.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And then it became that it's not.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  No, California was, you know, it was the fairyland 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 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.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  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 all the, you know, the marvelous parts are just packed with people these days.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  It's like that observation that, 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.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, because so many people from the Northeast have colonized.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the South ended.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, going across Texas is the same way. There's always the question in 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.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but man, the, um, like the West, uh, it's just staggering the, the draw.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  The continuity of kind of the language and the draw that you read about these.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  And I think.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Autographers and other people way back then, you know, and then you're like, you're like, yeah, I can like, I can, I see that, man. Like, I understand that pull, you know?

• 54:57Speaker 03

  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 cow, man, the Grand Canyon, you know, the Tetons. I mean, just on and on, these marvelous landscapes. 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, I want to live right at the foot of where that particular painting was done.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  And then you get enough of those people, you turn into California.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Well, thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Oh, it's fun. Thanks, guys.

• 56:07Speaker 01

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