18 June

Crossing the country on his way to the California Gold Rush, Edward Tomkins tries to describe the buttes and pinnacles in the Platte Valley

1850 ‘The whole country seems overspread by some of the loftiest and most magnificent pallaces that imagination of man can reach’, he wrote in his diary. ‘Here lays the ruins of a lofty Pyramid, there a splendid Castle.’ Other shapes reminded him of ‘our nations Capitol at Washington’ and the ‘City Hall at N.Y.’. It was all too much. ‘Even the ruins of Rome, Athens, Bagdad and Petria fall into perfect insignificance.’

The Forty-Niners were not horny-handed frontiersmen. Despite the danger, dust and fatigue of the 2,000-mile, seven-month overland trek from Missouri to California – not to mention the poor light at night – a great many of them kept diaries or journals. As with Sarah Kemble Knight (see 2 October), their anxiety at being so far from civilisation prompted them to invent daydreams of artefacts, the more classical and old-world the better.

When that project failed the credibility test, they resorted to the opposite mode of topographical description, scientific measurement. Here is Joseph Warren Wood describing Chimney Rock on 9 June 1849:

The Chimney … stands upon a high mound of clay & is about 100 ft high the elevation of the whole mass is 250 or 300 ft high. … The chimney is about 30 ft in Diameter at the base & 20 at the top …

But this was no flight from fantasy to hard fact. With their recourse to science they weren’t getting back to basics, but following – in Wood’s case, almost literally copying out – well known reports on the same landscape like John Charles Fremont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, published under US government auspices in 1845, and Edwin Bryant’s What I saw in California (1848).

The trail to California was already over-inscribed with geographical description. The most plotless of American landscapes had been over-plotted before the Forty-Niners arrived to see it for themselves.