In 1863
Albert
Bierstadt was at the peak of a career that would make him for a time
America's top landscape artist. Ludlow was among his supporters,
considering
Bierstadt's
landscapes representative of the best trends in American art of the era,
and using his position as art critic at the New York Evening Post to
praise the
Bierstadt
aesthetic.
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| Albert Bierstadt, who accompanied Ludlow on their trip across the
"heart of the continent." |
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Bierstadt
wanted to return West, where on a trip in 1859 he had found scenes for some
of his more recently successful and popular paintings. He asked Ludlow to
accompany him on a more extensive journey, both as a friend, and, one
suspects, a publicist. Ludlow's writings about the trip, published in the
New York Evening Post, the San Francisco Golden Era, the
Atlantic Monthly and then later compiled into book form, according
to one biographer of
Bierstadt,
"proved to be among the most effective vehicles in firmly establishing
Bierstadt
as the preeminent artist-interpreter of the western landscape in the
1860s."
The two left Philadelphia by rail, on a ride which would take them
eventually to Atchison, Kansas, and which cost them not a cent, thanks to
the philanthropy of railroad presidents who fancied themselves patrons of
the arts, or perhaps also wanted to be thought of kindly when remembered by
Ludlow's pen. In St. Louis, they were met by Rosalie, who had come out for
the visit with her cousins. Then in Atchison, with some abruptness, the
West started, as the party witnessed a lynching and prepared to board the
overland stage.
They camped out for several days on the Kansas river, hunting "on the very
flank of the main buffalo herd of North America."
When I remember that I have chased on horseback and slain a
brace of giant bulls; that I have helped to hold one of those
royal monsters at bay for half an hour while the Artist
Bierstadt
made a color study of his death charge; beyond all,
when I recall the memory of that black moving mass of savage
life, reaching without gap to the horizon's edge on every
side of me - that main herd only to be counted by hundreds
of thousands - I can almost forgive myself the suffering
endured later in the Overland
trip.
Even before he reached Denver, and before the real suffering of the trip
began, the overland stage was wearying. He describes sleep-deprivation
dreams that rank in absurdity and aggravation with some of his
earlier-described hashish hallucinations:
I, for my part, am so incredibly sleepy and exhausted that
when I nod for a minute between jolts, I dream of beds as
the traveler dying of thirst dreams of fountains. I am in,
oh such a glorious old family bed! with a spring mattrass
eight feet square and sheets that seem like the first-quality
slumber spread on linen backs in the poor-man's plaster
style. Just as it feels the heavenliest, and every nerve is
relaxing from the tension of five madly open-eyed nights and
days, a chambermaid who seems strangely like the clerk who
booked me at Atchison, dressed in woman's clothes, rushes in
to say that its all a mistake. The gentleman's bed is not
this bed but some other bed, a little matter of ten stories
up and six galleries off. I am dragged out and away; I totter
half inanimate through interminable corridors; find the bed
that is not a mistake and get into it. I am just as near
unconsciousness as occurred in bed the first, when a dreadful
thump comes at the door, and from a voice outside I discover
myself to be what in my waking moments of greatest
despondency and self-abasement I never heretofore suspected -
a Member of Congress - whose vote is imperatively necessary
to pass a bill compelling stages to stop every night and let
their passengers sleep eight full hours - a bill which I am
still further assured by the voice, will be eternally lost
unless I reach the House within ten minutes, as there is now
every prospect of a tie, and the Speaker, besides being a man
who in childhood used to pull flies legs off, owns fifty
shares in the Overland Road. Desperately staggering out of
bed in a haste which admits of no additions to my rather airy
costume, I wish to seek our national chamber of Legislation -
am detained on the way by those thousand dreadful hindrances
which belong to nightmare, and finally drag into the house a
pair of feet, each one of which seems to have a fifty-six
pounder hung to it, just as an Absentee from the Anti-Sleep
party enters by the opposite door!
This inability to get even a few moments of rest "rouses all that is Yankee
and self-conservative in my nature."
I ask the ostler if he has any spare rope about the stable.
Perhaps I look so resolved that he fears I want to hang
myself - a proceeding which it is more than likely he has
grown familiar with in the case of overland passengers....
He presently returns with about ten yards of line.... I knot
these into two very respectable cables, both of which I tie
around the roof of the coach, passing the ends through the
windows and uniting them above. I roll my overcoat into a
pillow and lay it on top, just back of the hinder loop.
Through this loop I squeeze my shoulders - fasten them
securely to it by a pair of gaskets in the form of shawl
straps - insinuate my feet between the foremost loop - lay
my head on the coat - and thus trussed to the top of the
coach, am ready for an old-fashioned horizontal sleep by the
time it starts.
Ludlow's enthusiastic curiosity led him to strike up conversations with
people he met from all walks of life, and on the most diverse of subjects.
He was especially curious about Indian legends and features of the natural
world, from the geography of the valleys he passed through, to the plants
along the way, most of which he seemed to know both by scientific name and
by one or more common ones. The curiosities of frontier dialect seemed a
constant source of interest, and his accounts of the journey are filled
with examples of strange diction. One of the stage drivers he quoted as
follows:
"When I first came out from Ameriky," said [William] Trotter,
(and that's the universal phrase for getting west of the
Missouri River) "I found lots o' bad liquor here. It 'curred
to me that ef I pitched right in, I might help him to drink
it all up shortly. But after tryin' that on a matter o'
three year, I found they had kept a gainin' on me and that
the folks had a dam sight more of it than I supposed. They
kept a bringin' and a bringin' of it on - and finally, when
I began to see the turkeys a walkin' round with little green
hats on, I reckoned it was time to quit. So I did - and I
haint touched liquor this eleven years. Do you know," continued
Trotter, fixing on me a gaze of impressive solemnity, "that
they haint drunk down to the bottom of that 'ere bad liquor
yet?..."
They stayed in Denver for a while, taking excursions into the nearby
mountains. Ludlow describes the scene of one of
Bierstadt's
studies, which would form the basis for his painting "Storm in the Rocky
Mountains, Mt. Rosalie":
Sparkling in fir-sheltered niches upon the bosom of this giant
distance, nestled the three lakes, fed with pure molten crystal
from the snow crown of the peak - fonts and chalices of holy
water resting against the mighty fire-carven wall of God's most
glorious out-door Cathedral. Earthquake and Flood - these were
the Michael Angelo and Raphael of that wonderful temple, and
when we thought through what patient centuries they had wrought,
counting each as we reckon a single labor-hour; what giant tools
they had wielded, what measureless masses handled - and how the
result of wild convulsion had come to be a beauty like the face
of the Divine, sweet peace, tenderness, and purity brooding over
the very scars of rage and fire, self and its low aims sank
utterly out of sight from us, and we were alone with the
Omnipotent Love and Power. That glorious roseate mountain stood
nameless among the peaks in its virgin vail of snow; so
Bierstadt,
by right of first portrayal, baptized it after one far away from
our sides, but very near and dear to our hearts - a gentle nature
who had followed us clear to the verge of our Overland wanderings
at Atchison, and parted from us bravely lest she should make our
purpose fainter by seeming moved. Henceforth that shining peak
is Monte Rosa.
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"A Storm in the Rocky Mountains - Mt. Rosalie"
Albert Bierstadt, 1866
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On the way through Colorado, the party came upon a petrified forest, giving
Ludlow an opening to wax philosophical on a theme he first addressed in
The Hasheesh
Eater in which he described gazing at patterns of frost on a
window-pane finding that "[t]o a certain body of the palm alone is the
breath of winter fatal. In the higher zones an incarnation reared of soils
and earthy juices perishes and droops away; yet the spirit of the palm is
not dead. Wafted away, it collects for itself other materials to dwell in,
and crystallizes around itself a form which shall only be beautified and
confirmed by that very power which destroys its other
embodiment." In the petrified
forest, he looked at a stump and wondered:
Though all the once live material of the tree has been
replaced by what we call inorganic matter (as if anything
could be inorganic in a world which is all one network of
systematic relations!) the work has been so gradual,
accomplished by such infinitesimal accretions, that the
stone tree has obeyed all the laws once vital in the wood....
[T]he tree has a soul which survived immortal after its body
was dead, and controlled the new atoms by the same law with
which it governed the old ones, marshalling them around it
into a nobler body which should express its invisible essence
by the same character as of old. There is a great lesson of
immortality in petrified
trees.
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| "There is a great lesson of immortality in petrified trees."
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