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02:21Sort of hard to take it all in. I mean, it's awe-inspiring, that's for sure.
02:27It's one of the most beautiful places, I guess, in the whole world to me. I don't think anybody in
02:32the United States of America should not come see this.
02:37I look at it and I say that it's just an example of a great God that had a very
02:43creative hand in forming the earth and giving us this opportunity really to see a fantastic part of his creation.
02:51You see people from other countries here, because you can tell by their accents or they're talking different languages, and
02:57you just kind of feel proud to be an American because, I mean, this is here.
03:01This is ours, and we have preserved it.
03:54Hey, look! It's the Grand Canyon!
03:57It will change the way you feel about everything you see.
04:01To most Americans today, wilderness is just another media event. To earlier settlers, it had been a terrifying and brutal
04:08place.
04:08But in the 19th century, Americans' view of it changed. It became a sign of their potential. The idea that
04:16contemplating the wild can uplift the soul lay at the core of American Romanticism and inspired America's first important landscape
04:24art.
04:31In the 1820s, cultivated nature worshipers from New York came flocking to this waterfall in the Catskill Mountains near the
04:39Hudson River.
04:39They spoke of their trips as pilgrimages. They saw themselves as a congregation in the Church of Nature.
04:50The tourist arrived and stayed in a fair-sized hotel built at the top of the falls called the Mountain
04:56House.
04:56He paid 25 cents to some elderly gnome to operate a sluice gate and release the water over the falls.
05:04So what the tourist got was no longer wilderness, but a wilderness experience. Something that you appreciated aesthetically, but no
05:13longer had to struggle towards.
05:25Among the pilgrims to the mountain house was the artist Thomas Cole, whose views of the Catskills and the falls
05:32were the first paintings to depict the American landscape as holy ground.
05:41In the beginning, all the world was America, John Locke had written in the 17th century, and Cole's images reflect
05:48this idea of America as the very prototype of nature with the solitary traveller as Adam.
05:58Cole inspired a whole generation of American landscape artists who became known as the Hudson River School.
06:07His work included scenes of Italian landscape based on Turner and Claude Lorraine.
06:12Classical ruins, picturesque peasants, and the artist sketching them while a goat sneaks up to eat his jacket, a deflating
06:20touch almost worthy of Mark Twain.
06:28But he believed European scenery was worn out, and his deeper attraction was to the Catskills, where he said,
06:34The associations are of God the creator, they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation
06:42of eternal things.
06:48This could require some artistic license.
06:51This is Cole's Falls of the Catskill. The leaves are turning red, it is autumn, peak viewing season.
06:58But he leaves out the tourists peering over the brink, and puts in an Indian brave, posed exultantly, the last
07:05of the Mohicans, the spirit of the woods.
07:08But the Indians had long since been driven away, and Cole was troubled by the raw, go-getting spirit of
07:15most Americans who saw landscape only as territory, raw material, not as a spiritual resource.
07:24For Cole, that seemed close to blasphemy.
07:32One of Cole's favourite images was that of pastoral, Arcadian American nature, beset by storms, which pass, but their presence
07:40suggests a kind of disturbance in the world, and maybe even in society.
07:44And so it is with his big picture called the Oxbow, a view of a bend in the Connecticut River,
07:49looking down from the top of Mount Holyoke.
07:52It's split almost into two parts. On the right, you have that serene golden light, the settlements, and the quiet
08:00curve of the river.
08:01And don't forget that an Oxbow was a yoke. It was a symbol of domination over raw nature.
08:06And on the left, you have nature which is uncontrollable, the storm blowing up out of the valley, and in
08:13the foreground, the reminders of earlier storms in the form of those blasted trees.
08:17And finally, as a little note on the right, you have the artist's umbrella planted like a kind of flag.
08:22He himself has retreated. You can just see him down in the gully, working on his picture, but he's leaving
08:28the moral decoding of the scene to us.
08:46Deep in the woods of North Carolina, an extremist eco-group called Earth First bewails the violation of American nature.
08:54I want to mourn the loss of all the old growth trees I've seen and tell them that we love
09:11them and that we don't want them to die, that there are some people here who do care.
09:20So I want you to know that trees, that we care.
09:27I think we are deeply hurting in America. I think we are deeply craving answers.
09:38I think that we've lost our identity as we have evolved into technology and into industrialized society.
09:47Bring me to this cathedral. Bring me to those guys. Bring me to this rock that has the most incredible
09:56life.
09:57That makes me feel alive.
10:01I've looked at clear cuts and burnt forest and I've felt outraged, but I didn't scream and I didn't cry.
10:07And I need to.
10:18This fear of the vanishing wilderness goes back a long way.
10:22In the 1830s, the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville remarked with uncanny insight that it is the consciousness of destruction,
10:29of swift and inevitable change that gives such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America.
10:35One sees them with a kind of melancholy pleasure. One is in some sort of a hurry to admire them.
10:42Now this created a conflict for Americans, because on the one hand, the land was seen as an enormous cornucopia
10:47of natural resources that you could do anything with that you wanted.
10:51On the other, it's God's fingerprint to be preserved and revered at all costs.
11:03By the mid-century, other painters identified Cole with the American landscape whose meanings he'd unveiled.
11:10There he is in the painting by his friend Asher Durand called Kindred Spirits.
11:15He's on the right, showing the works of the supreme being to the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant.
11:27The appetite for images of pristine American nature was not restricted to landscape alone.
11:32The year 1838 saw the publication of an immense portfolio of prints entitled The Birds of America.
11:40It documented, mostly at life size, over a thousand individual species of bird.
11:46The artist, John James Audubon, called it his great idea. And it was.
11:58There he is, clambering between the crags, a fresh specimen strapped to his back, while a golden eagle clutching its
12:05prey soars in the foreground.
12:14Audubon projected the image of himself as a frontiersman, a Daniel Boone of ornithology.
12:20He had no formal art training and no scientific background, but he did have an insatiable passion for knowledge and
12:27description.
12:29He travelled all over America so that he could paint his targets in their natural settings.
12:34He would shoot them and wire their corpses in place to make them look natural.
12:46Audubon was a brilliant stylist with a strong sense of profile and a whiplash line.
12:52And the results go far beyond the category of ornithological prints.
12:59Following the taste of his day, he would sometimes present his birds in moralising human terms.
13:06Of these two pairs of Carolina turtledoves, he wrote,
13:10On the branch above, a love scene is just commencing.
13:13The female seems doubtful of the truth of her lover, and virgin-like resolves to put his sincerity to the
13:20test by delaying the gratification of his wishes.
13:23A very American bird.
13:27Like Cole, Audubon saw how American progress threatened the continent.
13:32Some of his prints are elegies for species that were already facing extinction.
13:37And he was right to worry.
13:39The star of empire, as some Americans called it, was rising, and the movement was west.
14:03On the 2nd of March, 1846, the following words were declaimed to the U.S. Senate.
14:09The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent, to rush over this vast field to the
14:16Pacific Ocean, to teach old nations a new civilisation.
14:20Divine task, immortal mission, let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us.
14:36The phrase that summed all this up and rang in the ears of American whites was manifest destiny.
14:41It meant what it said, that it was manifest, obvious beyond all argument, that empire had to expand beyond the
14:48Mississippi and not stop rolling until it met the Pacific.
14:51Whatever you found on the way was yours by absolute right.
14:55And if the Indians fought back, they weren't just resisting invaders, they were up against history itself.
15:01And to see yourself as a force of history is to be absolved from both pity and from guilt.
15:08Manifest destiny was America's great myth of redemptive violence, and art played a considerable role in promoting it.
15:21John Gast's picture, American Progress, shows a goddess with the star of empire stuck to her forehead, proceeding like a
15:28blonde blimp above the ranks of the advancing settlers, while the Indians fall back.
15:34She unreels telegraph wire as she goes.
15:42In high art, the message was less blatant, but not very much.
15:47Albert Bierstadt paints the Conestoga wagons rolling forward into the westering sun, which floods them in golden light, implying, as
15:55one orator put it, that progress is God.
16:03Cheap coloured prints were produced in their tens of thousands by the lithographers Currier and Ives, enticing a near mass
16:10audience with promises of fortune in the west, where the settler would arrive in an American Eden, filling his log
16:17cabin with abundant game and family values.
16:30The hero of Manifest destiny was Daniel Boone, the frontier scout, Indian killer, and real estate dealer, who found a
16:38way from Virginia across the mountains into Kentucky, and thus westwards.
16:42Here, the artist George Caleb Bingham fuses him with the biblical image of Moses, leading his people towards a land
16:50of milk and honey.
16:53The Daniel Boone legend sets the terms of the mythology that would, for Americans, describe and explain the process of
17:03westward expansion for the next century.
17:05The process always involves a kind of exile from civilization, a kind of regression to the world of the savage.
17:13But from that regression comes a kind of purification, a new contact with nature, a regeneration of the spirit, a
17:20regeneration of earthly fortunes as well,
17:23and ultimately the man who has gone to the wilderness becomes the agent for a further advance of civilization against
17:29the wilderness.
17:31In Boone's manner of expressing his love for the wilderness, there's always violence.
17:37He says he loves the animals by hunting the animals.
17:41He loves the trees by cutting down the trees to build his cabin.
17:47The very acts of love that express his connection with the wilderness destroy the wilderness.
17:53And the tragedy of Boone is that he recognizes that, he's aware of that, and yet feels there's nothing else
18:01he can do.
18:03The tremendous general, there's nothing else he can do.
18:14In the last few years, there's always a lot of people who have been living.
18:23The natural of the wilderness is that when you get into the wilderness of the wilderness,
18:24you're the little of the river, and you're the
18:36In 1861, the United States government decided to make the imagery of Manifest Destiny official
18:41by commissioning a huge 600 square foot mural for it on one of the main staircases of the
18:47Capitol in Washington. The artist chosen was Emanuel Leutzer, who had already become famous
18:53for painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. And if there was any artist in America who
18:59could be relied upon to produce a large, efficient, patriotic engine, as it were, that man was
19:06Leutzer.
19:10The metaphor is Exodus, with that Daniel Boone-like frontier scout once again as Moses displaying
19:17the promised land of California to the chosen people toiling up the crest of the Rockies.
19:23A young man rises in his stirrups to catch sight of the distant land. Broken wagon wheels
19:29and animal skulls suggest the death toll of earlier migrations. But there is no one left
19:36to oppose them now. The plains below are empty of Indians.
20:01But the victims of Manifest Destiny never ceased to haunt the art of American whites. In the black hills of
20:11South Dakota, work keeps going on the largest, though perhaps not the best, sculpture in the world.
20:16Begun in 1949, the blasting of a mountain into an effigy of the Lakota Indian chief Crazy Horse.
20:25The whole thing will be 560 feet high. Crazy Horse's nose alone is 27 feet long.
20:34It's the invention of a Polish emigrant named Korczak Ziolkowski, who meant it as a reply to the
20:40faces of the presidential dead white males on Mount Rushmore, 20 miles away.
20:47Korczak died in 1982, but his family continued blasting out the form of Crazy Horse. One of his
20:54five daughters, Monique, drove me to the top to show me the work on the head 45 years after her
21:00father started it.
21:04Did Korczak ever imagine that this could be finished in his lifetime?
21:07No, I don't think so. He thought he would carve something 100 feet high at first, but then when
21:12Henry Standing Bear and him picked out the mountain, he just thought, what the hell, I have no place to
21:16go,
21:16so I'll carve the whole mountain. Well, did he have all you offspring to carry it on then?
21:21No, he didn't know that he was going to have a family until he married my mother, called her Fertile
21:26Myrtle.
21:27Fertile Myrtle! And she was? How many of you are there?
21:31There are ten of us. And every single one of you is working on this?
21:34Seven of us still work.
21:41When finished, if it is finished, it will look something like this, an Art Deco paperweight the size of a
21:47small alp.
21:48Crazy Horse points in answer to the derisive question of a white man, where are your lands now?
21:55He answers, my lands are where my dead lie buried.
21:59This line was Korczak's starting point.
22:02My lands are where my dead lie buried.
22:06Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that beautiful?
22:22But European artists have been praising, deriding, or trying to be objective about the American Indian ever since they got
22:29here.
22:32The most energetic of them was the artist explorer George Catlin in the 1830s.
22:39Catlin was largely free from the prejudices that disfigured white American views of Indians.
22:45He didn't idealize them as noble savages. He didn't demonize them as brutes.
22:50He tried to see them as real people in a real, if exotic, social setting.
22:56Catlin also tries to deal with this problem of the ephemeral quality of the wilderness.
23:01The fact that we destroy it as we appropriate it.
23:05We murder for the sect.
23:06That's right.
23:08And the paintings are, I suppose, his primary means for preserving at least the image of that world.
23:14However, Catlin also proposes the creation of a kind of Indian preserve on what was then called the Great American
23:22Desert.
23:23And there you have the notion of another kind of ambition or relationship that Americans have towards that wilderness.
23:30The desire to freeze it somehow.
23:32To preserve it, if only as a museum specimen, of the real thing, of the wild thing.
23:45An artist might have fantasies about a museum of living Indians, but the American government preferred them dead.
23:52Tribe after tribe was harried into exile and starvation.
23:56And art faithfully recorded the changing status of the Indian in white men's eyes.
24:06In 1822, Charles King could paint a delegation of Pawnee chiefs to Washington as a group of Roman noblemen with
24:14finely etched faces personifying dignity and reason.
24:19But as the Indians kept fighting their losing battle against the settlers, as horror stories about scalping and treachery, abduction
24:26and rape became common coin in the East, so artists took to painting them as fiends.
24:34In a lurid expression of racial anxiety, Charles Dias, in 1845, paints a white settler and a red warrior equally
24:43crazed with bloodlust locked together in their deathfall into a gorge.
24:53Parallel with the demonic Indian is the doomed Indian.
24:56In the last of the race, Tompkins Matheson has a group of them looking westwards, but the son that promised
25:03a future to Daniel Boone on his mountaintop promises only extinction to them.
25:08The dog knows that.
25:33This is the house the artist Frederick Church built for himself on a hill above the Hudson River.
25:38He called it Olana, which means our place on high in Arabic.
25:43From this viewing platform, he could survey American nature in all directions, in all its grandeur.
25:56Church was the leader of the Hudson River School, a group of nationalist painters who believed American landscape was unique,
26:04fresh and a sign of divine will.
26:10His wilderness was always spectacular, waiting for the white man.
26:15It was his show, put on by God for him.
26:22And Church's paintings, like this view of Niagara Falls, with the green water sliding implacably over the drop, celebrate its
26:30primal power.
26:39Church didn't succeed by figuring what the public wanted and then painting it.
26:43He wanted what the public wanted, and he was rewarded for it.
26:49This place is completely Church's conception, isn't it?
26:52Everything in it, from the house to the contents, is designed by him.
26:56The house, contents, landscape, even in a sense, Church designed the view.
27:01And so, while you are in here, you are walking through a three-dimensional work of art.
27:06And what does the work tell us about the man?
27:08Oh, I think it tells us a great deal.
27:11When a friend asked him if he was the architect for the house, he replied,
27:14I made it out of my own head.
27:15And so really, you're looking into Church's mind as you go through this house.
27:21Orlana is an extraordinary mix of memories, souvenirs, and emblems of past civilizations.
27:27He did the house in the Middle Eastern style, not because he liked Arabs, but because Christ had lived in
27:34the Middle East.
27:34Frederick Church was devoutly Christian, a patriot, a model citizen, who believed that the sturdy American character needed refinement by
27:43past civilizations.
27:45Out of that would come a new American man who would lead the world.
27:51Most of his life, Church felt that, in some sense, he was the son of coal, didn't he?
27:55Oh, very much the spiritual or intellectual inheritor of coal.
27:59And his landscapes developed themes that coal developed.
28:04Such as?
28:04Oh, the sense of American bounty, the extraordinary qualities of this continent, the spirituality of the church found in nature,
28:15coal found in nature.
28:16And really, you looked at nature and found God.
28:20Church painted this solitary cross in the wilderness as a memorial to coal.
28:25He was, in fact, coal's only pupil.
28:28But his pictures praised American expansion rather than warned against it.
28:32The Hudson River was not enough for him.
28:35He also sought enormous exotic subjects in South America.
28:56Normally, one doesn't use opera glasses in a museum,
28:59but that was how Frederick Church invited his public to view his great spectacle of Pan-American nature, the heart
29:06of the Andes.
29:08It went on view in 1859 and had pulled in 12,000 people in three weeks,
29:14thus becoming America's first one-man, one-picture blockbuster.
29:19He had it framed architecturally, literally as a kind of picture window,
29:23and surrounded it with palms and aspidistras.
29:27It made his reputation overnight.
29:31Church became, on the basis of the heart of the Andes, America's first real celebrity artist.
29:41In the 1850s, he went exploring in South America.
29:45The heart of the Andes is based on the sketches that he made.
29:48It's not a single view, but a combination of many, sealed by Church's signature, carved into a tree.
29:56His public loved the sheer abundance of the image.
29:59It's a painted encyclopedia of nature, but all its detail is unified in sublimity.
30:05The painter becomes God's stenographer.
30:08He reconciles science with religion.
30:22The whole thing is also a gesture of acquisition.
30:25The fact that it's framed like a window implies that the Andes are somehow right in the Yankees' backyard.
30:32That the North American viewer, in some way, owns the South American view.
30:41Two years later, when the Civil War broke out, Church fervently rallied to the cause of Lincoln and the Northern
30:47States.
30:54As his contribution to the war effort, he painted Our Banner in the Sky.
30:59It was circulated as a lithograph to Union troops.
31:02Landscape couldn't get more cornerly patriotic than this.
31:05The stars and stripes, a sign from heaven.
31:09Something that couldn't be challenged without provoking God's wrath.
31:29As the Civil War raged, Church painted the eruption of the Mexican volcano Cotopaxi.
31:35It may have been an allegory.
31:37The sound of artillery was often likened to the roar of volcanoes.
31:43This was a landscape of catastrophe onto which Americans could easily project their feelings about the conflict that was tearing
31:50their country apart.
31:52Eruptions burst the calm of nature.
31:54The sun is dimmed by ash and smoke.
31:58But its light burns through, predicting the victory of the Union.
32:11But was a heroic, optimistic landscape art possible when the very Earth of America had become the mass grave of
32:18a generation?
32:35Some artists were much less rhetorical.
32:37They reflected on a quite different scene.
32:40Not the West, but the East.
32:43Not the disputed land, but the neutral and timeless sea.
32:47Not images of struggle, but those of peace.
32:49They were the American luminists.
33:00The painter John Kensett saw the sea as an emblem of consciousness.
33:05Silence.
33:06An immense, reflective calm.
33:21His surfaces were tight, without strong brush marks, a continuous stipple of light.
33:31Luminism was painting's counterpart to the feelings of the American transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said,
33:39I float on a vast ocean of thought without rock or headland.
33:43I am from the beginning, knowing no end, no aim.
33:50The sea becomes a metaphor of eternity.
33:53It suspends narrative.
33:56Nothing happens.
33:59In Martin Johnson heeds the coming storm, stillness descends on the black water,
34:05the white sail draped over a rock, the lone watcher and his dog,
34:09and the intensity of the long moment is extreme, with everything near and far,
34:14in exact focus, like a Salvador Dali.
34:22The luminists didn't go searching for spectacle.
34:25They used what was on their doorstep.
34:27In Fitzhugh Lane's case, a narrow slice of coast around Gloucester, Massachusetts,
34:33with its tidal bays, its rocks and shipping.
34:39But to most Americans, such images would have looked like dreams in a backwater.
35:05A new industrial America was rising from the ashes of the Civil War, driven by the railroad.
35:13In the 1850s, America had just 9,000 miles of track.
35:18By the end of the 1870s, it had 93,000.
35:28Railroads crossed the continent.
35:41They opened the West, and artists rode them along with the land speculators, conmen and gamblers.
35:47They, too, were ready to mine the landscape.
35:56The steam train becomes the symbol of American progress.
36:00Its headlamp is the star of empire.
36:03It moves irresistibly through glorious landscapes.
36:11The old Conestoga wagon lumbers along, while the new train hurtles to its destination.
36:21Dropping their images of settlers' wagons, Currier and Ives took the railroad engine as the triumph of enterprise.
36:27Its smoke blinds the American Indians, blotting them out.
36:36Painters went West to satisfy the growing curiosity back East for images of the distant frontier,
36:43which had become feverish through tall stories and journalists' hype.
36:49Foremost among them was Albert Bierstadt, an immigrant from Germany who made a three-decade career out of grandiose Western
36:56landscape.
37:01Bierstadt worked with a sort of glacial, bombastic confidence,
37:04assembling spectacles for a public hungry for images of a pristine American Eden.
37:09This one, called Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, measures ten feet by six.
37:15Virtuosity plus.
37:16He's out to knock your socks off, whereas Frederick Church hoped to enlighten you.
37:23The railroad barons and industrialists couldn't get enough of this,
37:26and they paid unheard of sums for it.
37:29As one critic said, Bierstadt has copyrighted nearly all the principal mountains.
37:37Bierstadt was a tireless self-promoter, and he claimed to capture the West as it really was.
37:45This, he declared, was a minutely faithful account of the daily life of the Shoshone Indians in the Rocky Mountains.
37:53Maybe so, but the whole landscape is invented, and as for the Indians, Bierstadt had plans for them.
37:59He announced that one day, in the foreground of his painting,
38:03a city populated by our descendants may rise,
38:06and in its art galleries this picture may eventually find its resting place.
38:14Bierstadt's Rockies only look wild.
38:17Actually, they promise complete control of territory.
38:20The thought behind them was the exact opposite of the beliefs that Indians held about their own relationship to the
38:26land.
38:42The Native American view is that this place is very much a part of a great sacred totality.
38:58My people, who were the hunters, did not paint landscapes.
39:02In fact, very few tribes painted landscapes.
39:05That's a very foreign idea, you know.
39:07This was a part of the great holy, and you lived here,
39:10and you perhaps emulated portions of the environment.
39:13For example, the eagle feather headdress placed upon the head of an elected leader.
39:19The eagle flies high in the heavens near the sun.
39:22It's believed because it flies that high that it too has a sacred potency related to the sun.
39:28Consequently, the eagle feathers placed in a particular arrangement become the rays of the sun coming out of the man's
39:34head,
39:34and he's told to be as a father to your people, just as the sun is a father to this
39:39universe.
39:39So we see a slightly different interpretation of nature in that it becomes the living forces that control us,
39:48and we therefore pay homage to those potencies by adorning ourselves with those essences or those symbols.
40:04The railroads built the West.
40:07They created the myth of the West and fixed it in popular fantasy.
40:12Their promoters had to find new destinations.
40:16In fact, they created them.
40:18Nowhere is this plainer than in the story of Yellowstone.
40:46From the white world, only a few trappers and mountain men had ever visited this island.
40:51This weird thermal landscape.
40:53They returned with stories of a place where hell bubbled up.
40:57Satan's cauldron.
41:03Their stories of geysers and rivers of boiling water were too wild to be believed back east.
41:17In 1871, an official US geological survey team, led by Ferdinand Hayden, set out for Yellowstone.
41:25Hayden knew he would need pictures, not just words, to describe it.
41:29So he took along a 34-year-old artist, Thomas Moran.
41:34Moran's trip was underwritten by the Northern Pacific Railroad,
41:37which guessed that his images just might create a new tourist destination.
41:47Back east, Moran's watercolors thrilled their audience, rather as the first photos from the moon would a century later.
42:06Along with Moran, Hayden had invited a former stagecoach driver turned photographer, William Henry Jackson.
42:13This was the first time in America that a photographer and an artist had worked together on the same project.
42:24Jackson provided the objective record of this world of wonders to a public which thought the camera couldn't lie.
42:31His photographs didn't undercut Moran's sketches, they confirmed them.
42:41Moran often helped Jackson find scenes for his camera, and then he painted them himself.
42:49Hayden used their work to persuade Congress that Yellowstone should be protected forever.
42:55He wanted to create America's first national park.
43:04It was a view of the Canyon Falls that established Moran and the public eye.
43:09It was the summation of his trip, his all-out gamble with public taste, the big picture, as he called
43:15it.
43:15He painted it when he got back, and Congress loved it.
43:22Thomas Moran's enormous picture of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
43:26was the first American landscape by an American artist to be bought by the American government.
43:32It cost $10,000, or about 80 cents a square inch.
43:36It would have been cheap at twice the price.
43:38They put it in the capital where so many effigies of flesh and blood heroes already hung.
43:44And this, too, in its way, was a painting of a hero.
43:49The landscaper's hero.
43:51Limbs of rock, belly of water, hair of trees.
43:54It offered the panoramic thrill that no watercolour can give,
43:59and the density of substance that no photograph can rival.
44:03Moran didn't try for literal transcription of nature.
44:07Jackson's photography had shown him what the camera couldn't do,
44:10and Turner, whose pictures he had seen in England and adored,
44:14had taught him what painting could suggest.
44:23In 1872, the year Moran's canvas was finished,
44:27the Yellowstone area became a national park.
44:32Moran's painting didn't force the bill through Congress,
44:35but it did become the prime symbol of wilderness tourism,
44:38and it did wonders for the cash flow of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
44:55Defined by Moran and Bierstadt and diffused by popular art,
44:59wilderness was a commercial bonanza for the railroads,
45:02a goldmine of stereotypes.
45:04The machine had created the Museum of Nature.
45:08After Yellowstone came other national parks, including Grand Canyon.
45:17Every year, about five million tourists come here.
45:21Some will only stand on the rim for a few minutes,
45:23but for many, the experience is invigorating, spiritually confirming.
45:28God still speaks through his creation, the very overcrowded sublime.
45:39These wilderness museums were meant to preserve a threatened environment
45:43for future generations.
45:45But beyond that, they were national symbols,
45:47and they would answer the murmur of sceptical old Europe
45:50that America had no great monuments of the past to speak for it,
45:54because God spoke for it
45:57through his deep architecture of the ancient earth.
46:12Still, by the 1890s,
46:14the likes of Bierstadt, Moran and Church
46:16were seen as the remnants of a mode of landscape painting
46:19that was too big, too naive, too much all round.
46:29It seems strange that the very last part of Church's house
46:33that he finished should have been his studio.
46:35There was an earlier studio on the property,
46:37but in the 1870s, Church became afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis,
46:43and then there was a change in taste in the buying public.
46:47What, he went out of fashion?
46:48Very much so.
46:49But did he suddenly go out?
46:50I mean, what makes...
46:50Slowly, slowly went out of fashion.
46:52But what is it that makes a man who had been identified
46:55with the whole idea of American landscape
46:57suddenly drop out of favour with an American audience?
47:00Uh, the American concept of what nature looked like changed,
47:04or what it should look like.
47:05It became more European.
47:07But it changed too.
47:07Uh, more hazy, less detailed, less photographic.
47:10More moody.
47:11More moody indeed.
47:12Less, uh, less based upon rigorous natural investigation.
47:17Yes, yes.
47:18Less science, in a sense.
47:19And less rhetoric.
47:20Yes.
47:20Or a different kind of rhetoric.
47:22But more poetic.
47:23Yeah.
47:23Yeah.
47:261889.
47:28Pablo Picasso is eight.
47:30The Eiffel Tower has just gone up.
47:32And Bierstadt's The Last of the Buffalo is rejected from the Universal Exposition in Paris.
47:41Well, you might say, so it should have been.
47:44The picture is a lie.
47:45It puts the blame for the extermination of the buffalo on the plains Indians instead of white Americans.
47:51And yet you can't help feeling a tad sorry for Bierstadt, who was helpless in the current of cultural fashion,
47:58and soon to be swept away, like his subject matter.
48:19Nobody painted these scenes.
48:21They were left to the camera.
48:23Soon the buffalo were gone, wiped out as a matter of government policy by professionals with sharps rifles,
48:29who were out to destroy the Plains Indians' food base and turn them into beggars.
48:43As the forests were cut down and shipped to the cities, and mining ravaged the landscape,
48:48anyone could see that there were limits to wilderness.
49:01Then America began to run out of West.
49:10But no pioneer ethos lasts forever.
49:13By the 1880s, the main index of American social reality wasn't the wilderness anymore.
49:18It was the industrial cities.
49:21Slowly at first and then inescapably, the wilderness in the West were turning into objects of nostalgia,
49:27emblems of a vanishing freedom.
49:29But, of course, that only made them more popular.
49:39The myth of the West is only too familiar to us today,
49:42and it is so firmly embedded in the culture that Americans never get tired of it,
49:47even though it only lasted a few decades and ended over a century ago.
49:53It's hero is the cowboy, a kind of centaur, a living emblem of instinctive freedom.
50:08This mythic West is largely an invention, created at the end of the 19th century from a blur of fact
50:15and nostalgia.
50:24Here is Charles Schraevogel painting a cowboy on the roof of his apartment building in New Jersey,
50:31in a world of automobiles and telephones, not stagecoaches and pony express riders.
50:38And this is how the finished picture looked.
50:40Illustration is melding into movies.
50:44And it was this man who did more than any other artist to create the American cowboy and influence the
50:50movies.
50:50He was Frederick Remington.
50:54More an illustrator than a painter, Remington at the start of the 20th century
50:58was simulating a lost world of frontier fights and Indian scouts.
51:02Action painting.
51:04It clicked into place with the strenuous masculinity that his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt,
51:10was preaching from the bully pulpit of the White House.
51:13America makes itself through struggle.
51:18One of his chief themes was the image of the last stand.
51:24The Indian scouts were alerted to Custer and his movements on the plane.
51:28They zigzagged their way back, which signaled everyone that Yellow Hair and his men were ready to attack.
51:34Warriors took to their mouths.
51:36The women herded the children into the safety of the teepees.
51:39Every year in Hardin, Montana, the last stand of George Armstrong Custer is restaged a few miles from where he
51:46and his cavalrymen were wiped out by Lakota and Cheyenne tribesmen in 1876 at the Little Big Horn.
52:04A lot of people have negative stereotypes on George Armstrong Custer, and we want to keep bringing up these old
52:13grievances.
52:14Instead, we work together and take a bad situation and make something good out of it.
52:18Take a lemon and turn it into lemonade, if you will.
52:22Well, my name is Max Dolls, and I play Crazy Horse.
52:26What I do is I control all these warriors here.
52:28I got to tell them to spread apart here and split in four here.
52:33When the cavalry comes, I tell them to look up there in the hill.
52:36It's kind of hard work controlling all these Indians.
52:40Was the record to list this tragedy as a military wonder?
52:45Custer and his 220 men galloped in the direction of what they thought was the villain.
52:50Americans have been reenacting Custer's defeat ever since it happened.
52:54The first replay was done just a year after it, by Buffalo Bill Cody in 1877, using Indians who had
53:00fought in the original battle.
53:02With Remington's help, and a lot of later input from Hollywood, the last stand became a mythic American event.
53:17The root of that recurring theme of the last stand in Visions of the American West is that sense of
53:24this place, which is supposed to represent the future, also represents the doom of something.
53:29And it comes into the culture as a powerful symbol from the very beginning.
53:33What it symbolizes is, in a sense, the end of the frontier, because this is a battle in which the
53:39Indians, that marks the doom for the Indians as well, because Custer will be avenged.
53:45It represents the defeat of the frontiersmen.
53:49Custer is represented usually in a buckskin coat, like Daniel Boone.
53:53So it's his doom as well.
53:56But more than that, it was also seen as a symbol of what could happen in an industrialized America if
54:02the lower orders, if the freed blacks in the south, or even immigrant workers in the city, were to take
54:10advantage of their power as democratic citizens,
54:13and try to take over the government.
54:19The last stand accorded with a deep American anxiety, that in a time of massive immigration from Europe and Asia,
54:26white Anglo-Saxon America was going to lose its identity.
54:30It would be polluted, infected, subverted, and conquered by the scum of a foreign earth.
54:38Certainly, it meant exactly that for Remington, a raving, xenophobic bigot.
54:43To him, the solution was violence.
54:46Jews, Indians, Chinamen, Italians, Huns, he declared, rubbish of the earth.
54:51I've got some Winchesters, and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of them, and what's more, I
54:56will.
55:12In 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed.
55:24In 1893, a young professor at Wisconsin University, Frederick Jackson Turner, argued that it was in the act of going
55:33west that Americans had left their European heritage behind and created something new,
55:38and that what had been created was the distinctive American personality.
56:06The closing of the frontier in the 1890s began the slow ending of an American state of mind.
56:11A century later, we see its death.
56:15What died was the idea that natural resources were infinite, that somewhere out there, there was always going to be
56:21more land, another gold mine just there for the taking.
56:25Today, this seems like a distant myth.
56:27And long before the frontier closed, the focus of American art had already changed.
56:32What changed it was the growth of American cities, realism, skepticism, science, and the power of the machine.
56:55But the opposites keep going today, even in caricature.
56:59On one hand, Americans would like to have spotted owls for lunch.
57:03On the other, the loony therapeutics of the earth-firsters, rebirthing themselves as God's little creatures.
57:11I'm the hemlock tree, and this is my forest.
57:17We enjoy standing tall along the stream. We have rights. We belong here.
57:23We enjoy having the ferns tickling our toes and the rhododendrons brushing our knees.
57:30Many living rooms, many parking lots, many city streets were once forest floors.
57:38It's tough to bury an acorn in a parking lot.
57:44And it's hard to climb trees in the middle of a freeway.
58:13Thank you very much.
58:22More in our series of American Visions next Monday night at 10, here on BBC Four.
58:58I'm Michael McGovern from Kingsnake.
58:58One of the greatest editions of American Visions.
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