How the West Was Seen: The Conquest of Space, Time, and Vision

Martha A. Sandweiss. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xiii + 402 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.

Rebecca Solnit. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking, 2003. 305 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.95.

With these two truly splendid and connected works, we can see the range and diversity of the historian's craft as practiced today. The Sandweiss book, written by an academic, is panoramic in its sweeping scope, narrative sequencing, and clarity of vision. The Solnit book, by an independent writer, is far more allusive and seemingly narrower in scope, yet it uses the major episodes and achievements in Muybridge's life to illuminate larger aspects of Western history in the later nineteenth century. Solnit devotes much greater emphasis to continuities and discontinuities between then and now: how much Muybridge's work contributed to the genesis of cinema and the world of modern entertainment, yet how dramatically different his world was from ours. River of Shadows is an achievement of the creative historical imagination. Print the Legend is a compendious work of insightful historical exploration.

Martha Sandweiss has produced a fascinating and important volume, richly deserving the Ray Billington Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians. Although Print the Legend does not attempt or pretend to be comprehensive, the thoroughness of Sandweiss's research almost makes it feel exhaustive. The author explains that she sought to supply a social or cultural history that "explores how Americans came to understand this new medium and this new region together, how emerging ideas about the West informed an understanding of the potential uses and meanings of photography, and how the evolving pictorial representations of the West in turn shaped popular thinking about the very subjects they portrayed" (p. 4). Because the vast majority of images produced were portraits made for particular clients, she has minimized that aspect of the surviving material and wisely concentrated on what she calls "public photographs," ones that envision places, events, newsworthy individuals, and social types (especially Indians) that shaped American perceptions of the trans-Mississippi West from the 1840s until the end of the nineteenth century.

The book is organized topically within a chronological flow. Hence there are chapters devoted to the Mexican-American War, panoramas and Indian galleries, government expeditions, nationalism, and what Sandweiss effectively calls "the invention of an American future." Sandweiss then moves on to photography and misperceptions of Native Americans in the later nineteenth century, western photography and the illustrated book, and finally "Pictures as History and Memory," a fascinating essay that extends her interest in the "tension between past and present readings of photographs, to the difference between photographs encountered in history and through it" (p. 11). The author is astutely sensitive to this subtle point throughout. In a brilliant chapter aptly titled "Westward the Course of Empire," she observes that directly following the Civil War, "in an era consumed with the bitter factionalism of Reconstruction, these pictures of the West represented an alternative vision of America, not one fettered by the legacy of conflict, but one of boundless resources, unending wonders, and limitless possibilities for the remaking of the American nation" (p. 183). One of the author's major arguments, then, is that the subtext of so many of these images is the destiny and future of the United States rather than merely a record of what "was" during a fleeting moment or "once was" before progress paved the way for settlement and economic development.

Perhaps her most persistent theme concerns commercial opportunities, strategies for the publication and distribution of images, and obstacles encountered along the way by entrepreneurs whose success varied widely. As she puts it, most of the images "were made with an awareness of the marketplace, with a calculated attention to what would please a patron or appeal to...