Visual Culture in Nineteenth- Century San Francisco
AMY K. DEFALCO LIPPERT
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To Leon and Rhoda Litwack, for being inspirations of mine, and for your wonderful friendship.
To the memory of my beloved maternal grandparents, Irene Urbinato DeFalco and Dr. Francis H. DeFalco, and my fantastically radical paternal grandparents, Sylvia Levine Lippert and David Lippert.
Finally, for mom and dad, Regina Louise DeFalco Lippert and Alex Lippert. You are the two best people I know, and I’m so proud to be your daughter.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Note on Sources xv
Introduction 1
1. “These Lofty Aspirants of Fame”: The Making of the Gold Rush Legend 29
2. “Ten Times Better Than a Letter”: Gold Rush Photography 83
3. “Base Falsehoods” and the Genuine Article: The Visual Economy of San Francisco 136
4. From the Cradle to the Grave: Visualizing the Life Cycle 182
5. Visual Desire: Love, Lust, and Virtual Reality 225
6. Awful Magnificence: Infamy, Mortality, and Armchair Spectacles 266
7. Celebrity Culture and the Gold Rush Metropolis 315
Conclusion 369
Glossary of Selected Visual and Printing Technology Terms 383 Selected Bibliography 387 Index 391
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For all their support and intellectual enrichment, I am grateful to my History Department colleagues at the University of Chicago. Special thanks to Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Ken Pomeranz, and Bruce Cumings, who read all or most of the manuscript and provided valuable comments. My thanks to the participants in a manuscript workshop held in April 2015: Professors Tom Holt, Leora Auslander, Mauricio Tenorio, Kathy Conzen, Eric Slauter, Terry Nichols Clark, and special guest Richard White, who offered constructive insights. Rhae Lynn Barnes, Emilio Kourí, Emily Lynn Osborn, Michael Rossi, Kathleen Belew, and Jane Dailey helped to improve the work with their comments on portions of the manuscript draft, as did the inspiring and affable Tom Gunning. The works of Neil Harris and W. J. T. Mitchell have long influenced me, and it was a treat to find them so welcoming and encouraging during my time here at Chicago.
I appreciate the two research grants I received from the University of Chicago’s Social Sciences Division, which enabled the creation of a book companion website and the fees associated with the many images that I employ in my work. The Newberry Library has been a valued place for work and stimulating conversation: thanks to them for making me a Scholar in Residence, especially to Diane Dillon and Danny Greene, and to Sarah Burns and the members of the American Art and Visual Culture Seminar. I am grateful to Lise DubéScherr, formerly the executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, and to Richard H. Driehaus himself, for inviting me to become a part of their valuable work amid the city of Chicago and its vibrant cultural and intellectual community.
My thanks to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for a Visiting Scholar fellowship, particularly to John Tessitore, Patty McGarry, Professor Pat Spacks, and the inimitable “Scholar Patriots”: T. Austin Graham, Tracy Steffes, Cole Hutchison, Tommy and Holly Crocker, Jason Sharples, and Heather Treseler. Thanks to Emily and Chris Mirakian and Mike Brooks for an
unforgettable year in Boston. I am very appreciative of Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Tom Dziuszko, Diana Sykes, and all the great staff at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, which granted me an Upton Foundation Civil War Fellowship. I received vital support as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library, and will always relish my conversations with Roy Ritchie during that time. The Quinn Foundation gave me a critical dissertation write-up fellowship during my last year in the U.C. Berkeley doctoral program. I am thankful to the Book Club of California for a Research Grant (2006–2007) and to the Bancroft Library for naming me a Research Fellow in 2006.
At the Bancroft Library, special thanks to Jack Von Euw, Susan Snyder, Crystal Miles, Michael Maire Lange, Isabel Breskin, and the wonderful smile of David Kessler. At the Huntington Library, my thanks to Romaine Ahlstrom, Alan Jutzi, Juan Gomez, Catherine Wehrey-Miller, and the conversation, assistance, and autographed book from Peter Blodgett himself. Getting to know Denny Kruska and Harry Katz were special Huntington highlights. At the California State Library, I was happy to make the acquaintance of Gary Kurutz and to benefit from his extensive knowledge of gold rush–era collections and lithography. To Professors Richard Phelan and Sophie Vallas at the Université de Provence, who organized an excellent symposium on San Francisco and published the proceedings, and to Pierre-François Peirano, Dick Walker, Jeannene Przyblyski, Serge Chauvin, Meredith Tromble, and Aurélie Baudry, whom I met in Aix and who asked a great many thought-provoking questions while offering every encouragement.
Thanks to all the staff at the California Historical Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, the San Francisco History Collection in the Main Library, the Society of California Pioneers, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, the Library of Congress, the Kinsey Institute, the California Digital Newspaper Collection—I wish they had such a website for every state in the country!— and the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design. Polly Kaufman was helpful in providing her images from the Megquier collection. Richard Samuel West generously provided permission to publish images from his excellent book on the San Francisco Wasp. Thank you to the wonderful George Miles of Beinecke Library, Dr. Robert Chandler of Wells Fargo in San Francisco, and to Marc Selvaggio for pointing me in their direction in the first place. I am in turn grateful to Dr. Chandler for putting me in touch with Bill Secrest and John Boessenecker, both authorities on western history, who were kind enough to speak with me and share their impressive private collections. Gail Propp and Ron Sheeley graciously permitted me the use of images from their private collections as well.
Professors Elizabeth Leonard, Jim Scott, Julie Levin Caro, Jonathan McCoy, Lauren Lessing, Lisa Lessard, Jim Fleming, Lisa Arellano, Anupama Jain,
Chandra Bhimull, Marilyn Pukkila, and the entire history faculty at Colby College offered great collegiality and warmth during my 2009–2010 Faculty Fellowship there. As department chairs—and friends—go, it simply doesn’t get any better than Paul Josephson. Matt Klingle at Bowdoin is a force of nature, and I’m grateful to him for introducing me to Rachel St. John and the Southern Maine American History Research Group. Liam Riordan and Justin Wolff were gracious hosts during my visit to the University of Maine at Orono. Professor David Gordon and his wife Lesley gave me a beautiful place to live in Maine and wonderful people to live with. I will never forget the friends I made in Portland, Brunswick, and Waterville.
Thanks to my great hosts and friends in Los Angeles, Stephenie Frederick and Holly McKelvey. During those summertime trips to the Huntington, it was a pleasure to find camaraderie with fellow Golden Bears Dave Bowman, Matt and Amelia Sargent, and Susan Schulten, and fellow scholars Jen Spear, Mark Noble, Daniel Smith, Alex Boxer, and Emma Peacocke. Sarkis Badalyan made my daily Munger Library entries and exits very enjoyable. To Katie Burke Fairchild and David Quinalty, who gave me something and somebody to look forward to in Washington, D.C., after the Library of Congress had closed for the day. To Jon Powell, the generous colleague who was kind enough to introduce himself in the Madison Room—and who recommended great local bookstores.
My heartfelt gratitude goes to my friends: Christina and Dave McNally, Jennifer Nam and David Voiles, Dustin and Maryellen Jackson, Nick and Cristal Pearson, Steven Wasick and Ashlyn Nelson Wasick, Martina Nguyen and Ben Roberts, Kamryn Tupuivao Miranda and Rico Miranda, Leanne Taylor Siebert and Matt Siebert, Danny Gordon and Olivia Wilkes Gordon, Aaron Kornfield, Yassi Zaeni Mayer and Tim Mayer, Andie and Paul Atwood, Serra Falk Goldman, Kevin and Patricia Adams, Celso Castilho, Jo Guldi, Dylan Esson, Teddy Varno, Girish and Angie Patangay, Annelien De Dijn and Tanja De Coster, and Chau Tran, for sustaining me—and then some—over the phone lines and in person. Bill Goldman, we love you and we lost you and beautiful Marie way too soon—but we’ll keep your memory and your spirit alive. To my wonderful Berkeley neighbors, Scott, Elana, and Max Saul. To my graduate student friends at Berkeley, for being great friends and brilliant colleagues—particularly the exceptional members of David Henkin’s 19th-century Reading Group and M. M. Lovell’s Berkeley Americanist Group for their thought-provoking input throughout the dissertation stage of this project. To old friends and new: Nicole Eaton and Srdjan Smajic. To Robert Devens, for being someone I will always look forward to seeing anywhere, anytime. To the people who made me feel welcome in Chicago: Larry and Inez Okrent, and Lauren and Penny Aronson.
In addition, I want to thank all of my students at Berkeley, Colby, and Chicago over the years; your insightful comments in class discussions, your challenging
questions in office hours, your kind words, independent thinking, and impassioned debates only reaffirmed my decision to become a professor.
My utmost appreciation goes to the U.C. Berkeley History Department, for awarding me a series of fellowships without which I could not have traveled as extensively and researched as much. Its faculty and staff were wonderful throughout the years, especially Mabel Lee, Deborah Kerlegon, and Barbara Hayashida. I am indebted to fellow “Litwackians” Felicia Viator, Buzzy Jackson, Nick Salvatore, and especially Jim Grossman, for their collegiality.
I will always be thankful for having had the chance to work with Susanna Barrows, and I miss her greatly. Kerwin Kline and Martin Jay inspired me. Robin Einhorn taught me how to be a better teacher, and I learned a great deal from her in many ways. To Margaretta M. Lovell, for a great amount of generosity, candor, and intellectual stimulation to boot. Last but certainly not least among the faculty acknowledgments, to David Markheva Henkin; thank you. You made me feel as though I lucked out in every possible admirable quality when it came to my dissertation adviser. I retain responsibility for any remaining errors or oversights that remain in the final product. I am grateful to Kelsey Hicks for the book companion website design, the anonymous manuscript reviewers at Oxford University Press, to Elda Granata, Hayley Singer, Elyse Bailey, Susan McClung, Ed Robinson, and editors Nancy Toff and Alexandra Dauler.
To Diane and Jonathon Zamzok and Daniel and Nicole, for your love and for making my trips to the Beinecke Library possible and enjoyable by welcoming me into your home with such kindness! I am so grateful for my huge, beautiful family: Carol Lippert, Manolo Pacheco Lippert, Fernando (Toño) Pacheco Lippert, and Bea González de Castilla; Christine, Mark, and Eric Sepulveda; Fran DeFalco and Marina Meza, Nick Whirl, Vanessa and Jason Grabau, Joey Whirl and Kylie Radford; Frank Defurio; Don Francis; John, Colleen, and Jimmy DeFalco; Bill, Grace, Danny, and Kyle DeFalco; Damian DeFalco and Kristie Lima; Craig and Judy DeFalco; and Frank and Maureen DeFalco—thank you all for your many kindnesses. I love you.
To my adopted godfathers, Barry Aronson and Andy Gach, who taught me about baseball, O-Hell, and life in general, and who always believed in me. To the irrepressible spirit of my original godfather, Bill Aronson, and the memories with Great Aunt Rose and Great Uncle Julius Kahn. To Aunt Sherry and Uncle Rob Kopecky for your steadfast encouragement and generosity, and to Kathy and Don Grossnickle, my mother- and father-in-law, for all your love and support. With love and thanks to my new brothers and sisters, Will and Kristin Erat and Todd and Monica Grossnickle. To my brother, Tim, and my sister, Becky—thank you. You kept me smiling, you put things in perspective, and you never allowed me to get too caught up in my own world. I love you both so very much. I am grateful to Aunt Carol, Becky, and my brilliant father, Alex, for
reading portions of the manuscript. Becky, I cannot thank you enough for being such a devoted and fun aunt to Maya, and for taking care of her when we needed your help. I am forever indebted to my selfless and amazing mother, Regina, for uprooting her life to come to Chicago and help us take care of our baby girl. I will always love and appreciate you, Mom and Papa—far more than words can say. Finally, to my husband, Erik S. Grossnickle, and our beautiful daughter, Maya: I adore you. Thank you for your love, and for being the highlights of my life.
NOTE ON SOURCES
Thanks to the hard work and support of contributing libraries, archives, universities, historical societies, and other public institutions and their supporting members, a variety of the images discussed in this book are available in highresolution format online, where you can zoom in to closely view the details of pictures that otherwise might go overlooked or undetected in printed form— particularly where the copy quality and detail might suffer, or the scale of certain images would have to be reduced to fit the dimensions of the book. Please go to the book’s companion website at www.consumingidentities.com to see these images, referenced in the text as . There, you can also find the full bibliography for the book.
In several instances, the images referenced by nineteenth-century correspondents in manuscript collections have been separated from those letters and lost or stolen. Although these gaps in the historical record are irreplaceable, similar types of images (often with lost or unidentified subjects) have been substituted in their place wherever possible. The same is true for the pornographic images discussed in Chapter 5, almost none of which survive from the pre-1906 period in San Francisco in any of the substantial public collections I have consulted across the country. Erotica is—for obvious reasons pertaining to contemporary legal and social censorship—difficult to document in terms of provenance or year of production, and the law mandated that any confiscated pictures deemed obscene in nineteenth-century San Francisco be destroyed. Courtesy of the Kinsey Institute, I have utilized contemporary images from France and Britain that would have been charged with “obscenity” in the same context, France being an oft-cited point of origin for so-called obscene images in San Francisco.
Introduction
If print, as Francis Bacon believed, “changed the appearance and state of the world,” what did reproducibility and dissemination of the visual image do?1 Pictures wielded considerable power in nineteenth-century society, shaping the way that Americans portrayed and related to one another and presented themselves. This is not only a history through pictures, but a history of pictures: it departs from most historians’ approaches to images as self-explanatory illustrations, and instead examines those images as largely overlooked, primary source evidence. In these pages, we will discover how nineteenth-century Americans understood their images and explore the critically important contextual role that those images played in a rapidly expanding and industrializing nation. Pictures were an integral means by which people adapted to social change. Although they may not have realized it, these Victorians were carving out a new chapter in the history of individualism. The story that follows will examine visual depictions of human beings across a range of representational genres during the second half of the nineteenth century, both for what these images reveal about the time in which they were created and for what they signified to contemporary viewers. Visual imagery influenced the course of history; it instructed contemporaries about what really happened in far-off places, and those constructed renderings were passed down through the generations as gospel. After its introduction in 1839, the unprecedented detail of the photograph made it seem like an unassailable form of documentation, immune from manipulation. Publishers sought to capitalize on the medium’s command over the public trust by frequently stating that their artist-rendered prints had originally been “taken from a daguerreotype.”2 Many nineteenth-century Americans grappled with the question of whether an image could capture its subject’s inner character—in their words, whether it proved a “true likeness”—while an increasingly wide array of images influenced collective memory as the century wore on. Pictures afforded audiences a sense of virtual intimacy and immediacy: hallmarks of a new technological and social order. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco charts the growth of a commodified image industry in one of
the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, from the gold rush to the turn of the twentieth century. The discussion focuses on the circulation of human representations throughout the city of San Francisco and around the world, as well as the cultural dimensions of the relationship between people, portraits, and the marketplace. In so doing, this work traces a critical moment in the shaping of individual modern identities.3
Given the ubiquity of images in contemporary society, one might be forgiven for assuming that things have always been this way and wondering “so what?” about the role that visual culture has played in American history. But the same generation that saw the city of San Francisco come into existence also experienced a wholesale change in the scale and variety of images available to them. It has been difficult for scholars to document exactly what this change meant to people; most attempted answers have focused on specific media (such as the daguerreotype, the lithograph, or the tintype), on theoretical approaches to the “problems” of human perception, or on the cultural changes that took hold in particular realms (mass entertainment or crime and punishment, for example).
San Francisco produced an exceptional volume of images for any city of its era, let alone such a young and relatively small one. Because of the city’s distance from every other settled population center at the time, San Francisco’s inhabitants had to commit their thoughts to writing in correspondences and journals, thereby providing historians with a unique archive for tracing the power of images and the way that nineteenth-century Americans thought about them. A generation before the Civil War, San Franciscans developed a new vocabulary and a set of expectations around the images they exchanged with their kin.
The question of what constituted an accurate portrait, photography’s connection to personal identity and legacy, as well as the relationship between external appearance and inner substance, soon spread beyond conversations among friends and family to broader social debates about criminality, pornography and the corruptibility of images, and the cultural power of celebrity. San Francisco pioneered and showcased new uses and regulations of imagery in each of these arenas, years before they took hold around the country and the world.
The Pictorial Revolution
Along with the expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. Lithography (a process detailed in the glossary) was more efficient and affordable than the previous methods of woodcutting, block cutting, and etching. Before this innovation, as Walter Benjamin later noted, art reproduction had been carried out only in the
manufacture of ancient Greek currency. Painted portraits were not reproducible or easily transportable, and the size of the preindustrial urban audience—as well as its purchasing power—would pale in comparison with what was to come. Even if artists circulated engravings of individuals, as historian Vic Gatrell has commented, “by 1800 print’s capacities had hardly changed since the Renaissance.” Publication runs would be only between five hundred and a couple of thousand sheets before the engraving on the soft copper printing plate deteriorated. Paper was still made by hand, and the wooden hand-press required heavy manual labor to produce a meager two hundred sheets an hour.4
Industrialization quickly expanded image-publishing capacity, just as it did for texts; yet this development entailed wholly new genres of image production rather than a simple extension of a preexisting category like the printed word. By the 1830s, new steam printing presses churned out more than four thousand sheets of mechanically produced paper each hour, resulting in wider circulations and a vastly expanded print culture. Lithographs enabled the production of city views in the United States—soon every town and metropolis had one. Maps could be produced and revised much more inexpensively, prompting a spate of educational graphs, timelines, and charts for schoolchildren, as well as visualizations of data for practitioners in burgeoning fields like government land surveys, professional medicine, meteorology, and climatology. Lithographed sheet music covers adorned the pianos of bourgeois parlors across the country, illustrating the sentimental or comic themes within.5
In the early 1840s, two-color lithographic printing reached the United States, employing a separate, inked stone plate for each hue. The country’s first successful illustrated newspapers formed in the 1850s, using a standardized reproduction process for copperplate engravings or lithographs executed on stone. By the late nineteenth century, new halftone technology provided a process for printing photographs alongside text on the same paper, initiating the era of photojournalism and the modern periodical.6
Even in an age of enhanced transportation networks, increasing mobility, and transnational exchange, photography’s rapid dissemination across the globe is something of a marvel. The details of the photographic process were formally presented to the world on August 19, 1839, at a joint meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.7 News recounting LouisJacques-Mandé Daguerre’s invention was published in American and English newspapers even earlier, during the first three months of the year. As Daguerre was tinkering away in Paris, several inventors were simultaneously developing their own versions of photography, most unbeknownst to one another: FrenchBrazilian painter and inventor Hércules Florence collaborated with a pharmacist friend, Joaquim Correa de Mello, in a remote province of São Paulo, Brazil, to affix images on paper with silver nitrate in a process he dubbed “photographia”
by 1833; Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot had been working to secure images on paper (patented as the calotype in 1841); and Zou Boqi, an isolated scholar in the rural Nanhai area of China’s Guangdong province, constructed a wooden box camera and fitted it with a lens in 1844. Many of these inventors worked in such isolation that their own countrymen remained unaware of their innovations.8
Meanwhile, this new medium—part technology, part art—spread far and wide. By September 1839, Daguerre’s instruction manual arrived in the United States. Within ten years, some two thousand daguerreotypists were taking pictures across the country.9 In October, an English-language weekly was reporting news of the invention in Macao. Less than a month later, photography arrived in Africa; China’s Canton Press and British India’s Bombay Times were publishing articles about the technique in December. At the end of the year, Louis Prélier was aiming his camera at the port of Veracruz in Mexico, and another Frenchman was demonstrating the new process in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Montevideo.10
By 1840, there were daguerreotypists throughout South America and a photograph exhibition in Calcutta. The next year, a ship captain took the first daguerreotype in Australia. Daguerreans may have begun taking portraits of Hispanic Californios in Mexican California in 1842; by 1843, photographers were setting up shop in Singapore; in 1845, the first daguerreotype galleries opened in Honolulu, and in Hong Kong the following year. The new medium came to New Zealand and Japan by 1848, the same year that gold deposits were discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills.11 The gold rush catalyzed, accelerated, and dramatically expanded preexisting trade networks, and migrants from all the aforementioned countries made their way into San Francisco—making it “the second-largest passenger-receiving port in the United States,” in the words of historian Yong Chen, and more than quadrupling the population of California in the decade leading up to the Civil War.12
From its inception, photography provided Americans with affordable access to unprecedentedly detailed renderings of the familiar and the unfamiliar: pictures of themselves, of loved ones and strangers, as well as their own landscapes and views of the world beyond the places they knew and traversed. By the midnineteenth century, photographs became mechanically reproducible via new image technology. Commodified images could be conveyed much more efficiently than ever before over longer distances, thanks to simultaneous improvements in the national postal system, and developments in transportation and communication infrastructures. In other words, images became much more accessible to ordinary people at the same time that they seemed more lifelike and realistic.13 At just this moment, the gold rush prompted a long-term and long-distance separation of friends and loved ones that ensured San Francisco a critical but heretofore overlooked role in the history of the visual medium.
San Francisco quickly became an important center of a dramatically expanded American visual culture, physically as an entrepôt and culturally as a site born out of a famous moment that captivated international attention. It was a globally unique city in the mid-1800s, and that distinctiveness was reflected in the number and types of images that circulated through its streets, the intentions of those who created pictures, and the meanings those pictures held for their audiences across the city, the country, and the world. Human portraits were by far the most popular form of photography, and they enjoyed a particularly avid reception in the United States; but the pictures of people that traveled through the gold rush metropolis were infused with heightened levels of significance because they served as irreplaceable sources of virtual intimacy for a dislocated and anonymous urban populace.14
Recent scholarly literature covers a range of topics in the history of visual culture, from grand spectacles to problems of perception, but it has been limited primarily to studies of nineteenth-century Paris and New York: pivotal urban centers throughout the period, but insufficient proxies for the rest of the story.15 Seldom have historians devoted sustained attention to the personal dimensions of visual culture; the importance of imagery to people’s daily lives; the ways that pictures created overlap and intersection between public and private realms; or the connections between simulacra and lived experience. We usually think of modern visual culture in terms of spectacles—world’s fairs, panoramas, neon lights, monumental architecture, and film, to name a few—ignoring the fact that in nineteenth-century American cities, much of the obsession with visual experience focused on pictures of individual human beings. As a result of this oversight, we tend to think about the ubiquity of images in our culture or the public fixation on celebrity as a function of film, recorded sound, and broadcast technologies, but many of its foundations were already in place in the 1850s.
Shifting the focus to San Francisco can transform our understandings of that city, as well as the role that visual culture played in daily life during the nineteenth century. The gold rush metropolis embodied most of the century’s pivotal transformations, often in extreme forms: the separation, isolation, and individualism of the industrial era gave rise to a society in which the distinction between lived and virtual reality became as tantalizing as it was increasingly difficult to locate or discern. Historians have traditionally cast the gold rush metropolis as an exceptional “instant city” in its early years under U.S. control due to its culture and demographics, as well as the rapidity of its development.16 Some scholars have also characterized it as a place that gradually aligned with the more class-bound, conservative tastes and standards of its eastern metropolis counterparts as it approached the turn of the twentieth century; as the title of one history had it, San Francisco became “American.”17
But America also became San Franciscan during the second half of the nineteenth century. Immigration increasingly diversified the rest of the country, as it had already reconstituted the city by the Bay. National urbanization rates continued to increase until city life became the province of the majority by the 1920 Census. Visual surveillance and apprehension techniques like the mug shot were employed earlier in San Francisco than in most American cities—or most cities around the world, for that matter. Social reformers became increasingly strident and successful in their campaigns to proscribe pornographic images during the last quarter of the century, and San Francisco was an early center of this controversy. Mass entertainment forms such as theatrical shows and panoramas were already popular in American cities and were spreading around the country when San Francisco was founded, but the city quickly became an exciting epicenter of those forms—to the degree that it has been characterized as “probably the most active theatrical center in America” outside New York during this period.18 Most important, San Francisco developed what would become a much more widespread phenomenon: a popular reliance on images as supplements to (or substitutes for) interpersonal contact and intimacy, means of refashioning one’s own public persona, and expedients for ascertaining a stranger’s character or her desirability.
San Francisco provides a unique site for exploring the significance of the pictorial revolution to an increasingly interconnected globe, with the spread of capitalism and the circulation of gold as its primary catalysts.19 The city epitomized and showcased the changes taking hold at midcentury, and cast many broader trends in stark relief; its initial growth rates were exceptional, even for the already elevated national levels. It was not unique in the introduction of new image-making technologies or the construction of the modern celebrity, although few scholars have recognized the extent to which this alleged frontier outpost was, in fact, in the vanguard of such developments. The gold rush prompted the creation of unique archetypes and original versions of popular visual forms, such as the lithographed letter sheet. It also proved a propitious moment for self-fashioning in an “instant city” without entrenched hierarchies or conventions, a place where the highly disproportionate gender ratio would not even out until the final decades of the century.20
The gateway to the gold fields was located at the western edge of an as-yet unsettled continent, while on its other side lay the world’s largest ocean; as historian H. W. Brands remarked, it was “at once urban and a frontier,” a heavily populated metropolis amid a swiftly but unevenly changing hinterland.21 San Francisco was situated at the intersections of major global trade routes, but for its overwhelmingly nonindigenous population, the city also represented substantial distance from virtually every point of origin. It was home to U.S. citizens from every major settled region of the nation, as well as an extremely broad cross
section of humanity from around the globe. Those migrants brought with them their inherited ethnic and linguistic traditions; national, political, and religious identities; socioeconomic statuses; and preconceived notions about the rest of the world. Such affiliations and biases would all be tested in the urban crucible of San Francisco; some would persist or reemerge in the visual renderings that followed, while others were challenged and even transformed.
San Francisco’s thriving visual culture industry provided one of the first demonstrations of the popular demand for an array of image products, the difficulty of neatly distinguishing between public and private pictures, and the myriad uses to which photographs and illustrations might be put in the marketplace.22 Its inhabitants displayed, shared, and circulated daguerreotypes and photographs on a scale more commonly associated with later technological developments such as the carte de visite. To an unusual degree, the portraits and letters exchanged through the San Francisco post office constituted the sole substitute for interpersonal contact with one’s family and social network, on both sides of the divide. The city’s unique location coupled with its distinctive demographics to create a robust forum for entertainment, pornography, and celebrity.23
The images produced in and circulated through San Francisco soon traveled the same routes as the gold that funneled out of the port town: illustrated magazines, letter sheets, and miner portraits composed just a fraction of the visual exports. “Steamer days” brought ships with their own cargoes of family and individual portraits destined for lonely San Franciscan recipients, along with salacious pictures designed to entice the young male inhabitants. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 considerably reduced the physical and conceptual distance of the gold rush metropolis from other population centers on the continent, capping a formative period in which the city had developed an image culture that was materializing throughout the urban centers of the United States and in port towns around the world by the 1870s and 1880s.
The Instant City by the Bay
San Francisco: in 1848, the nine hundred or so inhabitants of a sleepy trading post were just preparing for a formal transition from Mexican to American rule as the name of their local Spanish mission was newly applied to the entire settlement.24 U.S. soldiers arrived to man the forts along the American River, in the Misión San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores), and at the Presidio—located on the northern end of the peninsula which some still called “Yerba Buena” for the wild mint that grew nearby.25 Not much else seemed likely to change in the quiet bayside town, with its scattered buildings and humble harbor.
For almost eighty years, the Spanish appellation for Saint Francis had been applied to the Mission Dolores and the huge inland bay that it faced, which extended about ten miles to the eastern shore. This exceptional geographic feature had been overlooked for some time, as it hid behind a narrow, often fogcovered, milewide strait that eluded many mariners. An overland expeditionary force under the command of Gaspar de Portolá de Rovira practically stumbled upon it in 1769. Prior to Spanish arrival, the peninsula was home to an indigenous population of about ten thousand, and the land of present-day California contained one of the most diverse Indian populations north of present-day Mexico. But only about 160 Yelamu people are thought to have occupied the future site of San Francisco, which consisted mainly of hills and sand dunes. As Britain’s colonists declared their independence on the other side of the continent, an expedition of predominantly mestizo, black, and Hispanicized Indian colonists and Spanish Franciscans came in 1776 and founded the Spanish empire’s then-northernmost mission and presidio (or military fort).26
Tensions soon escalated between northern tribes and Spanish missionaries and soldiers. In a series of early-nineteenth-century battles, the Spanish military allied with other indigenous peoples and proceeded to destroy Suisune, Miwok, and Patwin villages and their inhabitants. This conflict eradicated the “world of independent, small villages,” in the words of historian Anne Hyde, that had characterized indigenous life in the region. In 1806, an unprecedented measles epidemic eradicated a quarter of all mission Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile, the lucrative allure of the fur and horse trades continued to draw imperial rivals to the area, as it had since the late eighteenth century. British employees of the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company traversed the region, as did Boston-financed Yankee ship captains plying the Canton trade, and overland traders and trappers from the United States and Canada. The Russian presence in the region extended as far south as Fort Ross, just a hundred miles north of San Francisco, which the Russian-American Company founded in 1812.27
Printed images did not arrive in the West with the Anglo-American conquest. As previously noted, photography may have been introduced to California as early as 1842. Decades earlier, artists accompanying exploratory expeditions strove to capture the topography, resources, and indigenous inhabitants of the region in drawings and watercolors. These illustrations were often converted into lithographs or engravings and published in official survey reports, illustrated newspapers, or popular travel accounts in the respective home countries of the explorers: Spain, England, Russia, Mexico, and later, the United States.28 Most of California’s indigenous tribes would have been exposed to colorful religious paintings and hundreds of inexpensive prints—lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings—that Spanish missions commissioned from Mexico City to
inspire conversion and devotion, transcend language barriers, and provide distillations of Catholic teaching.29
Shortly after 1821, the Pacific coast region formally became part of the newly formed Mexican Republic, which expanded California’s international trade beyond Spanish transactions with its Philippine Islands colony. The Mexican transition enabled lucrative commercial exchanges with China. The onceclandestine trade of whalers, fur trappers, and Yankee merchants expanded significantly.30 In 1834, Mexican liberals succeeded in secularizing the missions, thereby freeing the Indians who had labored under their strict control. This transition developed the hide-and-tallow trade that the missions had dominated, and made available some of the most fertile land in Upper California. Alarmed by foreign encroachment on the northern margins of its territory, the Mexican government encouraged immigration to the region, which generated civil settlements and generous land grants to the so-called Californios: a group composed primarily of mestizos. These early settlers and military veterans soon consolidated social, political, and economic control on a regional level, for their own benefit and in order to create a buffer from the internally fractured, politically unstable, and nearly bankrupt young Mexican republic.31
The Californios were often sympathetic toward the separatist aims of a fastgrowing contingent of newly arrived (and predominantly Anglo) immigrants, yet the Americans treated the Californios as enemies when they mounted their short-lived Bear Flag Revolt in the Sacramento and Sonoma valleys over the summer of 1846. One of the revolt’s leaders was U.S. Army Topographical Engineers Brevet Captain John C. Frémont, who christened the strait at the entrance of San Francisco Bay—Chrysopylae, or Golden Gate. The name channeled the Greek moniker for Byzantium—Chrysoceras (golden horn), a reference to the city’s advantageous trading prospects with the Far East. President James K. Polk shared Frémont’s ambitions for the trading opportunities, strategic outposts, and mineral riches of California, and determined to acquire the region from the commencement of his presidency—as the Bear Flag rebels hoped that he would. When U.S. purchase offers failed, the president capitalized on a paper-thin justification for war on May 13, 1846, over a boundary dispute between Texas and Mexico.32
The Bear Flag Republic subsequently ended just a month after it began, when Commodore John D. Sloat arrived at Monterey and raised the American flag, executing his instructions to seize California upon the outbreak of hostilities (and before any other power could do so). For payment of $15 million and the assumption of outstanding American debts, Mexico was forced to cede almost half of its domain in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the MexicanAmerican War on February 2, 1848. For about five cents an acre, the United States obtained over 947,000 square miles, including Upper California, most
