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- [00:00]
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- [00:34]
Dave Cawley
Dead Horse Pass. You can imagine losing a horse off the side of this Eric Robinson took his final photographs at the bottom of Dead Horse Pass, looking up at the steep wall of the Uinta crest. I've gone over that portion of the Uintah Highline Trail a couple times and it's sobering. Don't linger too long because already I can feel muscles in my legs protesting at holding that. I pull my phone from my pocket and snap a quick picture. The whole basin is just beautifully framed. How can you not take a photograph of that? I'm Dave Cawley and this is a bonus episode of Uinta Triangle. I've wondered who first forged this portion of the trail and gave it the evocative name Dead Horse. The earliest reference I could find came from 1914, when the US Forest Service strung a primitive telephone line over the pass to assist in coordinating wildfire suppression efforts. The trail, to the best of my knowledge, first appears on a Forest Service map published in 1917, but that map doesn't include the name Deadhorse. Several Years later, in 1922, a man named George Beard traveled over the pass with his camera. As far as I can tell, he became the first person to photograph Dead Horse Pass. I mentioned George Beard briefly in Episode four, but I'd like to go a little deeper here to talk about who he was and put his work in context. A couple of the photographs Beard took a century ago became references for a painting he completed in 1923. It's not well known, but it resides in the Springville Museum of Art. I went there to see the painting and to speak with Emily Larson about
- [02:32]
Emily Larson
it, and I am the director of the Springville Museum of Art. We focus a lot on Utah artists and we're a really community driven museum. We were started by high school students and teachers over 100 years ago, and a lot of people are really blown away by the quality of our exhibitions and the architecture of the building when they come.
- [02:52]
Dave Cawley
Springville calls itself Art City, and looking at the museum you can understand why it's an institution sitting in the center of town. And it's chock full of paintings, sculptures and installations of a class greater than many people might expect. From a community museum in the suburbs. Emily shows me George Beard's Dead Horse Pass painting.
- [03:15]
Emily Larson
Yeah, so it's a pretty large painting. It's about three feet tall by two and a half feet wide. And it's vertically oriented or portrait oriented. And this, this cliff edge, big rocky mountain formation. And it fills up the whole picture plane almost. There's very little negative space. So the, the very top of the, the rock cliff formation goes to almost the very top of the canvas and then all the way to the bottom with just a little bit of sky. And the way that George Beard has painted it is really emphasizing a lot of movement in the brushstrokes and action. Even like some of these parts of the formation look like they might be falling off. So there's a lot of movement. The people. There are two figures, figures along the trail with both, with two horses. And they are very, very small comparatively. They're painted to look small and minute in comparison to this grand landscape.
- [04:25]
Dave Cawley
When I first saw a digital image of this painting, I recognized it as a place I had been. To me, it evoked the feeling of crossing Dead Horse Pass and made me curious how George Beard came to be there a century ago. Beard was born in England in 1855 and he started making sketches of his surroundings when still just a boy.
- [04:48]
George Beard (voice actor)
At an early age, I commenced wandering alone in the woods and often visited a beautiful lake a few miles from our home. I remember crying one day because I couldn't reproduce the attractive reflections appearing in the lake.
- [05:01]
Dave Cawley
Those are Beard's words, taken from an autobiographical life sketch and read by a voice actor. Beards parents had met Latter Day Saint missionaries in England in the early 1850s, only a few years after the first Mormon pioneers arrived in modern day Utah and established Salt Lake City. The Beards were baptized. So George was raised in the Latter Day Saint Faith. He emigrated to the United States and traveled to Utah territory as a 13 year old pioneer.
- [05:26]
George Beard (voice actor)
In 1868 we crossed the plains in an ox train. I walked most of the way and slept under the wagon at night, having only one blanket for a covering.
- [05:36]
Dave Cawley
Beard and members of his family settled in the mountain town of Coalville.
- [05:40]
George Beard (voice actor)
I chored for my brothers for the first year. When I was 14 years of age, I hauled coal from Coalville to Salt Lake City driving two yoke of cattle with a heavy wagon.
- [05:51]
Dave Cawley
At that time in the 1860s, lumberjacks called tie hacks were at Work in the nearby Uintah Mountains, chopping down old growth pines to make ties for the transcontinental railroad. Beard arrived just as the railroad was nearing completion and about to revolutionize travel across the American West. Several significant scientific surveys were also underway just then, and they had a profound influence on the art world. John Wesley Powell explored around Colorado and Utah in 1868 and embarked on his famous river expedition through the canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869. One of those canyons, Ledore, cut through the eastern Uinta Mountains. That same year, geologist Clarence King led his survey of the 40th parallel through a portion of the Uintas. A pair of prominent photographers traveled with him. Andrew J. Russell and Timothy o' Sullivan both visited the headwaters of the Bear river in the Uintas, with King that summer, photographing an area today known as the middle basin of Stillwater Fork. A year later, in 1870, another geologist named Ferdinand Hayden spent 20 days on the north flank of the Uintas. Hayden, too, traveled with a photographer named William Henry Jackson and an illustrator named Henry Wood Eliot.
- [07:07]
Emily Larson
The idea was that these paintings or photographs that the artists were making would then show people who couldn't traverse these landscapes what they looked like. And it was really a way to show the rest of the world what the west looked like.
- [07:21]
Dave Cawley
Photography wasn't as simple then as it is today.
- [07:24]
Emily Larson
They had invented the cameras that were easy to lug around and take snapshots of. A snapshot kind of camera didn't exist.
- [07:31]
Dave Cawley
It required a process called wet plate collodion. The photographer had to apply a wet chemical mixture to a pane of glass, expose the glass plate in the camera, then develop it quickly in the field using some form of darkroom. As you can imagine, setting up a dark room deep in the mountains took a ton of effort. A photographer might work for weeks to obtain just a few shots, so they were very selective. Hayden, in a formal report about his survey of the territory's work in the Uinta Mountains, said, in an artistic sense,
- [08:03]
Ferdinand Hayden (quoted)
no range that I have ever seen on this continent can compare with it in beauty. There is a far more rugged grandeur about the Wind river, the Sierra Nevada, or the Coast Ranges. But in none of them is there such simplicity of structure and nor the contrasts so pleasing to the eye.
- [08:22]
Dave Cawley
Powell, King and Hayden's names today grace Mountain peaks in the Uintas. But Hayden's far better known for what he did. A year later, in 1871, Hayden and photographer William Henry Jackson ventured into what's now Yellowstone National Park. An aspiring painter from New York named Thomas Moran accompanied them. Very few Anglo people had seen Yellowstone at the that point. And stories about this hell on earth where steam rose from the ground and sulfurous mud bubbled were dismissed by many Easterners as tall tales. Jackson's photographs proved otherwise and Thomas Moran, the artist, used Jackson's photos as references when creating his magnum opus, a massive painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It's a famous work you might have seen. It shows an idealized version of the true landscape, exaggerating some details. Moran, along with another prominent landscape painter of the time, Albert Bierstadt, didn't want to make photo accurate copies on canvas, but to instead capture the feel of places like Yosemite, Yellowstone and Utah's Red Rock canyons.
- [09:30]
Emily Larson
Both Moran and Bierstadt are coming to Utah painting at different times. A real emphasis on drama and grandeur in the way they're painting these western scenes.
- [09:41]
Dave Cawley
And the public gobbled it up. The Union Pacific Railroad sold copies of Andrew Russell's Uinta Mountain photographs to tourists, while Moran's painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone helped convince the US Congress to set Yellowstone aside as the world's first national park.
- [09:58]
Emily Larson
That too was becoming very influential on the way that the Utah artists were painting. This scenery and this emphasis on making it really dramatic, grand, almost unbelievable, even though the landscapes themselves, when you're in them, they feel that way, unbelievable.
- [10:15]
Dave Cawley
George Beard was still just a teenager at this time. Artistically inclined but not fully invested, he stayed busy working as a chore boy at the Colville Co Op and courting a neighbor girl named Sarah Lavinia Bullock. They married in March of 1877. The next summer, George and Lavinia made their first trip to the Uinta Mountains together. Beard later wrote about the month long adventure which culminated with their ascent of a prominent landmark called Bald Mountain.
- [10:43]
George Beard (voice actor)
The huge peaks losing themselves in the eastern distances, the Provo and Weber Rivers to the west, all lay before my vision. Then I fully understood how one could be monarch of all he surveyed. And I felt only the desire to put such scenery in its true colors on the canvas.
- [11:03]
Dave Cawley
Beard returned to the Uinta Mountains many more times to sketch the scenery. He devised a system of color codes so when he sat down to paint later, he could accurately recall the colors he had seen. The earliest reference I've found to George Beard exhibiting his work is from a few Years later in 1881, when he entered a painting in the Utah Territorial fair. The Deseret News called it well worthy of Note. Beard was 25 years old. He made what's believed to be his first visit to the Tetons. A couple Years later, in 1884, Beard exhibited a painting titled Source of the Bear River, a Uinta mountain Scene at an art show. The next year, the Salt Lake Herald wrote about his work, calling it, quote, the effort of an amateur, plainly enough, but an amateur not without strong artistic ideas and talent. George Beard didn't have formal art training,
- [11:53]
Emily Larson
but I think what was great about the art scene at this time is that it was pretty close knit, like Salt Lake City was a small, a smaller place back then in terms of population. And so I think the artists knew each other and you know, the, the saying, a higher tide lifts all the boats. I think you really see that in Utah, that even the artists who didn't go get that formal training were elevated by the experience of their peers. Years.
- [12:20]
Dave Cawley
Case in point, one of Beard's paintings exhibited in a gallery owned by a prominent photographer named C.R. savage in 1885. Savage was famous for photographing the driving of the Golden Spike, the completion of the transcontinental railroad. And Savage is likely the person who encouraged Beard to take up photography. By this time, the wet plate process had been replaced by dry plate silver halide that didn't require a mobile darkroom. A photographer still had to lug heavy, fragile glass plates, but didn't need to develop them in the field. George Beard bought a camera and started taking it with him into the mountains. He was about 20 years behind trailblazers like Andrew Russell and Timothy O' Sullivan in photographing the Uintas. But in the years to come, he'd take his camera deeper into the range and higher up its summits than any of his predecessors.
- [13:14]
Carvana User 1
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
- [13:16]
Emily Larson
Well, that's cool.
- [13:16]
Carvana User 1
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
- [13:22]
Carvana Announcer / Lowe's Announcer
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- [13:24]
Carvana User 1
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- [13:27]
Carvana Announcer / Lowe's Announcer
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- [13:29]
Carvana User 1
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- [13:31]
Carvana Announcer / Lowe's Announcer
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- [13:33]
Carvana User 1
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
- [13:35]
Carvana Announcer / Lowe's Announcer
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- [13:36]
Emily Larson
Okay.
- [13:37]
Carvana User 1
Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [13:38]
Carvana Announcer / Lowe's Announcer
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- [13:44]
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- [14:15]
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- [14:38]
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- [14:45]
Dave Cawley
In 1888, a government surveyor told Beard about a little known valley called Jackson Hole on the east side of the Teton Mountains in modern day Wyoming. It was still a wild place, with the first homesteads there having only been established a few years prior. Beard visited Jackson Hole repeatedly in the late 1800s. He kept a journal from one of these visits and I've actually handled it, turned its pages and read Beard's handwriting. The diary is in Special collections at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, and it contains proof Beard's artistic efforts were influenced by the then famous painter Thomas Moran.
- [15:23]
George Beard (voice actor)
From the upper end of the lake, go over a pass in the mountains to the north of the Tetons to the headwaters of Fall River. There is a trail south of the peaks leading to the Teton Basin. This is where Moran painted his picture of 3 Teton.
- [15:39]
Dave Cawley
Beard exhibited a painting of the tetons in the 1890 Utah Territorial Fair, where he won a silver medal. He entered yet more paintings of the Jackson Hole area in the 1894 fair. This was a busy period of life for Beard. He was by then running the Coalville Co Op, was elected mayor of Colville in 1891, and then in 1896 became a member of Utah's first state legislature.
- [16:03]
Emily Larson
Kind of this Renaissance man, like I don't know anyone in the legislature right now who's also a painter, photographer and explorer.
- [16:09]
Dave Cawley
The government positions undoubtedly raised Beard's public profile and facilitated valuable introductions. In 1897, the federal government created the Uinta Forest Reserve, and Beard's close friend and neighbor, John Howe Salmon, became one of the first forest rangers. Beard and Salmon had traveled together in the Uintas previously exploring and prospecting, they ascended to a high point overlooking a basin filled with lakes. Beard, by his own words, pointed to the largest one and said, over there
- [16:41]
George Beard (voice actor)
is the granddaddy of them all.
- [16:42]
Dave Cawley
From about 1900 to 1905, the U.S. geological Survey sent teams into the Uinta Mountains to make a new series of maps. Beard and some of his sons worked with the surveyors, and Beard became friends with the lead topographer, W.J. lloyd.
- [16:58]
George Beard (voice actor)
When Mr. Lloyd was making his maps of the Uinta Range country, he wrote me from Washington, D.C. that one of the highest peaks in the Uinta Range never been named. And he gave me the honor of naming it. Right off the bat, I named it Mount Lavinia.
- [17:15]
Dave Cawley
Beard and his forest ranger friend John Salmon also told Lloyd the surveyor their story about the granddaddy Lake.
- [17:22]
George Beard (voice actor)
When we survey it, Lloyd said, granddaddy goes.
- [17:26]
Dave Cawley
The book. Utah Place Names attributes the Granddaddy name to another man, but I find Beard's account more credible. Only Beard had this personal relationship with the surveyor.
- [17:37]
George Beard (voice actor)
My wife and I met Mr. Lloyd at his camps every summer. He named my wife the Mountain goat of the Rockies because she climbed some of the highest mountains with me.
- [17:47]
Dave Cawley
George Beard's photos also turn up in a publication by a government scientist named Wallace Atwood. Though they're uncredited, Atwood was studying evidence of past glaciation in the Uinta Mountains. Among the photos in Atwood's report is one of Lavinia on horseback at the outlet of Allsop Lake. Other photos from 1902 and 1903 show George and Lavinia high on the ridge between Alsop and Dead Horse Lakes. The painter Thomas Moran again visited Utah in 1900 and spent time interacting with members of the local art community, including a contemporary of George Beards named HLA Colmer. It's possible Beard might have met Moran at this time, but I can't say for sure. Beard did once call Moran the greatest of all living artists. Now, Beard's paintings are nowhere near as grandiose as Moran's, but what sets him apart is the fact he was just as much a photographer as a painter.
- [18:44]
Emily Larson
It was really rare at this time for the artist to be both photographer and painter, but George Beard was one who really could do both.
- [18:51]
Dave Cawley
Beard saw his greatest artistic success in 1915 when his painting the Old Mormon Trail exhibited at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. That was a giant world's fair held in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. And of course, this was about the same time the first references to Dead Horse Pass appeared In print again, Beard's photos show he led that horse packing trip over the pass in 1922. He completed his painting of the pass a year later. It displayed in the gallery at zcmi, a bustling storefront in the heart of Salt Lake City, in 1925.
- [19:28]
Emily Larson
What's really interesting about that is that gallery space was run by Alice Merrill Horne, and it was one of the most important, like galleried exhibition spaces in the 1920s and 30s in Utah, in Salt Lake City. And so it's kind of a nod to Beard that it was hung there because I Alice Merrell Horne was this tastemaker and she didn't love everyone's art. It had to be pretty impressive to get by her standards.
- [19:52]
Dave Cawley
A writer for the Salt Lake Telegram described the painting like this perpendicular columns of red rock rise to towering heights along whose side there creeps a tiny bridal path, at the outer edge of which yawns a cavernous death for the equine friends of man. Forceful drama has been deftly woven by the artist into the crags of Dead Horse Pass. Beard lived for almost 20 more years, but never received great notoriety. That's in part because he didn't market his work, painting mostly for his own pleasure. He continued photographing in his later years, visiting scenic places like Glacier national park in Montana, or Bryce Canyon and Zion in southern Utah. And he never stopped exploring the Hayntas.
- [20:40]
George Beard (voice actor)
No one who has not spent a few days or weeks in this section of Utah can appreciate its beauty, its primitive appeal, enough to baffle even the most gifted of artists, leaving out of mind such a poor dauber as I am myself.
- [20:57]
Dave Cawley
When beard died in 1944, his photos and a large number of his paintings passed down to his channel children. Dead Horse Pass remained in the family's possession, largely out of public view, until his grandson's wife, Elsie Beard, donated it to the Springville Museum of Art in 2002. You can see it yourself on the museum's website using the link in the episode description or by visiting the Springville Museum of Art.
- [21:22]
Emily Larson
And it's free. We are free to the public. We're open six days a week. We have variable hours by day, so check our website, website or online to make sure we're open when you come. We're closed Mondays during the day but open Monday nights, and then on our website we have our collection listed and it's usually pretty up to date of what's on view and what's not. And if something's not on view, we just ask that you email us a few weeks in advance and. And make an appointment. And we can usually pull anything out that's currently in storage if. If that's something you want to see.
- [21:56]
Dave Cawley
A newspaper writer profiled Beard shortly before his death. Calling him a man the world should know, he wrote, quote, I have a suspicion that George Beard's skill with a camera has not yet been recognized by friends overshadowed by his paintings. Well, I recognize it now, and I think George Beard shared my sentiment. When it comes to the Hyuintas, how can. How can you not take a photograph of that? This bonus episode was produced by me, Dave Cawley. Our executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittleswax for lemonada Media and Cheryl Worsley for KSL Podcasts. For more on the story of Uinta Triangle, visit our website@uintatriangle.com that's Uinta, spelled U I N T A. Thank you for listening.
- [22:56]
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- [23:27]
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- [23:50]
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- [23:57]
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- [24:28]
Lowe's Announcer
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- [24:51]
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- [24:56]
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