Yosemite National Park didn’t exist when Carleton Watkins visited in 1861.
It took another 29 years for the creation of the park. The birth of an idea that came to help define the west advanced by two friends who came out to California together from back east.
A photographer and a railroad baron. Not the most likely pairing of professions for a friendship. A wonderful reminder that friendships emerge from the most unlikely of circumstances.
Carleton Watkins came out to California with Collis Huntington. Huntington would wind up as one of the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad. Watkins would wind up as one of the towering photographers of the west.
Huntington filled up the west with fortune seekers and families.
Watkins helped protect it. He documented the west’s natural treasures. His work influenced politicians back in Washington who otherwise may have never grasped the grandeur of what would come to be Yosemite National Park.
And none of it would have happened without those glass plates.
Each plate measured 22 by 18 inches. Somehow he hauled thirty of them up into Yosemite in July 1861. He managed to get those glass plate negatives back to San Francisco. Then he worked with them, using the arduous wet-collodion process to print his images.
Those mammoth plates he carried back to San Francisco from Yosemite aren’t around anymore.
Every one of them gone forever. The whole lot shattered and buried in the 1906 earthquake.
But we have the prints and we have a sense of what he saw. We know where he stood, and we know he somehow figured out how to do what most of us can’t.
To frame something so expansive the sight defies the confines of depiction.
What Carleton Watkins saw in Yosemite in July 1861 helps define how we see our wilderness today. He set up his camera in front of grandeur most of his countrymen couldn’t conceive of.
What he couldn’t see was his nation falling apart. Blood spilled onto a grim battlefield thirty miles south of the nation’s capital.
That same month Carleton Watkins found himself in awe of Yosemite, America found itself horrified over the First Battle of Bull Run.
