The California Gold Rush: approaches to producing daguerreotype views. An examination of views in the Matthew R. Isenburg Collection at AMC Toronto

10.32920/ryerson.14663124 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Marcos R. Armstrong

Keyword(s):

Working Conditions ◽

Gold Rush ◽

Light Climate ◽

American Frontier ◽

Vantage Points

This thesis examines daguerreotypes of outdoor views made during the California Gold Rush from 1848 to 1856, now in the Matthew R. Isenburg Collection at AMC Toronto. The views were made for private commissions, public viewings, and as models for engraving. Daguerreotypists encountered a number of challenging working conditions in the field, different from those in galleries where portraits were taken. In analyzing 18 daguerreotypes from the Isenburg Collection, this thesis investigates how working conditions during the Gold Rush such as light, climate, and terrain, influenced daguerreotypists`s decisions when making views; these include the choice of camera apparatus, optics and aperture, variations in exposure times, and composition and vantage points. By considering the purposes of such views, and the photographer`s approaches to making them, the thesis explains the appearance of these early visual documents of the western American frontier.

Download Full-text

Friend on the American Frontier

10.5406/illinois/9780252038266.003.0011 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

James Emmett Ryan

Keyword(s):

Pacific Coast ◽

Missouri River ◽

Gold Rush ◽

American Frontier ◽

The Pacific ◽

Returning Home

This chapter asks how an ordinary Quaker not involved in the abolition campaign might have considered the matter of slavery and answers this by reading the memoir of Charles Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-Niner: The Adventures of Charles Edward Pancoast on the American Frontier. Pancoast was a Philadelphian Quaker whose time on the frontier in the 1840s and 1850s was marked by a cautious response to the problem of slavery. Most of his account in details his own adventures and fortune-seeking in the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. Failing as a drugstore entrepreneur in Missouri, Pancoast spent time owning and operating a steamship on the Missouri River, and eventually found himself at work and seeking his fortune in business among the gold rush miners of California. In all, young Pancoast spent 14 years afoot in the hinterlands and byways of Western America, before returning home to settle in Philadelphia in 1854 at the age of thirty-six.

Download Full-text

Remaking Slavery in a Free State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush California

Pacific Historical Review ◽

10.1525/phr.2011.80.1.28 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 80 (1) ◽

pp. 28-63 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Stacey L. Smith

Keyword(s):

Working Conditions ◽

American South ◽

Personal Autonomy ◽

Gold Rush ◽

Social Practices ◽

Free State ◽

White Southerners ◽

The American South

Hundreds of white Southerners traveled to Gold Rush California with slaves. Long after California became a free state in 1850, these masters transplanted economic and social practices that sustained slavery in the American South to the goldfields. At the same time, enslaved people realized that Gold Rush conditions disrupted customary master-slave relationships and pressed for more personal autonomy, better working conditions, and greater economic reward. The result was a new regional version of slavery that was remarkably flexible and subject to negotiation. This fluidity diminished, however, as proslavery legislators passed laws that protected slaveholding rights and vitiated the state's antislavery constitution. California's struggle over bondage highlights the persistence of the slavery question in the Far West after the Compromise of 1850 and illuminates slavery's transformation as it moved onto free soil.

Download Full-text

Anglo-Saxonism in the Yukon: The Klondike Nugget and American-British Relations in the ““Two Wests,”” 1898––1901

Pacific Historical Review ◽

10.1525/phr.2007.76.3.373 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 76 (3) ◽

pp. 373-404 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

ADAM ARENSON

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Gold Rush ◽

The Philippines ◽

Symbolic Language ◽

Anglo Saxon ◽

The West ◽

American Frontier ◽

Daily News ◽

The North ◽

Commercial Photography

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans and Britons connected their joint local experiences with the simultaneous colonial conquests in Cuba, the Philippines, South Africa, and China through the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. From 1898 to 1901 Dawson's newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and commercial photography demonstrated the power of this symbolic language of flags and balls, heated rhetoric and dazzling cartoons. The Klondike Nugget, the first newspaper in town and the only one run by Americans, took up the claims of global Anglo-Saxonism with the most fervor, although its sentiments were often echoed in the Canadian-edited Dawson Daily News. Differences re-emerged, especially over the boundary between Alaska and Canada, but this brief episode remained deeply imprinted in narratives of the ““two Wests””——both of the North American frontier West and the West as Anglo-Saxon civilization——told at the turn of the twentieth century.

Download Full-text