How the American West was discovered and invented

The whole world knows what the West looks like. Images of our meanest streets and our most sublime stretches of wilderness are pounded into the popular culture through movies, TV shows, 30-second spots and music videos. But the phenomenon, we are reminded in a flurry of new books, is at least five centuries old.

From the very start, the depiction of the West was less rooted in reality than in the imagination. Early cartographers like Henry Briggs produced elaborate visualizations of the New World that were rich in conjecture but lacking in geographical knowledge. Briggs, an English mathematician, drew a map in 1625 that depicts California as an island lying off the west coast of North America, thus fixing in printed form what Paul E. Cohen in “Mapping the West” calls “one of the most famous cartographical fallacies” in the long history of map making. Indeed, the notion persisted until 1747, when King Ferdinand VII of Spain sought to settle the matter once and for all with a royal decree: “California is not an Island.”

“Mapping the West” is both a treatise on the history of map making in North America and a celebration of cartographical glories and curiosities over more than 300 years. The oldest map reproduced here, attributed to the conquistador Hernan Cortes, dates to 1524 and offers a colorful if highly fanciful example of how newcomers have perceived (or misperceived) the West -- the lake that surrounds Mexico City is depicted as far larger than the Gulf of Mexico.

A fascinating array of styles and sensibilities is reproduced and annotated here, from a 1578 map of the American Southwest that purports to show “the seven lordly cities of Cibola ... gold and gem-encrusted” to John Wesley Powell’s 1878 “Map of Utah Territory,” a work of exacting topographical detail. Perhaps the single most arresting image in “Mapping the West” -- and one that expresses its remarkable reach -- is an 1876 battle map by a man called One Bull that depicts the Battle of Little Bighorn from the perspective of the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who engaged and defeated Gen. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry.

Above all, the book makes the point that the vast cartographical enterprise that began in the early 16th century was not completed until the verge of the 21st century: the Owyhee Desert of northern Nevada and southeastern Oregon, we are told, was not mapped in detail until the mid-1980s. Thus, as David Rumsey reminds us in an introduction to Cohen’s book, until very recently we could still relive the experience of men and women for whom the American West was, as their maps put it, “terra incognita” and thereby gain “an admiration verging on awe for the explorers who had no maps at all to guide them.”

While maps always have been tools of politics and diplomacy, the visual arts have been put to use in service of Manifest Destiny, the half-political, half-theological notion that transplanted Europeans were destined to conquer all of North America, as we are shown in “American Sublime” by Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, a sumptuous collection of work from the 19th century.

Thomas Cole (1801-1848), for example, rendered a series of five heroic paintings, titled “The Course of Empire,” that depict a dreamy landscape, strongly reminiscent of ancient Rome but actually inspired by his own vision of the American wilderness. The paintings were an exercise in propaganda. “Mingled with the triumph of art,” wrote one newspaper critic when the series was put on display in 1836, “is the triumph of the conqueror.... “

Eventually, art, politics and commerce were compounded into a single grand enterprise. In 1872, for example, Congress voted an appropriation of $10,000 to purchase “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” by Thomas Moran (1837-1926), a gargantuan canvas that the artist had “cannily arranged to have exhibited in the Hall of Representatives.” Moran’s art was embraced, too, by the new conquistadors of 19th century America whose weapons were spikes and rails. “The power of these images of an almost unimaginably distant and strange landscape to promote travel, exploration and tourism was quickly understood by the new railway barons, who commissioned from Moran pictures that they could use in advertising their services,” writes Wilton.

At first glance, the color plates reproduced in “American Sublime” seem to be nothing more than pretty pictures. Only when the authors put them back into the political and cultural context in which they were created do the images take on new meanings, and only then do we begin to see the sometimes grandiose intentions of the artists who painted them and the art collectors who displayed them.

Both Cole and Moran figure prominently in “The Anatomy of Nature,” but for a very different reason. They are among six landscape artists whom author Rebecca Bedell singles out as exemplars linking art, science and politics in 19th century America. “[T]hey struggled to create respected, valued, and profitable positions for themselves ... as educators, moralists, patriots, explorers, and facilitators of national expanse and economic development,” argues Bedell. “In all of these ambitious undertakings, the artists’ knowledge of geology played a part.”

“The Anatomy of Nature” reveals the origins of fine art in oblique but illuminating ways. Bedell shows us, for example, the battered wooden box in which artist Thomas Cole kept his own collection of minerals, fossils and stone artifacts. “As his mineral cabinet suggests,” she writes, “Cole made no firm distinction between art and science, between human history and natural history.”

Moran, too, was no mere salon painter. He accompanied three “Great Surveys” of the American West, including one conducted by Powell, and his heroic canvases of the Yellowstone and Colorado rivers are informed by his firsthand experience of the wilderness: “Artists and scientists ... shared the same bread-and-bacon meals and faced the same hardships and dangers,” writes Bedell. “Photographing, sketching, and painting were alternate modes of collecting samples, taking notes, performing analyses, and making reports.”

Thus did art and science contribute to the westward thrust of the American enterprise. “[G]eologists and landscape painters,” argues Bedell, “were able to collaborate in numerous social endeavors: promoting patriotism, spreading scientific knowledge, teaching moral lessons, inspiring religious awe, encouraging westward expansion, and fostering tourism.”

Map making and painting, of course, were established art forms when Europeans first arrived in the New World. Photography, by contrast, was a technology that emerged just as the exploration of the Western frontier was reaching its end: “a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century,” as Martha A. Sandweiss puts it in “Print the Legend.”

Sandweiss acknowledges that the West had long been the subject of “paintings and prints, maps and drawings,” as we have seen here, but she insists that “photographs seemed to make this imagined place more real.” As early as the 1840s, shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype, and continuing with ever-increasing effect over the remaining decades of the 19th century, images of the West -- the Mexican-American War and the California Gold Rush, Geronimo and Custer, Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon -- were being seen all over the world. “[N]o part of the American historical imagination,” insists Sandweiss, “is so shaped by visual imagery as its image of the nineteenth-century American West.”

Sandweiss includes a variety of vintage photographs, ranging from a hand-colored battle scene from the Mexican-American War to a “Wyoming Cow-boy” so stereotypical that it seems almost comical. But her book is meant to serve as a work of social and cultural history, and she makes the point, which applies as forcefully to landscape painting and map making as it does to photography, that an image can distort and ultimately replace the hard reality that it purports to depict.

A telling moment comes when she describes the work of turn-of-the-century Montana photographer Laton A. Huffman, who made and marketed about 83,000 photographs of the American West. For Huffman, as Sandweiss explains, “Montana’s charm lay not in the complicated present, but in a storied past characterized by picturesque scenes of cowboy life.” And Huffman offered “to make his prints more true to imagined memory than ever the original scenes had been” by painting in elements: prairie dogs, buffalo chips, distant hills or nearer buttes.

“With a hair on a stick,” as Huffman himself put it, he could enhance his photographs with “the wanted details,” thus anticipating the work that is now done with microprocessors by the movie makers and music video directors who are the latest generation of myth makers in the American West.

The essential quality of a frontier, of course, is the opportunity for self-invention. That’s why the West attracted not only explorers, pioneers and entrepreneurs but also utopians, fantasists and zealots of all kinds -- and still does. Artists, map makers and photographers were no less susceptible to the impulse to remake what their eyes beheld, and they left behind unique visual evidence of the whole process. Indeed, these four books remind us that even the most earnest effort to capture the West in an image -- a 16th century map no less than a 21st century music video -- is inevitably an act of imagination and sometimes an act of distortion.