| dc.description.abstract | The exploration of the monumental landscapes of the trans-Mississippi West in the decades following the Civil War produced a vast archive of imagery detailing the strange new landforms that would not only elucidate the Earth’s geological history but provide the justification for the country to expand westward. The artists and photographers who accompanied these expeditions not only gave visual form to the scientific findings but also fueled public enthusiasm for such explorations in images widely circulated by such popular magazines as Appleton’s, Harper’s Weekly, and The Aldine. Working within the conventions of landscape painting these artists aestheticized these sites, transforming land into scenery, which not only helped the American public to recognize the sometimes newly-acquired lands as American sites by inviting viewers to imaginatively inhabit the scene but also fueled such an enthusiasm for conserving such scenery leading to the establishment of the first national parks. When the National Park Service Act passed in 1916, the conservation of scenery was of the utmost importance to develop these sites into tourist destinations. Combined with the histories, place names, and visitors who projected cultural values onto the land, these aesthetic treatments of a site helped form landmarks and narrative traditions that would teach potential tourists how to look at and interact with the land itself. For the Virgin River Valley in southwestern Utah, which would eventually become Zion National Park in 1919, this process of aestheticizing the land and imbuing it with cultural referents began with artists from the Church of Latter-Day Saints in 1870, with photographer Charles Savage, who was the first to bring images of the canyon to the public through his photography studio in Salt Lake City. He and his Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) colleagues, easel painters George Ottinger and Alfred Lambourne, interpreted the canyon with the religious fervor of both their LDS community that settled Utah Territory and wider romantic conceits about the American West’s beauty as proof of the young republic’s desire to expand its influence. Soon thereafter came the United States geological survey of the Colorado River, headed by John Wesley Powell and accompanied by photographers and artists, such as James Fennemore, John K. Hillers, and Thomas Moran. Their pictures would go on to become some of the most popular and widely circulated images of Zion Canyon in the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the commercial sale of stereographs and prints as well as published illustrations in popular periodicals. The exhibition of some of these images at World’s Fairs in Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and St. Louis (1904) further extended the public reach of several Zion Canyon images, particularly those of the UGSG by Jack Hillers. Against the backdrop of the See America First movement in the opening decades of the twentieth century, promotional publications, written by those eager to nurture tourism to Zion Canyon, recalled the earliest images of the gorge not only to establish landmarks but to firmly place the canyon within the scope of uniquely American sites that defined the country’s exceptionalism. | en_US |
