Gold Rush Movies

Abstract

We think so well of our own times that some of us act as if Hollywood newsreels, travelogues, and documentaries were modern inventions. But a century ago our great-grandparents had travel pictures and edu cational reels that brought the distant world to them as readily as our neighborhood movies do to us. Scenic artists made long journeys to sketch with pencil and water color and oil the cities and the rivers, the strange, the quaint, the romantic corners and customs of the world. They spent weeks placing on hundreds of yards of canvas vast repre sentations of subjects that would instruct as well as please. And night after night audiences sat for two or three hours watching such pictures unroll before their eyes, while a commentator pointed out scenes of par ticular interest and a pianist from time to time played appropriate airs. The Funeral of Napoleon in Paris, the Burning of Moscow, the Ante diluvian World, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Niagara Falls and Mammoth Cave, Taylor's Campaigns in Mexico, a Whaling Voyage, a Balloon Flight from London to Mayence, a Grand Panorama of Broad way, the Hudson River, the City of New York, the Mississippi River (five pictures were done of Old Man River in the 1840's, the shortest of which was four hundred and twenty-five yards long) ? these were typical subjects the moving panorama presented to audiences. The excitement of the gold rush gave a new stimulus to newsreels. One picture of a voyage around Cape Horn was being exhibited in New York in mid-September of the first gold rush year. The spring of 1850 saw at Gothic Hall in Brooklyn a panorama of the Gold Mines of Cali fornia produced by Emmert (or Eimert) and Penfield. James Wilkins' Moving Mirror of the Overland Trail, painted in Peoria by a St. Louis artist, began its tour in September 1850. Beale and Craven's Voyage to California and Return was showing at Stoppani Hall, New York, in November 1850. At St. Louis in January 1851, Charles Rogers was busy painting another panorama of the Land Route to California. February 1853 saw the opening of Ball's Model of San Francisco at 312 Broad 29