The Big Picture - Diana GreenwaldThe Big Picture Thomas Moran’s The Grand Cañon of the...

The Big PictureThomas Moran’s The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstoneand the Development of the American West

Diana Seave Greenwald

The success of Thomas Moran’s The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone (1872) was linked not only with tourism andYellowstone Nation Park’s foundation but with the national debate about Western development. Formal analysis contrastsMoran’s sublime landscape in flux with Bierstadt’s and Gifford’s depictions of frontier landscapes as habitable wilderness.Although the Northern Pacific Railroad promoted settlement as a reliable source of revenue, the spectacular painting resultingfrom its support of Moran’s 1871 trip to Yellowstone instead showed the limitations of the homesteading model in a moun-tainous and arid Western landscape more suitable for mining and logging than for farming.

MEASURING 7 feet tall by 12 feet wide,The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone (1872;fig. 1) is monumental. Only a handful

of tiny human figures stand in the foreground ofthe painting. The men are dwarfed by their sur-roundings, indicating that, despite its size, the can-vas only hints at the colossal proportions of the ac-tual site. However, Moran does not sacrifice detailfor scale. Distinct veins of pink, orange, and yellowrun through rock formations; individual needlesare visible on the pine trees’ branches; and themist around the waterfall is not a uniform colorbut a range of whites tinged gray, blue, and yel-low. This painting—just like the site it depicts—ismarvelous. Moran affectionately called it his “BigPicture.”

The existing secondary literature describes TheGrand Cañon of the Yellowstone as an image of spec-tacular wilderness, of a wondrous landscape ready‐made and destined to be packaged as a tourist at-traction and a source of voyeuristic enjoyment.This theory is compounded by the Northern Pa-

cific Railroad’s (NPRR) sponsorship of Moran’strip to Yellowstone in exchange for several water-colors depicting the area.1 Scholars assume thatthis transaction was intended to cultivate the im-age of Yellowstone—declared the country’s firstnational park in 1872—as a tourist destination.This article argues that the NPRR sent an artistto Montana Territory to create images of bothspectacular wilderness for tourists and of habit-able wilderness for settlement—images resonantof the ideals expressed in the 1862 HomesteadAct. To suit its own commercial goals, the NPRRneeded to portray the Yellowstone Valley as a West-ern Eden that one should not just visit, but settle.

After a brief literature review and discussion ofmethods, the article introduces the HomesteadAct—the principal blueprint for the settlementof the West from 1862. This blueprint—an exten-sion of land policies dating to the end of the eigh-teenth century—came into question as it was ap-plied to environments in the mountainous Westnot suited for arable agriculture.2 The NorthernPacific Railroad’s attempts to develop the Yellow-stone Valley despite its geographic and geologicalchallenges are considered using period maps. The

Diana Seave Greenwald is a doctoral candidate in history atthe University of Oxford.

The author is grateful for the guidance and support providedfor this project by Elizabeth Hutchinson, Eleanor Jones Harvey,and the Winterthur Academic Programs staff, particularly AmyEarls and Rosemary Krill. Thank you to Ava Seave for her skill asperpetual editor and interlocutor.

© 2015 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2016/4904-0002$10.00

1 Joni L. Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the AmericanWest (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 190.

2 “Homestead Act,” Homestead Act of 1862 ( January 7, 2009),1. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost.

article examines the specific artistic needs of theNPRR and the process by which it selected an artistto paint Yellowstone in the light of this legislativeand railroad‐building framework for development.It then compares Moran and his depiction ofthe Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with AlbertBierstadt’s paintings of the Rocky Mountains andYosemite Valley and the latter location’s initial rail-road development. The article concludes with ex-tended formal analyses of The Grand Cañon of theYellowstone and close readings of contemporary crit-ical reactions to further explore connections be-tween legislative debate over Western developmentand Moran’s painting. In particular, this articleargues that Moran created an image of a frontierin flux that reflected the debated and heteroge-neous plans proposed for the development of theAmerican West during and in the decade afterthe Civil War.

Beyond Tourism and the National Park

In the sizable secondary literature dedicated toThe Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone and its extraor-dinary popularity,most scholars have reached some

permutation of the same conclusion: Yellowstoneis a wonderland, an American treasure to be pre-served, admired, and celebrated.Thepainting actedas a stand‐in for the site it portrayed and was, there-fore, a flashpoint for awestruck and patriotic emo-tions.

Scholars have reached this common conclu-sion because they approach the painting equippedwith a common vision of its historical context. Theyprimarily situate The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstonein one distinct narrative—the development of na-ture tourism in the United States. The story pro-ceeds roughly as follows: the first natural attractionswere the Catskills, White Mountains, and NiagaraFalls beginning in the 1830s; tourism‐related activitythen moved West to the Yosemite Valley in the late1850s–60s. Tourism arrived in Montana in 1872when Congress passed the Yellowstone NationalPark Protection Act (hereafter National Park Pro-tection Act) establishing Yellowstone as the firstnational park.3 At each of these stages, there was

Fig. 1. Thomas Moran, The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, 1872. Oil on canvas; H. 8400, W. 1441=400. (Smithsonian

American Art Museum, lent by the Department of the Interior Museum; photo, Smithsonian American Art Museum,Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY.)

3 An overview of this literature is presented in Gail S. Da-vidson, “Landscape Icons, Tourism, and Land Development inthe Northeast,” in Frederic Church, Winslow Homer and ThomasMoran: Tourism and the American Landscape, ed. Barbara Bloemink,

176 Winterthur Portfolio 49:4

a “Great Picture”—an enormous oil painting viewedin a dramatic solo exhibition complete with cur-tains and pamphlets—to portray and publicize thelatest natural phenomenon.4 According to this nar-rative, the development of nature tourism and thesuccess of Great Pictures share a common root.They are linked to an emerging interest in spectac-ular viewing experiences. This pursuit of the spec-tacular is fueled not only by an interest in traveland novel landscapes, but also by a growing senseof patriotism grounded in the magnificent Ameri-can landscape. As Barbara Novak first argued, thehistory of the United States could not rival the glo-ries of the European past, but themountains, water-falls, valleys, and canyons of the West were granderand more wondrous than their European counter-parts.5

This scholarly narrative is not without merit.Americans’ interest in seeking out spectacular nat-ural phenomena—either by traveling to sites inperson or traveling virtually by viewing a Great Pic-ture—increased exponentially during the nine-teenth century.6 This trend in nature tourism isrelevant to the creation of Yellowstone NationalPark and the success of Moran’s painting, but itis not the only relevant historical context.

In the early 1870s, the Yellowstone Valley’s fatewas uncertain. No one actively tried to encourageand accommodate Yellowstone tourism until yearsafter the debut of The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstoneand the passage of the National Parks ProtectionAct. One reason was a lack of federal funding; an-

other was lack of transportation infrastructure.The new law preserved “all timber, mineral depos-its, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park,and their retention in their natural condition”and established the park area as a “pleasuring‐ground” for the public.7 It did not, however, allo-cate any money to do this. In 1872 tourism mayhave been on the minds of Moran and other meninvolved with the painting and the establishmentof the park, but given the area’s isolation and lackof infrastructure, it is unlikely that tourism wasthe primary focus of those developing the Yellow-stone Valley in the 1870s. The NPRR did not reachnearby Garrison, Montana, until 1883.8 In 1871,after traveling to Montana to report on mining de-velopment, US Commissioner of Mine andMiningStatistics Rossiter Raymond concluded: “When it isconsidered with what difficulty and expense com-munication, travel and transportation are main-tained between the Territory of Montana and therest of the world, it seems marvelous that anyoneshould come there or stop there at all.”9 The tour-ism narrative is not sufficient to account for thevalley’s development.

Yellowstone National Park is just one corner ofthe Yellowstone River Valley, a fertile and mineral‐rich area surrounded by arid and mostly desolateterritory. The NPRR, which had a federal charterto lay track from Minnesota to Washington Terri-tory, could profit enormously from the valley’s de-velopment. Large amounts of sustainable revenuefor the railroad would come from establishing ag-riculture, logging, and mining—and settlementscreated by people working in these industries—on land only made accessible by rail. The NPRRwould make most of its money by facilitating theexchange of goods and commodities between thefertile and resource‐rich West and the vibrant in-dustrialized markets on the coasts.10 Comparedto the business of interstate commerce, promotingtourism in a distant Western territory in the 1870s

4 The concept and history of the “Great Picture” was first ex-plored in Gerald L. Carr’s scholarship, notably Carr, FrederickEdwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas: University of Texas Press, 1980),and Carr, “Albert Bierstadt, Big Trees, and the British: A Log of ManyAnglo‐American Ties,” Arts Magazine 60, no. 16 ( June 1986): 60–71.

5 Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape andPainting, 1825–1875, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press,2007).

6 Davidson, “Landscape Icons, Tourism, and Land Develop-ment in the Northeast,” 3–75.

8 Paul Schullery and Lee H. Whittlesey, Myth and History in theCreation of Yellowstone National Park (Lincoln: University of Ne-braska Press, 2003), 13–30; Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveyingof the American West, 74.

9 Quoted in Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the FarWest, 1848–1880, rev. exp. ed. (Albuquerque: University of NewMexico Press, 2001), 142.

10 John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Rail-road, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (Norman: University of Okla-homa Press, 2006), 65–79.

Sarah Burns, Gail S. Davidson, Karal Ann Marling, and FloramaeMcCarron‐Cates (New York: Bulfinch, 2006), 3–75; John F. Sears,Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Kenneth John Myers,The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895 (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1987);Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West; Joni L.Kinsey, ThomasMoran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and PopularTaste (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 60–61, 118–23,214–22; Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, Monument to theNational Cultural Landscape (Nashville, TN: Applewood, 2001);Nancy K. Anderson, Thomas P. Bruhn, Joni L. Kinsey, and AnneMorand, Thomas Moran (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1998), particularly the essay by Kinsey, “Moran and the Art of Pub-lishing,” 300–21.

7 US Statutes at Large 17, chap. 24, “An Act to Set Apart a Cer-tain Tract of Land Lying Near the Head‐waters of the YellowstoneRiver as a Public Park,” 32–33, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi‐bin/ampage?collIdpllsl&fileNamep017/llsl017.db&recNump73.

The Big Picture 177

was a peripheral revenue stream.11 This article,therefore, examines The Grand Cañon of the Yellow-stone within the context of NPRR attempts to de-velop the entire Yellowstone Valley as a productiveand profitable region.

Examination of The Grand Cañon of the Yellow-stone from the perspective of the developmentand settlement of America’sWestern frontier strad-dles the disciplines of art history and social history.This project, therefore, demands a blended meth-odological approach that combines formal analy-ses of artworks with primary sources, such as maps,historic demographics, articles in nationally circu-lated periodicals, and the passage of legislation.This approach is linked to T. J. Clark’s conceptof the “social history of art.” Clark argues that arthistorians should engage in formal critique whilealso working to establish “an account of how thework took on its public form—what its patronswanted, what its audience perceived.”12 In placingThe Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, its patrons, andits audience in a context linked to Western expan-sion, this article engages with a large historical andart historical literature dedicated to the visual cul-ture of the American frontier. Beyond the schol-ars writing on Moran and other artists specificallydiscussed in this article, those whose ideas havebeen most influential are art historians WilliamTruettner and Angela Miller and historians AlanTrachtenberg and Richard Slotkin.13 Miller writes:“the wilderness ideal of critical Romanticism, themiddle landscape ideal of harmony between na-

ture and culture, and the turn to preservationthrough federal protection (setting apart undevel-oped nature from development) follow a roughhistorical progression extending from the earlyto the later nineteenth century. Any understand-ing of the meaning of wilderness in the nine-teenth century must take account of this changingintellectual, aesthetic and social history.”14 Withinthis rough progression, this article focuses on theaesthetic and social history of a transitional periodwhen distinguishing undeveloped nature from de-velopment—and what form development shouldtake—was not clearly delineated.

During an approximately fifteen‐year periodbetween 1862 and 1878, Congress passed a seriesof laws that created varyingmandates formanagingwestward expansion—including a turn to preserva-tion. These debates over land use were reportedand echoed in periodicals and civic debates out-side of Washington.15 In the midst of these de-bates, the Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone was createdand debuted. This article ultimately places Moran’saesthetic accomplishment in the broader social his-torical context of contested Western land use.

The Homestead Act Moves West

By the 1870s, Americans had approximately a cen-tury of experience with westward expansion andhad particular preferences for a certain kind offrontier settlement. In art, literature, and legis-lation, the West was often treated as a space thatcould be made open for settlement adhering toa Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.16 The third presi-dent believed that farmers should be independentyeomen and that these men would be the back-bone of the American citizenry. He wrote in 1785,“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuablecitizens. . . . They are the most vigorous, the mostindependent, the most virtuous & they are tied totheir country & wedded to the liberty . . . by the

11 See Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and theMaking of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), Kindlelocation 342–72; Richard J. Orisi, Sunset Limited: The Southern PacificRailroad and the Development of the American West (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2005), Kindle location 710–943; AlfredRunte, Trains of Discovery: Railroads and the Legacy of Our NationalParks, 5th ed. (Plymouth, UK: Roberts Rinehart, 2011). Runtewrites on the history of trains for tourism—the vast majority ofhis examples come from the 1880s or later.

12 From “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times LiterarySupplement, May 24, 1974, 561–62. See also T. J. Clark, The AbsoluteBourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848 (London: Thames andHudson, 1973), and Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet andthe 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), forexamples of social histories of art.

13 See William Truettner, “Ideology and Image: JustifyingWestward Expansion,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Imagesof the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William Truettner (Washington,DC: Smithsonian, 1991); Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Land-scape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ith-aca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Alan Trachtenberg, TheIncorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 2007); Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environ-ment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, Press, 1998).

14 Angela Miller, “The Image of Nature in American Land-scape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation’ and the Art of Land-scape,” in American Wilderness, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), 93–94.

15 Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman, andWilliamN. Parker, “Northern Agriculture and the Westward Movement,” in The CambridgeEconomic History of the United States, vol. 2, ed. Stanley L. Engermanand Robert E. Gallman (London: Cambridge University Press,2000), 285–328.

16 Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West:A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2000), 330–61.


most lasting bonds.”17 Jefferson’s vision was trans-lated into the Land Ordinance of 1785. Accordingto this law, unsettled territory was to be divided intorectangular 160‐acre plots for farmers to eventuallysettle and own. Permutations of this grid were im-posed across the United States for most of the cen-tury to come. This is demonstrated by an early ex-ample from the Ohio River Valley (fig. 2).18 In themap, the neatly divided grid of plots to be appor-tioned evenly among new settlers is imposed ontop of the irregular borders and divisions createdby waterways delineating and permeating this tractof land. The grid supersedes geography. The Pre-emption Act of 1842 reaffirmed this programmaticmodel for Western settlement. It allowed men tomove onto 160‐acre plots of unclaimed public landthroughout theUnited States for the price of $1.25per acre.19

Also beginning in the 1840s, Western settle-ment along the Jeffersonian plan became inti-mately linked to the “free soil” question: the sup-port of Western expansion without the expansionof slavery.20 The emerging Republican party—offi-cially formed on a national scale in 1854—was ded-icated to slave‐free settlement and generally sup-portive of providing Western migrants with freepublic land for homesteading.21 As regional ten-sions mounted in the 1850s, the decision to pro-vide free land for settlers became a flashpoint forthe broader debate over the continued existenceof slavery. Republicans believed that homesteaderscould literally crowd out the potential extensionof plantation agriculture to the southwest whileproviding an outlet for the impoverished inhabi-tants of overcrowded Eastern cities.22

The 1862 Homestead Act first came up for de-bate during the Civil War, when Republicans over-

whelmingly controlled Congress.23 In debatingthe law, advocates cited the popularity of the mea-sure with the general public, the use of the act forcombating greedy land speculators, and the roleof the noble yeoman farmer in America’s develop-ment. Speaker of the House and PennsylvaniaRepresentative Galusha A. Grow declared duringthe debate of the bill, “The best disposition . . .of the public domain is to . . . consecrate it for-ever in homes for freemen . . . secure in all theirearning with which to develop the elements of ahigher and better civilization.”24 President Lin-coln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862,and it became effective on January 1, 1863.25 Theact granted 160 acres (of surveyed but unclaimedpublic land) to individuals who were the heads ofhouseholds or twenty‐one years of age. Themethodof transfer stipulated that individuals who had en-tered on a homestead were required to pay a fewnominal fees to live on the land and cultivate itfor five years, at which time title would transfer tothem.26

Unfortunately, however, this blueprint for set-tlement did not work within the geographic reali-ties of much of the West, particularly the far West.Most territory beyond Missouri or Iowa was aridand required modern irrigation technology tofarm.27 Life as a family farmer west of the Missis-sippi was precarious and not necessarily profit-able.28 The Homestead Act was best suited forfarms that resembled the idyllic 1868 Currier andIves series of prints of the “American Home-stead.”29 In the depiction of the homestead duringspring (fig. 3), the majority of the homestead-ers are lounging on a manicured lawn outside ofa quaint wooden house. Fat ewes with their lambseat the lush grass, and the only reference to hardfarmwork is a distant vignette of aman at a plow be-hind two oxen. The scene is idyllic—and very farfrom reality. A series of photos taken of home-steaders in the early 1880s gives a better idea of

17 Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth:Nature’s Role in American History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2009), 61.

18 Steinberg, Down to Earth, 62–63.19 Benjamin Todd Arrington, “‘Free Homes for Free Men’: A

Political History of the Homestead Act, 1774–1863” (PhD diss.,University of Nebraska, 2012), 105–6. Another important themein the history of land development is the contested role of the“land speculator”—rich owners of large tracts of land who investedin cheap federal land and held it for later resale. Advocacy ofhomesteading—well‐enforced homesteading—was considered away to combat these profit‐seekers who sold land to Western mi-grants at inflated prices. Finally, one should note that militaryveterans were always an exceptional class in land‐use debates. Theywere given priority for land under military “warrants” throughoutthe century.

20 Ibid., 82–120.21 Ibid., 147–50.22 Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain,

1776–1936 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 185.

23 In fact, a similar bill was passed in 1860 but vetoed by Pres-ident James Buchanan, a Democrat. Arrington, “Free Homes forFree Men,” 192–93.

24 Speech of Galusha Grow, February 21, 1862, CongressionalGlobe, House of Representatives, 37th Congress, 2nd Session, 909–10.

25 Arrington, “Free Homes for Free Men,” 223.26 Lisi Krall, Proving Up (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 42.27 Hine and Faragher, The American West, 330–61.28 Steinberg, Down to Earth, 133–35.29 The Library of Congress lists the date of this series of prints

of a homestead across the seasons as 1868, http://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.05780/. However, Frederic A. Connningham, Cur-rier and Ives Prints: An Illustrated Checklist, updated ed. (New York:Crown, 1983), lists the date of the series as 1869 (see 9–12).

The Big Picture 179

Fig. 2. Thomas W. Hutchins, surveyor, “Plat of the seven ranges of townships being partof the territory of the United States, N.W. of the River Ohio,” 1796. Engraving by WilliamBarker, published by Matthew Carey, Philadelphia. (Geography and Map Division, Li-brary of Congress.)


what it was like to farm in the far West during thenineteenth century.30 In the 1886picture of “RuralLife in Neb[raska]” (fig. 4), a family sits outside arudimentary one‐room house made of sod. Thesurrounding grasses seem sparse and unlike therichly forested scene in the Currier and Ives print;the only tree in sight is a small sapling apparentlyplanted by the family pictured. Much of the newlyopenedWestern land was not suitable for farming.Instead, it was rich in minerals or perhaps bettersuited for producing timber. Mining and loggingdid not fit well into relatively small gridded plots;they were spatially extensive activities demandingitinerant labor that could follow strikes and ven-ture into unused forest.31 The Homestead Act hadlittle relevance for these industries.32

Ignoring the geographic and economic reali-ties of the West in the passing of the HomesteadAct grew problematic within just a few years ofthe bill’s enactment. Different Western legislatorsand representatives agitated for adaptations to theact for their home states. For example, Minne-sota’s legislature asked for exceptions to be madefor new settlers in the state because “the emigrantarriving [in] the spring or early summer can raiseno crops for the first year from the fact that prairiemust be broken in the months of June and July.”33

The Territory of Colorado asked for homestead‐like claims to be awarded for working mineralresources rather than cultivating crops. Its legis-lators asked Congress to consider “the passage of

Fig. 3. Currier and Ives, American Homestead: Spring, New York, ca. 1869. (LC‐USZC2‐1902, Prints and PhotographsDivision, Library of Congress.)

30 Information about the photos is available on the Library ofCongress website, https://www.loc.gov/item/2005693382/.

31 Steinberg, Down to Earth, 116–33.32 Ibid., 234–73.

33 “Resolution of the Legislature of Minnesota, asking anamendment to the Homestead Act,” Referred to the Committeeon Public Lands, 42nd Congress, March 20, 1871. Similar doc-uments were submitted by Kansas, California, and Nevada rep-resentatives.

The Big Picture 181

an act granting titles to lodes or veins wheneversufficient improvement has been made to estab-lish the fact of discovery in good faith.”34

In response to these requests and with the sup-port of geological survey reports, Congress createdlegislation recognizing the geographic challengesand heterogeneity of the West. Though the Home-stead Act remained intact, legislators passed addi-tional acts to deal with divergence from the originalideal; the Timber Culture Act (1873), the Timberand Stone Act (1878), and the Desert Land Act(1878) are notable examples.35 In the early to mid‐1860s, homesteading along the Jeffersonian modelwas the undisputed blueprint for developing theAmerican West. However, by the early 1870s, thesuitability of this model was in question and wouldsoon be amended.

The Northern Pacific Railroad and theHomesteading Ideal

Railway development proceeded in tandem withthe sweep of free homesteading along the fron-tier as Western communities grew. The idea for anorthern transcontinental route running fromthe Great Lakes to Washington or Oregon Terri-tory first emerged in the 1850s.36 However, politi-cal tumult prior to theCivilWarmade the construc-tion of any transcontinental railroad impossible.In the 1860s, railroad technology profited from awartime boom—track became more durable, railgauges were standardized, and locomotives weremade more efficient. Riding this wave of techno-logical improvement and a surge of political impe-tus, construction of the first transcontinental rail-road along a south central route began in theearly 1860s and was completed in 1869 when theUnion Pacific and Central Pacific railroads wereconnected at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory.

With the focus on joining the Central Pacific tothe Union Pacific, the previously proposed routefrom Minnesota to Washington Territory was al-

Fig. 4. Solomon D. Butcher, Rural life in Neb[raska], 1886. Albumen print. (LC‐USZ62‐16084, Library of Congress.)

34 “Memorial of the Council and House of Representatives ofColorado Territory,” Referred to the Committee on Mines andMining, 42nd Congress, February 20, 1872.

35 For discussion of the Timber Culture Act, Desert Land Act,and the role of survey information in informing legislation, seePaul W. Gates, History of Public Land Development (Washington, DC:US Government Printing Office, 1969), 399–434. For informa-tion about the Timber and Stone Act andmining policies, see Ben-jamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (NewYork: Peter Smith, 1939), 496–501. 36 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 65–79.


most forgotten. Two primary advocates of thenorthern rail route during the 1850s and 1860swere engineer Edwin Johnson and career railroadmanager Thomas Canfield.37 Johnson and Can-field published reports about the merits of thenorthern route and lobbied Congress to grantthe land needed to construct the railroad. John-son’s Railroad to the Pacific, Northern Route, Its GeneralCharacter, Relative Merits, etc. (1854) begins with awarning that “it is very important that the bestroute or routes . . . should be selected, any erroror mistake in this respect cannot, from the magni-tude of the undertaking be easily remedied.”38 Afterthis warning, the report discusses the economicmerits of connecting Washington Territory to theEastern seaboard via the northern Midwest. Theseinclude connections to large cities in East Asia viaPacific trade routes from the Puget Sound, provid-ing access to “the copper region of Lake Superior,”and abundant timber within the region of the“Great Bend of the Missouri.”39 Johnson then fo-cuses on—or rather downplays—the physical chal-lenges of construction of the Northern Pacific’sproposed route, like altitude that would need tobe gained and lost and the quality of ground onwhich the rail would be built.

Concluding the introduction to the report,Johnson writes, “The population along and nearto the located portion [in Illinois, Wisconsin,andMinnesota] is already large, and is very rapidlyincreasing. Irrespective of the continuation to thePacific, the importance of several lines . . . to ac-commodate the region lying West of the GreatLakes, is such as to place them in the very first classof main trunk Roads.”40 This statement is not anhonest one. And its placement as the final state-ment of the introduction to the report perhapsindicates Johnson’s recognition that the greatestobstacle to the Northern Pacific’s proposal wasdemographics. According to the 1860 census, only237,000 Americans lived along the proposednorthern route, while almost 1.5 million peoplealready lived along the central transcontinentalrail line. Though the number living along the pro-posed northern route climbed to 593,000 by 1870,it was not until after 1880 that population levels

along the northern rail line surpassed the 1860population levels along the central line.41 Theelaborate and colorful “American Union RailroadMap of the United States” from 1872 (fig. 5) showsthese two routes. The in‐progress Northern Pa-cific is the thick black line running from the cen-ter of Minnesota across northern Dakota Territory,through Montana, and looping through Idaho andWashington. The Central Pacific is the black linedotted with dozens of named stations runningfrom the Nebraska‐Iowa border through southernWyoming, northern Utah, Nevada, and terminat-ing in California (fig. 6). In its margins, the maphints at the population dynamics along these lines.Montana’s largest city—then “Lewis & Clark,” laterHelena—had 5,041 residents. By comparison, inNevada—along the recently completed Central Pa-cific Railroad—the largest city listed hadmore than11,000 inhabitants; the new state had a total pop-ulation more than double that of the geographi-cally larger Montana Territory.

Why did the United States need a railroadthrough no‐man’s land? Johnson and Canfieldnever successfully answered this question—andnever had to. Gold was discovered in Montana Ter-ritory in 1862. After this find, Montana was ex-pected to experience a post‐gold‐strike populationboom. In anticipation of the boom, President Lin-coln signed an act in July 1864 creating the North-ern Pacific Railroad. The act provided no financialsubsidies but endowed the railroad with roughly50 million acres of land to develop and sell.42 Onthe American Union Railroad map, the forthcom-ing NPRR is surrounded by names of barely pop-ulated locations in Montana suggesting mineralriches: Silver City, Silver Bowey, and the BeaverHead Valley Gold Mines.

While lobbyingCongress for their charter, John-son, Canfield, and their partners presented the fu-ture railroad to legislators as the “People’s PacificRailway.”43 They planned to fund the project byselling bonds to thousands of small‐denominationpurchasers, rather than to a small number of bank-ing houses and speculators. The “People’s PacificRailway” pitch—when considered alongside fre-quent questions about whether there was a suffi-cient local population to make the NPRR viable—suggests that, from its inception, the NorthernPacific sought to connect with potential Western37 Ibid., 15–17.

38 Edwin Ferry Johnson, Railroad to the Pacific: Northern Route,Its General Character, Relative Merits, etc., 2nd ed. (New York: Rail-road Journal Job Printing Office, 1854), iii. Accessed via SabinAmericana, Gale, Cengage Learning.

39 Ibid., 5–10.40 Ibid., 13.

41 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 32.42 Ibid., 32–33.43 Ibid., 33.

The Big Picture 183

immigrants. The future success of the railroad waspredicated on a future population boom and thatpopulation’s sustained success in mining, farm-ing, and other sectors dependent on the railroadfor access to major markets. In one 1866 appeal toCongress, ten Western senators and congressmendeclared: “Much of . . . the Northwest is practicallywaste . . . for the want of such facilities for inter-course with, and transportation to, the commercialcentres of the country. . . . Lands now unprofitable,because inaccessible, will be peopled by millions bythe building of this road, and the agricultural andpastoral wealth of the country will only be exceededby the production of precious metals. . . .”44 Fromthe outset, the NPRR was selling one dream andone promise: economically profitable Western set-

tlement. An “if you build it, they shall come” ap-proach was integral to the Northern Pacific’s busi-ness plan. A map of the proposed route from 1868(fig. 7) subtly reinforces this business plan with an-notations about the resources on and in the landthe NPRR would open for settlement. Close exam-ination reveals notes such as “Lignite” (a type ofcoal) throughout the route and “Gold” in WesternMontana, Idaho, and Washington territories.

In the late 1860s the NPRR floundered. It wasshort of cash and poorly managed.45 Despite newfinancial support from Congress, the railroad didnot have the resources to start laying track andhad barely begun land surveying, a prerequisitefor construction to start. It was at this stagnantpoint in NPRR history that the project attractedthe attention of Jay Cooke. Cooke—the founderof Philadelphia bank Jay Cooke and Co.—made

Fig. 5. Haasis and Lubrecht, publisher, “The American Union Railroad Map of the United States, BritishPossessions, West Indies, Mexico, and Central America,” New York, 1872. (Geography and Map Division, Libraryof Congress.)

44 Alexander Ramsey, D. S. Norton, G. H. Williams, et al.,“An Appeal to Congress on Behalf of the Northwest in Connec-tion with the Construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad andTelegraph” (Washington, DC: Intelligencer Printing Establish-ment, 1866), 4. 45 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 35.


his fortune during the Civil War. Within roughly amonth of the attack on Fort Sumter, he sold $3mil-lion in Union bonds. InMarch 1862, the Secretaryof the Treasury appointed Cooke the “Subscrip-tion Agent for the National Loan,”making him re-sponsible for the sale of all US bonds. In 1863, heand his agents sold $511million in bonds; in 1864,they sold $830 million worth. “With over 500,000people purchasing bonds, Cooke’s success camenot just from advertising . . . or from his sales force,but rather his feel for the country’s mood, publicrelations creativity and receptiveness to new salesideas.”46 His methods for selling war bonds insmall denominations to large numbers of peopleresembled the proposed plan for selling bonds tomiddle‐class and working‐class people to supportCanfield and Johnson’s “People’s Pacific Railway.”

Cooke emerged from the war as a millionaireand at the height of his influence. He was personal

friends with President Ulysses S. Grant and was al-most appointed Secretary of the Treasury. Flushwith cash and political connections, Cooke wentsearching for postwar investments, and in 1869 hefound the struggling Northern Pacific Railroad. Inthe past, Cooke had successfully invested in trans-portation infrastructure, such as regional railroadsand municipal trolleys. He was a fastidious business-man, a hands‐on and risk‐averse manager. For ex-ample, he refused to invest Cooke and Co.’s fundsin oil fields in the process of being developed, butwould invest in a railroad leading to those fieldsonce they proved productive.47 Considering thisprecedent, his speculative investment in the NPRRis surprising. However, before investing, Cooke tooknumerous precautions and sent a reconnaissanceparty to inspect the route in the summer of 1869.The group reported that the route was navigable

Fig. 6. Haasis and Lubrecht, publisher, “The American Union Railroad Map of the United States, BritishPossessions, West Indies, Mexico, and Central America,” New York, 1872. (Geography and Map Division, Libraryof Congress.)

46 Ibid., 11.

47 Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War,vol. 2 (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1907), 2:81–82.

The Big Picture 185

and that the areas it led to—once mined, logged, orunder cultivation—were capable of earning backthe large amounts of capital needed to create therailway.48 In the autumn of 1869 Cooke becamethe primary financial backer of the Northern Pa-cific.49 The arrival of Cooke and Co.’s capital andmanagement team dramatically accelerated con-struction. While Cooke and his staff were generallycritical of existing NPRR management, they em-braced the railroad’s public image. Cooke’s mes-sage was the same as the one that led Congress tocreate the railroad in 1864. The West was ripefor settlement and economic profit; all that was re-quired for the region to recognize its potential wasa transportation system linking it to the northeast-ern marketplace.50

Cooke and the Northern Pacific were not, how-ever, wedded to an exclusively agrarian vision ofthe West. NPRR publicity portrayed the northwest-ern United States as a catchall Eden. A publicationadvertising the Northern Pacific stated, “this wholeregion may be characterized as one of great fertil-ity and capable of immense production under cul-tivation. . . . While the soil is so prolific, below it are

minerals and metals in such abundance as to be asufficient source of wealth to any people.”51 WhileCooke was willing to invite any and all profitabledevelopment to lands opened by the NPRR, oneaspect of the homesteading ideal was necessary:permanent settlement. Long‐term income, stabil-ity, and success for theNPRR could only come froma settled population that sold and received goodsand produce shipped by rail.52

Accordingly, Cooke and his aides expandedthe publicity campaign for territory that wouldbe accessed by their railroad. In 1871, a visitor toCooke and Co.’s New York office described NPRRpress secretary Samuel Wilkeson as “engaged tento twelve hours a day . . . arranging materials fornewspapers, circulars, pamphlets and books” ex-tolling the value and fertility of the land along theNorthern Pacific route.53 An 1871 map (fig. 8) re-places the small notations in the 1868 map (seefig. 7) with large statements written across Mon-

Fig. 7. G. W. and C. B. Colton and Co., publisher, “Map of the Country from Lake Superior to the Pacific Oceanfrom the Latest Explorations and Surveys to Accompany the Report of the New York Chamber of Commerce,” show-ing railroad route in red, New York, 1868. (Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.)

48 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 25.49 Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War, 2:157–60.50 Ramsey et al., “An Appeal to Congress on Behalf of the

Northwest,” 4.

51 Lorin Blodget, “The Opening of the New Northwest” (Phil-adelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857), reprinted in New Englander, July1871, 367, American Periodicals Series Online.

52 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 68.53 “Letters from Gotham,” Helena Daily Herald, May 26, 1871,

quoted in Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 19. There is an extensivedescription of these marketing and advertising operations in SigMickelson, The Northern Pacific Railroad and the Selling of the West:A Nineteenth‐Century Public Relations Venture (Sioux Falls, SD: Centerfor Western Studies, 1993).


tana and Washington territories: “the grazingperrennial [sic] and unlimited all through this re-gion” and “covered with Bunch Grass which iscured hay in summer and winter,” respectively. Theformer notation referred to the Yellowstone Val-ley, one of the most common and exalted topics ofthese pamphlets and promotional materials.

The NPRR’s land grant stretched from Duluth,Minnesota, to the Puget Sound and was of varyingvalue. Swampy northern Minnesota was unfit forfarming; lake areas could be cleared for timber,but only with great difficulty. However, moving intowestern Minnesota and North Dakota, the route en-tered the Red River Valley, which was well wateredand perfect for farming.54 Continuing westward,

deep topsoil around the Red River gave way to thesandy and agriculturally useless badlands. The aridand nonarable environment continued for hun-dreds of miles until the Yellowstone River Valley.The Yellowstone River flows for 692 miles frompresent‐day northwestern Wyoming through south-ern and eastern Montana to northwestern NorthDakota, where it empties into the Missouri River.The US Geological Survey denotes the YellowstoneRiver Basin as an approximately 70,000‐square‐milearea across these three states.55 The Yellowstoneregion was considered to be just as fertile as the

Fig. 8. E. H. Knight, surveyor, and Northern Pacific Railroad Company, “Map of the Country Tributary to the North-ern Pacific Railroad Compiled from English, Canadian, and American Official Sources and Original Surveys,” 1871.(Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.)

54 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 145.

55 Kirk Miller and Tom Quinn, “National Water Quality As-sessment: Yellowstone River Basin, United States Geological Sur-vey Fact Sheet, 149–97, 1997, http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/FS‐149‐97/fs‐149‐97.pdf.

The Big Picture 187

Red River Valley and home to valuable mineraland metal deposits—this was an essential economicopportunity for the NPRR. According to one rail-road pamphlet from 1870: “Some valleys are beau-tiful. [The Yellowstone valley] is grand. It aboundsin magnificent scenery, most excellent farm‐sitesand water‐powers. The soil is very rich and fertile,timber very convenient, coal and iron croppingout in abundance at different points, and other ev-idence of rich deposits of copper [and] the sur-rounding mountains are full of gold and silver‐bearing quartz.”56 The vision for the YellowstoneValley was in lockstep with the vision for the restof the land opened by the railroad—it was meant tobe settled, worked, and perpetually serviced by theNPRR.However, in the center of this Edenwas a geo-graphic anomaly: the approximately 3,750‐square‐mile volcanic basin and plateau where Montana,Wyoming, and Idaho meet that would becomeYellowstoneNational Park (fig. 9).57

Colter’s Hell in the Heavenly Valley

Yellowstone National Park is a caldera, a large cra-ter formed by a massive volcanic eruption. Thearea is one of the most volcanically active sites inthe world. It is home to approximately 10,000 ther-mal features, including 300–500 active geysers—about twice as many as the next largest geyser fieldin the world.58 Yellowstone is unique, otherworldly,and explosive. Accordingly, the area’s first Euro‐American name was “Colter’s Hell,” in honor of afrontiersman who wandered through it around1808.59 Systematic exploration of the areabeganwiththe 1869–70Washburn and Cook‐Folsom‐Petersonexpeditions.60

In the early 1870s, Washburn party memberNathaniel Langford became the most prominentreporter of the Colter’s Hell phenomena. With fi-nancial and logistical support from Cooke, Lang-

ford—a Montana politician and booster—pub-lished and gave public accounts of his trip throughthe volcanic corner of the valley. He lectured bothin Montana and major East Coast cities.61 He alsowrote a two‐part feature for Scribner’s Monthly called“The Wonders of the Yellowstone” (fig. 10). In hislectures and articles, the Montana politician pre-sented a wondrous but often hellish picture. Anexample is his description of the Grotto geyser(fig. 11): “So named from its singular crater ofvitrified sinter, full of large, sinuous apertures.Through one of these . . . one of our companycrawled to the discharging orifice; and when, afew hours afterwards, he saw a volume of boilingwater . . . shooting through it to the height of sixtyfeet, and a scalding stream of two hundred inchesflowing from the aperture he had entered a shorttime before . . . .”62 Langford’s writing is dramaticand meant to pique readers’ curiosity and fascina-tion with the bizarre. The overall impression cre-ated by “The Wonders of the Yellowstone” is thatthe area is a fascinating but threatening place. Inaddition to the story about the potentially deadlygeyser, the text of Langford’s article dedicates sev-eral pages to the harrowing plight of Truman Everts,a party member lost in the Yellowstone area forthirty‐seven days.63

Yet Langford’s characterization of the futurepark as a “remarkable region of natural wonders,”rather than simply Colter’s Hell, was a paradig-matic shift in the area’s reputation.64 Its threat-ening features were recast as components of awonderland. Cooke sponsored and endorsed thistransformation by supporting Langford’s public-ity work.65 The public—and later lawmakers—ac-tively consumed his articles and lectures.66 AndLangford, an important figure in Yellowstone his-tory, became the first superintendent of the na-tional park.

Langford concluded his “The Wonders of theYellowstone” article with an optimistic advertise-

56 The Northern Pacific Railroad’s Land Grant and the Future of theRoad, March 11, 1870, quoted in Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Sur-veying of the American West, 69.

57 National Park Service, “Park Facts—Yellowstone NationalPark,” http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/parkfacts.htm.

58 Thermal Biology Institute, “Overview of Yellowstone Geo-logic History” (Bozeman: University of Montana, 2006), http://tbi.montana.edu/outreach/hotscience/materials/resources/YNP%20Geology.pdf.

59 Marlene Deahl Merrill, “Introduction,” in Yellowstone andthe Great West: Journals, Letters and Images from the 1871 Hayden Expe-dition, ed. Marlene Deahl Merrill (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1999), 11.

60 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 76.

61 Merrill, “Introduction,” 10–13.62 Nathaniel P. Langford, “The Wonders of the Yellowstone,

Part II,” Scribner’s Monthly ( June 1871): 113–28.63 Truman Everts, “Thirty‐Seven Days of Peril,” Scribner’s

Monthly (November 1871), American Periodicals Series Online.64 Langford, conclusion of eastern lectures on Yellowstone,

quoted in Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the AmericanWest, 71.

65 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,71–72; Mark Daniel Barringer, Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and theConstruction of Nature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002),13–15.

66 Barringer, Selling Yellowstone, 13–15.


ment for the Northern Pacific: “By means of theNorthern Pacific Railroad, which will doubtlessbe completed within the next three years, the trav-eler will be able to make the trip to Montana fromthe Atlantic seaboard in three days, and thousandsof tourists will be attracted to both Montana andWyoming in order to behold with their own eyesthe wonders here described.”67 Despite that final

prediction, Langford’s characterization created apublic relations problem for the NPRR. His de-scription of the volcanic southwesterly section ofthe Yellowstone Valley was anathema to the imageof the valley created by the effusive Yellowstone‐related NPRR propaganda aimed at settlers. In1871 there were essentially two popular imagesof the valley: one to settle and one to wonder at.Thus, the Northern Pacific was faced with a bifur-cated vision of Yellowstone that needed to be rec-onciled. To resolve this paradox, the valley neededto be portrayed as a place that was simultaneously

Fig. 9. Map, Yellowstone National Park boundaries, 1895. (Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.)

67 Langford, “The Wonders of the Yellowstone, Part II,” 113–28.

The Big Picture 189

wondrous and livable—and the railroad wanted tohire Albert Bierstadt to create this image.68

Both Sublime and Beautiful,Bierstadt’s Wild Pastorals

Though they have their origins in antiquity, theconcepts of the sublime and the beautiful asthey are presently understood can be traced toeighteenth‐century enlightenment England—spe-cifically to philosopher Edmund Burke’s (1729–97) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas

of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).69 Roughly sum-marized, Burke defines beautiful things—primarilywomen in his discussion—as objects that “inspireus with sentiments of tenderness and affection to-wards their persons; we like to have them near us.”Beautiful objects can be possessed and are pleasur-able to behold.70 This is in distinct contrast to thesublime, experiences and environments that pro-voke “passions which belong to self‐preservation,

Fig. 10. Thomas Moran, “The Wonders of the Yellow-stone,” 1871. From Nathaniel P. Langford, “The Wondersof the Yellowstone,” Scribner’s Monthly 2, no. 1 (May 1871): 1.

68 Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 80.

69 Andrew Wilton, “The Sublime in the Old World and theNew,” in The American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States1820–1880, ed. AndrewWilton and Tim Barringer (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2003), 11. It should be noted thatBurke’s aesthetic philosophy was formed as part of a dialogue witha number of other commentators, notably Joseph Addison.

70 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of OurIdeas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2015), 37.


turn on pain and danger . . . they are delightfulwhen we have an idea of pain and danger, with-out being actually in such circumstances.”71

Burke himself applied these concepts of thesublime and the beautiful to art, which he catego-rized as “imitation.” He asserted, “painting andmany other agreeable arts have laid one of the prin-cipal foundations of [the sublime and the beau-tiful’s] power.”72 Other scholars have since fol-lowed Burke’s lead in applying the framework ofsublimity and the beauty to art. These include phi-losopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his trea-tise on aesthetics and taste—The Critique of the Powerof Judgment (1790)—he refined Burke’s concept ofthe sublime by defining it as themental experienceof a viewer or spectator forced to confront his orher own insignificance and insecurity in the faceof the incomprehensible vastness of the world oruniverse. Kant believed this feeling could be evokedby natural phenomena and by art.73 American land-scape painting has been frequently described withthe terms sublime and beautiful in reference tothe aesthetic experiences defined by Burke andrefined by Kant. Beautiful landscapes are the de-

piction of nonthreatening natural scenes and ofscenes easily comprehended—like calm settled val-leys—and the sublime are depictions of large, in-comprehensible natural phenomena—like enor-mous mountains, canyons, and arctic icebergs.74

Often, images of sublime landscapes are large‐format Great Pictures whose size evokes the scaleof the scenes depicted.75

There is also a compromise position betweenthe sublime and the beautiful: the picturesque.Developed by Reverend William Gilpin (1721–1804)—an aesthetic theorist, plein air sketchingadvocate, and avid fan of the landscape painterClaudeLorrain (1600–82; fig.12)—thepicturesquewas an aesthetic that balanced the implied vast-ness of distant mountains and incomprehensiblyold crumbling ruins with beautiful calm bodies ofwater or sunny fields. Albert Bierstadt’s art fromthe 1860s conforms closely to the picturesque; itbalances the sublime and the beautiful. This com-promise aesthetic suited the needs of the NPRR,

Fig. 11. ThomasMoran, “Grotto Geyser,” 1871. FromNathaniel P. Langford, “TheWonders ofthe Yellowstone,” Scribner’s Monthly 2, no. 1 (May 1871): 124.

71 Ibid., 43.72 Ibid., 42.73 Immanuel Kant, trans. Eric Matthews, The Critique of the Power

of Judgment (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

74 The application of this framework can be found in the ear-liest studies of American landscape painting, like Novak’s, Natureand Culture. Notable recent applications include Wilton and Bar-ringer, American Sublime, and Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: TheArt and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2015).

75 Wilton, “The Sublime in the Old World and the New,” 28–30.

The Big Picture 191

which needed to portray its lands as both spectac-ular and habitable.

Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’sPeak (1863; fig. 13) is the artist’s most famouspainting and is considered a Great Picture.76 It re-ceived generally favorable critical reviews and wasa massive commercial success after its debut. InLander’s Peak, Bierstadt presents the viewer with arich and varied picturesque Western landscape.A lush field populated by Native Americans en-gaged in quotidian activities dominates the fore-ground. Behind the field is a pristine lake dis-turbed only by a luminous waterfall colliding withits own mirror image when it hits the surface. Thisinterface between waterfall and lake—between re-

ality and reflection—serves as a transition point be-tween environments in the painting. In front ofthe waterfall is a habitable oasis that glows green,yellow, red, and brown; above the waterfall is wil-derness, and the palette shifts to cooler blues,whites, and purples. The colder palette simulta-neously denotes distance from the viewer and in-dicates that the background of the painting is for-bidding.

Bierstadt presents his viewer with an enticingWestern Eden that is welcoming and insulated—rather than threatened—by the surroundingmoun-tain chain. The large group of Native Americans inthe foreground further emphasizes the habitabilityof this oasis in the mountains. In the lower right‐hand corner of the canvas, a group is gatheredaround a dead bear and half a dozen dead deeror mountain goats; this place is full of game readyto be hunted. With their teepees pitched, these no-

Fig. 12. Claude Lorrain, Coast View with the Abduction of Europa, Rome, ca. 1645. Oil on canvas; H. 377=800, W. 6600.

(Open Content Program, Getty Museum.)

76 Linda Ferber, “Albert Bierstadt: The History of a Reputa-tion,” in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, ed. Nancy Andersonand Linda Ferber (New York: Hudson Hills, 1991), 21–68.


madic people show no signs of leaving anytimesoon. If the natives can recognize the value of liv-ing in this place, should not the Euro‐Americansstanding in front of the painting recognize it aswell? As the memento mori in the center of the fore-ground indicates, white settlers can easily displaceand replace the Native Americans in this scene.

Bierstadt’s painting figuratively issued an invi-tation to migrate. The pamphlet accompanyingthe canvas concluded, “on the plain [in the paint-ing’s foreground] . . . our descendants may rise.”77

Typical of critical reactions to Lander’s Peak, the re-view of the painting inHarper’s Weekly stated: “It is apurely American scene. . . . It is the curtained con-tinent with its sublime natural forms and its rudesavage human life . . . [yet] this work of Bierstadt’sinspires . . . cheerfulness and promise of the re-gion it depicts and the imagination contemplatesit as the possible seat of supreme civilization.”78

Debuting within one year of the passage of theHomestead Act, Bierstadt’s image of a landscape

that was simultaneously wild and pastoral—andthat conformed to a picturesque ideal—coincidedwith the passage of legislation that sought to tamethe wild frontier with a grid and flood of yeomanfarmers.79

In the summer of 1863—asLander’s Peak touredthe United States—Bierstadt traveled to Califor-nia’s Yosemite Valley.80 Upon his return, Bierstadtbegan to produce paintings of the valley, includingseveral Great Pictures. Looking Down Yosemite Valley,California (1865; fig. 14) and The Domes of the Yo-semite (1867) were heavily publicized and attractedattention to Yosemite and its status as a naturalwonder.81

Bierstadt’s paintings also benefited Californiagenerally and the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR)that soon connected it to the rest of the continent.

Fig. 13. Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on canvas; H. 731=200, W. 1203=4

00. (Rogers Fund,1907, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo, © Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.)

77 Ibid., 25.78 Review in Harper’s Weekly, quoted in Nancy Anderson,

“‘Wondrously Full of Invention,’ The Western Landscapes of

79 Kate Nearpass Ogden, “California as Kingdom Come,” inYosemite: Art of an American Icon, ed. Amy Scott (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2003), 24.

80 Ibid., 28.81 Ferber, “Albert Bierstadt: The History of a Reputation.”

Albert Bierstadt,” in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, ed. NancyAnderson and Linda Ferber (New York: Hudson Hills, 1991), 75.

The Big Picture 193

First, Bierstadt helped transform Yosemite intoa tourist destination.82 In 1864 the growing touristinterest in Yosemite was federally recognized andencouraged when President Lincoln orderedCalifornia to protect the area as a state park. Sec-ond, Bierstadt’s paintings not only popularizedYosemite, but also propagated California’s reputa-tion as a Western Eden. One review of LookingDown Yosemite Valley declared, “It looks as if it werepainted in an Eldorado, in a distant land of gold . . .

dreamed of but never seen. Yet it is real.”83 Notjust Yosemite, but California in general was adistant land of gold. “If California was ‘a secondCanaan for the impoverished and oppressed,’ thenYosemite Valley was the symbolic heart of the newPromised Land.”84 Bierstadt’s “simultaneously wildand pastoral” portrayal of Yosemite not only beck-oned tourists, but also migrants who would powerand participate in California’s economy, which wassagging in the period between the slowing miningprofits of the mid‐1850s and the completion ofthe transcontinental railroad in 1869.85 This dual‐purpose image suited the in‐progress Californiarailroad, which maintained a position that “if Cal-ifornia’s farms could be secured with parks, whichthemselves would attract thousands of tourists, the

Fig. 14. Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on canvas; H. 641=200, W. 961=2

00. (Gift of theBirmingham Public Library, Birmingham Museum of Art.)

82 See Peter J. Blodgett, “Visiting ‘The Realm of Wonder’:Yosemite and the Business of Tourism, 1855–1916,” California His-tory 69, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 118–33; Angela Miller, “AlbertBierstadt, Landscape Aesthetics, and the Meanings of the Westin the Civil War Era,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27,no. 1 (2001): 40–59. One reporter describing the route of thenew (railroad‐controlled) carriages remarked, “this line passes overtheMariposa Road, which runs through some of themost enchant-ing views of the valley, including that of Inspiration Point, renderedworld‐renowned by the pencil of Bierstadt.” In the late 1860s andearly 1870s, a flourishing tourism industry developed around thevalley. Journalist Ambrose Bierce grumbled that Bierstadt’spaintings “incited more unpleasant people to visit California thanall our conspiring hotel keepers could compel to return.” SeeAnderson, “Wondrously Full of Invention,” 95–98.

83 Anderson, “Wondrously Full of Invention,” 97.84 Ogden, “California as Kingdom Come,” 23–31.85 Ibid., 24; Richard B. Rice, William Bullough, Richard Orsi,

and Mary Ann Irwin, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California,2nd ed. (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1996).


railroad was not about to slight either benefit andin fact vigorously campaigned for both.”86

The CPRR—and its subsidiaries, most notablythe Southern Pacific Railroad—aggressively pro-moted agricultural settlement in the land it con-trolled and opened for development. Yet the samemen who promoted agriculture on the railroad’sland were also champions of the preservation ofYosemite and its transformation into a tourist at-traction. Cooke perhaps hoped that images ofthe Yellowstone Valley could serve the same dualpurpose that Bierstadt’s paintings had for Yosem-ite and California. Not only would Montana gaina tourist attraction, but the region could also bedepicted as the next “Canaan for the impover-ished and oppressed,” with its geological wondersserving as the symbolic heart of a new promisedland.87

The Hayden Survey: Choosing an Artist,Choosing an Image

In the spring of 1871, Cooke—with the help ofNPRR public relations chief A. B. Nettleton—searched for an artist to accompany geologist Fer-dinand Vanderveer Hayden, the head of the USGeological and Geographical Surveys of Territo-ries, on his government‐sponsored survey of Col-ter’s Hell.88 Though a respected geologist inter-ested in scientific discovery, Hayden believedpublicly fundedexpeditions shouldserve theAmer-ican people. Consequently, his survey reports ad-dressed areas’ suitability for farming, mining, orother development—their potential profitabilityfor Americans migrating West.89 He was an idealally for the NPRR, and by leading the survey hebenefited from the enterprise’s informal patron-age.

Hayden was never officially employed by therailroad, but an exchange of favors occurred.The NPRR—and Cooke’s extensive political con-tacts—helped Hayden lobby for a $40,000 federal

grant to survey Colter’s Hell, an area he had beenfascinated with for nearly twenty years.90 In ex-change, Hayden lent his credibility and reputationas a trusted scientist to the NPRR’s various causesand booster campaigns. He did this both in thepopular press and in Washington, DC, where hewas well connected and well liked.91 This casuallydefined favor‐based relationship was typical ofagreements that Cooke formed with associateswho were potential allies of the railroad, but whodid not need to be—or for public relations rea-sons should not be—its employees.92

Although NPRR executives were not noted artcollectors or connoisseurs, Cooke and Nettleton’scontact with art through their immediate familiessuggests that each man had exposure to judgingart and its effects on an audience. A. B. Nettleton’seldest daughter, Caroline (1863–1950), was a por-trait, figure, and landscape painter.93 ThoughCaroline was not yet an artist when Nettleton wasconsidering which painter to send west with Hay-den, the fact that her family supported her artisticambitions and later career is indicative that theNettleton household was not devoid of artistic sen-sibilities and sympathies. Jay Cooke’s father, Eleu-theros Cooke (1787–1864), was a supporter of thefine arts. He was a founding director and laterpresident of the Cosmopolitan Art and LiteraryAssociation, established in Sandusky andNew YorkCity in 1854.94

86 Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 4th ed.(Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2010), 53; Orisi, Sunset Limited, Kin-dle locations 793–806, 4846–49. Runte discusses dual sponsor-ship of tourism and agricultural development in the course of adiscussion of the “worthlessness thesis”—that protected land wascommercially useless for other forms of development.

87 Ogden, “California as Kingdom Come,” 23–31.88 Merrill, “Introduction,” 216–17. The US Geological and

Geographical Surveys of Territories was the predecessor to theUS Geological Survey, established in 1879.

89 Ibid., 6.

90 Hayden had a long‐standing interest in the Yellowstone Val-ley, specifically in its seismically active areas. His fascination beganwhen he met frontiersman Jim Bridger on a Montana survey in1856. Bridger had previously explored the area and liked to tell“wonderful tales” about what he had seen. Hayden was also amem-ber of the Raynolds expedition (1860), the first organized—but ul-timately weather‐thwarted—attempt to explore Yellowstone. SeeMerrill, “Introduction.” In the 1860s–80s, large geological surveysmoved across theWestern United States every summer. These wereambitious projects, and their leaders—Hayden, Clarence King,John Wesley Powell, and others—often competed for money andnotoriety. Hayden’s alliance with the NPRR could give him an ad-vantage in accomplishing his survey goals and in this ongoing com-petition. See Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the AmericanWest, 1–2; Hine and Faragher, The American West, chaps. 9–10.

91 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,43–67.

92 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 80.93 Mary Sayre Haverstock, Jeannette Mahoney Vance, and

Brian L. Meggitt, comp. and ed., Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900: A Bio-graphical Dictionary (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000),633.

94 In its inaugural catalog, the association declared that its pri-mary mission was “to encourage and popularize the Fine Arts . . .throughout the country.” The “Gallery of Art [was] located atSandusky” and featured a “splendid collection of Statuary andPaintings.” See The Cosmopolitan Art Association illustrated catalogue,

The Big Picture 195

The NPRR’s first choice to accompany Haydenwas Bierstadt. However, other commitments pre-vented the painter from joining.95 Sanford Gifford(1823–80) was the second choice.96 Gifford alsodeclined. Moran was Cooke and Nettleton’s thirdchoice. Determining how and why Moran got thejob requires consideration of the work of the twoartists selected ahead of him. Formal analysis andcomparison of Bierstadt’s and Gifford’s contem-porary works sheds light on the railroad execu-tives’ possible selection process and criteria. Thissimulation demonstrates that NPRRmanagers werelooking for a particular idealized image to becomeYellowstone’s public face: an image of habitablewilderness that one could simultaneously marvelat, live in, and profit from.97

Bierstadt’s particular expertise at reconcilingthese images of settlement and wondrous wilder-ness was demonstrated by Lander’s Peak and hisYosemite work. That Gifford was second choicebehind Bierstadt corroborates the railroad’s inten-tion to sponsor images of Yellowstone as an invitingwilderness. Most of Gifford’s American landscapesare Eastern mountain scenes lit by permeatingwarm and hazy sunlight. A Home in the Wilderness(1866; fig. 15)—a subject Gifford painted multipletimes—is typical of his work. Showing a mountainlake in autumn, warm reds, yellows, and pinks dom-inate the palette of the painting. Like Bierstadt inLander’s Peak, Gifford presents a tranquil body ofwater that reflects the surrounding scenery anddenotes the central horizontal axis of the painting.Pointed mountains surround Gifford’s lake, butlollipop‐like trees and a warm purple‐ and pink‐hued light smooth their crags. A small cabin bathedin a golden glow is placed between the lake, trees,

and mountains. While the cabin is dwarfed by itssurroundings, it is not overwhelmed, but ratherembraced by them.

Gifford had a reputation for rendering land-scapes intoxicatingly scenic and infusing themwith warmth. One of the most descriptive contem-porary reviews of Gifford’s oeuvre compared theartist’s paintings to the world described in The LotusEaters by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The critic quoted:“A land of streams! Some like a downward smoke, /Slow‐dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; / Andsome through wavering lights and shadows broke; /Rolling a slumberous sheet of foam below.”98 Gif-ford, like Bierstadt, presented images of invitingand habitable wilderness. The railroad could not,however, hire either painter. Just weeks before Hay-den’s departure, the NPRR managers still had notfound an artist to accompany the survey. Theyeventually selected Moran, sent him West, and, inthe words of Nettleton, hoped he would “surpassBierstadt’s Yosemite.”99

Thomas Moran (fig. 16) was born in Bolton,England, in 1837 and immigrated with his familyto the Philadelphia area in 1844.100 Moran be-came an apprentice to a wood engraver at theage of fifteen, and in 1856, he became the infor-mal student of marine painter James Hamilton(1819–78). Hamilton extolled the virtues of Brit-ish painter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), valorizedtravel and sketching in the field, and subscribed toRuskinite principles of truth to nature.101 Morantook only one trip to the wilderness before his1871 trip to Yellowstone—an 1860 expedition tothe Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior. He spentthe month of August sketching and rowing in a ca-noe during the day and camping on the shores ofthe lake at night. The challenging trip was produc-tive; The Wilds of Lake Superior (1864) was one ofMoran’s largest and most successful paintingsprior to 1872.102

Thomas Moran’s oeuvre prior to 1871 showsno tendency by the young artist to create a wildpastoral—a picturesque scene—à la Bierstadt. In-stead, his work conformedmore closely to the con-cept of the sublime. The central element of The

95 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 80.96 Hayden likely influenced the decision to invite Gifford af-

ter Bierstadt declined—the artist had spent the summer of 1870on a survey with Hayden and proved himself to be capable andfriendly in the field. See Applegate, “A Traveler by Instinct,” 67.

97 With respect to Bierstadt and Gifford, I chose relativelywell‐known canvases featuring American subjects that are also rep-resentative of the artists’ larger bodies of work. With respect toMoran, it is known that Cooke and Nettleton saw and liked his il-lustrations for the “Wonders of the Yellowstone” articles. It is, how-ever, difficult to know what other Moran work the two men saw.Therefore, the pre‐1871 canvas that I chose was—according tothe artist’s own notes, secondary sources, and provenance re-search—exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts inthe late 1860s and was a critical success. As they were wealthyand socially prominent Philadelphians, it is likely that Cookeand Nettleton would have visited the academy.

98 Quoted in Franklin Kelly, “Nature Distilled: Gifford’s Vi-sion of Landscape,” in Hudson River Visions, 14.

99 Quoted inWilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 80.100 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 9.101 Thomas Moran, “Autobiography of Thomas Moran,”

ca. 1890, Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center, Gardiner,MT, 1–2.

102 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 29–34.

1854: For the encouragement and general diffusion of literature and art . . .(New York: W. H. Tidson, stereotyper, John A. Gray, printer,1854).


Wilds of Lake Superior (fig. 17) is water rushing to-ward the viewer and falling off the bottom edgeof the canvas. Steep cliffs bound the water onthe left side and in the distance. Though the landshown in the right side of the painting is flat, it ispopulated with a stump, a bare tree, and whatappears to be dying grass. The sky is tumultuousand shows either an approaching or departingstorm. The landscape is treacherous and unpre-dictable—it is sublime. Children of the Mountain(1866; fig. 18), another of Moran’s most successfulearly paintings, is also not a picture of happy fieldsor cozy mountain homes.103 The vertically orientedcanvas features a sort of staircase of gray and slick‐looking boulders that form a steep and uneven di-agonal. A rushing whitewater stream further accen-tuates the precarious line of rocks, and turbulentmulticolored clouds dominate the center of thecanvas. The scene does not present nature as awarm and welcoming place. Why—despite Moran’sdemonstrated aesthetic interest in sublime tumul-tuous nature—did Cooke and Nettleton send theyoung artist west?

The first answer to this question is practical.Moran was recruited when Hayden was alreadyin Utah.104 Presumably, as the survey neared, therailroad managers had to relax their criteria forwhich artist they hired. Moran was well respectedin Philadelphia—where the main Jay Cooke andCo. office was located—and was ready, willing,and able to go to Montana for a low price.

Another reason is that, in addition to his risingreputation as a painter, Moran already had experi-ence illustrating Yellowstone. In the mid‐1860s,Moran became a commercial illustrator. Havingavoided conscription into the Union Army, hetook on reliable and lucrative work illustrating po-etry books and articles for Harper’s New MonthlyMagazine.Within a decade, he was one of the mostrespected and sought‐after landscape illustrators.105

He also displayed paintings at the PennsylvaniaAcademy of Fine Arts and sold them in galleriesaround Philadelphia. The American fine art sub-mission to the 1867 Éxposition Universelle in Parisincluded two of his works. Though he continuedhis commercial work, inclusion in the Éxposition

Fig. 15. Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Home in the Wilderness, 1866. Oil on canvas; H. 303=1600, W. 533=8

00. (Mr. and Mrs.William H. Marlatt Fund, Butkin Foundation, Dorothy Burnham Memorial Collection, and various donors by ex-change, Cleveland Museum of Art.)

103 Nancy Anderson, Thomas Moran (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1997), 43.

104 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 80–81.105 Ibid., 50.

The Big Picture 197

boosted Moran’s career and reputation as a fineartist.106 In 1869, The Spirit of the Indian, a largecanvas depicting a scene from Henry WadsworthLongfellow’s Hiawatha, won a prize at the NationalAcademy of Design in New York.107 Moran wasyoung artist on the rise in December 1870 whenhis friend Richard Watson Gilder, poet and editor‐in‐chief of Scribner’s Monthly, asked him to providefourteen illustrations for Langford’s “The Wondersof the Yellowstone.”

The tone of these illustrations also suggests anaesthetic reason for Cooke and Nettleton’s se-lecting Moran. Before sponsoring him, the NPRRmen presumably discussed the relative merits ofhis work. This discussion may have included a con-versation about his illustrations for Langford’s“The Wonders of the Yellowstone” (see figs. 10and 11).108 Even though the focus of the article

was the valley’s geologically bizarre and dangerousfeatures, Moran’s illustrations—based on Lang-ford’s rough recollections and field sketches by amember of the party—strike a balance betweenadventure and approachability. There were pic-tures of men gathering specimens from geysers,mischievous fat ponies, majestic waterfalls, andmembers of the party falling asleep on nighttimewatch. The tone of Langford’s article is one ofawe and risky adventure, but in Moran’s pictures,the sights are not overwhelming. The phenomenaare weird and otherworldly, but the men in thepictures stand right next to them (fig. 19).109 WhileMoran did not create images of habitable wilder-ness, in the illustrations he portrays it as approach-able. Running out of time to send an artist withHayden at all, this hint of an ability to transformColter’s Hell into something entertaining andnot totally resistant to human existence may havesupported Moran’s selection for the job.

As in its relationships with Hayden andLangford, the NPRR becameMoran’s informal pa-tron in exchange for partial financial support andthe expectation of mutual benefit. In the same let-ter to Hayden where Nettleton expressed his hopethat Moran would “surpass Bierstadt’s Yosemite,”the press secretary explained that Moran “expectsto pay his own expenses and simply wishes to takeadvantage of [the] cavalry escort for protection . . .[and] have six square feet in some tent.”Nettletonthen notes that accepting Moran as the artist‐in‐residence on the survey would “be a great accom-modation to our house [Cooke and Co.] and theroad [the NPRR].”110

The railroad dealt with Moran, Hayden, andother beneficiaries of the railroad’s patronage bycreating a clear, if informal, expectation of quidpro quo. Moran granted both the NPRR and Scrib-ner’s Monthly a stake in his Yellowstone work in ex-change for money to go west. He borrowed half ofthe $1,000 needed to travel from Scribner’s pub-lisher Roswell Smith and half from Jay Cooke.Moran gave Smith Children of the Mountain (seefig. 18) as collateral and planned to provide Scrib-ner’s with illustrations of Yellowstone after his re-turn. The specifics of the agreement betweenMoran and Cooke are unknown.111 However, thefinancier commissioned at least sixteen water-colors from the artist and planned to integrate

Fig. 16. Napoleon Sarony, Thomas Moran, ca. 1895.(Adoc‐photos/Art Resource, NY.)

106 Leading American art critic Henry T. Tuckerman praisedThe Children of the Mountain and even included the work in his Bookof the Artists, an 1867 who’s who of American painters and sculp-tors. Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 66–67.

107 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 66–67.108 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,

70–71.

109 Langford, “The Wonders of the Yellowstone, Part 1 andPart 2,” Scribner’s Monthly (May–June 1871).

110 Ibid.111 Ibid.


these into advertising for the NPRR and the re-gions it made accessible.112 On the back of oneof Moran’s Yellowstone watercolors, a note reads:“Made for Jay Cooke to repay loan of money forYellowstone trip.”113 Neither the NPRR nor Scrib-ner’s commissioned The Grand Cañon of the Yellow-stone or explicitly paid Moran to create a Great Pic-ture. Instead, the ties between the painting andthe NPRR were linked to an understanding be-tween artist and corporation that they could helpone another succeed.

Moran joined the Hayden expedition in Vir-ginia City, Montana, in early July 1871.114 Theparty included eighty‐three expedition members,who often splintered into smaller parties, eachwith their own objectives. One of these groups in-cluded Moran and survey photographer William

Henry Jackson (1843–1942). The artists followedthe survey’s general itinerary but lingered at sitesof particular interest to them—such as Tower Creekand the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.115 Theybegan the expedition from base camp in ParadiseValley to the north of the present‐day park. Fromthere, they went to Mammoth Springs, Tower Creekthrough the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone(fig. 20), and then to Yellowstone Lake. In thecourse of circumnavigating the lake, the party vis-ited geyser basins. Moving back to base camp, thegroup traveled through Mirror Plateau in thenortheast corner of the future park, returned tothe banks of the Yellowstone River, and followedthe waterway out of what would become the parkarea.116 According to Jackson, “Moran’s enthusi-asm [for the canyon] was greater than anywhereelse.”117 During the four days at the site, Moran

Fig. 17. Thomas Moran, The Wilds of Lake Superior, 1864. Oil on canvas; H. 301=800, W. 451=8

00. (Charles F. Smith Fund,New Britain Museum of American Art.)

112 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,190 n. 2.

113 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, chap. 5, 332,n. 19.

114 Ibid., 85.

115 Ibid., 90.116 Merrill, “Introduction,” 18.117 Quoted in Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains,

91.

The Big Picture 199

and Jackson hiked in, above, and around the cata-ract and spent an extended period of time at whatis now known as Artists’ Point, where Jackson tookmany pictures of the canyon (see fig. 20).118

After five weeks in the Yellowstone Valley,Moran had documented almost thirty sites andreturned home with dozens of sketches. Moran

did not, however, only use his sketches as an aide‐memoir ; he also had copies of Jackson’s photo-graphs.119 As a result, Moran’s sketches are notas detailed as work from earlier trips. They arecontour drawings recording topographical detailsthat are occasionally colored and usually includehandwritten notes about which color should go

Fig. 18. Thomas Moran, Children of the Mountain, 1866. Oil on canvas; H. 621=800, W. 521=8

00.(Anschutz Collection, American Museum of Western Art.)

118 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 91. 119 Ibid., 94.


where.120 Having Jackson’s records of geologicaldetail appears tohave freedMoran to focus on com-mitting colors to memory. For example, thoughMoran’s Mammoth Hot Springs (fig. 21) is lookingaway from the geological phenomenon at the cen-ter of Jackson’s Mammoth Hot Springs, YellowstonePark (fig. 22), one can still see geological detailsapparently transposed from Jackson’s work. The lipsof the springs in the lower left quadrant of Moran’swatercolor record the dripping candle‐like shape,structure, and texture of the formation central toJackson’s photograph. Nonetheless, Moran usesthis detail as only a frame for the dramatically col-ored geyser field and mountains beyond. Jackson’sphotographs—along with the artist’s own quicksketches—provided a documentary platform fromwhich Moran could create dramatically coloredand topographically varied scenes in oil and fin-ished watercolor.

As soon as he arrived back East, Moran beganthe work owed to those who had financed the trip.He created illustrations for a Scribner’s article aboutthe Hayden expedition and began the watercolorsfor Cooke although they were not finished until

1873, and only two survive.121 Moran also beganThe Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone.122 The oil paint-ing was the artist’s largest work to date, but he com-pleted it in just two months. It was unveiled in NewYork City on May 2, 1872.123

After the expedition, the visual culture ofYellowstone in circulation increased dramaticallyfrom just Moran’s original Scribner’s illustrationspredating his visit to Yellowstone. Throughoutthe 1870s Moran produced images of Yellowstonein several media—including watercolor, chromoli-thography, and oil painting—and Jackson publishedhis photographs. The results were the circulationof a Great Picture, documentary photographs,and paintings produced and reproduced in a va-riety of other media. This article focuses on TheGrand Cañon of the Yellowstone, but it is important

Fig. 19. Thomas Moran, “Crater of the Giant Geyser,” 1871. FromNathaniel P. Langford, “TheWonders of the Yellowstone,” Scribner’s Monthly 2, no. 1 (May 1871): 126.

120 Thomas Moran, summer 1871 sketchbook, acc. no. YELL23061, Museum at the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center,Gardiner, MT; Anne Morand, Thomas Moran: The Field Sketches,1856–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 36.

121 Moran’s biographer, Thurman Wilkins, believes thatMoran finished the work, but the series became “dispersed follow-ing the failure later that year of Cooke & Co. . . . Thereafter four-teen of the Cooke aquarelles seem to have disappeared. Only twoare now known to exist for certain, one having turned up [in the1930s] in the attic . . . of the former Cooke estate.”Wilkins, ThomasMoran: Artist of the Mountains, 97. Moran also may have stoppedworking on the commission once Jay Cooke and the NPRR wentbankrupt and no longer had a need for them. Either way, whileMoran painted many Yellowstone watercolors during his career,that particular 1873 series is unaccounted for.

122 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 95–99.123 Ibid., 100.

The Big Picture 201

to recognize that, contemporaneous with the dis-play of the painting, other images of Yellowstonein a variety of media were circulating.124 Impor-tantly, these images in other media—from Jack-son’s photographs (see figs. 20 and 22) to Moran’s

illustrations for the article on the Hayden expedi-tion (fig. 23)—show canyon or thermal featurelandscapes that were distinctly nonpastoral. How-ever, Moran’s use of huge scale and dramatic colorin the Big Picture make that depiction of Yellow-

Fig. 20. William Henry Jackson, Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, 1872. (Royal Photographic So-ciety, London; photo, SSPL/National Media Museum/Art Resource, NY.)

124 Anderson, Thomas Moran; Kinsey, Thomas Moran and theSurveying of the American West; Kinsey, Thomas Moran’s West: Chromo-lithography, High Art, and Popular Taste ; Douglas Waitley, William

Henry Jackson: Framing the Frontier (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press,1998).


stone more unsettling for the viewer than smaller,often black‐and‐white images.

The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone:A Dynamic Landscape

The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone (see fig. 1)depicts a dynamic landscape. The canyon walls,waterfall, and even the ledge where the few tinyhuman figures stand are sliding, falling, or sink-ing. Moran creates this sense of seismic motionby engaging with but subverting a number ofconventions of landscape painting.

The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone does not havea clear focal point. At first glance, it seems like themisty white and turquoise waterfall is at the centerof the painting. However, the rushing white waterof the Lower Falls is not actually along the centralvertical axis of the canvas. It is left of center and

located well below the horizon line along the topof the canyon. And while the tumbling water andclouds of spray it creates are eye‐catching, the falls’somewhat awkward position in the compositionmeans that they do not hold the gaze. The sur-rounding canyon demands the viewer’s attention.

The right side of the canyon is bright and sun-lit. It creates a strong diagonal beginning in theupper right‐hand corner of the painting and slid-ing out of sight just below the rocky gray outcrop-ping where two miniscule human figures stand.The canyon is painted in yellows, oranges, reds,and pinks dotted with passages of white and brown.The warm palette makes the canyon wall seem asif it is advancing toward the viewer. Its progresstoward the foreground is, however, impeded bythe detailed rock formations that Moran paintedagainst the front of the picture plane. The verytops of these formations appear to just touch thebrightest yellow part of the canyon wall, a dramaticstroke of color that highlights the crevasse’s diago-nal descent to the river. The rocks, therefore, em-phasize the downward slope and the impressionthat the top of the canyon is slowly but surely slid-ing down to the bottom.

The formations themselves (fig. 24) are denseand seem ready to be touched, even grasped. Thesmaller of the two collections of rocks is maroonmarbled with a cool off‐white. It looks like rawmeat that has been frozen solid and echoes a sim-ilar outcrop in the sunlight behind it. Flush to thepicture plane on the right side and just in front ofthe maroon rocks is a meticulously rendered col-lection of dark gray boulders piled upon one an-other and crisscrossed with languishing fungi andvegetation.Mosses and lichens, ranging fromblackand burnt sienna to a cool blue‐green, cover theboulder. A small and scrubby pine clings to the topof the outcropping. Part of a tree that is cracked,dry, and obviously dead protrudes from the right‐hand side of the canvas and in front of the boul-ders. This passage of delicate coloring, shading,and tiny geological and botanical details catchesand entertains the eye—making the boulders themost tactile element of the painting. The viewercould grip the rocks, like the mosses and plantsthat cling to them. This small cluster of tangible so-lidity contrasts with the sliding canyon wall behindit, emphasizing that the sides of the cataract are inmotion.125

Fig. 21. Thomas Moran, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellow-stone, 1872. Watercolor and pencil on paper; H. 141=4

00,W. 103=8

00. (Gift of Mrs. Armistead Peter III, Smith-sonian American Art Museum; photo, SmithsonianAmerican Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource,NY.)

125 Precise attention to detail and use of close observation inthe service of the broader composition is central to the Americantradition of landscape painting. In Nature and Culture: American

The Big Picture 203

Permutations of the palette used to create thegray boulders are repeated throughout the fore-ground of the painting. Specifically, this collectionof colors is used to create the ledge where the hu-man figures and their packhorses stand. The spacethe horses and humans inhabit is bleak. Its surfaceis uneven and includes an area of swirling sandthat seems to be swallowing a rotting log. Thestand of trees perched on the left side of the ledgeis painted in a range of greens that contrast withboth the black interior of the copse and the paleyellow of the canyon behind it. The largest treeof the group is also closest to the viewer. Contortedbranches topped with tufts of green leaves stretchout from its thick trunk, reaching over the canyonrim to create a gothic silhouette against the back-ground of the lilac gray sky.

Considered altogether, the small stand of trees,ledge, and boulders combine to form a V shape.This creates a frame for the scene that echoesand emphasizes the V shape formed by the diago-nal and downward‐sloping lines of the canyonwalls. A series of receding V‐shaped planes continueback to themouth of the canyon and the top of thewaterfall. However, the interaction between theseplanes is disconcerting and a deviation from con-vention. Other American landscape painters oftenengaged in a practice emulating Claude Lorrain(see fig. 12)—and other painters inspired byClaude—of framing and then constructing a land-scape’s depth with a successive series of planes. Inthese Claudian depictions, “trees fram[ing] thepicture’s lateral edges, as well as by the dark fore-ground coulisse, the middle‐ground scoop of wa-ter, and the distant mountain [are] a set of motifsendlessly permuted.”126

Fig. 22. William Henry Jackson, W. H. Jackson and Co., Mammoth Hot Springs, YellowstonePark, 1871. Albumen print; H. 1615=16

00, W. 211=1600. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; photo, Hervé

Lewandowski, © RMN‐Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.)

Landscape Painting, 199, art historian Barbara Novak writes, “Astrong empiricism shaping original solutions to the landscapeproblem had always been part of the American sensibility.” Thisbelief is echoed in Jennifer Raab’s recent book on Frederic EdwinChurch (see note 74).

126 Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting,196–97.


Bierstadt’s Lander’s Peak (see fig. 13) adheres tothis blueprint of framing trees, tranquil scoops ofwater, and distant mountains; Gifford’s Home inthe Wilderness (see fig. 15) conflates the trees andmountains, but centers around a tranquil lake.Moran’s painting uses framing trees, but wherethere should be tranquil water surrounded by lushgreenery in a Claude‐like landscape, Moran placesa churning turquoise river surrounded by slidingrocks. While there are peaks in the distance, theyare small and barely visible unless one is both rightin front of the painting and looking for them. In-stead, where one would expect to see a series ofpeaks—in the space just above the canyon and be-

yond the waterfall—there is a grassy plain. Moranengages with the concept of framing and succes-sive planes, but he modifies the model by placingmore tumultuous features, like churning waterand falling rocks, where tranquil ones should be.

The interaction between the planes in TheGrand Cañon of the Yellowstone is also unsettling be-cause of Moran’s color choices. The frame formedby the boulders and ledge is flush against the pic-ture plane. These elements are painted in a coolpalette of primarily blues, grays, and greens—apalette that recedes from the viewer’s eye. Thecanyon walls, which form the plane behind theboulders and ledge, are painted in a warm palette

Fig. 23. Thomas Moran, “The Great Cañon and Lower Falls of theYellowstone,” 1872. From F. V. Hayden, “The Wonders of the West, Pt. II:More about the Yellowstone,” Scribner’s Monthly 3, no. 4 (February 1872): 388.

The Big Picture 205

that moves toward the viewer. If Moran wanted tocreate a completely legible image of the space ofthe canyon, he would have painted the fore-ground primarily in a warm color and made thepalette progressively cooler to denote depth andincreasing distance from the viewer. Instead, hemakes the foreground cool and receding whilemaking the middle ground warm and advancing.This inversion flattens and compresses the spaceof the canyon, creating tension between space thatthe viewer intellectually knows is there and spacethat the eye can actually detect.

Moran also experiments with disconcertingcombinations of warm and cool colors on the areaof the back wall of the canyon hollowed out by thewaterfall. This almost heart‐shaped space in the

center of the canvas is a mix of reds, blues, ma-roons, and grays. Neither clearly warm nor clearlycool in tone, the depth of this part of the canyon isparticularly obscured. The chaotic mix of reds andblues, and even bits of bright yellow, echoes thechurning of the water as it gushes over the fallsand then collides with the canyon floor.

Forming the right edge of the outcroppingwhere the people and pack animals stand is a snak-ing path of large and flat‐topped boulders. Thisrock path extends from the very center of the bot-tom edge of the painting and reaches partially intothe canyon. A white man and a Native Ameri-can guide stand at its terminus, at the precipice.Where an entire Indian camp existed in the fore-ground of Bierstadt’s painting, Moran has a single


American Art Museum, lent by the Department of the Interior Museum; photo, Smithsonian American Art Mu-seum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY.)


male guide with his back turned toward the can-yon. If the native settlement in Lander’s Peak de-noted that landscape’s habitability, the NativeAmerican in Moran’s painting denotes the inac-cessibility of the canyon—a savage guide is neces-sary to even find it. The winding shape of the rockyoutcropping echoes the meandering path of thebright turquoise river cutting through the canyon.The eye should travel along the winding edge ofthe outcropping to the river and then up the fallsto the horizon. However, a portion of the canyonwall interrupts this clear path back into space. Thisleaves the viewer with disjointed glimpses of tur-quoise sandwiched between the protruding can-yon walls and the mist at the bottom of the falls.

This painting is, after a few minutes, disorient-ing. The viewer’s focus oscillates primarily be-tween the river and the canyon walls. When theeye is pulled to the sides of the cataract, it immedi-ately follows the diagonals down to the river alongthe canyon floor. However, the sliding canyonwalls interrupt the progress of the river. It is a cyclethat forces the eye to be in constant motion, which,in turn, creates the sense that the landscape is inmotion.

Fallen or falling pine trees on the cataract’ssides further emphasize this sensation of down-ward motion and collapse. The general aestheticand aura of collapse reaches a crescendo in thearea around the top of the waterfall. The greenplateau just above and beyond the canyon appearsto slip and sag under the force of the falls. In fact,if onewere to draw orthogonal lines from the lowercorners of the painting, they would converge on avanishing point just above and to the right of thefalls—just at the point where the tree line beginsto turn down and into the canyon. The space be-hind the falls and behind the vanishing point is ob-scured by mist, and the viewer is left with the im-pression that the land beyond the canyon is alsosagging and falling into the crevasse.

Even the grassy parts of the plain above the cat-aract (fig. 25) are not free from the dynamism thatpervades the scene. Mist extends upward from thewaterfall and cuts into the green and verdant‐looking space above. Echoing the shape of this ver-tical column of mist, three geysers to the left of thefalls send up steam and boiling water. Burstingfrom the plain, the steam and water ultimately leadthe eye to rolling clouds. Every element of thispainting is in flux. This sense of seismicmovement,the scale of the painting, and the restriction of thehuman presence to a small precipitous ledge con-form wholly to the aesthetic of the sublime.

An Artistic, Legislative, and Economic Frontierin Flux

On April 6, 1872, Moran wrote to Hayden, “Thepicture is all that I ever expected to make it, andthe indication is that it will make a sensation wher-ever it is exhibited.”127Moran was right. The paint-ing was a huge success from the moment it de-buted in May 1872. Even though Moran createdan image of the West radically different from Bier-stadt’s, the railroad did not reject the canvas. Scrib-ner’s arranged the painting’s debut in New York,and Nettleton and several other NPRR officialsattended. Cooke was scheduled to appear butdid not make it to the gathering of “press . . . lite-rati . . . artists [and] rich people.”128 It is unclearhow Cooke, Nettleton, and the rest of the NPRRfelt about The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone andits ability to help the railroad.

Reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Consen-sus among critics was that “Mr. Moran’s ‘GrandCañon of the Yellowstone’ [would] . . . be receivedby the best judges in America as the finest histori-cal landscape yet painted in this country,” or atleast would “rank with the great landscapes ofChurch, Bierstadt, and Gifford.”129 The majorityof reviewers focused on the dynamism of the land-scape. They described the shifting and seismicallymoving canyon in dramatic language. One reviewerquoted a particularly evocative passage from Hay-den’s official survey report: “The entire volumeof [the waterfall] seems to be . . . hurled off theprecipice with the force which it has accumulatedin the rapids above . . . and as it strikes the rockybasin below, it shoots through the water.”130 An-other reviewer addressed how Moran treated thesky above the canyon: “There is . . . atmosphereso puzzling to the artist from the ruthlessness withwhich it denies him those convenient grays . . . andover all, there is the violent sky.”131 Describing thecanyon walls and the processes of how the cataractwas formed, the reviewer for Scribner’s wrote: “Dis-integration also sends . . . floods, of pulverized

127 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 101.128 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,

64.129 Clarence Cook, “Fine Arts,” New York Tribune, May 4, 1872,

ProQuest Historical Newspapers; “Art Notes,” Appleton’s Journal ofLiterature, Science and Art 7, no. 166 ( June 1, 1872), AmericanPeriodicals Series Online.

130 “The Grand Cañon and Falls of the Yellowstone,” OneidaCircular, March 17, 1873, American Periodical Series Online.

131 “Literature and Art,” Christian Union, July 31, 1872, Amer-ican Periodicals Series Online.

The Big Picture 207

drift, glowing with all the hues of red and yellow . . .sweeping in long river‐like avalanches . . . lodgingand curdling like snow‐wreaths in the ledges andcrannies of the firmer basalt.”132 The AmericanWest as portrayed in The Grand Cañon of the Yellow-stone is full of “water . . . hurled off the precipice,”“avalanches,” “pulverized drift,” “violent sky,” and“disintegration.” Moran’s image of the most re-cently explored frontier is of a world entirely inmotion. Earth, wind, and water are all shiftingwhile fire‐hot geysers and glowing red rocks per-vade.

The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone debutedamidst the active national debate about the futureof the frontier exemplified by the Homestead Actand its modifications passed by Congress between1862 and 1878. Bombastic claims pervaded bothcivic debates over these acts and commentary onland use in the popular press. News and magazinearticles asserted that one Western territory or an-

other was “the best wheat‐growing region in theworld” or had potential for “rapidly increasing vol-ume of mining,” or both.133 The Grand Cañon of theYellowstone resonated with and reflected this atmo-sphere of debate about the frontier’s future.Viewed through the lens of the debate over the fu-ture of the West, certain passages in contemporaryreviews of Moran’s painting take on new signifi-cance. Their emotive descriptions of flux andchurn can be read as metaphors for the uncertainand variable future of the frontier.

Amidst all the midcentury land‐use commen-tary—both propagandistic and circumspect—there is a discernible trend: after 1865, lawmakers,bureaucrats, and popular commentators increas-ingly criticized the Homestead Act. The reactionagainst the law further accelerated in the early1870s, as is illustrated by comparing the annual re-port of the US Commissioner of Public Lands—


American Art Museum, lent by the Department of the Interior Museum; photo, Smithsonian American Art Museum,Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY.)

132 “Thomas Moran’s ‘Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone,’”Scribner’s Monthly 4, no. 2 ( June 1872), American Periodical SeriesOnline.

133 For example, “Gen. Hawley on the Pacific Railroad,” NewYork Evangelist, November 30, 1871, American Periodicals SeriesOnline; “Article I—The Opening of the New Northwest,” NewEnglander, July 1871, American Periodicals Series Online.


which was reproduced each year in a number ofperiodicals—from 1867 to the one from 1877.In 1867 the commissioner said that the Home-stead Act is a “great original measure [that] shouldstand unimpaired in its full vigor, and its resultswill continue to increase the producing power ofthe country.”134 By 1877, the commissioner wrote:“Congress should . . . withdraw all lands chieflyvaluable for pine timber from the operation oftheHomestead . . . laws . . . [and] theHomestead . . .laws [should] be expressly amended so as to beapplicable only to arable agricultural land.”135

Faced with the geography of the Far West, Amer-ican devotion to the Homestead Act began tocrumble.

These legislative and public attitudes were badnews for an enterprise that wanted Bierstadt topaint its lands and staked its future on a boomof permanent settlement in the Northwest. TheNorthern Pacific Railroad went bankrupt eighteenmonths after the debut of The Grand Cañon of theYellowstone. Even under Cooke’s fastidious guid-ance and with his extensive marketing experience,construction on the NPRR was inconsistent. Therailroad was unable to sell and settle enough landto generate revenue to offset the costs of surveys,construction, and management; this inability todevelop land had a negative effect on the sale ofNPRR bonds.136Thewell‐publicized violent disrup-tion of survey efforts by Sitting Bull’s Native Ameri-can warriors—which included the 1872 death ofLieutenant Louis Dent Adair, President Grant’snephew—further damaged Cooke’s NPRR. Afterthe publication of reports of violent encountersduring an 1873 NPRR survey through Montanaand Dakota Territories—commonly called theYellowstone Expedition of 1873—these problemsbecame more pronounced. The New York Timespublished an editorial on September 11, 1873,that began: “Our correspondence from the Yellow-stone Expedition . . . shows that difficulties lie be-fore the construction of the North Pacific Rail-road, and indeed the settlement and civilizationof the northern portion of our central territory.If several thousand of our best soldiers . . . can onlyhold the ground on their narrow line of march for

a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles west ofthe Upper Missouri, what will peaceful bodies ofrailroad workmen be able to do, or what can emi-grants accomplish in such a dangerous region?”137

Investors soon began to flee from Northern Pacificbonds; they were convinced that the route was tooleveraged, had unproven economic potential, andwas subject to consistent Native American hostil-ities. At 10:30 am on Thursday, September 18,1873, Jay Cooke and Co. shuttered. The closingof the large and reputable banking house helpedtrigger the Panic of 1873.138

Neither the Grand Cañon nor any other Moranartwork is featured in extant official NPRR promo-tional literature from the 1870s.139 This failure toappear in materials was not, however, necessarilyfor artistic reasons. The railroad apparently failedbefore Moran could finish the Yellowstone water-colors that Cooke commissioned.140 The day thatCookeandCo. and theNorthernPacificwentbank-rupt, shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt said,“You can’t build a railroad from nowhere to no-where.”141 The business plan of the NPRR reliedon a conviction that, in the West, the presence ofa railroad could transform nowhere to somewhereand that people wanted to settle a habitable wilder-ness. In the early 1870s, this business plan—andthe image it was predicated on—failed. Regularconstruction on the road would not begin againuntil after lawyer Frederick Billings took controlof the company in 1879. Under the direction ofHenry Villard, the railroad was finally completedwith a golden spike in September 1883.142

134 “Public Lands of the United States,” Merchants’ Magazineand Commercial Review, September 1, 1867, American PeriodicalsSeries Online.

135 “About Our Public Lands,” New York Evangelist, Novem-ber 15, 1877, American Periodicals Series Online.

136 Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble, 283–93.

137 Editorial, “The Yellowstone Expedition,” New York Times,September 11, 1873, 4, accessed via TimesMachine, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1873/09/11/79046623.html?pageNumberp4.

138 M. John Lubetkin, Before Custer: Surveying the Yellowstone,1872 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), Kindle loca-tions 2634–3481, 4140.

139 This assertion is based on the author’s reading of the sec-ondary material and examination of primary sources. There is,however, a Northern Pacific Railroad brochure from around1890 based on a Moran watercolor of a Yellowstone subject. Itreads “Northern Pacific R.R., the Wonderland Route to the PacificCoast.” Kinsey reproduces and discusses this image in ThomasMoran and the Surveying of the American West, 75.

140 Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 103.141 Ibid., xv.142 For the later history of the railroad, see Peter J. Lewty, To

the Columbia Gateway: The Oregon Railway and the Northern Pacific,1879–1884 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1987);Jan Taylor, “The Northern Pacific Railroad’s Last Spike Excur-sion,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 60, no. 4 (2010):16–35.

The Big Picture 209

Moran and the Yellowstone National ParkProtection Act

After its debut, Moran sent The Grand Cañon of theYellowstone to Washington, DC. It was first dis-played at the Smithsonian and then in the Capitol,where Congress had passed the Yellowstone Na-tional Park Protection Act (1872)—the founda-tion of the first national park—just two monthsearlier.143 It is not clear how Moran arranged forhis painting to be displayed in the Capitol, and itis possible that railroad officials facilitated the ex-hibition. Once it was in the Capitol, however,Moran asked Hayden to help lobby Congress topurchase the painting. Ultimately, the govern-ment bought it for $10,000, inaugurating Moran’slong career as a renowned painter of the Ameri-can West.144

More than this purchase links the artwork ofThomas Moran and the passage of the NationalPark Protection Act. Moran’s watercolors and Jack-son’s pictures were used as evidence in support ofthe bill.145 This relationship between Moran’s artand federal preservation has been a central com-ponent of arguments linking The Grand Cañon ofthe Yellowstone and the development of tourism.However, the creation of the first national park—and a Great Picture’s link to it—must also be situ-ated in the context of broader contemporary de-bates over land use.

Preservation is an alternative form of land use.Homesteading is predicated on working the land

and making it productive, thereby earning privateownership of it.146 The new Yellowstone NationalPark was permanently “reserved and withdrawnfrom settlement, occupancy, or sale under the lawsof the United States.”147 This was a radical depar-ture from the agrarian ideal. However, preserva-tion—as it is legislated in the Yellowstone NationalPark Protection Act—is stagnant. Though “dedi-cated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring‐ground,” Congress failed to allocate any moneyfor the management of the park or developmentof surrounding areas for at least four years.148 Inthe context of the controversy surrounding ques-tions of Western land use, declaring that the landshould stay the same—and underlining this factby failing to allocate funds—effectively postponedmaking a decision about land policy.

Today, Yellowstone National Park is a touristmecca. Moran’s painting helped to publicize thepark and turn it into a destination. The significantgrowth of nature tourism in Montana, however,happened only after transportation infrastructurewas in place and should neither overshadow norbe conflated with the early history of Yellowstoneand its place in broader debates and concernsabout Western development. Moran’s calling theGrand Cañon of the Yellowstone his Big Picture wasunexpectedly prescient.149 Moran’s Big Picture—an image of a geologically dynamic corner of thefrontier undergoing constant seismic transition—is indeed a reflection of the big picture, oneof a much wider historical context.

143 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,65.

144 Ibid., 60–62.145 Ibid.

149 Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West,65.

146 Krall, Proving Up, 9–29.147 “Yellowstone National Park Protection (1872),” http://www

.nps.gov/yell/learn/management/yellowstoneprotectionact1872

.htm.148 Ibid.; Schullery and Whittlesey, Myth and History in the Cre-

ation in Yellowstone National Park, 6.


The Big Picture - Diana GreenwaldThe Big Picture Thomas Moran’s The Grand Cañon of the...

Documents

Transcript of The Big Picture - Diana GreenwaldThe Big Picture Thomas Moran’s The Grand Cañon of the...