Turning Curious Eyes on a Rough-Edged Frontier

John C. Fremont is best remembered as the freebooter who fought to bring California into the Union. But, as we discover in “Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865” by Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn (Stanford University Press, $125, 679 pages), he was also among the first photographers to turn his lens on the scenic American West.

Fremont, it turns out, carried a bulky and cranky daguerreotype camera on an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1842, but he failed to bring back a single photograph--Fremont blamed it on the mountain air of the Rockies, but one of his cohorts “attributed Fremont’s lack of success to incompetence”--and the camera itself was lost when Fremont “foolishly tried to shoot some dangerous rapids, and the vessel capsized.”

Countless thousands of photographers have followed in Fremont’s footsteps, almost all of them with much greater success, and some 1,100 of them are celebrated in “Pioneer Photographers,” an authoritative reference work that bulks up to coffee-table-book dimensions. The cast of characters--and many of them were characters--include “discontented dentists, ambitious entrepreneurs, fearless adventurers and feckless womanizers,” as historian Martha A. Sandweiss writes in her introduction. And she points out that the authors are passionate amateurs whose scholarship is driven by their love for history and photography. Palmquist is a retired photographer, and Kailbourn is a painting contractor. Between the two of them, they have been at work on their ambitious research for half a century.

“Consider the book before you,” the authors explain, “the report of an archaeological dig into the origins of photography on the Pacific rim of North America.” Not every effort at capturing and displaying images on film was artful. “Cosmoramas, phantasmagorias, magic lanterns, stereopticons and even peep shows” were among the early uses to which photography was put, and there’s a certain showmanship and downright zaniness at work here.

My favorite example is a series of portraits of the photographer Eadweard James Muybridge, one of the more famous figures in the book, all dolled up in a costume that turns him into a living photo-montage with a gargantuan hat in the shape of a box camera.

These first stirrings of photography in the West point in many directions, but even the earliest pioneers can be linked to more recent and more familiar photographers of the same terrain. An 1861 shot of Cathedral Spires in Yosemite prefigures the work of Ansel Adams, for example, and a fern specimen photographed by Ellison L. Crawford in 1870 as a carte de visite is a direct ancestor of Edward Weston’s shells and squashes.

“What is more,” the authors insist, “moving panoramas and magic lantern and stereopticon shows were arguably links that bridged theater, the spoken word, representational art and photography, ultimately paving the way for the motion picture.”

For all of its considerable heft, “Pioneer Photographers” is not a collection of beautiful photographic plates. Among its 250 or so photos, most are portraits of the photographers whose lives and work are described in the biographical entries, and few of them are as diverting as the Muybridge series. Still, like every well-written and well-produced dictionary or encyclopedia, it’s possible to open the book at random and find something fascinating, illuminating or funny, and sometimes all of them at once.

“It is 4 o’clock in the morning, and we just arrived at the wharf of San Francisco,” wrote one young man who made his way to California in 1849. “From here, this new Babylon is lovely to behold.”

Ramon Gil Navarro, the author of these evocative words, was a mid-19th century Argentine dissident who decided that the gold fields of California were more appealing than political exile in Chile. Now his eyewitness account has been published as “The Gold Rush Diary of Ramon Gil Navarro,” edited and translated by Maria del Carmen Ferreyra and David S. Reher (University of Nebraska Press, $45, 305 pages).

Rather like “Pioneer Photographers,” “The Gold Rush Diary” is the result of “a kind of obsession,” as its editors and translators readily acknowledge. Del Carmen Ferreyra is Navarro’s great-granddaughter, and she worked from the original manuscript as it is preserved in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, “handsomely bound in red leather with gold trim and written with an exceedingly careful and elegant script.” Ferreyra and her collaborator, David S. Reher, describe her ancestor as “astute, cultured yet impassioned,” and the diary itself confirms their high opinion.

Navarro, for example, may conjure up the classical world when he likens San Francisco to “this new Babylon,” but he describes life on the frontier with the bemusement of a highly civilized man who finds himself among savages: “Everyone carries his own weapons, living and sleeping with them, defending himself as best he can,” he writes. “In other words, this is even more than a Babylon because there is the greatest sort of confusion of languages, of religions, of laws.”

His experience of California, in fact, is a succession of shocks and delights. At one moment, the sound of an aria played on a harp in a frontier saloon reminds him of “those happy days before we decided to head for California.” At the next moment, he is recording the drownings and shootings that punctuated his journey from San Francisco to the gold fields on San Antonio Creek in what is now Calaveras County. When he takes a meticulous inventory of his possessions--a particularly charming passage--his collection of books is far larger than his stash of gold nuggets. On his darkest days, he sinks into a despair that somehow anticipates some of the more embittered critics of California in our own era.

“All of the inhabitants in this California are men with no country, no God, no government, no laws and perhaps without even passions,” he writes. “All have given themselves over to only one empire: that of greed. This is the only thing that shines here.”

Emblematic of his broken dreams is a chance encounter with John Augustus Sutter, the man on whose land the Gold Rush began in earnest. “He does not have enough money to eat, and he was sitting there with his 6-cent pipe in his mouth,” reports Navarro. “What a world, where only fortune, both good and bad, holds sway!” Navarro himself failed to make his fortune in the gold fields, and he sailed for Chile in 1852, never to return to California.

*

West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached via e-mail at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.