William Henry Jackson (1843-1942)

South Pass and Wind River Mountains Travel of 1852

Watercolor and gouache on paper mounted to board.
Dimensions: 10 x 14 inches

Signed lower right “WH Jackson,” captioned in the paper-wrapped border at upper left, and described/signed on verso.
Illustrated in Ezra Meeker and Howard Driggs, Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail, page 72, 1932. 

 William Henry Jackson’s brilliant watercolor looks out over a vast, gold-green sagebrush plain from an elevated vantage point, capturing an emigrant wagon train stretched in a long, curving line that recedes into the distance toward the horizon. Dozens of canvas-topped prairie schooners, most drawn by ox teams rather than horses, wind along the dusty trail in loose, spread-out order — some trailing far behind, others clustered together. Riders on horseback flank the column, loose stock and colts run alongside, and tiny figures on foot walk beside their wagons and animals. In the background, the hazy blue-green folds of the Wind River Mountains rise up, their highest peaks capped in snow even in summer. 
     
     South Pass, a wide, gently graded gap in the Continental Divide in what is now central Wyoming, was the single most important gateway of the westward emigration. Between 1840 and 1869, as many as 500,000 emigrants funneled over the 7,440-foot-elevation pass to reach destinations in the far West, an emigration that helped make the United States a continental nation stretching from coast to coast. By 1852, the year depicted here, that traffic had swelled enormously — spurred by the California Gold Rush (1849) and continuing Oregon and Mormon migrations to Utah — turning the trail into a crowded thoroughfare of wagon trains, livestock herds, and travelers. What had begun decades earlier as a trickle of missionaries and pioneer families had, by the early 1850s, become a torrent of humanity, livestock, and wagons pouring through the pass. The gentle, treeless grade of South Pass was what made this mass wagon migration possible at all, since it allowed loaded wheeled vehicles to cross the Rockies without the steep grades found elsewhere along the Divide. 
     

     The Wind River Range, seen rising in the distance in the painting, is the rugged mountain chain lying just north of South Pass. Native Americans had known and used the pass, located south of the Wind River Range, for millennia before European and American explorers arrived. The range’s high, glaciated peaks (including some of Wyoming’s tallest summits) form a dramatic backdrop to the emigrant road, and their snow-streaked crests — visible even in the warmer travel months — would have served emigrants as a landmark signaling their approach to, and passage over, the Continental Divide.
     
     William Henry Jackson is best remembered as a pioneering photographer of the American West — in 1869 he won a commission from the Union Pacific to document railroad scenery, and his work soon drew the attention of Ferdinand Hayden, leading to Jackson’s participation in the Hayden geological surveys of the Yellowstone region in 1870-71, work that helped bring about the creatio later in his long life, he drew on his own memories, sketches, and photographs to create an extensive series of watercolors documenting the overland emigration era, including numerous South Pass and Oregon Trail scenes. 
     
     This particular work was reproduced in Ezra Meeker and Howard Driggs’s 1932 book Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail.