When natural landscapes become cultural landscapes
How the process of painting wild Yellowstone transformed the wilderness, the nation, and the act of enshrining cultural values
In July 1871, a rail-thin 34-year-old spent four days walking up and down the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. He appeared to be at leisure. Sometimes he made sketches, fished in the river, visited with geologists, or helped his friend William Henry Jackson set up photographic equipment. But mostly, Thomas Moran was committing scenes and colors to his prodigious visual memory.
When Moran returned to civilization, he painted his 1872 masterpiece The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone. The massive, 84-by-105-inch painting caused a stir when it was unveiled to the public in New York City. Congress purchased it for $10,000 to be displayed at the United States Capitol. (Today it’s at the Department of Interior Museum.)
In Wonderlandscape, I argued that Moran’s painting radically transformed the way Americans perceived the Western landscape. Pre-Moran, it was foreboding, intimidating wilderness. Post-Moran, it was a peaceful, awe-inspiring wonder.
And ever since I began researching that book more than a decade ago, Moran’s view of the canyon has become my favorite place in the park to visit. (Because it’s a painting, not a photograph, there’s no one real-life spot where the view replicates it. Artist Point is close, but Grand View and Inspiration Point make contributions as well.)
On these visits, I see nature. And I see culture. The cliffs, waterfall, trees, animals, sky, colors, sounds: glorious natural features. Yet somehow they mean more when I understand Moran’s legacy, when I feel how powerfully this view combined with his artistry to bring about social change.
Here’s the question: is this a natural landscape or a cultural landscape?
The geographer Carl Sauer wrote, “The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.” When you build a cathedral or a town or a baseball field, you alter the natural landscape for the purpose of your culture. In this sense, all of Yellowstone park is a cultural landscape because it contains roads and hiking paths and signs full of advice about how to engage with nature. As the elegant essayist Todd Burritt wrote, “Yellowstone is one of the most interpreted environments in the world.”
At my favorite spots in Yellowstone, the interpretation arises from Moran’s art and its cultural implications. These aren’t physical changes to the landscape, like a building is. The change happens in our minds. Nevertheless—even if this is a “virtual” change—the meaning of the landscape is greater than its natural features. This landscape was less meaningful to me before I learned about its cultural history.
Therefore, this landscape has to be a cultural landscape—Moran's art has given it a meaning and significance far beyond its natural features.
The funny thing about a national park is that everybody pretends it’s a natural landscape. “The national park is nature that has been made culture, while claiming to be pure nature,” wrote scholar Lynn Ross-Bryant. Which is fine: that’s part of our culture!
When I first learned about the definitions of cultural and natural landscapes, I feared this was an intellectual distinction without much real-world application. Because, after all, culture can be anything that humans touch, and nature can be anything including human touch. But eventually I realized: what makes cultural landscapes interesting is the investment we put into them.
Whatever you invest in, you care more about—that’s why people bet on random college basketball games, so that they’ll care about the outcome. Moran’s art, in addition to its role as art, represented American culture’s investment in Yellowstone. That’s why I care more about this canyon view than I do about other, equally scenic, views.
As historian Ethan Carr wrote, “The cultural value invested in natural places… assures the preservation of those places in a relatively natural state.” Carr was talking specifically about physical manipulations of nature, the way Frederick Law Olmsted used trees and water to create artworks such as New York’s Central Park. But he was clearly talking generally as well, about how works of art “directly express the value society invests in preserving and appreciating natural areas.”
In the end, any story of nature is a story of humans in nature, a story of humans manipulating nature, and a story of humans expressing their culture—including the culture of honoring nature.
Discussion:
Portions of this essay previously appeared, in very different form, in Big Sky Journal in 2019 under the title, “Thomas Moran: Sublime interpretations of a wondrous new world.” My thanks to editor Corrine Garcia.
I quote Lynn Ross-Bryant from Pilgrimage to the National Parks: Religion and Nature in the United States (Routledge, 2013). I quote Carl Sauer from K. Bharatdwaj, Physical Geography: a Landscape Appreciation (Discovery, 2009). I quote Todd Burritt from “Should Park Landmarks Honor People of Infamy?” Mountain Journal, Dec. 30, 2020. I quote Ethan Carr from Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Nebraska, 1999).
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This is an insightful lesson about Moran’s role in transforming Yellowstone’s cultural landscape. Undoubtedly, his painting introduced the stunning Yellowstone landscape to the American public. As you note, the painting caused a stir at its 1872 unveiling just weeks after Congress made Yellowstone a national park. Congress subsequently purchased it for an outlandish price, and made it the first landscape painting to be displayed in the Capitol. Prints of Moran’s masterpiece also became a ubiquitous fixture in schoolrooms across America.
Often overlooked, though, are the larger contexts of transforming the cultural landscape of Yellowstone. As I argue in my new book, Sacred Wonderland: The History of Religion in Yellowstone, the park was a product of Manifest Destiny. The legislation designating Yellowstone as a national park domesticated a previously “wild” territory as parkland, making it an extension of the civilized regions of the nation. In the logic of Manifest Destiny, parks were evidence of the nation’s fulfillment of the Christian duty to bring civilization to the entire continent.
Moran’s painting played a crucial role in this cultural transformation of Yellowstone. I’m not alone in noticing the relation between the two small figures in the lower portion of the painting. According to art historians who have studied the painting, they are the geologist Ferdinand Hayden and an unidentified Native American. Hayden gestures toward the brightly lit canyon while the Indian is facing toward the darkness away from the canyon, but his head is turned back toward the geologist’s gesture. As cultural geographer Gareth John notes, Moran’s positioning of these two figures symbolizes the imperialist relationship of US explorers and Native Americans, “as if the latter were conceding the territory in its pristine natural condition to the former.”
We tend to forget, or willfully suppress, the fact that Yellowstone and virtually all places in North America had cultural meanings long before Europeans and their descendants arrived. Other people had generations of investment in those lands. Certainly, the paintings of Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and others created a new cultural landscape for the people of the United States, but they also were displacing indigenous cultural meanings for those same landscapes. Moran purposely displays that displacement in this most famous of his works.
Good work!
If I have the story right, people lined up and paid to view this painting before Congress purchased it. What a different experience than how easily you can post it or how easily I can find the image if I want to see it. Of course, there was the intermediate step of print media; I have this image in books, and it takes very little effort to find it there. But at what point does the quality (I was about to say 'nature') of the experience of viewing this become something totally different than Moran's?
Also, you and I have seen this in person many times. Is the image the same after each trip? Is it the same for someone who has never seen it except as an image? And how does the fact that I could easily pull up a video of the falls in motion affect my perception of this image? Babbling, I know, but thinking about how technological change and cultural evolution affect our perception of and behavior in the natural world.