American Indians of the West

American Indians of the West

Nineteenth-century photographs of western landscapes depict a pristine wilderness untouched by inhabitants but ready to receive them. Such impressions were false or at the very least misleading. American Indians had been living in the West for centuries, and evidence of their activity in the region was apparent to explorers and photographers working there. During the 1871 exploration of the Yellowstone region, for example, the survey team, including photographer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942), traveled along Indian migratory paths. Even so, Jackson's views bear no hint of a civilization already in existence in Yellowstone.

Soon enough, photographers and their patrons recognized the negative impact of U.S. expansion on the American Indian way of life, and so set out to create a visual record of a "vanishing race." But these photographs were most often images of a defeated and dispossessed people, whose presence lent a romantic or historic flourish to the visual narrative of the West produced by an outside dominate culture.