Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope

Summary

Podcast Summary: The American West — Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope

Host: MeatEater
Guest: Dan Flores
Release Date: October 21, 2025

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Overview

In this episode of The American West, host MeatEater is joined by historian Dan Flores for a deep exploration into how iconic Western landscapes became "geographies of hope" for a fractured America, particularly during the turmoil of the Civil War. The episode beautifully intertwines tales of painters, photographers, and adventurers—Bierstadt, Moran, Jackson, and others—whose depictions of wild Western beauty provided psychological respite and national inspiration during the country’s darkest hours.

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Major Themes and Purpose

• Western Landscape as Healing Force: The episode argues that the American West, through its grand and sublime landscapes, offered a psychic cure and source of optimism for a nation ravaged by war.
• Artists and Photographers as Cultural Healers: Figures like Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and William Henry Jackson were not just chroniclers but curators of hope, redirecting the public gaze toward breathtaking wilderness and away from the horrors of conflict.
• Mythmaking and Reality: The creative assembly of idealized landscapes—often splicing multiple real places—helped cement the mythic status of the West as a uniquely American touchstone of freedom and potential.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Western Landscape as National Therapy

[01:51–11:15]

• Flores explains how, as the U.S. fractured over the Civil War, artists and photographers ventured west to chronicle landscapes that could provide emotional and spiritual relief.
• He draws connections from ancient coyote tales through literary Romanticism (Catlin, Cooper, Thoreau, Melville), illustrating how nature has always been a refuge from political and social turmoil.
  • "The Western landscape has never been mere background, but a life shaping, almost living presence." – Dan Flores [01:54]
• The 1860s obsession with the sublime—where landscapes represented a direct encounter with the divine—fed into the depiction of Western mountains, valleys, and deserts as near-religious spaces.

The Sublime and the Civil War

[11:15–22:00]

• Contrasts battlefield photography (Matthew Brady, et al.) with the artists who turned public attention to beauty and wonder.
  • "What Bierstadt's, Jackson's and Moran's adventures offered … was a Western psychic salve for the agonies of the war, a positioning of life over death." – Dan Flores [09:12]
• Albert Bierstadt’s first journey west in 1859 is recounted—his "religious rapture" on seeing the Wind River Range, seeking not specific geography but capturing an effect: the sublime.
• Painting as mythmaking: Bierstadt's monumental canvases (e.g., "Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak") amalgamate real and imagined Western features to produce a transcendent vision of American possibility.

The Pioneering Adventurers: Art, Science, and Landscape

[23:39–37:10]

• Focus shifts to William Henry Jackson’s intrepid photographic ventures in the Rockies and the Tetons, and Thomas Moran’s partnership in Yellowstone.
  • "Jackson would work beside an almost cadaverous young painter named Thomas Moran … the summer made Moran famous and he sold his best painting, the huge Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, to the US Congress for $10,000, where it served as prize example of the kind of magical landscape Americans now knew lay in the West." – Dan Flores [27:54]
• Examines how their artistic output didn’t just portray the land but helped found American conservation, influencing the creation of Yellowstone as the world’s first national park.
• Not all landscape grandeur sought was vertical—horizontal expanses (plains) were largely ignored despite their size and beauty.

The Enduring Mythos and Evolving Draw of the West

[52:22–59:02]

• Discussion turns philosophical: Can the West remain a symbol of freedom, space, and adventure? Will it lose its mystique as new cultural winds blow?
• The hosts reflect on cultural phenomena (the Gold Rush, “A River Runs Through It”, “Yellowstone” TV series, legalization of marijuana) that cyclically draw Americans to the West for new reasons.
  • "The west has managed over and over again in a way that the other regions don't seem to have done. The west has managed to come up with something, some sort of cultural development that suddenly causes people to want to kind of do a rush on a particular part of it." – Dan Flores [54:46]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Sublime Western Experience:

  • "A place that could affect you with sublime feelings was a place of religious power, for the sublime was an emotion you felt in the presence of God." – Dan Flores [08:11]

• On Photographers and Early Cameras:

  • "The first photographs are taken in the... 1840s. And so by... William Henry Jackson, for example, is taking photographs during the Civil War..." – Dan Flores [40:39]
  • Describes the complexity and patience required to photograph landscapes with 8x10 wet plates, favoring static scenes—mountains and canyons—over people or action.

• On Military, Art, and Exploration:

  • "So what everybody did, what these artists were obviously doing, was traveling with the military when they could... In other words, you sort of attached yourself to a group that provided... numbers that could keep you safe." – Dan Flores [50:05]

• On the Perpetual Lure of the West:

  • "I think... what they were doing was they were searching out and finding these larger than life landscapes that became a part of the western mystique for people all over the world." – Dan Flores [58:10]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening & Setting the Stage: 01:51–05:45
  • The role of the landscape in Western and national identity.
• Bierstadt, the Sublime, and Mythmaking: 05:45–16:55
  • Romantic artists and their attempts to heal a wounded nation through art.
• Western Art, National Parks, and Conservation: 23:39–34:00
  • How artists and photographers led to Yellowstone’s preservation.
• Art, Science, and the Military: 49:14–51:45
  • Early artists/naturalists’ reliance on military expeditions and the federal government.
• The West’s Future Mystique: 52:22–59:02
  • Evolving reasons for the West’s allure and potential changes in perception.

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Conclusion

This episode presents a rich, nuanced portrait of the American West as both real geography and enduring idea—an ever-evolving "geography of hope." Through vivid storytelling and analysis, Flores and the hosts bring alive the historical figures who mythologized the landscape, and challenge listeners to consider how those myths still shape our sense of place and possibility.

For anyone fascinated by the intersection of nature, history, and American culture, this episode offers both scholarship and inspiration.

Transcript

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[Dan Flores]

The most dramatic landforms in the American west first came to the attention of the world during the Civil War era. When painters and photographers travel west to provide the American public a respite from wartime tragedy. The enduring result has been a set of Western landforms known and recognized around the world. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuttvineards.com enjoy responsibly. A Western Geography of Hope Landscapes are unfailing primary characters in almost all the stories about the West. So one of the themes of this podcast is tracking the role the Western landscape has played in the unfolding story of the region. From 10,000 year old coyote tales to Edward Abbey's books to a century's worth of Western movies with the camera making love to monument Valley or to a mountain valley called Paradise. The Western landscape has never been mere background, but a life shaping, almost living presence. None of us ever grows weary of seeing the snow capped Rockies or Sierra Nevada, the cliffs soaring up from the bottom of Zion, or the Grand Canyon, the cool forest of giant trees touching the California sky, cactus deserts with many armed saguaro sentries, or the calm, echoless horizontal yellow of the prairies. This episode, then, is the story of a handful of prized Western landscapes that helped rescue us Americans from one of our deepest historical holes, then became familiar touchstones of our national culture. In the summer of 1859, as the political divide in the United States was pulling the north and south ever closer to violent conflict, a young man just 29 years old, was on the verge of introducing the country to the healing possibilities of Western topography. Albert Bierstadt was seeing the inspirational world of the west for the first time. Fresh from three years of study with the famous art professors of Germany's Dusseldorf Academy, followed by a grand tour of the Alps with artist friends Worthington Whitridge and Sanford Gifford, Bierstadt, by the 1850s was about as soaked in romance for nature as anyone could get without levitating right off the planet. People like George Catlin, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and and Herman Melville had been trying heroically to ignore the political fractures of the time. They had Romanticism, with its focus on adventure and nature and fashioning one's original relationship to the universe, humming and vibrating in literature and art. While the Confederacy was having its birth over the slavery issue, the poet Walt Whitman claimed he was looking for an American atom. All these paved the way for someone like Bierstadt, who was in search of a natural world in the west that could make people forget politics and heal the country. Looking back now on a time dominated by the enslavement of a whole population of people and morbidly bloody battles waged to preserve the Union. There's almost a tinge of unreality in this story of artists, photographers and the charismatic places they sought out. Bierstadt, along with another painter named Thomas Moran, and photographers like William Henry Jackson and Edward Muybridge, abandoned battle scenes to seek out nature and somehow were able to put adventure in pursuit of America's wildest landscapes before a historic conflict that was tearing America apart. On the surface, that seems passing, strange, even shallow. The truth, though, was that young men like these were not the first to turn to nature. At the very moment the US was embroiled in violent wars during the American Revolution, A writer named William Bartram traveled the south and had written America's first famous nature book, Travels, while completely ignoring the revolution that was going on all around him. Thoreau himself worked nonstop on walden, published in 1854 throughout the Mexican War. George Perkins Marsh's best seller, man in nature, appeared in 1864, when newspapers were full of news about the horrifically bloody Battle of the Wilderness. It turns out that flight away from war and into nature is a pattern through most of American history. So Bierstadt and other nature adventurers weren't inventing a strategy to take the public's mind off the horrors of the Civil War. Still, the stark visual contrast they offered up must have been shocking. Photographs from the battlefields of the age showed the gritty, awful reality of fragile flesh and mortality, the futility of all human dreams. In contrast, the soaring Western landscapes the artists and photographers were seeing fairly brimmed with beauty and optimism, even reassurances of a divine spark in the world. That contrast may be the very reason these stories exist side by side. An age that highlighted the disturbing battlefield photographs of Matthew Brady and his crew of Civil War photographers must have needed a set of contrasting scenes from the American West. What Bierstadt's, Jackson's and Moran's adventures offered to to Civil War America was a Western psychic salve for the agonies of the war, a positioning of life over death. The Civil War was the first time in history a non combatant public had confronted the unvarnished reality of warfare. In the year 1862, Matthew Brady shocked America when he exhibited photographs of corpses contorted in rigor mortis from the horrific Battle of Antietam. People who saw Brady's photographs struggled to expunge the scenes from their memories. The effect in the north where the photos were shown shocked the public in the same way that television footage of battles in Vietnam, broadcast nightly in the 1960s, horrified Americans a century later. The timing was no coincidence that in the years between 1859 and 1873, painters and photographers roaming the west located and offered up stories and images about American places of grand beauty, where the mind could go for relief and reassurance about the country's mission and history. The Civil War was a conflict in which both sides convinced themselves that God and the Bible represented their interests and their motives. American landscapes that could inspire and heal had to spring from that same source. So it's not surprising to find that when young Bierstadt first saw the Rocky Mountains, and specifically he was looking at the Wind river range of today's Wyoming, he lapsed into a state of near religious rapture. The winds, he said, were a classically sublime landscape. That word had a meaning in the mid-1800s we might not attribute to it today. A place that could affect you with sublime feelings was a place of religious power, for the sublime was an emotion you felt in the presence of God. The reason a place like the Wind River Mountains could have that effect, Romantics believe, was because wild country was straight from the Creator's hand, fresh and unsullied by human sin. But as German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, the sublime did carry a burden. The sublime, as distinct from the merely beautiful, affords a negative pleasure because it's accompanied as its defining condition by a moment of pain. That pain was the inability to hold fast forward to a rapturous state, to possess it and retain it simultaneously with the knowledge of death and loss. On the eve of America's great conflict, Bierstadt's hometown newspaper in Massachusetts reported that the young man was about to set out for the west, with reference to a series of large pictures he hoped to create from the region's most inspiring topography. Bierstadt was accompanying Colonel Frank Frederick Lander, chief engineer of a wagon road across South Pass. The group left St. Joe, Missouri, early in May of 1859, and on June 24, during the long days of summer solstice, they reached South Pass. Just to the north of their road lay the Wind River Range, mountains Americans had read about in the books Jessie Fremont, wife of explorer and presidential candidate John Charles Fremont, helped her husband publish. Biersaut's first impressions were his own, but it's clear he believed the journey had led him to one of the West's Shangri las. He told the magazine Crayon that his first glimpses had convinced him that the winds were very fine as seen from the plains. They resemble very much the Bernese Alps, he went on. Their jagged summits, covered with snow and mingling with the clouds, present a scene which every lover of landscape would gaze upon with unqualified delight. Entering the first canyons into the mountains, he found places that reminded him of the White Mountains and the Catskills back east. But when we look up and measure the mighty perpendicular cliffs that rise hundreds of feet aloft, he wrote, all capped with snow, we then realize that we are among a different class of mountains. He also wrote this line, which became much discussed, and the color of the mountains here and of the plains, and indeed that of the entire country, reminds one of the color of Italy. In fact, we have Here, the Italy of America in a primitive condition. After several weeks in the Wind river high country, certainly up to Island Lake in the Titcomb Basin and in several other spots on the western slope of the winds, Bierstadt returned to the east with bags bulging with sketches and stereoscopic photographs. The task now was translating how a high drama landscape like the Wind River Range had made him feel, with the goal of somehow causing other Americans to experience that so jolt of sublimity about Western nature. His underlying ideology, was plain enough to heal the psyche of a fractured nation. Bierstadt and those who followed him endeavored to show that there was a divine presence in the West's wildest landforms. The puzzle for people since, though, has been trying to figure out just where Bierstadt was in the winds and what he actually saw. Not only did he appear confused about where he had been, resulting in mislabeled ranges and peaks, in his zeal to reproduce how western America made one feel, he had a disconcerting tendency to paint pictures that combined scenes from different places. What no one has ever questioned, though, is that Bierstadt was doing his best to capture American places that were enormous, grand, even melodramatic. Bierstadt's famous Civil War era Western paintings succeeded in these intentions, and admirably. But the places he visited have never been easy to locate on the solid Western earth. Here's one example. In 1861, Bierstadt finished a painting he originally called Wasatch Mountains. His party had actually been nowhere near the Wasatch in Utah, and later he retitled this painting Island Lake, Wind River Range, Wyoming. As I said, he does appear to have visited Island Lake, at the base of a peak Fremont had climbed a few years before and now bears Fremont's name. But Bierstadt's painting actually appears to be of another Island Lake, one in the Wyoming Range mountains the Lander party came to many days after they were in the winds. Whatever this scene actually was, it was Bierstadt's first attempt to impress upon Americans that their west truly was Italy in a primitive condition. And so he suffused the scene with a heartbreaking wash of late afternoon yellow coloring many of us know and love in the West. Another of his attempts to show the Italian light of his newly found special Western place was a painting called Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains. It was also from 1861, a year of high drama nationally, when the Confederacy was being born and artillery fire on Fort Sumner produced the first battles of the war. Bierstadt's reputation. Making masterpiece from his 1859 trip, though, was his 8 foot by 12 foot Rocky Mountains Lander's Peak. He finished it in 1863 and it sold two years later for $25,000, the most money an artist had ever made from an American painting. Rocky Mountains was the ultimate Western landscape of its time. It reveled in theatrical cloud effects intended to represent stair steps to heaven. And in order to create a perfect subliminal West, Bierstock composed a scene that fused at least three different places in and around the winds. The lake and the waterfall in the painting were from Island Lake in the Wind's Titcomb Basin. I know this because I've solo camped directly across Island Lake from the falls in this painting. The added Shoshone encampment Bierstadt put in at the base of the peak, though, was from an Indian encounter he'd had down in the sagebrush country of of South Pass. As for the painting's towering mountain, it was neither Lander Peak nor Fremont Peak above Island Lake. Instead, to represent the face of God, Bierstadt added the crest of Temple Peak, several miles away from Island Lake, to compose his mountaintop. So the inspiring Western place Bierstadt represented in Rocky Mountains actually not a real place, but a compilation of at least three different scenes. Of course, you have to admit, artists, writers, philosophers and purveyors of religion have been tinkering with the reality of the world forever. Bierstadt nonetheless had set something powerful in motion, calling on grand special places in the west topography to serve as markers of hope and and optimism in an ugly age. The public devoured the artist's sacred mountains, clamored for more, and the painter obliged them. The war did intervene. Personally, though, Bierstadt was actually drafted into the Union army in 1863. But of course, he did what the wealthy and successful did back then. He hired a substitute to serve in his place. So Bierstadt did not fight, but he did continue a career that he thought of as an antidote to a troubled time. Over the next 30 years, Bierstadt went on to become one of the most famous cultural figures in post Civil War America. Along with writer Fitzhugh Ludlow, the author of a best selling drug memoir, the Hashish Eater, Bierstadt continued to seek out the sublime and what the two of them regarded as a search for the West's best places. That took them to the Colorado Rockies and then naturally onto the canyons of the Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada of California, and ultimately to the Geysers blue pools and colossal waterfalls of the Yellowstone plateau. Bierstadt sought out each of those places, portraying them in some of the most wildly romantic landscapes ever painted, and in doing that, began an inventory of what still today makes up the most famous destinations in the American West. After stealing away Fitzhugh Ludlow's wife, Rosalie, Bierstadt and his new bride went on to Hollywood like celebrity. Only a couple dozen writers, artists or photographers have measured up to their kind of status and American culture ever since.

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[Dan Flores]

What? See you when you get to the West. Creation. All creation. That's how American poet Walt Whitman described the West. Creation was the target in the summer of 1872, when a photographer and two assistants lugged nearly 300 pounds of gear, a heavy 8x10 wet plate camera, a tripod, fragile glass negatives, and an entire portable darkroom to the ragged top of a granite peak in the Northern Rockies with one of the most sharply serrated ranges in the west on the far horizon. The photographer composed his shot in the viewfinder, inserted a dripping glass plate, and then removed the lens cover as he counted down the exposure. Like Bierstadt when he first went west, the photographer photographing the Grand Tetons was just 29. His name was William Henry Jackson and he would soon be the West's most famous photographer, except for a crazy Californian named Edward Muybridge, who had had himself lowered by rope and pulley to snag vertigo inducing shots in the Merced river canyon of the Yosemite. No one had ever taken a photograph in a place like Jackson was now. And the name the young man gave his resulting print reflected a certain amount of pride in that he called it photographing in high places. The special sublime western landscape the photographer had sought out for this adventure, as I said, was the Grand Tetons. And Jackson was to the post war years what Ansel Adams would be to the 20th century American West. 10 years earlier. In 1862, right in the heart of the war, Jackson had enlisted in the Union army where he landed the position of staff artist. Jackson specialized during and after the war in the visual memoir of the young man in uniform engaged to a woman named Katie Eastman, who, at least as he remembered it later, was the Belle of Vermont. Jackson was mortified when she broke off their engagement. So at the age of 24 and out of the army, he struck out for Montana Territory. After a few weeks travel, he wrote that we were now in new and exciting country. The yellows were turning into reds and saffrons, while the blues were becoming deep purples. And the air was so clear that the highlands of the west seemed almost within grasp. The air at 8,000ft was exhilarating. The Wind river mountains, blue, purple and topped with snow, were a splendid sight. Who wanted to print endless copies of Civil War mementos? When this kind of world, untouched by the war, lay beyond the Mississippi River? Jackson decided to become a photographer of this new country and committed himself to seeking out its most powerful places. This was one of those right place at the right time moments. In 1870, a professor of geology from the east had looked over Jackson's photographs, admiring a photographer with the stamina to get heavy camera gear into the wilds of the West. He was Ferdinand Vandiver Hayden, and Congress had given him an appointment to explore the West, a task that could stretch out over several seasons. He had a painter who the Hudson river artist Sanford Gifford, a friend of Bierstein's. What he needed was a photographer to bring the sublime west in black and white form to an America still reeling from the war and its aftermath. The wildest natural landscapes in the west had an almost Eden like significance. For Americans of this generation, the west was powerful and mysterious, and Jackson believed there were ways to portray it so that everyone would understand what the country's most dramatic settings meant for its future. In 1871, Hayden planned to take his team to one of the most grand, eloquent the fabled headwaters of the Yellowstone River. Montana territorial governor Nathaniel Langford, accompanying a party in 1870, had gotten up on that strange plateau and had told the national magazines that the place was an absolute wonderland. Some in that 1870 party, with the collusion of the railroads, had floated a radical idea. Maybe the government ought to retain title to the plateau for public pleasure and tourism and not let the place get privatized. Assessing the Yellowstone plateau in light of this odd idea of underlay Hayden's visit this time, Jackson would work beside an almost cadaverous young painter named Thomas moran, who in 1871 joined him and Bierstadt as the third of the era's adventurers who helped turn the country's gaze away from the war, Moran shared working class roots with Jackson. He had grown up in Bolton, England, the village Karl Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, considered the seediest, most polluted industrial town ever spawned by capitalism. Moran's father, after hearing Indian painter George Catlin speak in London in the 1840s, had left for America with wife and children in tow. But the memory of a working class background colored Moran for the rest of his life. America's unique genius is that it allows people with talent and a work ethic to overcome a lack of training or connections. Moran had no professional training in painting, but he studied every nuance and trick employed by artists he admired the great European landscapists, particularly people like Claude Lorraine, Salvador Rosa, and especially JMW Turner. Moran avoided conscription in the Union army by fleeing to England to study. So while Pickett charged and Grant sent thousands of Union boys to their fates with their names pinned to their uniforms so their corpses could be identified, Moran rapturously studied Turner's art firsthand in London. His privilege was being able to escape the country so that for him, the war happened in some other world. Back in America. At war's end, fueled by Romanticism's love affair with mystery and feeling, Moran got his main chance when Scribner's Monthly asked him to create sketches illustrating an article called the Wonders of Yellowstone. It was written by Nathaniel Langford and was the article that led Ferdinand Hayden to lead a government trip to Yellowstone the next summer. With loans from Scribner's and the Northern Pacific Railroad, which hoped to haul tourists to this new Western wonder, Moran wrangled a seat on the bus. So Moran and William Henry Jackson were to spend a summer on the Yellowstone plateau that changed history. Getting off the train at Rock Springs, Moran was mesmerized by the nearby cliffs looming over the Green river and did a first sketch of the west there. But for a reality check, there is also a Jackson photograph of that scene. By the time they were in Wyoming, all signs of industrial capitalism were already in place. In Rock Springs, there actually were railroad tracks, a bridge and a water tower beneath those Green river cliffs. Moran ignored all of them and painted the Green river the way the west was supposed to look as a sublime wilderness. In Yellowstone, the interior West's most magical place, Moran and Jackson were challenged by one another. The photographer by the painter's use of color to evoke feeling, the painter by those large, crystal clear photographs that could never lie. Jackson later insisted that their work from that summer convinced everyone who saw them that the regions where such wonders existed should be carefully preserved to the people forever. The summer made Moran famous and he sold his best painting, the huge Grand Canyon of the yellowstone, to the US Congress for $10,000, where it served as prize example of the kind of magical landscape Americans now knew lay in the West. The year after Hayden, Jackson and Moran were in Yellowstone, members of Congress who had never seen Yellowstone themselves gave the country and the world its first national park. Moran and Jackson spent the next quarter century traveling with the government surveys of the age, seeking out more Western magic. Moran famously sought out the Tetons and the Grand Canyon, which he called the most magnificent site of my life. Jackson spent nine seasons with Hayden in the employ of the United States Geological Survey, searching for more magic and finding such scenes in places like Colorado's Garden of the Gods. Jackson Left posterity some 30,000 negatives of Western places and inspired other fine glass plate large format photographers like Timothy o' Sullivan to comb the west to find its most marvelous landscapes. In o' Sullivan's case, the Canyon country of the Colorado Plateau and notably Arizona's Canyon de Chelly. Not even committed romantics like Bierstadt, Moran, Jackson and o' Sullivan found all of the West's most marvelous places. They missed the Oregon coast. They didn't see Monument Valley or the Big Bend country in far southwest Texas, the many magical spots in the Cascades, the Glacier park country, the white Sands dunes of New Mexico, nor Alaskan landmarks like Denali, or the Arctic Plain north of the Brooks Range, what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And none of them bothered to portray scenes on the Great Plains, probably because they were all committed to the idea that sublime landscapes were vertical, not horizontal. But I've been committed over a lot of my adult life to tracking these adventures, to many of the stunning western places they sought out and made famous around the world. And there's no doubt they hit the mark again and again. Hikes through the Titcum Basin, along the shores of Island Lake and through the Cirque of the towers in the Wind River Range, and you still feel today as if you could walk on water. The height of so many of the peaks in the Colorado Rockies, where Bierstadt named a peak Mount Rosalie after his traveling companion's then wife, is almost beyond comprehension. In Yosemite, the gray cliffs soaring above the Merced river still strike one as otherworldly, something from Mars or Jupiter's moons. For an even more profound Yosemite experience, sometime backpack from the Tuolumne Meadows down the Grand Canyon of Yosemite's other river to the waterfalls of Hetch Hetchy Canyon painted by Bierstadt before California built the infamous o' Shaughnessy Dam there. The Tetons and Yellowstone, both still world class global destinations, have an enduring magic best appreciated via backpacks or climbs in the Tetons and in Yellowstone by 5am Dawns in the primeval Lamar Valley when grizzlies roam and gray wolves howl their greetings to the sun. As for the Grand Canyon to approach, appreciate one of the most powerful landscapes on Earth. Float it for three weeks confronting rapids ranked on a scale not applied to any other American river. Or at the very least, do the one day 24 mile rim to rim hike time spent in a place so amazing that as John Muir once said, those are hours that don't get deducted from your allotted span. On Earth, as Bierstadt, Moran and many other scents have come to know well, the west is blessed with landscapes. An astonishing number of them in fact, powerful enough that they can leave you changed for life. The painters and photographers of 150 years ago call that effect the sublime. Good name for it.

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[Dan Flores]

Yeah, longer than that. I mean, the, the first photographs are taken in the. And they're daguerreotype photographs are taken in the 1840s. The first, there's a Frenchman whose name I can't quite recall right now who took some of the very first photographs. And so by, I mean, so what I was describing in this particular episode with William Henry Jackson, for example, is he's taking photographs during the Civil War. And there are a whole host of photographers who are working with a guy named Matthew Brady who Starting in about 1861, 1862, start going out to the battlefields and shooting photographs of battles in the Civil War and particularly the aftermath of battles. So that's kind of the setup for this particular episode is that the Civil War, as a result of the invention of photography and the ability of photographers like Matthew Brady to go out to Civil War battle scenes and capture what the War was like, it's the first war where non combatant members of the public are actually seeing images of what war is like. All people have ever had before are just, you know, red badge of courage, like descriptions of what war is. And suddenly now here are these black and white photographs. And of course they're shocking, they're grisly, they're human shapes lying like cordwood across a battlefield and behind battlements, all twisted into rigor mortis and things from having been dead for a day or two. And the public is seeing this for the first time. And so one of the things that these photographers and painters who go west at the time are trying to do, so they claim, is they're trying to give the public, and one has to say specifically the Northern public, in this case, not necessarily the public of the Confederacy, but the Northern public, they're trying to give a kind of a psychic release from the horrors of the war. Because of course, the early part of the war does not go well for the Union. I mean, the Confederates seem to be winning most of the battles. The Confederate generals seem to be outsmarting the Union generals. And so the war is looking really bleak by 1862 and 1863. And that's when somebody like Albert Bierstadt, this German American painter who had trained in Europe and now goes out to the west, goes to the Wind River Range and ultimately to Colorado and Yosemite and Yellowstone and all that's when they're trying to offer the sort of the grand God derived epic landscapes of the west as kind of a more positive hope for America than these battlefield scenes that people are reading about and seeing. Yeah, but yeah, photography is, is available. And so these glass plate photographer guys like William Henry Jackson and Timothy o', Sullivan, you know, I mean, they basically have to take the camera which is exposing the images on a big glass plate, like this big, and it's dipped in an exposure chemical and you drop it into the camera and the way you expose, so you have to keep it. Once it's dipped into the exposure chemical, you have to keep it covered and you drop it into the camera. And the way you expose it is you just remove, remove the viewfinder and you count down. You know, they ultimately learn, okay, this is a well lit scene, I need to remove the viewfinder for 10 seconds. And then. Which of course means they can't, you can't photograph motion because the camera exposures are too slow. So every. That's. Which is why landscape tends to be the thing that people start shooting, you know, Mountains and canyons, fortunately just kind of stand there and they're nice and still so you can point your camera at it, remove the lens cover and come out with these absolutely gorgeous photographs of the West.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

In the course of a couple days I ran into two references of people paying their way out of the Civil War. I'm reading a book about Africa and it mentions Theodore Roosevelt's trips to Africa and it brings up that his father paid his way out of the Civil War.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

And then.

[Dan Flores]

Bierstadt did.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

So he, he did directly paid his way out.

[Dan Flores]

He paid his way out, yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

What was that system? And did that system carry on into, into World War I or anything?

[Dan Flores]

No, it did not. But during the, the 19th century, I mean, you know, and elites have always had it better than all the rest of us. If you were wealthy enough you could simply. And, and, and there was a draft. Abraham Lincoln instituted a draft in the Civil War and so able bodied men were called up. I remember one time reading the description of what constituted an able bodied man in the Union draft. And one of the requirements was you had to have a tooth on the top and a tooth on the bottom that met so that you could grab a packet of powder and tear it apart in order to load your weapon. So that was, that was one of the, the stipulations for being an able pied Union recruit in the draft was you had, you had to have two teeth that met, one on the top and one on the bottom. But if you were wealthy enough, you just hired somebody to go and fight in your place.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

And that's a private deal.

[Dan Flores]

That's a private deal. And that's what beer style? Yeah, he was called up in the draft and he sent his substitute down to the draft board to report for him.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

How many, I mean, how many these substitutes are dying, man, they're absolutely dying. I wonder if the money, the money then goes to their family.

[Dan Flores]

Yes, the money would go to their family. I mean, you know, the Civil War is abysmally brutal war because most of the military tactics for the war were based on using muzzle loaded weaponry that had a range of maybe could kill somebody at 125 yards or something. But by the time of the Civil War weaponry had improved. So that if you did a frontal assault like all these guys were trained to do, you could start killing frontal assault attacks could kill people at 4 or 500 yards. And so that's why it was such a bloody war is that the weaponry was not comported with the military strategies that people were still using. And, you know, that's why Pickett's Charge was such an absolute, you know, just disaster for the South. And they just kept sending these guys out, you know, and I. I will never forget, you know, the guy who was the talking head, the primary talking head in Ken Burns Civil War film when he was talking about Shelby Foote. Shelby said, you know, I think I would have said, general, I don't think I'm gonna do that.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

They probably would have shot you.

[Dan Flores]

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

[Interviewer/Host]

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

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Host]

And science. And I think that's sort of something that always strikes me as odd and maybe underappreciated, is that so many of these artists and early naturalists are traveling with military expeditions. And the federal government is, you know, leading the charge essentially on very different fronts in terms of, like, the. The incorporation of the west into American culture.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, this. This is something that, you know, you have to sort of understand about the early West. The 19th century west in particular, is because the native people were out there. There was always the fear that if you just went out, you know, as a. As a Philip Nolan kind of character, that you might not survive. So what everybody did, what these artists were obviously doing, was traveling with the military when they could. And what the, you know, the naturalist and the scientists from an earlier period did. And I think I referred to George Catlin in particular, doing something like this is you traveled with the fur companies. You. In other words, you sort of attached yourself to. To a group that provided numerical. The kind of numbers that could keep you safe. And so that's how you, you know, and even, you know, the Maximilian Bodmer expedition, what they did was they would go from military posts to military posts. You would go to Fort Union, and if you were going to work there and do natural history or do painting or whatever, you would stay there and. And a military establishment for your safety. Because the idea was that if you just kind of wandered out by yourself in the west, you might not survive. Philip Nolan. That's one of the reasons. Philip Nolan. I think that's probably one of those eccentricities, many and great. That we were referring to is Philip Nolan apparently just would go out with a couple of other guys and they somehow would manage to survive it.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

He must have had A way that he must have just had a way to be that just he could make it that he wasn't threatening.

[Dan Flores]

I think he wasn't. He was.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

He didn't have any affiliations. Maybe he didn't.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, I don't think he did have affiliations. And so it's a time when the native people are looking for. Because they're French traders from Louisiana, have now been replaced or about to be replaced in the Louisiana Purchase, and they. The Spanish will not trade them guns and ammunition. And so they're looking for some other avenue of. Of acquiring those really essential items. And I think Nolan probably was casting himself as. I can do this for you. Yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

This is a. This is a big speculative question.

[Dan Flores]

How long.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

How long from now will the west hold its mystique as a place that represents space and freedom, not the people that won't want to visit anymore, but, like, people's reasons for visiting places evolve over time. Like, you remember, Colorado was very early in legalizing weed. So, like, Colorado became. People always wanted to go to Colorado, but suddenly there's this thing like. Like Colorado was known as this.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

Other thing. Right. This kind of progressive attitude toward marijuana, and people would go there for that reason. So people will always go to the West. But how much longer can it be what it. You know, how much longer can it be its current thing?

[Dan Flores]

Well, that's a great question. You know, and I. The truth is, I probably don't have a good answer for it. I think, however, based on that example and a lot of others, I mean, you can trot out one after another. When I first moved to Montana, A River Runs through it was just appearing in theaters, and there was for the next about five years. There were people from all over the country coming to the University of Montana, and I have no doubt to Montana State, too, because A River Runs through it suddenly made Montana into the place to go and the place to be north.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

It was affiliated with the area. It sat in the area. It's very specific about the rivers.

[Dan Flores]

And I think the, you know, the series Yellowstone is doing the same thing right now. It's having the same effect. So there are all these cultural developments that you kind of can't really predict that are going to make one place or another kind of suddenly the way Colorado was when pot was legalized there, suddenly the place to go and the place to be. And that's happened in the West a lot. I mean, you know, the old classic line, go west, young man, that's been, you know, something that's popped up in Western history again and again and again. And all of these people that we were talking about in this episode, they're all from somewhere else. I mean, you know, Albert Bierstadt is from Massachusetts. William Henry Jackson was from Vermont. Thomas Moran was a Brit whose dad had seen George Catlin touring Europe in the 1840s and immediately packed up his family and said, that's the place to be. I want to go to America. Because it's got that going. So that kind of thing you kind of can't predict. But the West, I will say, has managed over and over again in a way that the other regions don't seem to have done. The west has managed to come up with something, some sort of cultural development that suddenly causes people to want to kind of do a rush on a particular part of it.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

But the theme. The spasms are different. Right. Like the gold rush, the land rush, whatever, but like the theme of adventure, opportunity, freedom. Right, like that. Like someday. That'll be. Not someday. Kids born in Michigan won't think of the west that way.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Or Louisiana.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

I mean, it'll be like. It'll stand for. I don't know what the hell it'll. It'll stand for like an oppressive atmosphere.

[Dan Flores]

I don't know.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

It'll be like.

[Dan Flores]

I mean.

[Interviewer/Host]

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

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

They've not. But they're not the West.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Host]

But I mean, at one point. Yeah. I mean, California became the west, and then things.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

California was the West. Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

And then it became that it's.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. No, California was, you know, it was the fairyland of the west, where everything was perfect, the sun always was shining and. And, yeah, the weather was grand and. Yeah. And California, of course, you know, I mean, I was just in California a couple of weeks ago. I mean, California still has all those qualities that were there when it was drawing people from all over the world. But of course, what your reaction, at least what my reaction to California is now is, holy cow. So many people, so many cars, so much congestion. Yeah. I mean, it's. You know, you can find parts of California that aren't like that, but they tend to be the parts of California that people don't really want to go to. And all the, you know, the marvelous parts are just packed with people these days.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

Took that observation that. That, you know, wherever you define the south, beginning as you travel south, you enter the South. But then they'll point out. But when you hit the Florida peninsula, you then leave the south as your Southern Journey continues.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Because so many from the south colonized.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

Yeah, the south end.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. I mean, you know, going across Texas is the same way. There's always the question. And going across Texas. So when am I in the West? Am I still in the South? Yeah, it's always a little difficult to figure it out.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

Yeah. But, man, the, like the west, it's just staggering. The, the, the draw, the, the, the, the continuity of kind of the, the language and the draw that you read about these and I think photographers and other people way back then, you know, and then you're like, you're like, yeah, I can, like I can. I see that, man. Like, I understand that poll, you know.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. And I think, you know, what they were doing was they were searching out and finding these larger than life landscapes that became a part of the western mystique for people all over the world. You know, everybody sort of understood, holy cow, man, the Grand Canyon, you know, the Tetons. I mean, just on and on, these marvelous landscapes. And that's what these guys were. They were kind of out there finding them and then presenting them to the world. And it was another one of these cultural moments that we're talking about that the response of the world was, wow, I want to go there. I want to. I want to. I want to live right at the foot of where that particular painting was done.

[Interviewer/Host]

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

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

Well, thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.

[Dan Flores]

Oh, it's fun. Thanks, guys. Foreign.

[Dude Wipes Spokesperson]

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