The American West

Many Americans saw the West in photographs before they ever saw it in person, and a good share of those photographs were made by men on government payroll. After the Civil War, Congress sent surveying expeditions into the territories to map the land, study its geology and report on its resources. Photographers went along, hauling heavy cameras, glass plates and portable darkrooms by mule into canyons no camera had ever seen.

Timothy O'Sullivan, who had photographed the Civil War, worked on several of these surveys. William Henry Jackson went with the Hayden survey to Yellowstone in 1871, and his pictures helped persuade Congress to make it the first national park in 1872. Carleton Watkins had already done something similar for Yosemite in the 1860s. These were working photographs meant to document, and they became some of the most admired landscape pictures ever made.

The railroads followed. The first transcontinental line was joined at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, and railroad companies hired photographers to show off the country they had opened up, hoping to sell land and tickets. Behind the railroads came miners, ranchers and homesteaders, and the pictures change accordingly. Boomtowns of raw lumber. Cattle drives and cowboys. Sod houses on the plains with a family lined up out front.

The West in these pictures was also a place that already had people in it. Native American nations appear throughout the record, sometimes in portraits made with care and sometimes in pictures staged to fit what Eastern buyers expected. It is worth reading the captions closely, since they often tell you as much about the photographer as the subject.

Something to notice is the scale. Western photographers often put a person, a wagon or a tent somewhere in the frame. It was not decoration. Without it, a viewer back East had no way to judge how big a canyon wall or a waterfall really was.