The West

Santa Fe was a capital before Plymouth was a colony. The Spanish established it as the seat of their province of New Mexico around 1610, and the Palace of the Governors on its plaza is among the oldest public buildings in the United States. The adobe city, the Pueblo villages nearby and the high desert light later drew artists and photographers by the dozen.

This board ranges widely. Utah was settled by Latter-day Saints who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 under Brigham Young, and they built a planned city of wide streets laid out on a grid. The Salt Lake Temple took 40 years to build and was dedicated in 1893. The first transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. Nevada was silver country. The Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859, made Virginia City one of the richest towns in the West, and later Nevada pictures show the building of Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Southern California grew on a different kind of boom. Los Angeles was a small town until the railroads arrived in the 1870s and 1880s, and then land promoters sold sunshine, orange groves and health to Midwesterners by the trainload. Oil was found, the movie studios arrived, and the city spread across the basin. San Diego, near the oldest of the California missions, put on the Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park in 1915, and the Spanish-style buildings from that fair still stand.

Hawaii was an independent kingdom until 1893, when its queen, Liliuokalani, was overthrown by a group backed by American businessmen. The United States annexed the islands in 1898, and they became a state in 1959. Early photographs show sugar plantations, Honolulu harbor and Waikiki before the hotels.

In pictures of the desert West, look at the light and the shadows. The air is dry and clear, the sun is strong, and photographers could get sharp detail at long distances that was hard to capture in the hazier East. It is one reason Western landscapes in old photographs often look almost unreal.