ALBERT BIERSTADT
1830-1902
The Oregon Trail, 1869
Oil on canvas, 31 X 49" (78.74 x 124.46 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Gift of Joseph G. Butler, III, 946-0-101
Albert Bierstadt went west for the first time in 1859, a young,
ambitious painter in the party of Colonel Frederick W. Lander, who had been charged by the
Interior Department to survey a new wagon route to California which would go north of Salt
Lake and thus prevent further friction between emigrants and Mormons. Lander was also to
placate the Native Americans whose trading would be disrupted by relocating the California
and Oregon wagon trails that
had been in use for years. The expedition offered the artist an opportunity to see
America's fabled mountains, known to a fascinated public through written descriptions and
photographs in black and white, and to encounter Native Americans in their natural
setting. If the Rockies were as grand as the Alps, paintings of them would find buyers
already enthusiastic at the prospects of westward expansion, especially merchants and
boosters of the railroads.
When Bierstadt set out he was a better landscape painter than previous artists who had
gone west, having studied for three years in Dusseldorf and painted in Italy. In Boston
and his hometown of New Bedford, he was enjoying success with his paintings of landscape
and European genre, due in no small measure to a talent for self-promotion.
Lander's expedition crossed Nebraska, and continued northwest following the North Fork of
the Platte River into western Wyoming. Along the way Bierstadt sketched and took
photographs of Native Americans and emigrants, some bound for Pike's Peak but others
returning discouraged, like those he encountered near Fort Kearny with their 150 wagons.
Yet three sketches published in 1859 as woodcuts in Harper's Weekly are
among the very few Bierstadt images which include what was a common sight along the trail
and the subject of The Oregon Trail: emigrants, animals, and wagons under way. By
late June Bierstadt had left Lander, who continued on to California. Bierstadt stayed
three weeks in the Wind River Mountains, sketching and photographing Native Americans and
scenery. It was here, after exploring the mountains, that Bierstadt wrote a letter to The
Crayon, an artistic journal, declaring the Rockies true rivals of the Alps and marking
the beginning of his occupation with the subject which was to bring him fame and enormous
fortune.
Bierstadt exhibited his first Rocky Mountain picture by March, 1860, and hoped to
travel west again that year. However, helping his brothers Edward and Charles establish a
photography studio and the beginning of the Civil War delayed his next trip until 1863.
He was also faced with the difficulty of obtaining permission to accompany an army
unit since Native Americans were attacking Overland mail stations. By the time Bierstadt
again went west his reputation for painting the Rocky Mountains had been established by
the exhibition of The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art), large at 6 by 10 feet, which had been shown in New York, Boston,
New Bedford, and Portland, Maine, often with an admission charge. Emanuel Leutze had
painted Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1862, United States Capitol),
and the West was on many minds.
In May, 1863, Bierstadt and the prominent writer, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, having failed
to find a willing army unit, set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, trusting the Overland mail
stagecoach to get them safely to California where they planned to visit Yosemite and then
go north through the Oregon and Washington territories into lower Canada. Ludlow planned
to send back letters about their adventures and gather notes for a book. Bierstadt sought
more Rocky Mountain and Western subjects which he knew would be made even more popular by
Ludlow's writings.
Near Fort Kearny, Nebraska, they passed a wagon train described by Ludlow as:
... a very picturesque party of Germans going to Oregon. They had a large herd of cattle and fifty wagons, mostly drawn by oxen, though some of the more prosperous "outfits" were attached to horses or mules. The people themselves represented the better class of Prussian or North German peasantry. A number of strapping teamsters, in gay costumes, appeared like Westphalians. Some of them wore canary shirts and blue pantaloons; with these were intermingled blouses of claret, rich warm brown, and the most vivid red. All the women and children had some positive color about them, if it only amounted to a knot of ribbons, or the glimpse of a petticoat. I never saw so many bright and comely faces.... The whole picture of the train was such a delight in form, color, and spirit that I could have lingered near it all the way to Kearney.
Over three years later Bierstadt was
reported to be working on a large painting representing an emigrant train on its way
across the Plains. Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867, National Cowboy Hall
of Fame, Oklahoma City) was finished by November 27, 1867 and went on exhibit in a
San Francisco art gallery. It was sold a year later to Amasa Stone of Cleveland, Ohio. The
Oregon Trail is identical in subject to the Oklahoma City painting but only one-half
its size. It could have been painted during Bierstadt's European sojourn from 1867 to
1869 when he took studios in London, Rome, and Paris, showed Rocky Mountain
pictures to Queen Victoria, and made pictures of the American West popular in Europe and
Britain. The Butler Institute picture, probably painted after the artist's return to
America, was bought in Washington, D.C. from the artist and descended in the same family
until 1946.
Except for the Harper's Weekly woodcuts and a wood engraving after a Bierstadt
drawing of an Overland mail stagecoach in Ludlow's 1870 account of the 1863 trip,
there are no images by Bierstadt of any coach or wagon actually en route west. This seems
even more curious when we read a description by Bierstadt from 1865: "The
wagons are covered with white cloth; each is drawn by four to six pairs of mules or oxen;
and the trains of them stretch frequently from one-quarter to one-third of a mile each. As
they move along in the distance, they remind one of the caravans described in the Bible
and other Eastern books."
The Oregon Trail turns what to Ludlow was a jolly encounter with a colorful band of
emigrants into a spectacular allegory of westward expansion. Under a dramatic orange-red
sky the travelers trek into the western sun, which tinges the high cliffs as it sets
beyond a grove of ancient trees. They pass animal bones and a broken stove which testify
to previous unlucky travelers. Native American tepees in the distance are reminders of a
constant menace. No matter that by sundown camp should have been made, accuracy of fact is
no more a goal here than in any other historical allegory of America's westward
migration.12 This subject first appeared soon after the end of the Civil War when America,
with heightened interest in the West, turned its attention to peaceful rather than
military matters. The Butler Institute version was painted in 1869, the completion
year of the transcontinental railroad which would soon make history of the emigrant wagon.
There may have been, even in 1869, on the part of Bierstadt or his patrons, a
degree of nostalgia for this particular aspect of the pioneer experience soon to disappear
in fact, but to persist in myth for over a century as one of the iconic images of Americas
expansion westward.
WILLIAM S. TALBOT