Pimlott Picturing Territories

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lililllil
3 1822 03454 7349
Mark Pimlott
Without and within
essays on
territory and the interior
Contents
Without and within: an introduction 9
Picturing fictions 15
Picturing territories 59
Territory and interior: United States 1880-1939 111
Territory and interior: United States after 1945 175
Prototypes for the continuous interior 243
Only within 271
The templum of the Earth. Herzog
August Bibliothek WolfenbOttel:
Cod. Guelf. 36.23 Aug. 2
2
, Bl. 41v
(Corpus agrimensorum
Romanorum) from Joseph
Rykwert The Idea of a Town: the
Anthropology of Urban form in
Rome, Italy and the Ancient World
(Princeton NJ, Princeton
University Press 1976)
1. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a
Town: the Anthropology of Urban
Form in Rome, Italy and the
Ancient World (Pr incet on NJ,
Princeton University Press, 1976)
Picturing territories
It is difficult, sitting at a desk in a room in a house in a traditional
European city, to imagine what the experience of a frontier might actually
be: what it would be like to confront a place at the limit of what has been
known, a place that is not a place, that is unknown. It would be quite
unlike the experience one might have when finding oneself in an
unfamiliar neighbourhood or some remote place having been dropped
off by a coach. In this latter instance, the prospect of finding someone
to provide guidance as to how to reach civilisation would be always
available; there would be the road along which the bus continued its
journey; there would be traces of human action, of urbanisation. At a
frontier, there would be no such indexes, no roads, no signs, no cities,
no places, no names. Such a situation offers two alternatives: retreat
or appropriation. It is this last course that sees the imagining, naming,
marking and making of territory.
It is difficult, too, to imagine that such a condition could ever have
existed for the thoroughly urbanised European environment. Yet, this
situation of beginning that pertains to each new settlement has marked
the development of all civilisations, including this Western, urban
civilisation of today. One understands the traditional European city
as an accumulation of spaces.dedicated to habitation, collective activity,
public life and civic values achieved over a long period of time. There is
evidence of the efforts of previous periods in history and their affective
ideas: accreted, effaced or enduring; there is evidence of character
specific to each city, again, accumulated over time; there is evidence
of the borrowing or adaptation of ideas from other places and other
times, the imagery of other places, and fantasy. There is evidence
of organisation, of hierarchies offunctional and social status; and
representation, from the depiction of function (dwelling, depot) to
the depiction of institutional elites in the monumental fabric of the city.
There are the spaces of the city: the yards, streets, open spaces, squares,
parks- the places within the city's confines that constitute its interior.
From these spaces it is difficult to recognise the origin of the city, the
moment of its inception. Most frequently, it exists in myth.
In his accounts of the origins of Rome and Roman settlements, Joseph
Rykwert describes both the rites that accompanied their foundation and
some explanation of the original or mythical events from which they
sprang.
1
The foundation rites of these settlements, very often at frontiers
in Europe, Africa and Asia Minor, involved the reading of sites in relation
to the world and the heavens, performed by an augur; the imagining and
drawing of its territory, the templum; the derivation of its orientation,
its quartering by the cardo and the decumanus; the surveying of the site
59
. I
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-- . 7 ,,
'...
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The Roman agrimensor at work,
reconstruction drawing by P.
Frigerio, after Frigerio 'Antichi
lnstrumenti Technici' Como,
1933, from Joseph Rykwert, The
Idea of a Town: the Anthropology
of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and
the Ancient World (Princeton NJ,
2. Leonardo Benevolo, transl. Judith
Landry, The Architecture of the
Renaissance volumes I, II (London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)
3. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
(New York, Oxford University
Press, 1978)
and the locating of its important buildings, and the setting of its
boundaries and gates. This last act in particular was invested with
special significance. For the ploughing of the ground (ploughing itself
invested with the sexual symbolism of the union between man
and earth) with an ox and a cow-the ox adjacent to the area outside
the settlement, the cow adjacent to the area set inside-defined the
city protected within its boundary and the world without. The city
was therefore founded in contradistinction to this world without,
conceived and made as both an actual and symbolic territory claimed
from the World.
The New World offered opportunities for European urban civilisation
to expand, explore, exploit and colonise; to found new settlements in a
vast, unknown domain, a truly new World. First, Portuguese and Spanish
settlements, then Dutch, French, and British began as pragmatic
arrangements of people and institutions. A new settlement established in
a hinterland-at a frontier-could either re-enact the city as it was
known at home, or create a city at its moment of origin.
2
The early
settlements in the Americas, such as those in Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Sao
Paolo and Lima, borrowed their forms from European models, with little
regard to local circumstances or the appropriateness of their application.
Early Dutch settlements such as New Amsterdam, later to become New
York under the British, repeated practices of Dutch town-making, making
canals (in solid rock) where none were necessary.
3
The buildings
reiterated the forms of those in the mother countries. Yet, with time and
the freedom offered by both the completely new conditions of the New
World and the apparent limitlessness of its frontier, the forms of these
settlements were often conceived in the image of the ideal as set out by
the Roman precedent (whose own praxis came from ideals more deeply
ingrained), with their cardinal aspects, their quartered and gridded
territories, their keenly felt limits set against the unknown (and possibly
60
4. Leonardo Benevolo, t ransl. Judit h
Ancient World (Princeton NJ,
Afbeelding van de Stadt
Amsterdam in Nieuw Nederland.
'The Castello Plan' 1660,
Museum of the City of New York,
Gi ft of La Biblioteca Medicea
Laurenziana, 49.150
hostile) without; from established military practice (not estranged from
the Roman precedents); and from other ideal models, such as suggested
by readings and interpretations of Thomas More's Utopia.
4
Whether idealised or remembered, the form of America's first
settlements realised an ancient and long-absent aspect of urban reality:
that the outside that lay beyond the confines of the city was not necessarily
the domain of competing or enemy cities, but the unknown. In other
words, the real conditions of the American settlement were very close to
those experienced in much earlier settlements, in time much closer to the
origins of human civilisation. In addition, there was the compulsion to
expand, to extend into the domain of the unknown. This remains the germ
of American urban civilisation.
Devices
The purpose of this essay is to describe devices used to territorialise
and urbanise the frontier of the United States that have come to dominate
the forms of its urban civilisation: their genesis, development and their
effects on public spaces. One dominant pattern (of ancient origin), the grid,
5
plays a central role in the very modern conception of American territory.
The conquest of this territory as it was realised in the United States
during the nineteenth century and its means have influenced the making
of its cities and their spaces: they bear the marks of the territorialisation
6. Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on the
State of Virginia' in Albert Ellery
Bergh [ed.], The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson vol. 2 (1853) on
www.etext.lib.virginia.edu
8. Dee Brown, The American West
(London, Pocket Books/Simon &
Schuster, 2004)
9. Rosalind E. Krauss, 'Photography's
Discursive Spaces' in The Originality
of the Avant-Garde, and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge MA,
MIT Press, 1985)
Schuster, 2004)
12. Malcolm Bell III & Junior League
of Savannah, Historic Savannah
(Savannah GA, Historic Savannah
Foundation, 1968) 3
and urbanisation of its vast frontier, an achievement effected over
remarkably short period of time. It was an achievement enabled b
zeal for independence held by individual settlers; a sympathetic e
felt by its political elite, forged in the heat of revolution, resulting in
idealism about the State, its institutions and the means available to it 6
actualised conceptual models of territorial appropriation that
the last phase of Renaissance thinking;
1
the development of industrial
civilisation and its demand for resources and the terrain wherein they
were held; commercial interests and their need to speculate and generate
capital; military interests and their demands for perpetual revolution and
conquest; actual needs to connect disparate populations together that
required infrastructure on a scale never previously achieved; the dispersal
and near-annihilation of indigenous people living in this territory;
8
and
representations that galvanised a collective desire to occupy these
territories by picturing its empty and emptied spaces, to make them
imaginary.
9
Despite the various histories of European colonies in the Americas,
and despite the various settlement plans that were proposed (and built,
in great number, in a most rational manner between the fifteenth and
eighteenth centuries, particularly by the Spanish in Peru, Colombia,
Mexico and California),
10
it is the United States where town planning,
hitherto pragmatic and modestly symbolic, was conceptualised and
projected on a territorial scale. The establishment of settlement changed
from methods colonial in character, bearing the traces or hopes of
far-away fatherlands, into a strategy of possession for a people at a
continuously advancing frontier (although it is known that indigenous
people lived 'on the other side', it was always assumed that they could be
pushed back into an endless beyond).
11
One notes the difference between
these two modes of planning and action in the plan and view of a colonial
settlement, Savannah, Georgia (1733), when contrasted with the abstract
planning and territorial grid of a revolutionary nature, as proposed by
Thomas Jefferson in his Land Ordinance of1784 (modified to become law
in 1785, further modified for widespread implementation as the
Northwest Ordinance in 1787).
The clearing: Savannah
The plan for Savannah by James Oglethorpe, as authorised by George II as
part of the urbanisation of the new colony of Georgia, provided specific
areas ofland for town dwellers, suburb-dwellers and farmers, each with
their characteristic plot size, organised in a grid of super-blocks with
specific limits: 'In the assignment of land to the individual colonists,
Oglethorpe granted each freeholder 50 acres (20.23 hectares) of land,
which in addition to the 60 x 90 foot (roughly 20 x 30 metres) town-lots
or "lotts for houses", included "garden lotts" of 5 acres (just over 2
hectares) each, and beyond such garden lotts hath set out farms of 44
acres ... ' (17.8 hectares).
12
Each time the city grew, it would expand in units
of super-blocks.
13
In an image of the settlement made by townsman Peter
Gordon (1734), the lots can be seen to be drawn out in a kind of clearing:
the town is set against the wilderness. Among the houses are the
monumental or public buildings: ' ... the guard house, the tabernacle,
62
Peter Gordon, View of Savannah
as it stood the 29th March 1734,
Library of Congress, Washington
DC, Historic Urban Plans, from
Malcolm Bell Ill & Junior League of
Savannah, Historic Savannah
14. Malcolm Bell III & Junior League
of Savannah, Historic Savannah
(Savannah GA, Historic Savannah
Foundation, 1968) 5
15. Bell, ibid. 2
16. Simon Schama, Landscape
and Memory (London, Harper
Perennial, 1995) 49
17. Schama, ibid. 192, 193
P1ctunng terntones
courthouse, public store, public mill, draw well, fort, and the parsonage
house ... '
14
Beyond the defined area of the township there is pictured a
wooded wilderness. Some grazing of creatures happens there, but it
was acknowledged to be potentially dangerous, and so a parcel of land
was reserved within the system to accommodate those who would have
to find space quickly in case of war. The whole plan was devised in
consideration of easy defence. Indeed, 'Where the town lands end, the
villages begin; four villages make a ward without, which depends on
one of the wards within the town. The use of this is, in case war should
happen, the villagers without may have places in the town, to bring
their families and their cattle into for refuge, and to that purpose, there
is a square left in every ward, big enough for the outwards to come in.'
(Francis Moore (1736)).
15
This land without held both a rational terror and an irrational
anxiety more deeply felt, with its place in sylvan myth.
16
The wood was
outside the jurisdictive and psychological control of the settlement; it
represented the terror of the wilderness, shelter to wild men and beasts, a
shelter that had to be progressively cleared.
17
Despite the super-block of
Savannah's plan-a specifically American and modem innovation in
planning consistent with practice throughout the Americas from the
63
..
The territorial grid established by
Thomas Jefferson with the Land
Ordinance of 1785, from Leonardo
Benevolo, Architecture of the
Renaissance, volume II (London,
18. Frederick Jackson Turner, The
Significance of the Frontier in
American History(New York, 1920)
on http://xr oads.virginia.edu/
19. Thomas Jeffer son, Constitution
of the United States of America,
(Library of Congress, 1776)
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sixteenth century onwards-there were still day-to-day difficulties set
by the limiting and threatening wilderness. Savannah was essentially a
colonial settlement, which characterised the space outside its limits as
hostile. It would require a leap of the imagination, profound political
change, idealistic legislation and their related devices to transcend these
limits and destroy both real and imagined antagonism. Although
legislation would enable the appropriation ofland through various
agencies, it was to be the idea of the frontier-and its correlate of
continuous expansion-that would fire the popular imagination and
remain its inspiration.
18
The plan of Savannah and the grid devised by Jefferson are separated
by the facts of revolution and political independence. In due course, the
links that existed between Britain and its American colonies became
strained by the Americans' feeling that they should determine their own
affairs in the light of Britain's exploitation of the colony's resources, and
of its people in relentless and excessive taxation without return of either
service or protection.
19
The colonists were not to be dominated,
purchased or converted, as the indigenous populations of South and
Central America had been.
20
The Americans felt that they were no longer
settlers, linked by blood, language and birth to Britain, but had become
'native' to America, indeed American. Thomas Jefferson-stat esman,
thinker, essayist and architect-had dwelt upon the issues of
government and self-determination, inalienable rights and freedoms of
the individual for some time before his drafting of the Constitution of the
United States (1776). It was Jefferson's belief that governments as they
were known at that time tended to corruption, and the only legitimate
government for the colonial States would be one elected directly from its
people (freemen), who could then pursue their own interests and destiny:
64
21. Thomas Jefferson, Constitution
of the United States of America,
(Library ofCongress, 1776)
22. Thomas Jefferson, letter to
Thaddeus Koschiusko (1810)
ME12:369, University of Virginia
23. Jefferson, Thomas, 'Notes on the
www.etext.lib.virginia.edu, op. cit.
24. Dana Cuff 'Community Property:
Enter the Architect or, the Politics of
Form' in Michael Bell, Sze Tsung
Leong [eds.]. Slow Space (New York,
Monacelli Press, 1998)
State ofVirginia' in Albert Ellery
26. Hennepin County, Minnesota,
'History of the Public Land Survey &
Hennepin County' on
www.co.hennepin.mn.us/vgn/portal
/ internet/ hcdetailmaster/0,2300,12
73. 83307 .115204042,00.html
27. Joseph M. Jonas, 'The Land
Ordinance of May 20, 1785: Ohioville
Borough's Main Connection to the
American Revolution', Milestones,
v.9, no.4 (1984) on www.bchistory.
org/beavercounty /BeaverCountyCo
mmunities/Ohioville/Ohioville/Ohio
villLand0rdMF84.html
28. 'Ordinance of1787; Great
Northwest Ordinance' on www.u-s-
history.com/pages/h365.html
29. 'The Articles of Confederation
Government: Ordinance of1784;
Public Land Policy' on www.u-s-
history.com/pages/h1158.html
30. 'Introduction to Ohio Land History'
on www.users.rcn.com/deeds/ohio
t-'1ctunng terntones
'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.
21
'The freedom and happiness
of man ... [are] the sole objects of all legitimate govemment.'
22
In his experience of the (vast) State of Virginia, there were very few
indigenous buildings of any consequence, and even fewer works of
architecture. Overall, the building stock of wood and plaster, unhappy in
appearance, was indicative of the waste that was common among a
people with plenty of space but no hope or purpose.
23
Self-determination
was necessary; Jefferson had an idea of how this self-determination
might be effected, not only in the terms of a constitution of a new State,
but how that State set about guaranteeing equitable means for the
realisation of happiness of the common man. This happiness would be
connected to the right to pursue business; the right to own, live on the
land and be sustained by the fruits of his labour (inspired by the ideas of
Thomas Locke);
24
the right to self-government; the birth-right of equality.
25
Specific devices, instituted in the forms of Laws and Ordinances, would
serve as the ground from which self-realisation could flourish.
The Land Ordinance of 1785
Soon after the conclusion of peace with Britain (1783), Jefferson devised
a plan for the survey, partition and distribution of land which would
become adopted as law, and serve as the model for all land distribution in
the United States until the present day.
26
This became necessary as it was
clear that the land west of the Applachian Mountains stretching to the
Mississippi River would be finally occupied by people from the coastal
States in search ofland. Each of these States (Jefferson's Virginia among
them) had overlapping claims to deep inland hinterlands, largely
unpopulated by Americans. First, indigenous claims were surrendered
through treaties and purchases, which were the subject of grave misgivings
by the indigenous societies.
27
It was decided furthermore that the coastal
States should concede the Western, inland portion of their lands and all
their contested claims for the creation of an inner layer ofTerritories-
N orthwest and Southwest-to be populated and cultivated, each of which
would be able to apply for Statehood when their populations reached a
level of 60,000.
28
The Land Ordinance devised by Jefferson in 1784 had the
object of ensuring that these hinterlands remained part of the Union, and
that when populated could contribute to the repayment of debt incurred
by its War oflndependence with Britain. The guarantee of the areas'
population was the rapidly growing immigration to the country from
various parts of Europe. Jefferson established procedures for these areas
to achieve Statehood, and furthermore attempted to institute the
prohibition of slavery in them.
29
This last component of his plan was
rejected by Congress, leaving an anomaly which would be a central
contributing factor much later in the Civil War between North and South.
The plan also had an instrumental component, namely a system for
the division ofland. The Ordinance, which became law in 1785, proposed a
grid of varying dimensions, suited to the making of both city plots and
farms: 'The land was to be surveyed into 6 square mile townships, and
those townships were to be divided into 1 mile square "lots". Half the
land was to be held as townships and half as lots.'
30
After an initial
survey within the Territory of Ohio, modifications to the Ordinance were
65

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Township plat of Thirty-six sections
(Mark Pim Iott)
31. 'Introduction to Ohio Land Hist ory'
32. 'Public Land Policy: Ordinance
of1785' on www.u-s-history.com/
pages/h1150.html
33. www.u-s-history.com
Renaissance volumes 1, II (London,
made, due to pressures brought to bear by the coastal or landless States
and those southern States campaigning for the continuation of slavery.
A new law, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, met the various objections
regarding the relation between the established States and the new
Territories, which had been felt to have been given unfair advantage in
the previous proposal. These States had already felt aggrieved to have
conceded their claims for the potentially resource-rich hinterlands.
The new Ordinance featured a revised specification for the division of
land, further refined and finalised in 1796: 'It defined the surveying
system to be used by all future public land surveys. In this system the
townships are six miles or 9,6 kilometres square (Jefferson had originally
proposed 10 mile square townships), composed of 36 one-mile (1,6
kilometres) square sections, each of which may be sub-divided into
quarters or smaller. The numbering of the sections is serpentine, starting
in the northeast comer of the township. Townships are identified as
being north or south of a baseline and in a range east or west of a
longitudinal meridian line ... '
31
It was further specified that section
numbered 16 of each township should be reserved for an institution of
public education. All other sections would be auctioned to t he public.
The minimum bidding price was to be one dollar per acre (0,4 hectares),
or$ 640 per section. It was hoped that high demand for these lands
would raise substantial funds.
32
However, even the $640 was above the
means of most, and the first sales yielded little in the way of funds for the
Treasury. Furthermore, the 640-acre (259 hectares) sections offered in the
first sales were too large for most farmers. Later, although the system
would be retained, the minimum acreage offered would be reduced.
33
The Land Ordinance determined the distribution and density
of townships and their method of survey, which was to remain unaltered
throughout the entire continental territory. Its methods were unaffected
by topography: its ambition was to be egalitarian and democratic.
The Ordinance could define individual parcels ofland in a township;
it could define the boundaries between new States. Its universal
applicability, tied to the meridians and parallels, distinguished it from
every method that had preceded it, that took into account local
circumstances and had tended to divide land along topographical
boundaries and geological formations. This very quality made the
identification, survey and acquisition of territory-the process
ofterritorialisation- abstract and detached. This was representative
of the universal, revolutionary means that Jefferson wished to place
at the disposal of the American individual.
'Thus the Cartesian network, which guaranteed the measurability
of visible forms in the traditional artistic and scientific system, was
generalized so as to become applicable on any scale, well beyond the
limits that could be embraced by the human eye. The measure of
building plot or structure could be derived, with suitable subdivisions,
from the geometrical co-ordinates which ringed the earthly globe; but
with this generalization the boundaries of traditional culture were
overstepped, for they had been linked precisely to the anthropomorphic
scale of human sight and movements, and a completely new cultural
universe was opened up.'
34
66
35. Rosalind E. Krauss, 'Grids' in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde, and
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge
MA, MIT Press, 1985) 18
36. Rosalind E. Krauss, 'The Originality
of the Avant-garde' in The Originality
MIT Press, 1985) 158
Patrick Gass, Captain Clark and his
men shooting bears, from A
Journal of the Voyages and
Travels of a Corps of Discovery,
Phi ladelphia (1810, Matthew
Carey) Library of Congress 728
Application of the Ordinance: the survey
' ... Logically speaking, the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity.'
35
' ... The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of
inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but- more
importantly, its hostility to narrative ... '
36
Immediately the Northwest Ordinance of1787was made law,
means were undertaken to implement the survey and division of land,
proceeding from east to west. The possibilities of realising the survey at
a truly continental scale came with Thomas Jefferson's Presidency and
the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. It also
marked a point when the wilderness, which had been until that time
actual and local, was completely transformed. The surveys of new
territories in the midst of the continent changed the perception of the
wildnerness and of American space, particularly as it revealed a territory
that was not endlessly wooded, as the east had been-and subjected to
endless and brutal clearing- but vast, spacious and relatively barren.
Jefferson commissioned an expedition to explore the Interior from Captain
Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark. Lewis was Jefferson's private
secretary, living with him in Washington and party to his decisions on
policy. The expedition was one of discovery: the people involved in the
expedition became known as the Corps of Discovery, making conceptual
claims on a territory which had until then been, in Jefferson's mind at least,
a fantastic place of volcanoes and strange beasts. The Lewis and Clark
expedition of 1803-1806 was to document the landscape, its topographic
and geological features, its flora and fauna, and its climate throughout
different times of the year: in essence, the expedition was commissioned
37. Gerard Baker, 'What happened to
the Indians in the years after Lewis
and Clark?' on www.pbs.org/
Jewisandclark/living/idx..9.html
38. Stephen Ambrose, 'Why Did
Jefferson Want to Explore the West?'
on www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/
living/idx..1.html
Schuster, 2004) 412
40. Brown, ibid. 34
41. National Park Service 'Government
Surveys: the U.S. Army Corps of
Tupographical Engineers' on www.nps.
gov / jeff/lewisclark2/ circa1804/West
wardExpansion/EarlyExplorers/Gov
ernmentSurveys.htm; 'Railroad
surveys' on www.nps.gov/jeff/
lewisclark2/circa1804/WestwardEx
pansion/EarlyExplorers/Railroad.htm
to discover what its prospects were for human habitation and sustenance.
Famously assisted by a young female Indian guide, the expedition survived
through its negotiated relationships with, and strategic- in retrospect
misplaced- assistance of the native population.
37
Jefferson wanted ~ d
to occupy, populate and exploit: foremost to establish a peaceful and
American territory, one that could sustain a people distributed over an
area the size of a continent, as idealised in his plans for the Land
Ordinance. Jefferson had an insatiable personal appetite for land and its
products, and had substantial holdings himself.
38
The Western territory
was to be the homeland for Jefferson's democratic ideal. The expedition of
Lewis and Clark tested the plausibility of his hypothesis; it was also the
first manifestation of the American adventure, and set the Romantic tone
for the imagining, picturing and occupation of the American West from
then onwards.
The surveying of the Western territories proceeded at great speed
to the Mississippi River. In the meantime, violent conflict continued
with indigenous people at the periphery of populated areas in the east.
From these conflicts, lands were ceded and numerous treaties were
signed with the various Indian tribes and societies, imposing conditions
upon them that were fashioned as guarantees: the consequence was their
continual westward migration. Further purchases ofland were made
from the Spanish in Florida; the lands were immediately occupied by
people from the east. A series of military conflicts between the Indian
nations and the U.S. Army continued from north to south of t he territory.
Defeated nations were forced behind a line west of the Mississippi River.
Their lands were occupied by waves of settlers pushing westward, who
continually demanded new territories. Various expeditions were
undertaken to find routes between the populated areas of the East
and the West Coast, where trade with Asia was possible.
The Oregon Trail, established by 1842 between Independence,
Missouri and Fort Vancouver, Washington Territory (a distance of some
two thousand miles, or 3,200 kilometres), became an extremely well-used
route between the two.
39
The secret expeditions ofJohn C Fremont,
undertaken between 1842 and 1845, were intended to make this route
more secure. Fremont was involved in further, clandestine searches
for yet more passages through the Rockies and Coastal Mountains.
40
' ... the U.S. began the calculated use of expeditions of discovery as
diplomatic weapons. According to Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri
senator, these expeditions were "conceived without {the government's]
knowledge, and executed upon solicited orders, of which the design
was unknown". These covert missions committed the government to
positions on territorial expansion and "manifest destiny" far beyond
any publicly announced policies. Their purpose was to dramatise the
West for the American public.'
41
The missions were marked by widely
publicised tragic incidents, which, in addition to the Gold Rush of 1849 in
California, magnified the West's infamy and capital. With its population
and wealth burgeoning overnight, California became a State in 1850.
Its growth was accompanied by developments in the applications and
distributions of photography, through which the West, and California in
particular, acquired its imagery.
68
42. John L. O'Sullivan, excerpt from
'The Great Nation of Futurity' in The
United States Democratic Review,
vol. 6, no. 23 (1839) 426- 430 on
www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/
osulliva.htm
43. William Gilpin, Mission of
the North American People.
Geographical, Social and Political
(Philadelphia, 1874) 30, quoting a
letter of1846 from Henry Nash
Smith, 'Virgin Land: the Ame rican
West as Symbol and Myth' (1950,1978)
on http:/ /xroads.virginia.edu/
-HYPER/HNS/ home.htm
The West Coast developed dramatically, but in effective isolation. The
space between West and East was a territory occupied by indigenous and
displaced populations that had been pushed westwards as a consequence of
the conflicts, purchases and treaties of their lands in the east.
The Garden: Yosemite and Manifest Destiny
'The American people having derived their origin from many other
nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely
based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate
at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we
have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of
them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the
contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the
formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates
us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as
regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral,
political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our
country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. [ ... ]'
'The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American
greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of
many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of
divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever
dedicated to the worship of the Most High- the Sacred and the 'I'rue. Its
floor shall be a hemisphere- its roof the firmament of the star-studded
heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising
hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no master, but governed by
God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood-of
"peace and good will amongst men ... "'
42
'The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the
continent-to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean-to animate
the many hundred millions of its people and to cheer them upward ... -
to agitate those herculaean masses-to establish a new order in human
affairs .. . -to regenerate superannuated nations ... - to stir the sleep of a
hundred centuries-to teach old nations a new civilization-to confirm
the destiny of the human race- to carry the career of mankind to its
culminating point- to cause a stagnant people to be reborn-to perfect
science-to emblazon history with the conquest of peace-to shed a
new and resplendent glory on mankind-to unite the world in one
social family- to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity-to
absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings
round the world!'
43
The West acted as a magnet for eastern attentions and westward
expansion. Not only were there prospects of personal fortunes to be
made; it was also believed that the West was the natural home-a
Promised Land-for the American People. Encouraged by a combination
ofreligious fervour and the flush of Romanticism, a cult of the West was
generated and given form by the idea of Manifest Destiny, that posited
that the West was the property of Americans by divine right, and that
there was furthermore a moral obligation to appropriate and cultivate
its territory. John O'Sullivan was editor of the United States Democratic
69
Carleton E. Watkins. First view of
the Yosemite Valley from the
Mariposa Trail, California,
1865-1866, The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles. 84.X0.199.3
70
Schuster, 2004) 411-415
45. Sandra S. Phillips, 'To Subdue
the Continent: Photographs of the
Developing West', in Sandra S.
Philips [et al.), Crossing the Frontier:
Photographs of the Developing West
from 1849 to the Present (San
Francisco, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art/Chronicle Books, 1996)
Perennial, 1995) 192, 193
Picturing terntones
Review, who first stated ideals in 1839 that would be called Manifest
Destiny in 1845: it was the will of God that the United States should
control North America in its entirety.
44
This was a holy obligation, which
was taken up by many advocates, including preachers, politicians,
militarists and businessmen. Frequently, these were rolled into one,
such as the politician and apostle of the transcontinental railway, Thomas
Hart Benton, and the engineer, militarist, politician (the first Governor of
Colorado) and self-styled philosopher Colonel William Gilpin, the author
of The Central Gold Region (1860), later published as Mission of the
North American People (1874). According to Sandra Phillips, the duty
implicit in the proselytisers of Manifest Destiny was consistently evoked
in sexual terms, a character resonant with the origin rites of Roman
settlements.
'Attitudes toward the West were expressed in the language of
control: We were to "conquer" Nature, or as Gilpin put it: "subdue" its
geography. Nature was in need of"taming"; she was "wild", "virgin"
and often "dark"; she needed to be "penetrated" and "controlled".
John L. O'Sullivan, who first used the term Manifest Destiny in 1845,
did so in terms of an almost inevitable sexual claim: " ... fit] is by the
right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole
of the continent", he said. Likewise, the eloquent geologist Clarence
King wanted to use his scientific learning to "propel and guide the
great plowshare on through the virgin sod of the unknown".'
'[ .. .] The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, one of the great motivating
forces that promoted rapid development of the West, held that the
American land was providentially favoured and its potential wealth
destined for fruitful use. (Thomas) Cole's sublime wilderness was thus
enthusiastically transformed into a garden, and Jefferson's dream
of a yeoman nation was fulfilled.'
45
This idea could be said to act as justification for whatever occupation,
conquest or exploitation ofland that was desired to be undertaken.
Hitherto, the American wilderness had been habitually treated with
contempt: the English-born Romantic painter Thomas Cole had mourned
the treatment of the land and the spoliation of its natural beauty; James
Madison had bemoaned the 'injurious and excessive destruction' of the
landscape;
46
the awesome expanse of the continental heartland was
r egarded as an obstacle to be traversed as quickly as possible. Manifest
Destiny gave the traversing and occupation of the American West a
purpose, authorising the entire American democratic project as one of
civilisation and investing its manifestation on theland with divine
justification. The texts of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Walt Whitman, in their venerations of the divine in Nature and the
American man, followed Manifest Destiny's lead.
As though evidence of divine Providence, the West was held to be
the Garden (Eden) through the discovery of the Yosemite Valley in
California. This valley, pictured by photographers and painters, became
Manifest Destiny's symbol. Its sublime beauty was a demonstration of
the presence of God in the making of America: proof that Americans
were a chosen people, that Manifest Destiny was not a theory but an
evident fact.
71
47. Rosalind E. Krauss,'Photography's
Discursive Spaces' in The Originality
MIT Press, 1985
the Continent Photographs of the
Photographs of the Developing West
from 1849 to the Present (San
Francisco, San Francisco Museum
of Modem Art/Chronicle Books,
1996) 18; National Gallery of Art,
Washington, 'Carleton B. Watkins:
the Art of Perception'onwww.nga.
gov/exhibitions/watkinsbro
the Continent: Photographs of
the Developing West', in Sandra S.
Photographs of the Developing
West from 1849 to the Present
(San Francisco, San Francisco
Museum of Modem Art/Chronicle
Books, 1996) 18
50. Weston Naef [ed.], In Focus:
Carleton Watkins. Photographs
from the J. Paul Getty Museum
(Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty
Museum, 1997)
51. Phillips, Sandra S. Phillips, 'To
Subdue the Continent: Photographs
of the Developing West', in Sandra S.
West from 1849 to the Present (San
Francisco, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art/Chronicle Books,
1996)19
52. National Gallery of Art,
Washington, 'Carleton E. Watkins:
the Art of Perception' on www.nga.
gov /exhibitions/watkinsbro; Weston
Naef[ed.J,In Focus:
Museum, 1997)
54. National Gallery of Art, ibid.
Perennial, 1995) 191
Though pictured by several photographers including Eadweard
Muybridge, the photographic 'views'
47
made by Carleton E. Watkins were
perhaps the most widely known, advertised and distributed. Watkins had
moved to California in 1851 as a young man like many others, attracted by
the excitement raised by the Gold Rush.
48
Through a series of cultivated
connections (most notably to future railroad baron Collis Huntington)
and fortuitous circumstances, he came to be a photographer, and was
commissioned to photograph the mines of the Mariposa estate-close to
Yosemite-by John C Fremont, who operated them. These photographs
were intended both to document the mines and to attract the attention of
potential investors in them.
49
The Yosemite valley-an extraordinary
landscape of huge, totemic rocky outcrops and waterfalls set around a
meadow with mirror-lakes and a winding river- inspired Watkins to
make photographs. Its beauty had to be represented to be believed. He had
a camera specially made by a carpenter to accommodate extremely large
glass negative plates,-mammoth plates-from which he made contact
prints on site (there were no satisfactory enlargement processes
available to photographers at the time).
50
The first of his eight expeditions
was made in 1861.
51
He was further commissioned to make photographs of
Yosemite in 1864 and 1865 by Josiah Whitney and William Brewer for the
California State Geological Survey.
52
In 1862, Watkins exhibited the first collection of Yosemite
photographs in the windows of the Goupil Gallery in New York, where
they were rapturously received: '.As specimens of the photographic art
they are unequalled. The views are ... indescribably unique and
beautiful. Nothing in the way of landscapes can be more impressive.' -
exhibition review, The New York Times, 1862.
53
The photographs tapped
into the spirit of the country's leading literary lights and ideologues:
'Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Watkins' images of the massive
sequoia, "Grizzly Giant", "made the tree possible", for these photographs
provided evidence of its existence. The photographs affected the East's
most prominent artists: the landscape painter, Alfred Bierstadt saw
Watkins' photographs ... and was inspired to visit the Yosemite Valley.'
54
Furthermore, the photographs were read as symbols of Manifest Destiny:
'Watkins' photographs ... were a phenomenal success ... Suddenly,
Yosemite became a symbol of a landscape that was beyond the reach of
sectional conflict, a primordial place of such transcendent beauty that
it proclaimed the gift of the Creator to his new Chosen People.'
55
Watkins's photographs made a mental, mythical image of the
American space, reinforcing ideological arguments and inspiring new
desires. The photographs documented Yosemite; they also acted as
proof of the West's transcendence, ensuring the inevitability of its
occupation. Fused with ideology, legislative and military agency and
technological development, the reactions unleashed by the pictures
galvanised the various processes of American territorialisation.
The pictures made a significant impact, partly due to their novel
and spectacular subject matter, and partly due to their composition.
A representative Watkins photograph of Yosemite (different from his
documentary photography for mining and railroad interests that he was
commissioned to make, and were sold to the public) placed a significant
72
-
Carleton E. Watkins, From the
Best General View, Mariposa
Trail, Yosemite Valley, California,
Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles, 84.X0.199.4
73
Carleton E. Watkins, The Grizzly
Giant, Mariposa Grove. 1865-1866,
The J . Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles, 84.X0.199.64
56. Daniel Wolf[ed.], The American
Space: Meaning in Nineteenth
Century Landscape Photography
(Middletown CT, Wesleyan
University Press, 1983)
natural phenomenon in the centre of the view: the subject was an entity
that confronted the viewer with its substance and immutability.
Photographs of the Cathedral Rocks at Yosemite showed geological facts
isolated as strange forms in composed spaces: they were pictured not
merely as rocks, but as beings that could be identified with. The photographs
of the giant sequoias seemed to reinforce this anthropomorphic
investment: their huge trunks, figured by the detail of the ages, defiant ly
filled their pictures' frames, inviolate. The photograph entitled Grizzly
Giant (1866)
56
showed an enormous specimen-apparently a survivor of
some natural calamity- filling the view with its gnarled ent irety, rendering
a crew of men standing around its base as insignificant. Watkins pictured
noble impossibilities t hat were utterly self-sufficient. His pictures of
Yosemite, like the pictured landscape itself, were full: t heir scenes did
not require human presence. Their plenitude invited the viewer to be
enraptured by them, to vener at e them. Watkins's views of Yosemite came
to constitute a call to the West, a paradise to be seen and experienced.
74
Carleton E. Watkins, Cape Horn,
near Celilo, Columbia River, c.
1867, The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles, 84.XC.979.7348
and Memory (London, Har per
Perennial, 1995) 196
58. National Gallery of Art ,
gov/exhibitions/watki nsbro
59. Weston Naef [ed.],Jn Focus:
Museum, 1997)
theContinent: Photographs of t he
Phillips [et al.], Crossing the
Frontier: Photographs of the
Developing West from 1849 to
the Present (San Francisco, San
Francisco Museum of Modern
Art/Chronicle Books, 1997) 19
Schuster, 2004); Rosalind E. Krauss,
'Photography's Discursive Spaces' in
The Originality of the Avant-Garde,
and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1985
Picturing terntones
The painter Alfred Bierstadt, inspired by the sight of Watkins' photographs
in New York (and very probably a contemporary visit to Berlin to see the
paintings of Caspar David Friedrich)
57
responded by travelling with
surveys and painting Yosemite with quasi-religious reverence, invoking
the sublime. Watkins' photographs of Yosemite were presented as
equivalents to the marvelous landscapes they pictured. Their 'mammoth'
format prints (typically around 18 x 22 inches-450 x 550 mm)
58
held all
details of their pictured scenes in very fine focus. Watkins favoured
presenting these monumental photographs in black walnut frames and
large mattes, hung closely together to line the walls of his own Yosemite
Art Gallery, which he opened in 1867.
59
Watkins sent thirty of his Yosemite
pictures to the Universal Exhibition in Paris, where they were awarded a
medal,
60
and garnered an international viewing public.
The views and their maker were made famous, and there was consequently
much demand for prints and reproductions. Watkins, on his first
expedition in 1861, had ensured that he made various stereo views of
the Valley, altering the angles of view slightly for different effects, in
addition to his mammoth plates.
61
At the time, the stereograph was by far the most popular type of
photograph with American consumers, for whom they constituted a
form of home entertainment: Watkins consciously made work for a
variety of audiences.
62
Across society, then, Watkins's photographs
profoundly affected contemporary interpretations of the Western space:
'(Watkins' images) have become icons of the last vision of an
uncorrupted world. Watkins was a keen observer of the transitions
between wilderness and encroaching humanity, and many of his
75
Carleton E. Watkins, Cape Horn,
Columbia River, 1867, The J. Paul
Getty Museum, Los Angeles,
96.XC.25.3
63. Richard Par e, Photography and
Architecture 1839-1949, Montreal
(1982) 22
photographs reflect this ... It is not so much a wistful record of the
vanishing wilderness as an affirmation of the land of promise and
the assumption of the American birthright. It is a vision of"past
hopes and future longings" (John Coplans).'
63
Watkins' views of Yosemite both proselytised and sold Yosemite
as a divine artefact and as American destiny manifest to the eastern,
urban, American public; his views of railways and working settlements
in nature legitimated the idea of occupation and inhabitation of a
spectacular and apparently empty American landscape.
...............
The framing of Yosemite was representative of the conflicts that lay
at the heart of American hopes for its territorialisation of the West: it
was at once there for expansion and exploitation (since its spaces and
resources were so impossibly abundant, there seemed no limit to
the advantages to be had from them); and it was a space to be venerated,
considered as symbolic of American idealism. It furthermore represented
the idea of the democratic American Na ti on itself, in being the territory
upon which its idealism, in the form of the Land Ordinance- that guarantee
of individual autonomy and collective self-government-could be enacted.
The Homestead Act of 1862
There were additional incentives for occupying the West. The financial
needs of the United States Treasury meant that the spaces claimed,
surveyed and owned by the U.S. government as Territories-so-called
Public Lands-were required to produce revenue. The great, State-
76
Carleton E. Watkins, 'Agassiz'
Column, Yosemite. 1878, The J.
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,
92.XM.99.8
77
r-1ccunng temtone
64. Richard Pence, The
Homestead Act of 1862,
www.users.rcn.com/deeds
65. Pence, ibid.
66. James Corner and Alistair
S. MacLean, Taking Measures
Across the American Landscape
(Yale University Press, New Haven,
1996)
Manassah Cutler, Map of Ohio
showing land divisions as
mandated by Thomas Jefferson's
Land Ordinance of 1785, c. 1788,
From Michael Bell, Sze Tsung Leong
[eds.], Slow Space (New York,
Monacelli Press, 1998)
sponsored impulse forthe inhabitation of the vast spaces of the centre
of the American West was provided by the Homestead Act of1862. The Act
came into existence after an extremely long and contentious period of
debate about how Public Lands should be distributed.
64
This Act was
devised so that the landscape, as foreseen by Jefferson in the Land
Ordinance and achieved by the surveyors of the U.S. government, could be
completely occupied and cultivated. This was effected by the legislation
of a pattern of homesteads, each with a house and farm, and areas of land
set aside for forestry, agriculture and animal husbandry within an area of
pre-determined size. 'The Act ... allowed anyone to file
for a quarter-section of free land (160 acres, or 64,75 hectares). The land
was yours at the end of jive years if you had built a house on it, dug a
well, broken (plowed) ten acres (just over 4 hectares), and actually
lived there.'
65
This pattern is still visibly evident in the American
landscape today, forming an image of the typical agrarian American
West.
66
There were incentives to encourage this occupation, in the form of
the deferral of rent payments (the U.S. government owned the land) for the
first five years of occupation. Applicants for land holdings had to live on
the land and cultivate it, with a few conditions pertaining to the
cultivated elements. If the land was properly cared for, the occupants
78
68. Richard Pence,
The Homestead Act of 1862,
www.users.rcn.com/deeds
The survey landscape of the
West from the air ( Iowa),
from Google Earth
then had the opportunity to keep the property. With a whole territory full
of productive land, an entire population could become landholders, kept in
productive work, contributing to both their individual purses and both
regional and national economies. It was a realisation of the ideal set out
by Thomas Jefferson some seventy-five years before: the self-governing,
land-working 'nation of yeomen'.
67
The realisation of the Act had mixed
success: it operated by the assumption that all land was equally
productive, when this was not the case. Many of the stipulations set by the
government were impossible to achieve because of the local circumstances
of the lands and their available natural resources. In most cases, the areas
ofland assigned for rent were too large for family farmers to cultivate
them with any degree of success. In others, these areas were far too small
to be economically viable. Na tu rally, such properties, and successful ones
as well, were prey to land speculation. 'The better lands soon came
under the control of the railroads and speculators, forcing settlers to
buy from them rather than accept the poorer government lands. Even
so, by 1900, about 600,000 farmers had received clear title to lands
covering about 80 million acres (32.37 million hectares).'
68
69. Frederick Jackson Turner, 'The
Significance of The Frontier in
American History' (New York, 1920)
on http://xroads.virginia.edu/
70. Turner, ibid.
Schuster, 2004)
% 7EHYPER/TURNER/
Schuster, 2004).; Stephen Ambrose,
Ambrose, The World at War: Special
Presentation-Who Won World War
'.lWo? (London, Thames Television,
1974)
The settlers were inevitably new immigrants and poorer Americans
from the East.
69
Soon after the end of the Civil War, many former Southern
soldiers moved to the West to make a new start.
The new settlements of the West arose in real settings with a political
aspect, free from slavery. The issue of slavery was so contentious that it
contributed to the split of the Union. In the enactment of the Land
Ordinance of1785, several states in the South had ensured its anti-slavery
provisions were removed. The Civil War between North and South
(1860-1865), however, allowed legislation to be enacted without resort to
the South's consent: they had ceded from the Union. The Homestead Act
of1862 was therefore free oflimitations that might have been imposed by
these States. The movement to the West encouraged by the Homestead Act
came mostly from the Middle region of the country, as opposed to North
or South, and featured people not of English descent as in these areas but
those of many other nationalities who had either recently emigrated from
Europe or had been established for some time.
70
The homesteaders were
drawn from all over Europe, sometimes in entire communities and
congregations. The railroad companies were particularly instrumental in
the 're-settlement' of such communities on land they had acquired
through speculation, offering the land and even 'ready-made' homes to
buyers on favourable terms.
71
The United States' financial resources had been extremely strained by
the Civil War. When the Civil War was concluded, the U.S. Army could turn
its attentions to securing the West for American territorial and economic
interests. The land was seen as a kind of treasury: it was to
be peopled and rendered productive in order to generate wealth.
Natural resources were to be drawn from the land both to create wealth
and sustain the burgeoning industry of Eastern and central cities.
The development of the West was seen as absolutely necessary for the
safe conduct of the country's economic and even social order.
Clearing the interior: Indian Wars
The West, therefore, had to be secured: a long sequence oflndian Wars
throughout the 1860s and 1870s were waged to claim Indian lands as
territories of the United States, and clearthem forthe ever-advancing
waves of settlers. The frontier was constantly being pushed westward
and the Indians restricted to ever-smaller areas.
72
Treaties between the
Indians and the Americans were agreed, with the stated object of
defining new boundaries for the limits of both Indian territory and
American expansion; yet the inevitable consequence of these treaties
was the displacement of many Nations to new reserves that bore no
relations to the natural or traditional occupations of the people enclosed
within them. The many agreements were broken as a matter of course
by the Americans, and the Indians were forced either to vacate and
retreat, or subjected to 'white man's ways' on reserves. Their alternative
was also the only foreseeable outcome: annihilation.
73
The U.S. Army
were the agents of this forced removal, in response to the demands of
settlers, speculators and government. The ideology of Manifest Destiny
was its impetus, blinding most to the iniquity of its perpetration.
Territories occupied by the Indians were seen to be necessary as grazing
80
Across the Continent; Westward
the Course of Empire Takes its
Way, 1868, Drawn by F.F. Pal mer,
Published by Currier & Ives
The Museum of the City of New
York, Harry T. Peters Col lection,
56.300.107
77. National Park Service, 'Railroad
surveys' on www.nps.gov/jeff/
Iewisclark2/ circa1804/WestwardEx
pansion/EarlyExplorers/
Railroad.htm
78. Sandra S. Phillips, 'To Subdue the
Continent: Photographs of the
Developing West', Crossing the
Developing West from 1849 to the
Present (San Francisco, San
Art/Chronicle Books, 1997) 22, 23
Crossing the West the transcontinental railroad
As part of the programme of possession and conquest, it was necessary
that the West was explored and surveyed. A series of major surveys
were undertaken during the 1840s and 1850s to study the topography
of the Western landscape, with the objective of finding routes for
transcontinental railroads. In 1848, Thomas Hart Benton instigated the
exploration of a route between St. Louis and San Francisco: the expedition
was led by John C Fremont (who was also Benton' s son-in-law). In 1853,
Congress approved a government-sponsored survey of principal railroad
routes between the East and the Pacific.
77
Political disputes, particularly
over the issue of slavery, consistently delayed any kind of implementation
of a transcontinental railroad until 1860, when its implementation had
become a matter of economic urgency.
A consortia of businessmen (the so-called 'Big Four' of Leland Stanford,
Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington and Charles Crocker, Californian
merchants and bankers
78
) formed the Central Pacific Railroad Company
in 1861 and initiated a search for a route through the Sierra Mountains.
They approached the U.S. government to secure the rights and means to
build it. On the basis of the abundance of resources held in the Western
territories, the government decided to financially support the railroad-
building initiative; the project of building this route was enormously
expensive and could not possibly be achieved by the consortium on its own.
82
90. Dana Cuff'COmmunity Property:
Leong (eds.), Slow Space (New York,
Monacelli Press, 1998) 126
the continent: Photographs of the
Phillips [et al.), Crossing the
92. Phillips, ibid. 25
93. Phillips, ibid.
94. Daniel Wolf[ed.J, The American
University Press, 1983) 119
interest in the land immediately adjacent to the railways that was owned
by the railway companies. These lands had been acquired either through
government land grants or the speculative-and frequently fraudulent-
purchase of homestead properties. They were then rented or sold at
prices much higher than they were acquired.
9
Concentrated at regular
intervals as a consequence of the mechanisms of the Land Ordinance of
1785-the Jeffersonian grid assisted in the easy survey, division, and
speculation ofland-industry soon followed all along the track 'as it
was laid, generating an enormous amount of wealth to Eastern
investors ... '.
91
The tourist industry grew in parallel with the push for
land, spurred by the pictured evidence of Edenic idylls, and rapidly
advancing industrialisation, urbanisation and its promise of wealth.
People wanted to see the wonders of the West, both man-made and natural,
for themselves. The famously plush Pullman railway coaches (whose
interiors were also photographed by Watkins) were made for the comfort
of both the transcontinental business traveller and the tourist, whose
journey westward had become quickly notorious for its arduousness.
The work made for the railways by photographers such as Russell,
Jackson, Alexander Gardner and others tended towards the dramatic and
the romantic, in the tradition of painters such as Thomas Cole, Thomas
Moran and Alfred Bierstadt. Their paintings shared, with the ideology of
Manifest Destiny, a propagandic quality. Through the agency of commercial
photography, the image of the American West was intrinsically linked to
its bounty of resources and Capital. The railroad surveys of the 1850s and
1860s drew upon Manifest Destiny's ideology and its Imperial
pretentions.
92
The American landscape had been portrayed in the writing of
John O'Sullivan and William Gilpin as an environment made by God,
miraculously preserved for the American people. In a God-fearing view
that held onto strictly biblical definitions of time and the origins of the
World, factual evidence of very deep time was revelatory, if difficult to
absorb. The Manifest Destiny view was the popular view. Many
photographers, such as Jackson, pictured the West as magnificent and
awesome, with the works of American enterprise-railway bridges and
earthworks-glorified in their epic struggles with nature, and either
natives or railway workers dwarfed, reduced to decorative figuration.
Others, such as Andrew Joseph Russell, edited out those evident aspects
of the landscape which did not fit with the idea of its fecundity. In the
cropping of images he simply chose to delete those elements of the
landscape that were too bleak and empty.
93
Timothy O'Sullivan
The photographs by Timothy O'Sullivan stand apart from the majority
of works made for the surveys. In photographs made for the King and
Wheeler surveys, the prominence of the pictured view's specific
character is particularly evident. Predeterminations of character and
atmosphere are absent. O'Sullivan had made perhaps the most famous
pictures of the human waste of the Civil War battlefields with Alexander
Gardner, which were compiled in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book
of the War.
94
The horror of those scenes resulted from their plain,
depicted facts and their avoidance of romantic predilections, despite
88
Carleton E. Watkins, Rooster Rock,
Columbia River, c. 1883, The J. Paul
92.XM.99.8
89
Timothy H. O'Sullivan. 'Sage brush
desert, Ruby Valley, Nevada,'
c. 1869, from Daniel Wolf [ed.], The
American Space: Meaning in
Nineteenth Century Landscape
Photography (Middletown CT,
Wesleyan University Press, 1983)
95. William H. Goetzmann,
Desolation Thy Name is the Great
Basin: Clarence King's Fortieth
Parallel Survey on http://viking.som.
yale.edu/will/west/dadess.htm
96. Rosalind E. Krauss,
'Photography's Discursive Spaces' in
The Originality of the Avant-Garde,
and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1985) 134;
Goetzmann, ibid.
97. Krauss, ibid. 136
the inference of their captions. O'Sullivan's work for t he surveys was
similarly appreciated for its uninflected picturing of geological and
topographical informat ion.
95
O'Sullivan's survey photographs were documentary pictures whose
application was intended to be scientific.
96
They were not photographs
proposed as works of art (as in the case of Watkins), and not published in
albums during O'Sullivan's lifetime (as pursued by Watkins, Russell and
Jackson), though stereo views of his work with the King and Wheeler
surveys were distributed and sold while the surveys proceeded.
97
The character of O'Sullivan's pictures most faithfully represent that
aspect of confrontation with that which is not known germane to
the experience of the frontier, deeply imbedded in the making of the
American settlement and by extension, the American city.
98
He pictured
the spaces he confronted in ways t hat are devoid of spectacle.
His photographs present information to the viewer. (The composition
of views in the case of all these landscape photographers was not just a
matter of pointing the camera, but involved the manipulation of the
camera's bellows and the relation of the lens to the photographic plate
that affected focus, pictorial relations and ultimately the viewer's
90
Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Desert Sand
Hills near Sink of Carson, Nevada,
1867, The J . Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles, 84.XM.484.42
99. Robert Adams, 'Introduction'
i n Daniel Wolf[ed.], The American
University Press, 1983) 7, 8
100. Weston Naef [ed.]. In Focus:
from the J. Paul Getty Museum,
Museum, 1997) 110
Picturing terr itories
apprehension of the pictures' 'spaces'.
99
) In O'Sullivan's views, evidence of
American occupation of the space, used as props in Jackson's stereos or
panoramas, is not used to dramatise the potential of settlement; rather,
things are included in the photographs in order to establish measure and
scale. The views appear to be fundamentally different from those of
Watkins. If anything, O'Sullivan's pictures seem both to reflect and to
affect discomfort and alienness: Amy Rule: 'What David (Robertson)
was saying reminds me of something that the historian Martha
Sandweiss has said about Watkins. To paraphrase her, she said that
Watkins was an adventurer in his own land, whereas Timothy
O'Sullivan photographed in the West, he was a traveler in an exotic
land. She feels that with O'Sullivan there is a sense of awe and danger
and suspense and drama, which of course is why we love his work,
but with Watkins, and perhaps particularly in this picture, he is in his
own element'.
100
The views of O'Sullivan can be seen as direct registers of the
experience of the frontier, as it was described by the historian Frederick
Jackson Turner in 1920: 'The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds
him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and
91
Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Ancient
Ruins in the Canon de Che/le,
New Mexico, 1873, The J . Paul
84.XM.484.4
92
American History' (New York, 1920 )
102. Hubert L. Dreyfus, 'Heidegger on
Gaining a Free Relation to
Technology' in Feenberg, Andrew
and Alastair Hannay [eds.],
Technology and the Politics of
Knowledge (Bloomington, Indiana
University Pr ess, 1995) 275
Picturing terntorie
thought .... In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong
for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or
perish ... Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome
is not the Old Europe ... The fact is, that there is a new product
that is American'.
101
The experience of the frontier throws the colonist- or in this case,
the photographer-back upon himself. In the case of O' Sullivan,
something different may have occurred; he may have been subject to
another kind of transformation. At the frontier, there is a confrontation
between one who is and knows and the known and that which is
unknown and potentially unknowable. This produces within the one who
is confronting the space of the unknown described by Martin Heidegger
as a kind of 'clearing': 'Beyond what is, not away from it, but before it,
there is something else that happens. In the midst of beings as a whole
an open space occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting ... This open center
is ... not surrounded by what is; rather the lighting center itself encircle
all t hat is ... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to human beings
a passage to those entities that we ourselves are not; and access to
the being that we ourselves are.' (from Martin Heidegger 'The Origin
of the Work of Art' in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York, Harper &
Row (1971) 116.
102
)
Timothy O' Sullivan's pictures affect something quite different
to those of Carleton Watkins or the proselytising photographs of
William Henry Jackson, Andrew Joseph Russell and others: they
acknowledge the strangeness, the otherness of the frontier and its
potential danger; the otherness of the photographer, his effects and
the world they represent; and the possibility of confrontation with
the other. This confrontation is not measured in terms of absorption,
appropriation or annihilation: rather, it is staged as an approach.
There is movement toward the other, an attempted meeting with otherness.
In this context, it is instructive to see O'Sullivan's photographs
of indigenous people and their settlements. He views them not as
curiosities or specimens, but as different people in their world. They are
not 'ennobled' in the manner ofJackson's portraits of defeated chiefs;
the people he photographs stand, without exaggerated formality, in
front of their own houses, or sit in front of bushes. Their settlements
are documented as they exist; their walled gardens, organised in grids,
modestly stretch out into the landscape, the walls rising and falling in
sympathy with the undulations of the terrain. Pictures of ordinary
realities of other ways of life were unusual in the context of the
photography of the West, and O'Sullivan's photographs are documents
of consciousness of both the West's and its peoples' specificity and
difference; as artefacts made in a spirit contrary, ambivalent or
sceptical with regard to the ideology of Manifest Destiny and its
territorialising impulses.
Appropriation and transformation of the frontier
The experience of the frontier had been with the United States before
its War oflndependence. First, there was the colonial frontier, European
in its outlook: Savannah's early development was emblematic.
93
on ht tp://xroads.virginia.edu/
104. Turner, ibid.
105.Jefferson, Thomas, ' Notes on the
State of Vi rginia' in Albert Ellery
Jefferson vol. 2 (1853) 241
on ht tp://xr oads.virgi nia.edu/
Schuster, 2004) 35
108. Frederick Jackson Turner,
'The Significance of The Frontier in
on htt p://xroads.virginia.edu/
109. ' Mormons saddle up for Bush's
second coming but hope for humility',
The Guardian (London, Wednesday,
19 January 2005); James Trainor,
'Don't Fence Me In', frieze, issue 90
(London, April 2005)
110. Dana Cuff, 'Community Property:
Leong [eds.], Slow Space (New Yor k,
111.Jefferson, Thomas, 'Notes on the
Jefferson vol. 2 (1853) on www.etext .
lib.virginia.edu, op. cit., 207, 241
Growing, specifically American feeling changed both that outlook and
the approaches towards exploring, claiming and settling the hinterland.
A feeling for independence, individuality and a concomitant rejection
of government was represented by a demand for land t hat pushed t he
actual frontier westward over major natural boundaries in increasingly
rapid succession. The Allegheny mountains, the Mississippi River, the
Missouri River, the Rocky Mountains, then the Great Plains wer e all
natural boundaries that were so transcended, each secured by series
of Indian Wars.
103
According to Frederick Jackson Turner, the meeting of
each new frontier was accompanied by an ever-incr easing distance
from Europe, both cultural and emotional; the corresponding establishment
of a specifically American charact er-that of t he pioneer-and t he
reinforcement of Jefferson-inspired attributes of individuality,
resourcefulness and militancy. These attributes developed as a result
of contact, at every stage of movement westward, wit h primit ive
conditions and new opportunities, fashioning a simple, primitive society.
104
This was a society that was in constant movement, with an ever-present
wish to find new space to occupy and exploit. The rush of new emigrants
from Europe, looking for places to re-establish themselves, for med a
heterogeneous culture bound by the individual desires to find space and
fulfil what was natural in Americans-according to Thomas Jefferson-
'the actual habits of our countrymen (that) attach them to commerce'.
105
This group of many peoples came to comprise what is described by
Turner as a 'composite nationality',
106
democratic and tolerant in nat ure.
Emigrants were often settled in whole communities directly from Europe,
encouraged by incentives of the Railroad Companies and their agents,
including very cheap travel to the West and preferent ial house-
purchasing deals in pre-built estates.
107
Turner notes that the tendency of
such groups, particularly when they encountered the frontier's primit ive
conditions and relative absence of institutions, was toward familial
rather than social organisation: ' .. . the most important effect of the
frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe.
As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism.
Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of
primitive organization based on the family. The t endency is anti-social.
It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.
The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.'
108
Tendencies such as fierce independence, distrust of government and
resistence of administration and other forms of control were persist ent.
They came to characterise the attitudes of pioneers, settlers and permanent
(and current) residents of the West.
109
Antipathy to control was accompanied
by the demand for self-determination. The Homestead Act, for example,
arose from the petitions of the popular Free Soil Movement, which held
that land ought to be free if people were going to work upon it. This idea
had been prevalent since the time of the Revolution.
110
Once t he owner ship
of the land from the effort of Labour was established individuals insisted ,
on being left alone. Jefferson had championed the idea of such yeomen,
believing that workers of the land were honest and most fit to govern
themselves.
111
Consequent were the ideas of common suffrage and right s
to individuality, privacy and self-realisation. For Turner, the frontier was
94
Schuster, 2004) 140
Form' in Michael Bell; Sze Tsung
Leong [eds.]. Slow Space (New York,
115. Cuff, ibid. 126,127
productive of individualism. This coincides perfectly with Jefferson's
observations about his countrymen and his hopes for them, which he
worked to enable lifelong through legislation.
Despite the raising of the individual and his rights, the production of
the homestead and the possession of land through labour, the American
territorialisation of the West produced a different kind of space, which
was non-specific and antagonistic to place. This was partly due to the
means of the West's cataloguing, measure, partition and occupation- to
the many uses of the versatile grid. It was furthermore due to constant
agitations for new space for living and the accompanying migrations
westward by many diverse groups, each in search of places of their own,
lands of opportunity and fresh starts. Movement came from people in the
eastern States; from former Civil War soldiers, particularly from the
South; and from European emigrants, primarily non-English.
112
The image and reality of the Wild West reflected the unsettled nature of
such settlement. Local or cultural specificity was impossible to achieve:
'Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation.
Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier
worked irresistably in unsettling population. The effect reached
back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast
and even the Old World.'
113
The nature of the tenure of land produced particular physical
conditions and also a new kind of society. Because the settler was
pre-occupied with land ownership and the ideal of private property
earned through his labour, the idea of common, shared or public property
was anathema (apart from the provisions included in the terms of the
Land Ordinance of1785). The landowner felt the right to use the land as he
saw fit,
114
affecting patterns of both rural and urban development. This
was often felt in the form of complete disregard for the needs of adjacent
landowners, the conditions of existing resources or topography, or any
responsibility to them. Thus when it came to the disposition ofland
within towns, it was sold off very much in the manner of the great
government landholdings that preceded it. There was little or no public
property as a consequence: 'Most towns followed federal practice and
placed all land on the market, relegating public areas to the spaces in
between. This settlement pattern reflected and reinforced the
dominance of privatized property rights while subordinating the
collective social order.'
115
The grid, the railroad and the city
'From as early as the mid-eighteenth century, the great historical
merit of American city planning has been the considering of the
problem explicitly from the point of view of those forces which provoke
morphological change in the city, and controlling them with a
pragmatic attitude completely foreign to European practice.'
'The use of a regular network of arteries as a simple, flexible
support for an urban structure to be safe-guarded in its continual
transformation, realizes an objective never arrived at in Europe.
In the American city, absolute liberty is granted to the single
architectural fragment, but this fragment is situated in a context
95
116. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture
and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development (Cambridge MA, MIT
Press, 1976) 38
_ t... :- .. ,......
C'X.PlA"ATlON.
-R. 1t ,. Uper;u1oa
. ..... It H. .t'rorrtu1R(
\- o'i\t \1'>.'u. .
Du """"' .-/.f/11tf lllrn lo.uthn If"''
.. n:.,., ... r"""''*" If-.,( /tHtlf.,,.11"/llJ' .. v M
'"""'' , 11,41 "' ..._"-"
l_.t., .. ,,,.,,, , .. , _J, 11.Atll
TJi, ,..,.,.,,...,ru,. ).,... .... ....... ........-- -
Map of Illinois showing routes and
property holdings of the Illinois
Central Rail road Company, 1860,
from Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco
Dal Co, Modern Architecture/1
(London, Faber & Faber/Electa,
1986)
that it does not condition formally: the secondary elements are
given maximum articulation, while the laws governing the whole
are rigidly maintained.'
'Thus urban planning and architecture are finally separated ... '
116
The pattern ofland sales in the Western territories of the United States
gave priority to the market and entrepreneurship. Owners of adjacent
properties developed their plots in ways that were typically antagonistic
and competitive rather than cooperative. Common or public interest did
not interfere with private interest. As cities developed, land had to
produce capital differently from how it did when dedicated to agricultural
uses. Like the countryside, cities were divided by means of the grid into
plots of equivalent size. Through this equivalence, geography was of little
importance. Non-specificity suited land speculation (the Railroad
96
Leong [eds.], Slow Space (New York,
118. Cuff, ibid. 129, 130, 132
120. Freder ick Jackson Turner , 'The
Significance of The Front ier in
American History' (New Yor k, 1920)
Solon Spencer Beman and
Nathan F Barrett, plan of
Pullman, Illinois, 1880, from
Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco Dal
Co, Modern Architecture/I
1986)
Companies had been the first to make fortunes from this): its nature
dictated that land was required to economically perform. The chaos that
might have ensued from unchecked speculation and development was
controlled only by zoning regulation,
117
which, by the nature of landowners'
attachment to self-interest and 'their right' to the creation of wealth,
118
was constantly under pressures of negotiation and influence. The American
city retained a chaotic character nevertheless. So assembled, it reflected
characteristics nearly opposite to those of the traditional European
city, whose origins proceeded from both more specific and sacred
considerations.
119
Manifested revolutionary ideology and its legislated
means produced both a different kind oflandscape and a different kind
of society, ideally suited for the condition of the frontier: 'From the
conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound
importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial
days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have,
while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their
origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result
is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking
characteristics .... For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom
are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa.
The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious
summons to accept its conditions; the inherited way of doing things
are also there; and, yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom,
each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of
escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence,
and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas,
and indifference to its lessons, have accomplished the frontier.'
120
121. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco
Dal Co, Modem Architecturell
(London, Faber & Faber/Electa, 1986)
14
122. Tafuri, ibid.14, 15
123. Tafuri, ibid. 16
The cities that grew very quickly out of the circumstances of
the frontier and its correlative attitudes were working extensions of the
ideas and ideals of the frontier society of individuals and families.
A landscape of self-realisation was paralleled by a city of capitalism.
Within the new cities, individualism and competition were given priority,
representing the ideals of self-realisation formulated by Jefferson.
The full exercise of these priorities tended not to work only against the
idea of the State (as a controlling force), but the idea of a society in the
European sense, both colonial and modern. What resulted were very
different ideas regarding the role of the city, its relation to the territory
around it, and finally, its own interior character.
The distribution of urban developments in the American West
came to be only infrequently related to geographical circumstances.
Early Western settlements had been located in immediate proximity
to natural resources that were to be exploited. Mining towns, for example,
were common, and found themselves in the midst of the sources of their
bounty. However, with the development of the railways came the disposal
ofland adjacent to railway lines, for both rural and urban development.
(Urban development being easily located where rural development was
compromised by less fertile land.) The railways themselves generated an
enormous amount of capital: 'in the second half of the century
something like 40-45 percent of American private capital came from
the expansion of the railroad network'.
121
Tafuri and Dal Co's description
of the development of the Illinois Central Railroad Company likens the
laying of track and the distribution of working towns along it to a process
of colonisation emanating from the urban centre, in this case, Chicago.
The new settlements along the line were spaced at absolutely regular
intervals following the predeterminations of the Land Ordinance's grid.
The majority of these were working or Company Towns, dedicated to
a single productive specialisation. Territory was considered to have the
potential to produce wealth in the manner of the city. To achieve that
potential, the Illinois Central had set up a parallel organisation-the
Illinois Central Associates-dedicated to property speculation along
the line, which was in railway ownership as a result of the land grants
offered to the railroad companies by the U.S. government in the 1850s
and 1860s. The Associates' purpose was to exploit this property as
completely as possible. The regularly spaced stations became centres of
urban development, all equivalent and fit for exploitation, speculation,
development and sale.
122
These quasi-urban settlements were essentially
dependent on the larger urban centres to which they were linked.
Their limited functions-isolating both specific industries and their
workers (from each other and the charged situations of the urban
centres)-transformed the territory into a capital-generating machine.
123
The Illinois Central model typified railroad-driven development
throughout territories around large urban centres in both the East
and West.
. The grid defined the pattern of the exploited rural territory; of the
city; of the city's outlying areas and its dependent working colonies
and suburbs. Within the city, the grid accommodated free development,
movement and change. The city did not require a stable centre,
98
Frederick Law Olmsted; Calvert Vaux,
Central Park, New York, 1863, lithograph
from J. Bachmann and Simon Schama,
Landscape and Memory (London, Harper
Perennial, 1995)
99
Alexander Jackson Davis,
entrance to Llewllyn Park,
Orange, New Jersey, 1853, from
Manfredo Tafun, Francesco Dal
Co, Modern Architecture/I
1986)
Leong [eds.), Slow Space (New York,
Monacelli Pr ess, 1998} 126, 127
Schuster, 2004} 48
126. Julie K. Rose, 'City Beautiful:
the 1901 plan for Washington DC' on
www.xroads.virginia.edu
127. Manfredo Tafuri and Fr ancesco
Dal Co, Modem Architecturell
(London, Faber & Faber/Electa, 1986) 16
particularly in the absence of any monumental core in: the European
manner. Rather, concentrations of various kinds could move in time
according to their natural impulses. The grid enabled the possibility of
infinite interchangeability, extension and r ealisation. The division,
disposal and development of land in the cities followed the same patterns
as it had in the countryside, derived from the same system: the Land
Ordinance. Regardless of whether it was a Company Town or one made of
myriad private interests and initiatives, the city was proposed as being
financially productive: space within the city's grid dedicated to anything
other than the realisation of those interests (apart for that public land
stipulated in the Ordinance) was deemed unproductive and consequently
unnecessary. The spaces between parcels of land that could be exploited
were considered infrastructural and pr imar ily dedicated to movement:
this interstitial space ultimately accommodated the city's public areas.
124
Public spaces and public uses as positive entities only came to be seen as
part of the urban consideration with the advent of individual acts of
philanthropy by those who had made their fortunes in taking advantage
of the opportunities of the Western territory (the Ames brot hers, Phillip
Danforth Armour, Collis Huntington, George Pullman-all involved with
the cattle trade and railroads-notable among them
125
) or the growth of
reform movements in which they played a part, such as the City Beautiful
movement.
126
In the former instances, civilising gestures offered to the
new American city usually came with some sort of direct or indirect
benefit to their benefactors, acknowledged by its citizens at the t ime and
for posterity. In George Pullman's eponymous company town-dedicated
to the production of transcontinental railroad coaches-the whole urban
organism was offered as an exemplary model for the moral, physical and
working life of its captive worker-citizens.
127
100
the Continent: Photographs of t he
Developi ng West', in Sandra S.
Phillips [et al.], Crossing the Frontier:
Francisco, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art/Chronicle Books, 1996)
15; Simon Schama, Landscape and
Memory (London, Harper Per ennial,
1995) 196
Dal Co, Modern Architecture/I
(L-Ondon, Faber & Faber/Electa, 1986) 18
130. Sandra S. Phillips, 'To Su bdue
the Conti nent: Photographs of the
DevelopingWest', in Sandra S.
Phillips [et al.], Crossing the Frontier:
Francisco, San Francisco Mu seum
of Modern Art/Chronicle Books,
1996)19, 20
131. Simon Schama, Landscape and
Memory (London, Harper Perennial,
1995) 191
132. Schama, ibid. 192, 193
the Continent: Photographs of the
Developing West', Crossing the
Dal Co, Modern Architecturell
(L-Ondon, Faber & Faber/Electa, 1986) 18
A parallel Romanticism
Parallel to the ruthless speculation and exploitation that characterised
the development of the entire American territory was the flowering of a
Romantic tendency, associated particularly with the landscape. It was
evident in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, the paintings of Alfred
Bierstadt and his contemporaries,
128
Watkins's photographs, the American
Renaissance literature of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
and Walt Whitman,
129
and reflected in the landscape planning of Frederick
Law Olmsted. Although this feeling was typically framed by its authors as
being particularly and uniquely American, it had links with European
thought, tradition and practices.
The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822- 1903) played
a critical role in giving this tendency physical form and integrating
American nature into his considerations of the planning of cities.
Through his practice, he contributed to the invention of two modern
professions: the landscape architect and the town planner. John C.
Fremont invited Olmsted, who had been deeply involved in difficulties
over the design of Central Park in New York, to become superintendent-
manager of the Mariposa mining estates, adjacent to the Yosemite valley,
in 1863.
130
Olmsted soon saw the necessity to campaign for the protection
of Yosemite from commercial development, and played a central part
in ensuring it was designated a protected area. He campaigned, along
with Senator John Conness, Josiah Dwight Whitney (who would lead the
California State Geological Survey) and Galen Clark, to encourage
legislation to preserve Yosemite as an area of outstanding natural beauty,
protected from commercial exploitation in perpetuity. This was eventually
passed as law by President Abraham Lincoln on July 1, 1864, in the
midst of the American Civil War: a bill that granted granted Yosemite
to the State of California 'for the benefit of the people, for their resort
and recreation, to hold them inalienable for all time ... '.
131
The idea of the urban park that Olmsted then championed in his
many subsequent urban and regional projects had at its core Yosemite's
suggestion of Paradise Regained, one that had apparently been lost
through the ritual spoliation of the American landscape for short-term
financial gain.
132
The original, redemptive promise of the Western
landscape-primal, Edenic, ideally unsullied by the greed of human
exploitation
133
- could be integral to the workings of cities: a civilising
force at once recalling the nobility of the individual-as the original
man-and the primary experience of the frontier.
134
A constructed or contrived Nature had already made its appearance
in extra-urban developments in the 1850s. In that decade, the design of
cemeteries for eastern cities drew upon the English landscape tradition
to create Romantic settings for the contemplation of death and Nature's
corresponding, endless fertility. The residential suburb ofLlewllyn
Park in Orange, New Jersey (1853) employed the imagery of cottages set
in verdant countryside to evoke nature and rural community life.
135
As Tafuri and Dal Co point out, the ideas contained within such
developments were in opposition to the laissez-faire principles that had
predominated and defined the forms of nineteenth-century American
cities and territories. Such developments were proposed as antidotes to
101
136. Joseph L. Arnold, 'Riverside IL'
Encyclopedia of Chicago on
www.encyclopedia.ch icagohistory.
org/pages/1080.html
Dal Co, Modem Architecture/ I
139. Phyllis Lambert, Viewing
Olmsted (Montreal, Canadian
Centre for Architecture, 1996) 7
Dal Co, Modem Architecture! I
the brutish, speculative city, and contained a moral dimension that,
though in part indebted to Manifest Destiny, was cosmopolitan in outlook
and ultimately dedicated to reform.
The inclusion oflandscape in the composition of the city had, however,
complex implications. In the case of the suburbs-as monofunctional as
the company towns- the fact that constructed idylls signified Edenic
conditions did not mean or lead to their widespread realisation. The
luxury of contemplating fantasies of nature was reserved primarily for
those who could afford it. The layout of the suburb of Riverside outside
Chicago, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (designed
1868-70, largely completed 1875), was composed exclusively of curving,
wooded streets. Houses were set apart from each other as though in
isolation, and groups of houses were separated by parks. Riverside was a
speculative development, designed for a middle class who worked in the
urban centre, connected to Chicago by a parkway and rail line. Delayed at
several points due to fires (1871), economic crises and bankruptcy (1873),
it ultimately established itself in the manner consistent with which it was
designed: a suburb for the city's elite.
136
The ensemble gave the
impression of a natural idyll. Bridle paths that coursed through the
settlement reinforced this, but also evoked the symbol-laden means of
transport of the American frontier. The urban experience of the
Riverside-dweller consisted of two apparently antithetical and isolated
conditions: a place of dwelling and a site of work. The two conditions were
however interdependent: the appreciation of the reality of their
relationship was blurred by the distance between the suburb and the
urban centre and the compelling quality of Riverside's Edenic
representations. Its inhabitants were at once connected to the urban
centre by rail (centre of the development and framework of the territorial
economy) and displaced from it and its struggles.
137
In the apparent
autonomy of the suburbs, the urban experience was profoundly changed:
the city could now be seen as composed of separate elements, spaces and
significations. The accidental circumstances of urban life-serendipitous
or dangerous- were excised from suburban experience.
The exclusivity of the rural space proposed in these richer Arcadian
suburbs preserved Nature's mythical status in an extended experience of
the city. Its presence within the city itself was largely a consequence of
Olmsted's ongoing efforts. In his work in various cities-New York,
Brooklyn, Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Washington,
Tacoma, Milwaukee, Detroit, San Francisco, Montreal and elsewhere-
138
the park, as evocation of nature and American landscape presumed lost,
became integral to the structure of the American city. The park, particularly
when organised in connective systems, significantly re-structured
such cities, and provided sylvan and pastoral contrasts to the space of
free speculation within their grids, which would otherwise have run
roughshod over all available land.
139
Ultimately, these re-workings of
urban structures necessitated revisions in cities' commonly corrupt
administrative apparati.
140
The benefit to cities in the work of Olmsted and others of the park
movement were not only in terms of the civilising of its spaces or even the
resource offered its citizens rich or poor, but in their effect on values of
102
=rederick Law Olmsted,
General plan of Riverside,
llinois', 1869
Picturing temtones
properties in proximity to their sites, which escalated dramatically. The
parks worked for their cities' social, administrative and economic benefit
directly in relation to capitalists' interests.
For example, Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's design for New York's
Central Park-crossed by a network of paths and routes that separate
different modes and purposes of transport, many of which were so
devised to traverse the site unimpeded-both preserved and accentuated
the natural features of Manhattan's original granite landscape. Scenic
interludes were added as both visual and practical enhancements, such
as lakes and reservoirs; woods and clearings, rocky outcrops, pavilions
for entertainment, bridges and monumental set-pieces. The design
permitted the later inclusion of monuments and civic buildings such as
the city's Metropolitan Museum. The park's spatial compositions were
derived from suggestions of the existing terrain and the American
landscape per se, and tempered by devices of the English landscape
garden tradition, which Olmsted and his British-born collaborator Vaux
103
Following page: Central Park,
New York ( Mark Pimlott, 2000)
142. Lambert, ibid.10
143. Manfredo Tafuri an d Francesco
Dal Co, Modern Architecture/ I
(London, Faber & Faber/Electa, 1986)
18
knew from direct experience.
141
The design furthermore featured further
European touches: furniture acknowledged the street and park furniture
ofHaussmann's Paris; rusticated walls markingthe boundaries of the site
had the appearance of European fortifications. The real estate values
around this civilised and fortified preserve sky-rocketed.
Olmsted's study of European parks and gardens caused him to believe,
however, that such areas should not be the exclusive privilege of those
who could afford their pleasure, but open to all.
142
He appreciated their
universal, civilising potential, and hi s feeling for the utopianism
of Fourier (who proposed sheltered, controlled working communities or
phalansteres) and his followers associated this potenti al wit h the urgent
need to re-direct administrative authorities to the task of holding
increasingly heterogeneous urban communities together.
143
Olmsted's
work r esist ed the chaos of the city of unhindered speculation and laissez-
104
145. Frederick Jackson Turner,
TheSignificance of The Frontier in
American History (New York, 1920)
faire; revisions to the administration of the city and the rise of planning
were both its objective and its correlate. Furthermore, it bore responsibility
to the city's relation to the landscape through the form ofland management
(Olmsted was originally a farmer-a yeoman-with strong interests in
this area:
144
) Central Park demonstrated that a park could play a crucial
role in managing city-wide infrastructure; the design for the Fens in
Boston-an extensive project for natural drainage, park networks and
urban connections-respected and managed nature's own infrastructures.
Central Park, like most Olmsted designs that re-worked existing
terrains, offered an image of an idealised American landscape in the
midst of the city, where landscape was cast as both the city's counterpart
and its progenitor. This embodied image served at once as an antidote to
the city's iniquities and a monument to the urban project. As a city
containing Olmsted's interventions grew, the visual contrasts between
the city and the imagined territory from which it was won were sharpened.
The city as viewed from the spaces of Olmsted's designs could be regarded
as the product of a great endeavour, vital yet benign, ennobled by its
dialectical relation to the landscape. Both city and landscape thus
acquired a mythic aspect, becoming representations of themselves and
hence properly monumental. In this schema, Nature was not anathema
to the city or vice versa; rather, the two were symbolically joined as heroic
partners; the urbanisation of the continental territory was legitimated,
and was visible to all.
Perpetual frontiers
'The future alone can disclose how far these interpretations are correct
for the age of colonialization which came gradually to an end with
the disappearance of the frontier and free land. It alone can reveal how
much of the courageous, creative American spirit, and how large a
part of the historic American ideals are to be carried over into that
new age which replacing the era of free lands and of measurable
isolation by consolidated and complex industrial development and by
increasing resemblances and connections between the New World
and the Old.'
'But the larger part of what has been distinctive and valuable in
America's contribution to the history of the human spirit has been due
to this nation's peculiar experience in extending its type of frontiers
into new regions; and in creating peaceful societies with new ideals in
the successive vast and differing geographic provinces which together
make up the United States. Directly or indirectly these experiences
shaped the life of the Eastern as well as the Western States, and even
reacted upon the Old World and influenced the direction of its thought
and its progress. This experience has been fundamental in the economic,
political and social characteristics of the American people and their
conceptions of their destiny.'
145
With the disappearance of the frontier, the supposedly defining
characteristic of the American 'spirit' or psyche absented itself from
actual experience. The frontier instead remained inscribed in the forms
of representations and devices, in symbolic park networks and in the
underlying structural legacy of the grid. Frederick Jackson Turner
105

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