Post Nine: Print the Legend

This well written book shows how the 19th century invention of photography was used to tell the story of the American West. It was also used to support a legend and myth created by a nationalist sense of purpose. The expansionist thrust into the newly acquired territories following the Louisiana Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to include the Mexican American War saw the employment of photography to record historical events. These photographs including the earlier daguerreotypes were primary source documents that were received by 19th century photographers, daguerreotypists and the American public in different ways.

Martha Sandweiss captures how the daguerreotypes were first used. She exposes their technical limitations and their inability to be reproduced. Moreover demonstrates that the public could not effectively view the daguerreotype an effective means to explain the nations expansion into new territories. It took other forms expression to provide narration and explanation that the early photographs could not do by themselves. Only indirectly were the daguerreotypes used to construct paintings arranged in linear sequence to form the panoramas of the American West. Sandweiss tells the engaging story of the many varieties of panoramas that became popular during the day. From John Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi River to John Welsey Jones's pantoscope that depicted Overland travel through the West. Jones's pantoscope, a panorama that employed 1500 daguerreotypes as a basis to sketch Western scenes that provided the basis of the sequenced paintings. Along with the visual scenes were the necessary narration that provided education and entertainment for those viewers attending the "virtual" trip across the country in the comfort of a darkened theater. The message here was clear. The daguerreotype was too small. If it was to be used for public viewing it had to be recreated in the forms of sketches and paintings.

Martha Sandweiss also tells the story of how wetplate photography was progressively used by government topographers and railroad photographers to more directly tell the story of expansion into the American West. Because of the photograph's ability to be reproduced it can be placed into media that can support the message of westward migration of the Americans. Sandwiess does allude to Westward expansion which takes on a different tone during and after the Civil War when this expansion forms a basis in part for the reunion of the country. The description of how Emanuel Leutz's mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way and how it is placed in the U.S. Capitol in 1862 is revealing. Note the timing of that imperial statement. It comes at a time when focus on another part of the country (the West) becomes an anticipated focus towards reunion of North and South.

Along with painting the picture of American expansion into the West, Sandweiss shows how the expression of Western expansion through photography dealt with the American Indian as a vanishing race. "If the disappearance of the native peoples was inevitable, Americans bore not real cupability... it was simply natures course, no one was right or wrong." (p273) Even with photography used as a accurate method to portray the physical object such as the American Indian, it could be still used to tell the story of the storyteller - to interpret the photograph to support the myth and legend of the American West.