Isaac Stevens Railroad Expedition Lithograph Collection
Isaac I. Stevens, Washington's first territorial governor, is one of the most formidable figures in the state's history. Best known for his Indian treaty tour of 1854-55, the ramifications of which are still in the news today, Stevens first came west in 1853 as the head of an exploratory expedition. Previously a career military man, the governor was selected as the civilian head of the northern-most of several railway corridor topographical surveys.
As soon as the United States established a sovereign foothold on the Pacific Slope in 1846, advocates for a transcontinental railroad linkage from coast to coast flourished. Because it was imagined that there would be sufficient capital for only one cross-country rail line, Congress, fractured by the sectional divisions that would soon rend the county in a civil war, concluded that a series of scientific surveys could best decide what contemporary politics could not-the single most practicable rail route to the Pacific. In all there were five major corridor studies; four running east/west and another that ran north/south in California and Oregon.
As a former army surveyor, Stevens actively sought the command of the northern corridor study. He saw this commission as both a practical way to get to the new jurisdiction that he was charged with establishing, Washington Territory, as well as the foundational element of its future prosperity and prominence. The various surveys all followed a methodology refined from the path breaking model for scientific exploration; the template created during the great British maritime voyages in the 18th century by Captain James Cook. In this regard, the Stevens party, like the other railroad surveys, had a team of scientists in various disciplines (like geology and natural history), cartographers, and to our point here, illustrators who could provide a visual dimension of the various landscapes traversed by the expedition.
Of all the railroad survey reports, the one prepared by Isaac Stevens was the most lavishly illustrated. Stevens hired for his team the best known of the railroad survey artists-John Mix Stanley. Born in Canandaigua, New York, Stanley had the singular advantage of having already conducted an artist's tour of the west in 1847, following in the popular mode established by the better known George Catlin. Both artists, among others including Karl Bodmer and Paul Kane, helped popularize the notion of the Vanishing American by preparing and exhibiting their collections of Indian portraiture, imagery thought to be all the more valuable because of the presumptive inevitable extinction of the Native peoples of North America.
Stanley's views of the romantic West-pristine wilderness, exotic trading posts, the Native encampments-were snapshots of history illustrating the prospective northern railroad corridor from Lake Superior to Puget Sound. The route ran, generally speaking, through present day North Dakota, along the banks of the Missouri River through Montana, into the Bitterroot Valley near Missoula, past Cataldo mission in Idaho into the Spokane River Valley, and then down across the Palouse until Stevens struck the Columbia near Wallula for the concluding phase of the voyage to Fort Vancouver. Aside from the main route that he explored personally, Stevens dispatched several smaller parties to explore difficult to reach country so as to add to the comprehensiveness of his survey data, including maps. The most famous of these was the Rocky Mountain reconnaissance of Lt. John Mullan.
Because the northern survey was considered, aforethought, as the most difficult route to assess, uniquely it had a western contingent led by Captain George B. McClellan. This detachment started from Fort Vancouver and moved eastward with the plan of meeting Stevens in the interior of the Columbia Basin. Stevens did not imagine he could survey both the northern Rockies and the Cascades in a single season of exploration. McClellan's principal objective was assessing the prospects of running the rail line through the Cascade Mountains, an assignment that he failed to achieve to the considerable regret of the governor.
By pure serendipity, a unit within McClellan's command had a German immigrant infantryman who just happened to have considerable artistic skill in his own right. Gustavus Sohon would eventually have a dozen of his field sketches translated into lithographs by the publishers of the railroad reports. When Stevens met with McClellan's force and learned of Sohon's skill, the immigrant artist was assigned to Mullan's command that spent an extra half year completing its study of the northern Rockies. Meanwhile, Stevens, Stanley and the several dozen men who had originated the venture in Minnesota completed their travel to Fort Vancouver and some still further to Olympia where Stevens established the territorial government of Washington in November, 1853.
In some respects Sohon's drawings met or exceeded the standard set by Stanley, the expedition's official artist. Stevens intended to give an account of his treaty tour much like his encyclopedic geographic memoir of the trip from St. Paul to Olympia. Knowing that dramatic illustrations would greatly enhance the value of his treaty-making narrative, and now familiar with Sohon's "great taste as an artist," Stevens secured Sohon's services from the army and had him attached the entourage that would engage tribal leadership in the northern west as far east as north central Montana. Today, Sohon is best known for his artistic record of the Stevens Treaty tour.
Given that the Lewis and Clark expedition, unlike its contemporaneous counterparts in the form of the Cook and Vancouver maritime voyages of discovery, did not produce drawings of landscapes encountered in their trek west across the continent, we owe the first substantive views of the northern west to the man who followed in their footsteps fifty years later-Isaac I. Stevens. No more significant body of imagery was produced in this region before the photographic era than that which flows from the direct and adjunct influences of Stevens.
Additional Information:
Guide to the Isaac I. Stevens Papers 1831-1892 - Isaac Ingalls Stevens (1818-62) was the first governor of the Washington Territory (1853-57) and represented the territory in Congress from 1857-61. He was an enthusiastic proponent of westward expansion and an early booster of the commercial potential of the Pacific Northwest. As superintendent of the government survey of a northern route for a transcontinental railroad in 1853 and as the first governor of Washington, he played an important part in promoting the settlement of the Pacific Northwest.
The Lewis and Clark Journey of Discovery: Railroad Surveys - Competing interests, commercial and private, national and local, military and civilian, logical and illogical composed the age of the great railroad surveys.
History of Railroads and Maps - The American Memory project of the Library of Congress has this section on surveying and mapping activities in the United States.