Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [5]
Prologue
ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR art forms in nineteenth-century America was the panorama. A panorama was an oil painting done on a gigantic scale—so gigantic that the first sight of it would make spectators gasp. Today, a painting that fills up an art gallery wall (say, ten feet by thirty feet) would strike people as unusually large; back then, it would have counted as a panoramic miniature. Some panoramas were so big that special halls had to be built to display them.
The subject of the typical panorama ran to the spectacular and violent. One famous panorama (or, to give it its grander name, “cosmoramic view”) showed the burning of Moscow in 1812: in the foreground were Napoleon’s armies retreating through the snow, and in the background was the skyline of the city in flames. Another panorama showed the cannonades blasting the ships in the harbor of Tripoli during the Barbary Wars. There was a popular panorama of the “magnificent and imposing sight” of Vesuvius in eruption. Another very elaborate panorama displayed a series of biblical scenes, culminating, according to the advertisement, with “the awful destruction of the world.”
But the most popular—and by far the largest—panoramas were of the Mississippi River.
The choice of subject was a natural one. The Mississippi was famous. It was known everywhere as the wonder of the New World, the American Nile; it had been the subject of worldwide fascination and romance ever since the first European explorers had sent back descriptions of it in the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century, it had become a major tourist attraction: a steamboat voyage between St. Louis and New Orleans was considered an essential part of an American grand tour.
In those days it was called the Father of Waters. This was said to be the meaning of the original Indian word Mississippi. Actually, it was nonsense—a gauzy poeticism born out of white sentimentality about the noble savage. Mizu-ziipi was an Ojibwe phrase that meant “very big river.” (If any speakers of Ojibwe had felt moved to be poetical about the Mississippi, they would have more likely called it michu-ziipi, “endless river.”) But even if the phrase was bogus, it did convey something essential about the river—its immensity, the sense that it was a sprawling, dominating presence in the American landscape.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had taken on another aspect. The eastern half of the continent was largely colonized by then; the western half was still mostly unexplored. (The prairie and the plains were known as the Great American Desert—a desert more in the sense of deserted than of arid land.) The Mississippi had come to be the natural boundary line between the two. There were no bridges anywhere along its length; a crossing to the far side had something epic about it, a venture from civilization into the unknown. A trip up or down the river, even in imagination, was as exhilarating as a voyage along the edge of the world.
In the early 1850s, when the enthusiasm for panoramas was at its height, there were five different Mississippi panoramas on tour through America and Europe. Each was advertised as the biggest painting on earth. The most famous of them, John Banvard’s Grand Panorama of the Mississippi River, was known as the “Three-Mile Painting.” The ads said it was the “Largest Picture Ever Executed By Man.” Banvard’s chief competitor, John Rowson Smith’s Leviathan Panorama of the Mississippi River, was advertised as “extending over Four Miles of Canvas.” It was “One-Third Longer than any other Pictorial Work in Existence.” Another, Sam Stockwell’s Mammoth Mississippi Panorama, was announced as “Three Times the Extent of Any Painting in the World”—which, if that claim had been true (and if the other claims for the panoramas had also been true), would have made it twelve miles long.
Were the claims true? No. The Mississippi panoramas were most likely around twenty feet tall and a couple of hundred