Loggers systematically cut over huge areas, floating great rafts of logs downriver to giant steam-powered sawmills and leaving forests of stumps for hundreds of miles. The slash cover of dead wood and brush fueled terrifying fires that consumed millions of acres, destroying the humus layer of the already nutrient-poor soil. In 1871 an inferno raging through the woods of Wisconsin destroyed the town of Peshtigo and killed more than fifteen hundred people, far more than died in the famous great Chicago fire of the same year. By the turn of the century, the logging industry had used up the timber in the Great Lakes region and was moving on to the South and the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Logging was unsightly, but mining pushed the boundaries of scenic ugliness. In California, the use of high-pressure water jets to wash down mountains of deposits, so that laborers could cheaply and quickly separate the gold from the rubble, washed tons of silt downriver, burying plant life in avalanches of debris. Farmers with clogged irrigation systems and inundated crops fought bitter legislative battles against mining companies. But by the time the federal judge declared hydraulic mining a public nuisance and issued a permanent injunction in 1884, an estimated twelve billion tons of earth had been eroded away. The resulting silt reduced the depth of San Francisco Bay by three to six feet. Even greater destruction to the bay came from the mercury mines in the foothills surrounding the town of San Jose. Mercury was used to separate gold from quartz rock, and mining operations dumped tons of the stuff into streams that fed the bay, leaving a legacy that poisons the fish to this day.
The Lakeview gusher, Kern County, California. Photograph by the U.S. Geological Survey, 1910. Library of Congress.
Petroleum drilling also left ecological scars. The oil spills from gushers polluted soil and water and, catching fire, sent heavy clouds of acrid smoke drifting across the countryside. The Lakeview gusher in Kern County, California, spewed out 378 million gallons of crude before it was capped, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Plunder and pollution defined frontier economies. Americans scrambled to grab resources and profits. Rapid exploitation rewarded the fiercest competitors, and a laissez-faire government stood aside—or enthusiastically aided the sharks. There seemed to be plenty of nature to go around. The frontier idea was premised on vastness. Fish, furs, minerals, timber, oil—all were available in unending supply. Or so it seemed, until the fear of the closing frontier woke Americans to the dangers.
. . .
Nineteenth-century landscape artists promoted the awesome bigness of the West. Albert Bierstadt, an American who trained in Europe painting Rhine castles and snow-capped Alps, specialized in the monumental. Returning to the states, he joined a government survey party headed west and found the Rockies “the best material for the artist in the world.” Entranced, he tramped and sketched his way through the Wind River Mountains, then returned to his studio in New York City to paint a number of huge finished works. In The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863), nature loomed and belittled man. On a canvas measuring six feet by ten, Bierstadt brought viewers into a panoramic and infinitely receding landscape of valley, lake, and mountains, replete with a busy Indian encampment in the foreground. Dramatic interplays of shadow and sunlight embolden the distant peaks and overwhelm the human subjects. The critics were impressed: “No more genuine and grand American work has been produced of that majestic barrier of the West where the heavens and the earth meet in brilliant and barren proximity.” Bierstadt took the canvas on a triumphant tour through the United States and Europe, then sold it for the unprecedented sum of twenty-five thousand dollars (half a million today). Bierstadt arranged to have the picture engraved and sold subscriptions during the tour, netting him thousands of dollars more.17
“The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak.” Engraving by J. Smillie, 1866, based on a painting by Albert Bierstadt, 1863. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The idea that human beings could subdue this place seemed silly. Bierstadt’s West exhausted humans, they did not exhaust it. In fact, Bierstadt exaggerated his western landscapes to illicit emotions of awe and sublimity. Along the way, he roused skeptics as well. Mark Twain once described one of his Yosemite landscapes as “beautiful—considerably more beautiful than the original,” and joked that the painting had “more atmosphere of Kingdom-Come than California.” Verisimilitude, however, was never Bierstadt’s shtick. He offered magic and mystery to a wartorn nation that hungered for magnificence and a deep connection to North American nature. Europe had its castles, cathedrals, and centuries of recorded history. Nineteenth-century Americans countered with purple mountains. Not everyone approved of Bierstadt’s maximalist style, but his massive canvases represented a vision of western nature as beyond human comprehension, much less domination. The images suggested that dramatic western scenery was a national treasure.18
The other great late nineteenth-century painter of monumental western landscapes was Thomas Moran, an artist as well steeped in English romanticism as Bierstadt was in its German form. Studying in London, Moran fell in the thrall of the romantic landscapes of J. M. W. Turner, a colorist who in his last canvases seemed to anticipate impressionism. Longing for dramatic western vistas to feed his style, in 1871 Moran joined the Yellowstone survey party of Ferdinand V. Hayden. Jay Cooke, the financier and railroad tycoon, loaned Moran five hundred dollars for the trip, hoping that his paintings would rouse interest in the region for his Northern Pacific Railroad. After the expedition, Moran produced a series of watercolors for Cooke, engraved for reproduction. Together with the photographic prints of William Henry Jackson, another artistic member of the Hayden party, Moran’s images of towers, geysers, and pinnacles helped convince Congress to create Yellowstone National Park. Like Bierstadt, Moran believed in gigantism. He hung canvases over entire walls to bully viewers with his perspective. Congress purchased his Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872) for the astounding sum of ten thousand dollars. And Americans could hang smaller versions of Moran’s work on their living room walls when chromolithographs of his Yellowstone views became available in 1876.
Moran and Bierstadt encouraged the public to think of western landscapes as a spectacular emblem of America. The artists connected people to iconic places, giving New Yorkers and Philadelphians a stake in corners of Wyoming and California. This art promulgated many mistaken notions. The mountains were never that tall, the valleys never that deep. But the point was the emotions these images conjured, not the facts they transmitted. Moran and Bierstadt made Americans feel for the West, and they induced mixed sensations. Their images played on the environment’s grandeur and vastness. Their West seemed to have plenty of room for miners, farmers, and nature lovers. But they also splashed their canvases with worry. The places could be lost. If Americans cut the forests and ground the mountains to dust, what would signal their uniqueness? The anticipation of ruin made this art compelling. Americans bought both the promise of abundance and the sense of loss when they purchased a knockoff.
“The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.” Lithograph by Thomas Moran, 1875. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
In 1892 Thomas Moran produced one of his most striking watercolors. In Smelting Works at Denver, huge smokestacks belch toxic wastes into the crisp air, the smoke, mountains, and sky dissolving into a haze of yellows, browns, and blacks. Moran found a terrible beauty in both the towers and pinnacles of Yellowstone and a cityscape of the emerging industrial West. Americans appreciated both landscapes for they communicated a similar idea—abundance and ruination traveled on the same breath of western atmosphere.
. . .
The mingling of industrial might and nature appreciation didn’t end with Moran’s smelter haze. The same people who benefited most from the West’s mines, oil patches, and urban sprawl often led and financed the preservation of iconic animals and landscapes. Missing from Moran’s watercolor was the owner of the smelter, the capitalist who produced the smoke and collected
profits, who could also invest in philanthropic causes and such aesthetic pursuits as protecting natural beauty and purchasing nature paintings.
“Smelting Works at Denver.” Watercolor by Thomas Moran, 1892. © The Cleveland Museum of Art. Bequest of Mrs. Henry A. Averett for the Dorothy Burnham Everett Memorial Collection.
Elites were prominent in the environmental movement from the start. Game animals caught their attention first. Traditionally Americans hunted to eat, to cover their bodies, and to acquire skins for trade, but by the mid-nineteenth century sport hunting had become popular, especially among men of the American upper class. Sport hunting, as opposed to traditional hunting, focused on means rather than ends. There were fair and foul ways of taking game. Sport hunters were outraged, for example, by the continuing war of market hunters on the passenger pigeon. On a number of occasions groups of sportsmen attempted to prevent the attacks on large nesting colonies of pigeons; there were armed confrontations and occasionally even exchanges of gunfire, but they did little good. Eventually the depletion of their favorite trout streams and hunting ranges pushed sportsmen to organize, pressing state legislatures for laws limiting and regulating the take of wildlife. The campaign for hunting laws began after the Civil War, and by century’s end a majority of states and localities had established fish and game commissions, defined fishing and hunting seasons, and set licensing requirements and bag limits. Wealthy sportsmen initiated the first organized efforts to regulate the use of the environment.
George Bird Grinnell, a patrician New Yorker with a doctorate in zoology from Yale University, rallied support for protecting iconic western animals. In 1880 Grinnell became editor of Forest and Stream, one of a number of sportsmen’s magazines founded in the late nineteenth century, and he used its pages to condemn the destruction of the buffalo as “mercenary and wanton butchery” and to decry the “corruption” of hunting by “the mighty dollar.” In 1887 Grinnell joined with Theodore Roosevelt in convening a group of wealthy sportsmen to establish a national society for the promotion of sports hunting. The Boone and Crockett Club—named for two of the nation’s legendary backwoodsmen—sought to perpetuate the traits of “energy, resolution, manliness, self-reliance, and capacity for self-help.” The frontier experience had cultivated a “vigorous manliness” among Americans, Roosevelt wrote, and “unless we keep the barbarian values, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.” The Boone and Crockett Club quickly became the nation’s most influential lobby, working for the protection of threatened species and the creation of a system of wildlife refuges.19
Conserving nature involved police work, and the humans most likely to be policed were the same ones Frederic Remington feared. Hunting regulators targeted Italian immigrants in rural Pennsylvania who hunted songbirds for recreation and a gustatory treat. Other reformers went after middle-class city women who purchased hats decorated with the plumes of endangered species. Game wardens patrolled parks and reserves in the Adirondacks to stop locals from using (in their language, “wasting”) forest resources. The United States Army oversaw Yellowstone National Park from 1886 to 1918, arresting American Indian trespassers—Eastern Shoshones and Bannocks—as well as white poachers who entered the park for elk and bison trophies. In Glacier National Park, created in 1910, officials excluded the Blackfeet from their traditional hunting grounds and policed the boundary line that separated federally conserved nature from federally reserved Indians. The park’s eastern edge abutted the Blackfeet Indian Reservation for hundreds of miles.
Saving beautiful places from unethical despoilers reversed the federal government’s long-standing practice of selling or donating the public domain to private owners. Some landscapes and resources, conservationists argued, were too valuable for the market. Federal power must be exerted to keep the scenery intact or the stock well managed so that future generations could enjoy the grandeur, the board-feet, or the irrigation water. The glacier-carved Yosemite Valley in the central Sierra Nevada of California went public first. Gold miners “discovered” the gorgeous valley in 1851 and attacked the villages of the native Yosemite people, driving them from the site the Indians knew as Ahwahnee—place of deep grass. Within a few years, tourists trekked into the area, and their published accounts and drawings brought the spectacular vistas to national attention. The combination of granite cliffs, lofty waterfalls, verdant meadows, clear streams, and huge redwoods made Yosemite the perfect subject for romantic art of the sublime and picturesque, exemplified by Albert Bierstadt’s paintings of the valley, widely distributed as engravings and chromolithographs. In 1864 a group of prominent citizens, including Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York City’s Central Park, persuaded Congress to grant the valley to the state of California for “public use, resort and recreation.” Small, only ten square miles, the reserve bubble-wrapped the scenery. Nineteenth-century visitors did not think in terms of environments or ecosystems. Soon tourist facilities cluttered the valley floor. But Yosemite escaped the shearing force of sheep and cow teeth; the destiny of most grassy locales in the West at this time was a vigorous gobbling, not an aggressive ogling. Compared to other sites, Yosemite was lightly exploited, and writers and artists called for more “nature reserves.” These voices were given a powerful boost when the Southern Pacific Railroad noted a significant uptick in tourist traffic along the rail lines leading to Yosemite.20
Railroad tourism dated from the advent in the late 1860s of Pullman sleeper cars—rolling hotels, paneled in mahogany, lights shaded with Tiffany glass—bringing travelers west in comfort and style. Western railroads needed places to transport the plush crowd, and federal parks became destinations. Long treasured by Indians as a rich hunting and fishing ground, the headwater region of the Yellow stone River, high in the Rocky Mountains, was legendary among fur trappers for its iridescent pools, roaring waterfalls, and mirror lakes. The trappers’ reports seemed ludicrous—water exploding from the ground, boiling springs beside icy streams. But in 1870 a party of scientists and local boosters hiked into the area and confirmed the tall tales. The next year, University of Pennsylvania geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden, founder of the United States Geological Survey, led a Yellowstone expedition (the one that included photographer William Henry Jackson and artist Thomas Moran). Hayden’s report—and particularly Jackson’s photographs and Moran’s watercolors—generated considerable interest. Railroad financier Jay Cooke, mindful of the profits that ticket-buying tourists would bring his Northern Pacific Railroad, capitalized on the publicity to strongly suggest that Congress consider declaring Yellowstone “a public park forever—just as it reserved that far inferior wonder, the Yosemite Valley.”21
Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. Photograph by William Henry Jackson, 1873. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Unlike Yosemite, the Yellowstone region belonged to the federal government (Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho did not become states until 1890), so Congress would have to create the park. Assured that this remote and cold terrain would defy agriculture and other normal capitalist manipulations, that being set aside would do “no harm to the material interests of people,” in March 1872 Congress designated more than two million acres on the Yellowstone River as “a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” stipulating that all the timber, minerals, wildlife, and “curiosities” be retained “in their natural conditions.” Withdrawing land from the survey and dispersal system for “pleasure” brought vociferous protest. One congressman barked that commercial development was being stymied to placate “a few sportsmen bent only on the protection of a few buffalo,” and another snorted that this heralded the government’s entry into “the show business.” Others thought differently. A Missouri senator declared Yellowstone a “great breathing-space for the national lungs,” and the support of the railroad interests helped redirect American land policy from a blanket-order “survey and sell” to a stance that had the state keeping the spectacular
stuff. Yellow stone remained the only national park until 1890, when the Southern Pacific successfully lobbied for federal legislation creating a wilderness sanctuary in the area surrounding Yosemite Valley and another to protect the groves of huge sequoias in the southern Sierra Nevada.22
Railroad tourism: an advertisement by the Northern Pacific Railroad promoting Yellowstone National Park, 1889. Author’s collection.
From these beginnings, wilderness and commerce were entwined around a staff of tourism in the national park system. Advocates for scenic landscape protection, however, framed the debate as a conflict between capitalism and nature. No nineteenth-century American played this refrain with more verve and eloquence than John Muir. Born in Scotland and raised on a hardscrabble Wisconsin farm, Muir escaped his domineering Presbyterian parents through reading, fiddling with mechanical devices, and exploring nature. He left home, labored in an Indianapolis carriage factory, and, after a workplace accident temporarily blinded him, tramped from Canada to Mexico and sailed from Alaska to the South Seas, writing about his experiences. A fervent disciple of transcendentalism, Muir once invited Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was touring California, to “worship” with him at Yosemite. Emerson accepted, but instead of sleeping with Muir under the stars, he bunked in one of the park’s tourist hotels, explaining that the wilderness was “a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife.” For Muir, nature was all—wife, mistress, offspring, even God, though quite unlike the God of his strict Presbyterian ancestors. The forests, he wrote in one of his first published essays, were “God’s first temples.” Muir’s wilderness philosophy drew heavily on the contrast between sacred nature and what he called “the galling harness of civilization.”23
The American West Page 40