The Pandora's Box of Solomon Carvalho: Ethnic Transformation in the Age of Manifest Destiny

Abstract

The Pandora's Box of Solomon CarvalhoEthnic Transformation in the Age of Manifest Destiny Scott Palmer (bio) The photographers recruited to accompany Western expeditions, working alongside surveyors, topographers, and cartographers, were decisive contributors to the popular iconography of expansion in the American West during the nineteenth century. And while these figures were typically employed to provide evidence supporting these expansionist ventures through the visual documentation of land claims and topographic features, their own social and cultural predilections and biases nonetheless frequently emerged in their work as well. Through the auspices of one of the era's strongest advocates of manifest destiny, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the Sephardic Jewish painter and daguerreotypist Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815–97) produced one of the more ambiguous, and overlooked, accounts by a photographer during this early phase of full-scale westward expansion. In 1853 Carvalho joined an expedition led by Benton's son-in-law, the "Pathfinder" John Charles Frémont (1813–90), a US–Mexican War veteran and among the most famous Americans of his time. Frémont's fifth expedition was to survey the "Santa Fe" route along the 38th parallel for the planned transcontinental railroad favored by Benton. Frémont, who had experimented with expeditionary photography as early as 1842, needed visual proof of the practicality of such a route; Carvalho and the German cartographer Frederick von Egloffstein were two of the men selected to supply it. Even though Frémont forbade journals on his expeditions, Carvalho wrote in secret, penning detailed letters to his wife, some of which later reappeared in John Bigelow's Memoir of the Life and [End Page 281] Public Services of John Charles Fremont (1856), a campaign biography published in support of Frémont's unsuccessful presidential candidacy on the newly formed Republican ticket in 1856.1 These excerpts later became the basis for Carvalho's expanded account of the expedition, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West (1858), which was dedicated to Frémont's wife (and Thomas Hart Benton's daughter), Jessie.2 Notwithstanding the expedition's purpose, Carvalho's book has relatively little to say about railroads but is instead full of cultural musings and detailed encounters with the inhabitants of the Great Basin, from Ute Indians to Mormon settlers. While both Frémont and Carvalho established close connections with American Indians, they were nonetheless ardent expansionists entirely convinced of their right to take control of, in Carvalho's words, "hitherto untrodden country" (Incidents 17). In this respect, Carvalho's narrative yields a detailed portrait of the practical social exigencies of manifest destiny, describing how relationships between whites, religious sects, Native tribal rivalries and alliances, and Mexican rancheros were negotiated in the American West. And yet while Carvalho himself enthusiastically participated in the rhetoric and objectives of expansion as a member of Frémont's expedition, his harrowing journey forced him to confront his own identity as a practicing Sephardic Jew who was afforded only "probationary whiteness" (176), as Matthew Frye Jacobson describes the status of Jews in nineteenth-century America. In her book Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination Rachel Rubenstein briefly introduces Carvalho as one of the Jewish artists of the period who engaged in "complex performances of Americanness, Indianness, and Jewishness" as a strategy for "challeng[ing] their non-Jewish contemporaries' nineteenth-century visions of Jews and Indians as vanished or, if present, irredeemably alien" (25). If Carvalho indeed sought to "redeem" some contemporary agency for Sephardi such as himself, how did he manage his own avowed ideological investment in manifest destiny alongside the liminal nature of his own social position? How were these seemingly irreconcilable positions expressed through the complex technical and observational task of shooting [End Page 282] and developing daguerreotypes in the field? And how did he, as Rubinstein suggests, come to see his own racial location as (at least momentarily) coterminous with the experience of many American Indians? This study will consider these questions through a closer examination of Carvalho's strategic representations of his own ethnic identity as he adjusted to the shifting social and physical conditions during his travels in the American West. As his own privileged...