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ARTS & RESISTANCE

No. 58 (Fall/Winter 2023)

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Resistance Etched in Steel

High on a rocky plateau overlooking a rich valley toward mountains beyond stood a group of Native Americans with their horses, attentively observing the scene spread out before them. Their dress identified them as indigenous: leggings and tunics, feathered headdresses, bows and quivers hanging from their shoulders. One of them sat by the horses and smoked a calumet, the sacred ceremonial pipe of personal prayer and communal rituals, used to mark the end of disputes, strengthen alliances, and insure peaceful relations. Their attention focused on the scene that unfolded below. A town nestled in the distance, its church steeple, industrial chimneys and substantial two- and three-storey buildings announcing a flourishing settlement. In the middle ground a suspension bridge allowed an oncoming train to cross the river, while a steam-powered paddle boat headed toward the town. In the near ground, directly below the rocky escarpment, a log cabin dominated space recently cleared, the tree stumps of an earlier wood still visible. A fence protected livestock while laundry waved from a line in the breeze.

Title vignette from Colton’s Atlas of America (New York, 1856)
Colton’s Atlas of America with detail of Indian Territory shown at right.
This image was engraved on a steel plate, the skill of the engraver evidenced by the detail of the foliage around the rocky outcrop, the studied care taken with the clothing, the variegated shading of the landscape background, and the light touches expressing the cloudscape above. Over the scene was written, “Colton’s American Atlas” and below, “Published by J.H. Colton & Co. No. 172 William St. New York.” This was the frontispiece to Colton’s Atlas of America: Illustrating the Physical and Political Geography of North and South America and the West India Islands by George W. Colton, published in New York by Joseph Hutchins Colton in 1856. Inside the atlas the table of contents listed sixty-three maps of Canada, the United States with its territories and major cities, and the countries of Central and South America. The table of contents called the initial image “Vignette Title.” How this vignette connected and resisted the contents of the atlas is our subject of reflection.

Colton’s Atlas of America was one of many publications of Joseph Hutchins Colton (1800–1893) who, from 1831, produced railroad maps, immigrant guides, folding pocket maps, large wall maps, and compilation atlases. He was aided by his son, George Woolworth Colton (1827–1901), whose map compilations comprised the contents of the Atlas of America. So what vision of America did the Vignette Title lead us to expect? Native Americans were placed boldly in the foreground and elevated above the landscape, encouraging us to expect some delineation of their own lands among the 63 maps of provinces, states, and territories inside the atlas. But we look in vain. Only on the maps of North America and the United States was a specifically Indian Territory, west of Arkansas, delineated and colored.

While other states and territories each received a single map in the Colton atlas, the Indian Territory was relegated to the margins of the maps of the surrounding states and territories of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska
and Kanzas [sic]. On the detail from the map of Missouri, the Indian Territory may just be seen in the lower left corner; Native American names were printed in faint capital letters; and the distinctive pattern of township and range sections came to an abrupt stop at the state line, where the “West” began.

The Indian Territory, barely present in the Atlas of America, resulted from the The Indian Removal Act of 1830, whose purpose was described by President Andrew Jackson as “. . . the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. Two important tribes have accepted the provision made for their removal at the last session of Congress, and it is believed that their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages.”

Forests gone and hunting grounds lost. Those are the “obvious advantages” observed by the Native people on the rock in the Title Vignette.

“The same obvious advantages” accruing to the Native Americans under this “benevolent policy” was given a resistant treatment in the title vignette. “Consummation” meant not only the completion of “the removal of Indians beyond white settlements,” but also the consumption of those lands to which they had been removed. No sooner settled in regions far from their native territories than Native Americans were once again pressed into smaller and smaller spaces, encroached on every side by homes, fences, towns, and buildings, engulfed by the grid of settlement, overwhelmed by the bold lines of roads, canals, and railways. Forests gone and hunting grounds lost. Those are the “obvious advantages” observed by the Native people on the rock in the title vignette.

Who created this subversive image? The vignette is signed “C.E. Doepler del[ineavit = designed it]” and “C. Wise sc[ulpsit = engraved it]”. C. Wise, the engraver, remains unidentified though his artisanal skills are clear. Carl Emil Doepler (1824–1905), on the other hand, was a German artist resident in New York City in the 1850s. Born in Warsaw, Poland, and trained as an artist in Dresden and Munich, he arrived in the city in 1849 to work as an illustrator for the publishers Harper and Brothers and G.P. Putnam, among others, for whom he created numerous images for children’s books and popular histories. His work address at Harper and Brothers at 82 Cliff Street in downtown Manhattan was only a few blocks away from 172 Williams Street where Joseph Hutchins Colton maintained his publishing house.

Doepler did not stay in New York; he returned to Germany by 1860 where he taught costume design in Weimar and became the costume designer for the city’s theater. He is probably best known for the costumes he designed for early productions of Richard Wagner’s Das Ring des Nibelungen, the great opera cycle concerning mythic Teutonic gods. Doepler’s ideas for how these gods were dressed have influenced productions of the Ring cycle to the present day. The title vignette for Colton’s Atlas of America showed Doepler’s early interest in cultural representation through clothing. His later working methods on the Nibelungen costumes might tell us something about how he created the frontispiece for the Colton atlas. The German scholar Joachim Heinzle has described Doepler’s efforts to produce “historically correct” Germanic costumes through his research in museums and study of early Teutonic weaponry, jewelry, and clothing to achieve what he thought was an accurate presentation of the mythic characters in Wagner’s opera.
On this detail from the map of Missouri, the Indian Territory may just be seen in the lower left corner; Native American names were printed in faint capital letters; and the distinctive pattern of township and range sections came to an abrupt stop at the state line, where the “West” began.
While in New York, Doepler may have been similarly alert to the work of artists who brought images of the indigenous peoples in the trans-Appalachian and trans-Mississippi regions of North America back to the cities of the East. To capture an accurate view of the Native Americans for his frontispiece, he may have relied on the work of an artist such as John Mix Stanley (1814– 1872). Stanley’s traveling art exhibit, the North American Indian Portrait Gallery, was on tour between 1850 and 1852 in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; it was in New York from November 1850 to February 1851, where Doepler could have seen it.

Doepler may also have been familiar with the work of Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) who was also well known in Germany for his artistic works. Bodmer accompanied Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (1782–1867) on his trip from 1832 to 1834 through the interior of North America, traveling up the Missouri River into the heart of the Great Plains, deep in the homelands of the Mandan and Hidatsa, which were also the hunting and traveling regions for several other indigenous groups, such as the Sioux, Assiniboine, Cree, and Blackfoot. The Prince’s matter of fact descriptions of Native Americans, given without editorial nuance, were illustrated by Bodmer’s strikingly detailed colored images and published in German as Reise in das Innere Nord-Amerikas (Coblenz, 1839–41) and in English as Travels in the interior of North America (London, 1843–44). Their joint work created an archive of information for Native peoples of the northern Great Plains.
In Doepler’s Title Vignette, we might detect the influence of Bodmer in the clothing, headwear, and stance of the Native Americans. Their position on the rocky plateau overlooking expansive terrain was a compositional device used by Bodmer, who concentrated on the individuality of each person he depicted.
Perhaps this objective point of view, the eye of a natural historian, appealed to Doepler. Like Bodmer, he was a foreigner in a strange land, viewing its denizens with the cool, neutral eye of an outsider, unsaturated by American exceptionalism and its god-given imperatives. Instead of the city on the hill, Doepler placed the Native Americans on the high ground and attended to the details of each of them: their clothing, their postures, their expressions of apprehension and watchfulness as the generic and undifferentiated tide of farms, fences, roads and railroads, houses and buildings spread below their plateau.
The Title Vignette continued to function as an introductory image in atlases after J.H. Colton encountered tough economic times in 1859. The maps from Colton’s Atlas of America were taken over by Alvin J. Johnson, a fellow New York-based map and atlas publisher, who incorporated them into Johnson’s New Illustrated (Steel Plate) Family Atlas, first published in 1860. Reusing the plate as a title vignette, he removed the words “J.H. Colton” and the publication imprint; in the Table of Contents he renamed the image: Civilization.

But what is the “civilization” invoked? Fences and farms, steam and railways, houses and tall buildings, the civilization of Manifest Destiny, a concept coined in detail by John Louis O’Sullivan, who summed it up in his article on the Oregon question in the newspaper, The Eastern State Journal (White Plains, NY, January 29, 1846): “And that claim [to Oregon] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the Continent which Providence has given for the development [sic] of the great experiment of liberty and federative self government entrusted to us.” However, Manifest Destiny comes at a price. Inside the atlas, a geographical description of North America reveals the cost: “Of the American aborigines few remain. They have vanished from the land before the march of civilization.” In spite of its title, Doepler’s frontispiece, with its foregrounding of Native Americans, resists civilization and the claims of Manifest Destiny.