My name is Diane Dillon. I am the Assistant Director of Research and Education at the Newberry Library. And I’ve selected an array of books and images to contextualize [Albert] Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, the 1865 painting that’s included in the Picturing America set as part of our Picturing America School Collaboration Conference here at the Newberry Library.

The first image that I want to show you, or rather the first artifact, is a book. It’s a bound volume of magazines actually. Its Hutchings' California Magazine, which is important for a number of reasons, but mainly for our purposes because it included the first printed black and white views of Yosemite. They remind us that Bierstadt, even though he was probably the most famous, he was not the only, or not the first artist to visit and paint Yosemite. That honor belongs to Thomas Ayers, who was a self-taught draftsman who came to California for the gold rush. He then visited California, visited Yosemite with James Mason Hutchins, who was a writer and publisher who was really Yosemite’s first promoter and later operated a hotel on the valley floor.

Hutchins provided several of the valley’s first artist explorers with inspiration and more importantly with commissions. He published Ayers’s views in a large format in lithographs in 1855, and then published these engravings, or four of them, in the first issue of his new magazine, Hutchings' California Magazine, a monthly that he launched in 1856.

And Ayers’s drawing of Yosemite Falls, which you see here, was the most widely disseminated early black and white view of the area. So these early pictures by Ayers really got the whole momentum started for disseminating widely views of Yosemite Valley.

As you might expect, photographers soon followed draftsman and painters into Yosemite Valley. And the most celebrated nineteenth century photographer of Yosemite was Carlton E. Watkins. In the 1860s, he produced a whole series of stunning mammoth plate photographs of the area. Taking these photographs in such a rugged and remote location as Yosemite was a considerable undertaking in the 1860s. He had to travel on primitive and dangerous trails, lugging a leviathan camera, which was specially made for him by a San Francisco cabinet maker. He also carried a smaller stereoscopic camera, tripods, a portable darkroom, or “dark tent,” glass plates, chemicals, processing trays, various accessories, plus his own camping gear.

He was hired to be part of a team by Josiah D. Whitney, who was the leader of the California Geological Survey. He produced 6,000 original prints to illustrate this book, which was Whitney’s magnum opus, called The Yosemite Book. It was a very deluxe edition—as you can see it has a very gorgeous leather binding—with tooled gold on the front. It was published in 1886 and included actual tipped in photographs at the back. So they’re not reproductions of photographs like we see today in newspapers and magazines today but the actual photograph is glued in.

These images were incredibly influential because they were so impressive and gorgeous, but they especially made an impact on Albert Bierstadt, who went and saw Watkins’s views of Yosemite and the nearby Meraposa grove of big trees when they were exhibited in December of 1862 at Goophill’s Gallery in New York. And photographs like this one of El Capitan and Cathedral Rock encouraged Bierstadt to make his own journey west to the Pacific Coast the next year in 1863.

As you’ll note the paintings are quite similar but not exactly alike. Watkins generally includes bigger trees and more details in the foreground. You see sometimes rocks and wildlife. Whereas, in Bierstadt’s painting, he takes a longer view. As a result, the valley pictured by Bierstadt seems much more monumental and timeless. It’s purged of anecdotal details.

Bierstadt traveled west in 1863 in the company of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who was a talented New York writer and journalist. Ludlow kept the trip in the public eye by writing a series of articles along the way for the New York Evening Post, and then afterwards, published a series of reminiscences for California readers in the San Francisco publication The Golden Era and for national readers in the Atlantic Monthly. Then in 1870 he collected these reminiscences into a book, The Heart of the Continent, which featured woodcuts and engravings after paintings by Bierstadt.

Bierstadt’s whole entire trip to the West Coast, to the Pacific, and his adventuring into Yosemite, and his decision to paint it was an escape from the Civil War. He was able to get away from the bloody carnage that he’d seen when he had visited the troops along the Potomac and also offer this landscape that was completely pristine and unsullied by the war, that seemed to offer a kind of new hope or a new beginning, not only to Bierstadt, but to his audiences who saw the painting.

Now they were also connected to the Civil War in another way, in that as merchants and manufacturers began to make profits from the war, art sales increased. So Bierstadt saw and seized this opportunity. Then in 1864, less than a year after Bierstadt’s first visit to California and his painting expedition into the Yosemite Valley, President Lincoln signed the bill setting aside Yosemite Valley and the nearby Maraposa Redwoods as a public park to be administered by the State of California. This was terribly important because this is the first environmental set aside anywhere in the world.

No one helped bring the wonders of Yosemite to center stage and preserve them from development and ruin more than John Muir. He was the author of many letters and essays and books about his adventures in the wilderness, which have been read by millions and are still quite popular today.

His 1912 book Yosemite is a classic study of the natural history of the area. In this book, Muir makes it clear that he really understood nature as having a divine presence. He uses metaphors of divine artistry describing how Yosemite had been sculpted from receding glaciers, and he saw a strikingly perfect grand design filled with architectural nuances, such as natural domes, towers, fountains, amphitheaters, all embellished by gardens and groves.

Muir was a founder of the Sierra club, which today remains one of the most important environmental conservation organizations in the United States and the world.

In the late 1880s, Muir edited a deluxe gift book entitled Picturesque California. This oversized volume is filled with reproductions of paintings of now celebrated Yosemite landscapes by famous artists, including this View of Half Dome by Thomas Moran. But the book also features numerous engravings inside that document the Indian presence in Yosemite Valley. And its important to remember that the area that is now Yosemite National Park was and still is today, home to several different Native American peoples. Miwok speakers, indigenous to the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, were likely the most consistent occupants of the valley before 1850, especially the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Other groups included the Mono Lake Paiute, who were seasonal occupants, and then in the southern part the Chuckhanzee and Western Mono hunted and gathered.

Large granite boulders still show the depressions left by Native women who pounded acorns into flour over a span of at lest 3500 years. To these Indians, the Yosemite Valley and the adjacent areas provided seasonal food resources, a place to collect raw materials for basketry, ceremonial regalia, hunting equipment, and tools. And the original artists of the Yosemite were indigenous people who created finely woven baskets, mostly for utilitarian purposes of collecting, processing, transporting, and storing of seeds, bulbs, greens, acorns, and pine nuts that all comprised much of their diet. I think most whites are ignorant of the ways that these Indians had actively shaped the Yosemite landscape, mainly through controlled burning.

When the artists like Bierstadt arrived, they had flower-filled meadows, clear vistas, and park-like forest to picture, thanks in large measure to the Native’s management of the ecosystem. For centuries, if not millennia, Natives had understood that nature needed assistance in providing the food and other materials they collected in the valley. Some shrubs required pruning. Many plants benefited from harvesting of their bulbs and corms. And above all periodic burning prevented meadows from becoming forests. This encouraged plants, valuable for the long straight shoots for basket weaving, and favorable conditions for the cultivation of grass seeds.

I wanted to also say a word about the name “Yosemite.” Yosemite—usually spelled with an “i” at the end in the central Sierra Miwok dialect—translates as “they are killers,” or “the killers.” And the term was used by the Miwok to identify a Native group living in or near the Yosemite Valley in the mid-nineteenth century. It might have also served as a pejorative term to describe any Native group living outside one’s territory with whom they had conflict.

The paintings, photographs, magazine articles, and books focused on Yosemite transformed it into a Mecca for tourists by the late nineteenth century.

This guidebook by E. S. Denison called Yosemite Views from 1881 is representative of the genre. It includes information about travel and accommodations, including a map of how to get to the Valley on the railroad, also a railroad timetable, and engravings of some of the most popular sights in the Valley, many of the same views that had been painted by Bierstadt and other painters earlier in the century. It also included information about where to stay, what kind of hotels were there. So it was really a handy guide for tourists.

I think that this book reminds us that the tourist presence in Yosemite had a double edge. On the one hand, increased visitors meant that more people came to understand the singularity and beauty of the landscape and the need to preserve it. But at the same time those visitors also put the landscape in danger. The presence of the hotels, roads, railroads, and the trash and pollution that went along with it, of course, were inroads into the landscape that directly contributed to the destruction of parts of the natural landscape. So it really was a double-edged sword.

The last set of objects that I want to talk about are a group of photos from the turn of the century that right around 1900 that were made by a topographer, author, and railroad executive, and sometime photographer, named Olin D. Wheeler. He had been a topographer with John Wesley Powell’s famous survey of the Colorado River and then got a job as the person in charge of advertising for the Northern Pacific Railroad. He was the author of the annual publication Wonderland, which promoted the scenic beauty of the region through which the railroad traveled. He also was a very talented photographer and took a large collection of photographs inside Yosemite National Park.

Yosemite had been set aside as a state park in 1864 and then became a national park in 1890. So he photographed a series of vistas that commemorate, much like the paintings do, some of the most spectacular scenery in Yosemite. What I think is really fascinating about these photographs as you look at them one after the other, each one has a car in it, showing the tourist presence.

Wheeler also documented hotels in the area and other kinds of tourist adventures, like horseback rides and picnics, and he showed the luxury accommodations of the hotel where you could have lunch on a veranda looking out over the mountain landscape.

So these photographs usher in what really was a new era for Yosemite, which was a tourist era, and set the stage for later twentieth century photographers who also visited Yosemite and promoted it, mostly famously Ansel Adams.

Gone completely in these views is the pristine wilderness with no human presence that was pictured by Bierstadt, because, as I was mentioning earlier, each of these views includes at least one tourist and one automobile.

SLIDE LIST

1. Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Birmingham Museum of Art; Gift of the Birmingham Public Library

2. Hutchings' California Magazine Vo1. 1, No. 1 (July 1856) Case A 5 .408

3. Geological Survey of California, The Yosemite Book  (New York: J. Bien, 1868.) Vault Graff 4646

4. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent (New York: Hurd and Houghton; Cambridge : Riverside Press, 1870). G 89 .52

5. John Muir, Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912) G 941995 .602

6. Picturesque California and the region west of the Rocky Mountains, from Alaska to Mexico, ed. John Muir (New York, San Francisco:  The J. Dewing company, 1887-1888) Ayer 160.5 C15 M9 1887

7. E. S. Denison, E. S. Denison's Yosemite Views  (alternate title: Yosemite and the Big Trees of California) (San Francisco : H.S. Crocker & Co., 1881) Graff 1050

8. Olin D. Wheeler, Olin Dunbar Wheeler collection of photographs of Yosemite Valley and the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition [ca. 1880-ca. 1925] Ayer Photographs, box 68