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These letters and essays from the American West suggest
how exotic the frontier appeared to the eastern visitors
who observed it with fresh eyes. Like Sarah Kemble Knight
two centuries before them, Bayard Taylor and Louisa Amelia
Smith Clappe carry cultural baggage on their journey: eastern-style
educations, cultivated aesthetic tastes, conventionalized
moral values, and expectations informed their impressions
of what they saw. Taylor, in this excerpt, is writing a return
visit to San Francisco, comparing the new “actual metropolis” to
the hardscrabble boomtown of “tents and canvas houses” he
had seen only four months before. Clappe, as a woman traveling,
ventures into more dangerous territory: the mining camps
where roughnecks from all over the nation were coming in
search of quick riches. Her interest in these places, and
the “cameral angles” and perspectives that she
favors, are very different from Taylor’s.
Explorations
1. On the Web, or in an illustrated history of American
art, look at some panoramic paintings of the American wilderness
by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church - two nineteenth-century
artists who were popular when Taylor and Clappe were writing
their travel narratives. Their paintings were often enormous,
and drew huge crowds when they were displayed in New York,
Boston, St. Louis, and other large American cities. Which
of these travel accounts is more like these paintings, and
why?
2. Compare how individual people are represented in these
two travel accounts. How would you describe the way that
the inhabitants of San Francisco and Sacramento are described
in Taylor’s narrative? How do people figure into Clappe’s
account of the mining camps?
3. Looking backward and forward in the Norton Anthology,
compare these accounts to Sarah Kemble Knight’s description
of her journey to New York, and to the opening of the excerpt
from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Speculate
about differences in these works as acts of observation and
description, and the possibility of describing two different
traditions.
Other Sites to Consult
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/cbhtml/cbhome.html: California
as I Saw It: First Person Narratives of California's Early
Years, 1849-1900: A Library of Congress collection consisting
of full texts (including letters from Louisa Amelia Knapp
Smith Clappe to her sister) and illustrations.
http://famousamericans.net/bayardtaylor/: Lengthy biography
and sketches of Bayard Taylor.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/church_frederic_edwin.html:
Collection of links relating to Frederic Church.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/bierstadt_albert.html:
Collection of links relating to Albert Bierstadt.
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