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Albert Bierstadt
(1830-1902)
Albert Bierstadt went west for the first time in 1859, a young,
ambitious painter in the party of Colonel Frederick W. Lander, who had
been charged by the Interior Department to survey a new wagon route to
California which would go north of Salt Lake and thus prevent further
friction between emigrants and Mormons. Lander was also to placate the
Native Americans whose trading would be disrupted by relocating the
California and Oregon wagon trails that
had been in use for years. The expedition offered the artist an
opportunity to see America's fabled mountains, known to a fascinated
public through written descriptions and photographs in black and white,
and to encounter Native Americans in their natural setting. If the
Rockies were as grand as the Alps, paintings of them would find buyers
already enthusiastic at the prospects of westward expansion, especially
merchants and boosters of the railroads.
When Bierstadt set out he was a better landscape painter than previous
artists who had gone west, having studied for three years in Dusseldorf
and painted in Italy. In Boston and his hometown of New Bedford, he was
enjoying success with his paintings of landscape and European genre, due
in no small measure to a talent for self-promotion.
Lander's expedition crossed Nebraska, and continued northwest following
the North Fork of the Platte River into western Wyoming. Along the way
Bierstadt sketched and took photographs of Native Americans and
emigrants, some bound for Pike's Peak but others returning discouraged,
like those he encountered near Fort Kearny with their 150 wagons. Yet
three sketches published in 1859 as woodcuts in Harper's Weekly are
among the very few Bierstadt images which include what was a common
sight along the trail and the subject of The Oregon Trail: emigrants,
animals, and wagons under way.
By late June Bierstadt had left Lander,
who continued on to California. Bierstadt stayed three weeks in the Wind
River Mountains, sketching and photographing Native Americans and
scenery. It was here, after exploring the mountains, that Bierstadt
wrote a letter to The Crayon, an artistic journal, declaring the Rockies
true rivals of the Alps and marking the beginning of his occupation with
the subject which was to bring him fame and enormous fortune.
Bierstadt exhibited his first Rocky Mountain picture by March, 1860, and
hoped to travel west again that year. However, helping his brothers
Edward and Charles establish a photography studio and the beginning of
the Civil War delayed his next trip until 1863. He was also faced with
the difficulty of obtaining permission to accompany an army unit since
Native Americans were attacking Overland mail stations. By the time
Bierstadt again went west his reputation for painting the Rocky
Mountains had been established by the exhibition of The Rocky Mountains,
Lander's Peak (1863, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), large at 6 by 10
feet, which had been shown in New York, Boston, New Bedford, and
Portland, Maine, often with an admission charge. Emanuel Leutze had
painted Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1862, United States
Capitol), and the West was on many minds.
In May, 1863, Bierstadt and the prominent writer, Fitz Hugh Ludlow,
having failed to find a willing army unit, set out from St. Joseph,
Missouri, trusting the Overland mail stagecoach to get them safely to
California where they planned to visit Yosemite and then go north
through the Oregon and Washington territories into lower Canada. Ludlow
planned to send back letters about their adventures and gather notes for
a book. Bierstadt sought more Rocky Mountain and Western subjects which
he knew would be made even more popular by Ludlow's writings.
Near Fort Kearny, Nebraska, they passed a wagon train described by
Ludlow as:
... a very picturesque party of Germans going to Oregon. They had a
large herd of cattle and fifty wagons, mostly drawn by oxen, though some
of the more prosperous "outfits" were attached to horses or mules. The
people themselves represented the better class of Prussian or North
German peasantry. A number of strapping teamsters, in gay costumes,
appeared like Westphalians. Some of them wore canary shirts and blue
pantaloons; with these were intermingled blouses of claret, rich warm
brown, and the most vivid red. All the women and children had some
positive color about them, if it only amounted to a knot of ribbons, or
the glimpse of a petticoat. I never saw so many bright and comely faces....
The whole picture of the train was such a delight in form, color, and
spirit that I could have lingered near it all the way to Kearney.
Over three years later Bierstadt was reported to be working on a large
painting representing an emigrant train on its way across the Plains.
Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867, National Cowboy Hall of Fame,
Oklahoma City) was finished by November 27, 1867 and went on exhibit in
a San Francisco art gallery. It was sold a year later to Amasa Stone of
Cleveland, Ohio.
The Oregon Trail is identical in subject to the
Oklahoma City painting but only one-half its size. It could have been
painted during Bierstadt's European sojourn from 1867 to 1869 when he
took studios in London, Rome, and Paris, showed Rocky Mountain pictures
to Queen Victoria, and made pictures of the American West popular in
Europe and Britain. The Butler Institute picture, probably painted after
the artist's return to America, was bought in Washington, D.C. from the
artist and descended in the same family until 1946.
Except for the Harper's Weekly woodcuts and a wood engraving after a
Bierstadt drawing of an Overland mail stagecoach in Ludlow's 1870
account of the 1863 trip, there are no images by Bierstadt of any coach
or wagon actually en route west. This seems even more curious when we
read a description by Bierstadt from 1865:
"The wagons are covered with
white cloth; each is drawn by four to six pairs of mules or oxen; and
the trains of them stretch frequently from one-quarter to one-third of a
mile each. As they move along in the distance, they remind one of the
caravans described in the Bible and other Eastern books."
The Oregon Trail turns what to Ludlow was a jolly encounter with a
colorful band of emigrants into a spectacular allegory of westward
expansion. Under a dramatic orange-red sky the travelers trek into the
western sun, which tinges the high cliffs as it sets beyond a grove of
ancient trees. They pass animal bones and a broken stove which testify
to previous unlucky travelers. Native American tepees in the distance
are reminders of a constant menace. No matter that by sundown camp
should have been made, accuracy of fact is no more a goal here than in
any other historical allegory of America's westward migration.12 This
subject first appeared soon after the end of the Civil War when America,
with heightened interest in the West, turned its attention to peaceful
rather than military matters. The Butler Institute version was painted
in 1869, the completion year of the transcontinental railroad which
would soon make history of the emigrant wagon. There may have been, even
in 1869, on the part of Bierstadt or his patrons, a degree of nostalgia
for this particular aspect of the pioneer experience soon to disappear
in fact, but to persist in myth for over a century as one of the iconic
images of Americas expansion westward.
WILLIAM S. TALBOT
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