Carleton Watkins: Making the West American by Tyler Green

Abstract

233 Reviews 232 OHQ vol. 120, no. 2 Chinese side of the story is that of various organizations, including the Six Companies and the Consulate General in San Francisco, providing funds for defense in criminal cases, for civil lawsuits, and for lobbying efforts at the state and national levels. The attorneys hired by Chinese for major cases were often eminent in their field. They included Matthew Deady in Portland; Thomas Burke in Seattle; and several other lawyers mentioned by Wunder, including Hall McAllister in San Francisco; Fremont Wood, G.W. Adams, Lyttleton Price, and James W. Poe in Idaho; and Henry Blake and James E. Callaway in Montana. The list should also include two Chinese government representatives in Washington, D.C. — John W. Foster, legal consultant to the Imperial Government of China, and the brilliant London-trained solicitor , Chinese Ambassador Wu Ting Fang — and one non-government representative in New York, where in the early 1900s a young Columbia Law School student named Franklin Roosevelt is claimed by official Chinese sources to have become a legal advisor to Situ Meitang, head of the powerful Chee Kung Tong secret society. More than most other immigrants, the Chinese appreciated good lawyers. They worked together to select them and to pay their often-substantial fees. The strength of the book is partly due to Wunder’s unusual training — he is one of the few historians to have a J.D. as well as a Ph.D. — and his ability to present legal concepts in a jargon-free way. He makes deft use of voluminous court records, many of which have rarely been used by other historians. He also explains with exceptional clarity the issues involved. Very few other historians of Chinese America can match his ability to place Chinese legal issues so securely within the context of national events and relations among ethnic groups. A further strength is Wunder’s extensive familiarity with such legal sources as district court records, which can be hard to find and not easy for non-lawyers to appreciate . The book would be worth reading for the legal references alone as well as the incisive intelligence with which the cases and the racism behind them are presented. Bennet Bronson Seattle, Washington CARLETON WATKINS: MAKING THE WEST AMERICAN by Tyler Green University of California Press, Oakland, 2018. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 536 pages. $34.95 cloth. Do we really need another biography of Carleton Emmons Watkins, the great nineteenth-century American landscape photographer? Since historian Peter Palmquist first brought attention to Watkins in 1983, dozens of books have been written about his life and work. No wonder, as he is a compelling (although slippery) figure to chase through history. Watkins left behind a staggering body of now-iconic views of the nascent American West, including early images of Yosemite Valley and the Columbia River Gorge. These photographs set a gold standard for landscape photography that shaped how Americans view and idolize our western spaces. Yet, until now, Watkins’s life story has been a tattered tale, repeatedly told in fragments from the same few sources, with plenty of blank spaces. Tyler Green’s Carleton Watkins: Making the West American is a breath of fresh air — it is the most meticulously researched portrait of the photographer to date, adding a treasure trove of compelling new details to his well-told narrative. Green painstakingly follows Watkins from his birth in rural New York in 1829 through his journey from California gold-rush émigré to a celebrated, self-made photographer of the West, ending at his deathbed in penury and blindness in 1916. The usual stories — such as how the revolutionary , large-format photographs Watkins took of Yosemite in 1861 helped influence Congress to preserve the area in perpetuity — are all here. But there are plenty of new stories, too: how RalphWaldoEmersonsoadmiredWatkins’swork that he displayed two of his photographs in his home in Concord, Massachusetts, and, best of all, Green’s discovery that own his great-greatgrandfather , William Lawrence, saved Watkins from bankruptcy in the 1870s. Green is mindful that Watkins left few letters or diaries to contextualize his own life. He is also admirably cautious (where previous authors have...