West of The Imagination; 102; Clean Version No Open/close; The Golden Land

Yeah. In the far west, in the fall of 1831, the

fall of 1833, something unusual happened to the members of a scouting expedition led by Captain Joseph Walker. In the middle of the night, they'd been awakened by a distant rumbly. Some thought it was an earthquake. Others believed it was the sound of a far off ocean. They rode westward and eventually came upon the shores of the Pacific, an ocean whose breakers crashed on the very edge of the far west, an ocean they had never seen before. One of the men, Zena's Leonard, rode in his journal that being at the edge of the

far west inspired the heart of every member of our company with a patriotic feeling for his country's honor. As he rode by the ocean, Zena's Leonard imagined the settlement and civilization, even of this remote part of the land. The empty west he predicted would soon be greeted by the sound of the workman's hammer and the whistle of the plowboy. Within 40 years of turbulent history, what Zena's Leonard had predicted would come true. Leonard was speaking for a generation of Americans in the 1830s and 40s, who believed that their personal destiny was bound up with the destiny of their

nation, that the west was a promised land full of opportunity, fame and fortune, a land of new beginnings, of freedom and democracy in the wilderness, a golden land. The two words manifest destiny became a catchphrase in the 19th century that was echoed again and again in politics and in popular art. The painter John Gast saw a manifest destiny as an historical epic guided by a sweep goddess of liberty. Indians and other foes must inevitably give way before the divinely inspired parade of civilization. To the artist Emanuel Eitsan, the west was a promised land.

Pioneer families, scouts, mountain men, goal seekers, all surged westward, full of hope. Each one of them was a hero, a soldier in the army of manifest destiny. The painting was titled westward the course of empire takes its way. But history has demonstrated that the conquest of empires has never been without cost. When Zena's Leonard stood on the shores of California, he was actually standing on land claimed by the Republic of Mexico. Mexico stood in the path of manifest destiny.

In Mexico, church and state had combined forces to guard the frontier of Catholic Christendom. The conflict began in earnest in 1836 in the state of Cajila y Tejas. American settlers demanded the right to democratic government and a fair judicial system. 187 Texans died to defend those rights at an abandoned mission called the Alamo. The paintings which helped to make a myth of the Alamo were painted many years later with hindsight. Henry McCartle in this panorama of the battle distilled all the events into one climactic moment like the big scene in an epic movie.

His hero is the Texan leader Travis about to meet his death from a Mexican Bayonet. This is the fall of the Alamo by Robert Underdunk. His hero is David Crockett. He said his aim was to portray battle, murder, and sudden death. These paintings were monuments to heroism. Back in Washington in the late 1830s, the public and the politicians were outraged. There was talk of war. If America's divine destiny was the conquest of the continent, then Mexico must become our darkest foe. This is Samuel Morse's grand painting of the House of Representatives.

Up in the gallery on the right he placed an Indian standing like a mute and powerless witness to the unfolding national drama. It was William Gilpin's report to the Senate that best captured the mood of the times. The untransacted destiny of the American people is to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries, to cause stagnant people to be reborn, to perfect science, to emblaze on history with the conquest of peace, to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind, to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt Cherokee unto shed blessings round the world. Divine task, immortal mission, let us tread rust and joyfully the open trail before us.

In the wilderness, the effect of such bombastic rhetoric was being translated into symbolic action. An expedition was dispatched to map the way west across the Rockies. At the top of this peak in Wyoming's Wind River range, a flag was planted by the expedition leader, Lieutenant John Charles Fremont. He claimed the territory in the name of civilization and became known as the Pathfinder, a legend in his own time. The effect of these patriotic addicts moved across the country very slowly at first, like ripples across a placid pond.

In the Midwest dotted with farms and towns in their infancy, there was work enough for the settlers, trying to carve out a life for themselves in difficult economic times. A few had become prosperous. They had better things to do than worry about Mexico. If a thousand miles away, some politicians were banging the drum of Manifest Destiny, and a hot-headed lieutenant was climbing mountains, it somehow seemed unimportant. What finally swept up these tiny isolated villages into the nation's wider drama were the telegraph and the printing press. Suddenly news could travel faster, even to the midwestern frontier,

and the news that traveled fastest was war. War was declared with Mexico in 1846. Soon the printing presses in every town and city were busy, spreading the gospel of Manifest Destiny. For the first time, newspapers ran pictures of sensational battles. Advertisers jumped on the bandwagon. The famous general, Zachary Taylor, known affectionately as old, rough and ready, found his nickname adorning ads for the best-selling brand of tobacco. In a popular print, a sinister general vega is captured by the war's first hero, Captain May. A steady stream of romantic pictures followed.

Popular art made the war glamorous, and exciting. So great was the impact of the media, both news and colorful propaganda, that public opinion and involvement began to change. The affairs of small town life seemed overshadowed by something of a much grander design. The artist Richard Katen Woodville painted this scene and gave it a special importance by freezing it in time. In a painting he called Warnos from Mexico, we see common men pausing to stare at the information of larger and grander things. They are fascinated by what they envision and imagine. A drama that looms larger than life. A drama that looms larger than the fate of any single man.

The war with Mexico was fought on many fronts, success depended on the recruitment of men to fight. That meant that whole communities must be persuaded of the villainy of Mexico and America's divine destiny. Are you ready? Can there be a coward amongst you? A man who would desert his country in its hour of danger. A traitor to his country's cause. Poor penniless, patriotic man here who stands by his post. To the end of the war.

These speeches were common all over the Midwest and the South in the summer of 1846. Because they were often given nut by soldiers but by small town politicians. They were successful. Step up. Take the pledge. Make your mark. Tens of thousands signed up for the war. Driven by the images of glory and promises of new land rested from the Mexican foe. Some went south to the Rio Grande to join General Zachary Taylor. Others went southwest 1,500 miles of brutal marching. In the baking heat of July, the first troops arrived at Benzfort on the Santa Fe trip. Here they drilled and assembled into the great army of the West

under Colonel Stephen Watts-Carnie. A first hand impression of the army's occupation comes from the only white woman present at the fort. Susan Shelby McGoffan. Confined to her sick bed, she wrote in her diary that she not so much saw as heard Carnie's army. The blacksmiths hammer, the bugle, the jungle of swords and spurs, the drill, the commands in the courtyard. It all seemed combined in a great martial symphony. Colonel Carnie has arrived, she wrote, and it seems the world is coming with him.

Looking back on the Mexican War, there were two very different views portrayed by the artist. One was the General's view, the other was the common soldiers. There were two interpretations of what happened when the army finally crossed into Mexico. This is the decisive battle of Buenavista, seen from the American General's point of view. It's a classic history painting made by Karl Nebel, who collaborated with a war correspondent to recreate the scene accurately. But also at the battle was a rank and file soldier named Samuel Chamberlain. The sketches he made were not for publication. In this unsettling picture,

innocent civilians are massacred in a cave by undisciplined Arkansas volunteers. Here Chamberlain shows how Americans who fought for the enemy were hanged by advancing troops. And this is the grim reality of street fighting, hand-to-hand. By contrast, this is Nebel's view of the triumphant entry of General Winfield Scott into Mexico City. This was the sort of picture the American public wanted to see, a successful conclusion to a hard fought war. When the war was over, the United States had won over a million square miles of territory.

Since most of this was unmapped and unknown, the government launched a series of expeditions to collect detailed information. Scores of army topographers, as well as geologists and botanists, set out to map and describe the vast empty spaces of the west. The explorers ventured up the Colorado River from the sea to view the majesty of the Grand Canyon. They crossed the treacherous ice of the Snake River at the Hell Gate, and with them they brought artists. Artists were an indispensable part of this great reconnaissance.

Their paintings were designed to be printed alongside detailed reports to Congress, and they were supposed to authenticate what the scientists and matmakers saw. But often they did not. John McStanley's chain of spires along the Hila River is actually a collage of images. The plant life is an odd medley of everything the artist had seen in the southwest, and the noble stag belongs in a northern forest. The truth is that the landscape generally got the better of the painters. Stunned by the solitude and harsh grandeur, the artist forgot what they came for, and commenced to draw and paint what they felt. The careful drawings of F.W. Van Eglowstein are probably the only ones that could be of any use

to a railroad builder, but even this artist was a romantic. In the landscape of the Wasatch range, in what is today Utah, he puts an Indian perched on a mountain top like some nature gods, sadly surveying all that he once possessed. This land had been the territory of the Pawnee, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho trucks. But less than a year after the end of the Mexican-American war, the prairie along the North Platte River became a highway for thousands of pioneers. This strange rock called the TP by the Indians was dubbed chimney rock by the pioneers and became their signpost in a vast ocean of grass. At Scott's bluff, 800 miles west of St. Louis, the tracks converged and threaded

through a narrow gap onto the sweet water, devil's gate, south past, and beyond. Here the great Oregon Trail became a thin white ribbon, winding its way through a broken desolate land, a road over which three generations of American pioneers have passed. In the imagination of the settlers, the West was the promised land. One of many who decided to follow the path of Manifest Destiny was a young woman from Iowa, named Catherine Hahn. Her diaries, telebur dreams. Early in January of 1849, we first thought of emigrating to California. Full of the energy and enthusiasm of youth, the prospects of such an undertaking held no terror for us. Indeed, as we had been married only a few months,

it appealed to us as a romantic wedding tour. Golden California was the chief topic of conversation. Who was going? How best to fix up the outfit? What to take as food and clothing? On April the 24th, 1849, we left for the uncertain and dangerous trip beyond which loomed up in our mind's eye, castles of shining gold. The dream was captured in a painting by Albert Beerstha to ride off into the sunset and start a new in that vast and empty territory. On the trek westward, scouts were indispensable.

And without them, one didn't stand a chance. With them, what lay ahead was far from certain. This was The Great Nightmare, painted by George Caleb Bingham in a picture he called the concealed enemy. A more familiar version, because we've seen this scene enacted again and again in the movies, was made by Karl Weimer. He called it the attack on an immigrant train. In the southwest, there was another horror, the desert. Lieutenant George Brewerton's painting of the Mojave is called Jornado Del Muerto, the journey of the dead man. An eyewitness sketch documents another ghastly but all too common seen. The carcasses of dead cattle have poisoned a precious waterhole.

After a few years, the main overland trail was not hard to find. The litter of abandoned belongings left behind to lighten the load lay across the prairies in an unmistakable path 20 miles wide. It wasn't Indians, but disease and hardship that took the highest toll. Gravestones became signposts to the way west, and many who died were children. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makeeth me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreeth my soul. He leadeth me in the past of righteousness for his name's sake. Ye, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff, thy comfort me. Thou preparest the table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil,

my cup runeth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. In spite of the tragedies and the hardships, the dream of a better life than the west never died. The small trickle of emigrants that started using the Oregon Trail in the 1830s grew to a steady stream. In 1849, the year that Catherine Hahn went west, 50,000 went out in a single year. In all, over 300,000 people made the great Trek westward between 1840 and the completion of the first railroad in 1869.

The story of the pioneers is the greatest epic of the American west in the 19th century. The pioneers carried not only ploughs, seed and tools with which to build a new home, they carried in their hearts and minds a certain democratic ideal for their new life in the Promised Land. This painting by John McStanley reflects that ideal. It's a town in Oregon at the end of the trail, not just any town, but the perfect town. Democracy was the plan for life in such a place, and it's perhaps the most important thing that America took west.

Democracy was also the subject of the work of George Caleb Bingham. He was quite different from other artists of his time. Unlike the painters of the great reconnaissance, Bingham stayed at home, and unlike artists of grandiose themes, he painted what was close to home. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer could have fit right into Bingham's world. It's a world people with ordinary folk, like these Missouri River boatmen, bathed in the warm sun of a late summer afternoon. In Bingham's world, the biggest news in town could be a prize beef to be won at Target Shooting. There's a mythic quality to his most famous work, fur traders descending the Missouri.

A strange wild animal is chained to the bow of the boat. A half-breed boy is dreaming of civilization downriver. The old trapper comes from a time that was fast disappearing. Bingham's special interest was politics. He successfully ran for office in his hometown, Arrow Rock, Missouri, and painted a series of pictures of democracy in action. This is the county election. A friend of Bingham's made a detailed key to the painting, identifying not only who the characters are, but what they're up to. The man on the right is swearing in the voters, but the candidate happens to be his own son-in-law, Darwin Sampington, raising his hat to a prospective supporter.

Strong drinks were offered to encourage the turnout, and a certain Mr. Higgins has already succumbed. Obey Pearson and the White Hat was one of Bingham's neighbors. The boy on the right was Bingham's son. Bingham even put himself in the pictures, seated, sketching the scene, as was true to his habit. In these political pictures, the strident tones of manifest destiny have fallen mute. There are no white goddesses or larger than life, visionary pioneers here. Instead, human beings, weak and powerful, good and bad, are presiding over the future of their society. Bingham's vision is a profound view of the ordinary. He shows us, with gentle humor, the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy. The democracy that was brought to the West. A great deal had happened to America in the two decades since 1833.

When Zina's Leonard had galloped along the Pacific coast, the war with Mexico had been popularized. The men recruited the campaign's plan. The troops had set out, then the war had been won. The pioneers had embarked on their epic migration that would roll on for three decades. The expeditions of the great reconnaissance had mapped the vast new regions that America had inherited. But nothing gripped the people's imagination and propelled the country into a new age faster than a certain discovery, made near a remote California settlement in January of 1848. Gold. Gold was the dream of a hundred thousand prospectors.

Gold was the subject of a San Francisco newspaper editorial that read like a fairy tale, too good to be true. The dreams of the visionary have come to pass, it said. In the sunny climb of California, maybe found the modern Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey. Its mountains studded and its rivers lined and choked with gold. The discovery of gold fascinated serious eastern artists like William Sidney Mount, who call this painting California News. But soon popular lithographs were poking fun at the 49ers. Here desperate prospectors tried to find a ship to bring home their new found riches.

Gold seekers adopting the slang of the day claimed that they were going to see the elephant. Gold. So fantastic was the prospect before them. The crazy dreams of prospectors knew no bomb. In this cartoon, a sperm whale toes back a nugget, the size of a house. What could be greater proof positive of America's sublime destiny than gold? In reality, the life of the California 49er was a lot tougher than the headline suggested. Neither fools nor freeloaders lasted long in the hills. The early California prospector was an independent self-made man, a different breed of pioneer, who staked his wits and hard labor against an uncertain fortune. But what was extraordinary about many of the paintings of the early mines was the way in which they

idealized the gold field experience. Charles Nahl, one of the more thoughtful chroniclers of the era, painted this domestic sea of a miner's cabin on a Saturday night. The warm red tone gives the group a feeling of intimacy. But a companion work by Nahl presents a very different message. This is Sunday morning at the mines. The characters here are divided into two camps. On the right, a pious group seeks salvation from the scriptures. On the left, we find an unredeemed diehard from Saturday night's revelries. This painting is like a sermon in which the artist warns us of the moral pitfalls of gold fever. Few stories better illustrate what it must have been like in those early gold rush days,

than the story of Lotta Crap Tree. She was a child entertainer who toured the gold camps of the Sierra's in the 1850s. To the miners, she was an antidote to loneliness in what was a hard and lonely life. She sang songs guaranteed to bring tears and laughter to even the most hard bitten group of prospectors. In so doing, she became the diminutive heroine of an era. Gentlemen, I am honored to present to you San Francisco's favorite, the celebrated dance suit and vocalist, Miss Lotta Crap Tree. When she was six years old, Lotta Minion Crap Tree made her dancing debut on a Blacksmith's

Anvil in a small mining camp named Rough and Reddy. By the time she was 12, she was singing on the stage in San Francisco. Later, during the Civil War, dances known as the Lotta Polka and the Lotta Gallup became national favorites. But to the men in the camp she visited in her childhood, Lotta was the beloved daughter or the little sister that everyone had left behind, a fairy star in a world without women. I've wondered all over this country, prospecting and digging for gold. I've tunneled hydraulic and cradled and nearly I've frozen the cold,

for one who got wealthy by mining. I saw many hundreds give more, I made up my mind. Many hundreds got poor as the song put it. Few prospectors made a fortune and life in the camps was anything but easy. And yet thousands came west, long after the best claims were state. Thousands driven by the dream of the west as a golden land. When the surface gold of the mother load was played out, mining went underground.

Underground, the men were a different breed. They worked in mines with names like the North Star, the Empire, the Oriental, and the 16-to-1, and they carved networks of tunnels that were literally hundreds of miles long. There were no artists down here to idealize the life of the hard rock miner, only the stark reality of the camera. Even the surface was changing.

Where zenith Leonard had once passed, imagining the sound of the workman's hammer, no stone was left unturned, no valley left unexplored. This is the site of a huge hydraulic mining operation in the 1880s, a completely different kind of mining from the deep rock shafts. Here at Malakov Diggings, the entire hillside was literally washed away by gigantic hydraulic jets. It was like turning a modern fire hose on a pile of sand. A mountain could be devoured in a day. Before long, the land was ravaged and the rivers clogged with silt and waste. But at exactly the same time as the mountains were being washed away, artists like Albert Behrstad set up their easels in the Sierras to capture an image of pristine nature.

It would take a new sensibility to alert Americans to the beauty of their land, lest it all be destroyed in the quest for profit. The problem was, there was little sense of permanence in the Boomtown West. When a mine, a mountain, or a city had served its purpose, it was simply abandoned. This is Bannock, Montana. In 1862, it was the site of one of the biggest gold strikes since the California mother load. It was deserted about 40 years later. Bannock became the haunt of notorious characters. Henry Plummer, both sheriff and outlaw, was hanged from gallows out here on the hill. Such towns gained a reputation for wild and arbitrary justice, a far cry from the democratic ideals aspired to by the early pioneers. In San Francisco, public hangings had become a popular

entertainment. Throughout Northern California, armed stages carried the gold out and brought eastern speculators in. Such newcomers, cosmopolitan, cultured, and above all rich were here to stay. They brought their families with them and invested in the boom. Here in the town of Columbia, gold was discovered in 1850. Five years later, the population was 10,000. Between the years of 1863 and 1885, gold worth more than $55 million was weighed on the scales of this Wells Fargo office.

The original loan prospector had become a quaint anachronism. Emigrants from China arrived to build the railroads and created their own tightnet closely guarded community. Everywhere the west was changing. Barbershops, pharmacies, banks, post offices, dentists, dance halls, all the trappings of civilization were on hand. But there were some who remembered what had been here 25 years before. In the 1870s, there was a wave of nostalgia for the past in California. It was captured and encouraged by painters like William Hahn and James Walker.

They looked back on the years before 1848 as an idyllic era. Mexicans who had once been portrayed as villains, the proclaimed enemies of manifest destiny now became an exotic memory. The life of the ranchero was idealized. The artist recreated a romantic view of their California past. This was their California just 25 years later. Perhaps the most incredible example of the roaring booming transformation of the west is the story of the city of San Francisco seen through the eyes of the artists who were there. In this strange painting of 1850, Telegraph Hill is covered with tents of the first gold seekers.

One year later, a grand armada of 774 ships from every conceivable corner of the earth clogged San Francisco Bay. It took an extraordinary panoramic photograph by William Schoo to capture this scene. Many of the ships were abandoned and scuttled by their gold-hungry crews, or made over into stores and saloons to crowd the boardwalks of the rapidly expanding city. The artists who made these watercolors, Frank Marriott, observed that the new comrade San Francisco is at once impressed with the feverish state of excitement that pervades the whole population. Another observer put it this way. Take a sprinkling of sober sighted New England businessmen, mingle them with a number of Chinese laborers, a dark band of Australian convicts, a dash of frontier desparados,

some professional gamblers and general swindlers, and having thrown in a promiscuous crowd of disappointed lovers and black sheep. Stir up the mixture, season strongly with gold fever, bad liquor, cards, odes, pistols, knives, and dancing, and you have something approximating society in the early days. An individual who fit perfectly in the disgust of characters was Juan Joshua Abraham Norton. In 1849, he lost a fortune by trying and failing to corner the rice market in San Francisco. Along with his riches, he lost his grip on reality and happily proclaimed himself the emperor of the United States and the protector of Mexico. The citizens of San Francisco readily honored his checks, drawn upon a make-believe royal treasury, and presented him with a plume hat and a gold braided frock. The photographer Edward

Mybridge made a portrait of him seated on a bicycle, and for three decades his eminence was among the most honored and beloved residents of the town. For a city that honored eccentricity, its architecture was no exception. The first frame buildings had been shipped around the horn from New England. Soon, whole houses, in sections, arrived from Hamburg, London, Hong Kong, and Australia. Paid for by the incredible wealth from the gold fields. An army of architects went to work, and San Francisco, the golden, shining cosmopolitan city, rose up out of the boom. There was everything here, Corinthian column, gingerbread cottages, onion domes from Russia, British lions on guard, even Arabian palaces.

San Francisco was no longer a western town, or even some might say a strictly American city. It rose like an edifice in a dream. Then, just after the turn of the century, it all came tumbling down. April 18th, 1906, the day after the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire. 490 city blocks went up in flames. 250,000 were homeless, and the paper said the great city was doomed. Certain hellfire and brimstone preachers said that this was God's wrath and repribution for wanton waste and speculation, for those who built their city on a tide of gold. Others couldn't help but notice that this catastrophe didn't quite fit in with the religion

of manifest destiny. Was this what lay beyond the golden horizon of lights as pioneers? Was this the future ensured by Mr. Gas miraculously floating goddess in robes of white? Whatever the answers, the citizens of San Francisco rebuilt their dream, piece by piece at the very edge of the far west. A photographer named Arnold Guemphi perfectly captured the mood of the times when he took this picture. Two ladies of the night standing, laughing defiantly in front of their apocalyptic city. It's a most unexpected trigger to the indomitable spirit of the golden west.