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By Root 696 0

yards long, nowhere near miles. But they were still prodigious pieces of work. They were much too large ever to be displayed all at once. Instead they were shown in theaters, by gaslight, like primordial movies. Two cylinders were set on opposite sides of the stage; the panorama was gradually unrolled from one and wound up on the other. There’d be a narrator standing at the side of the stage, keeping things lively by telling stories and cracking jokes and scoring off the hecklers in the audience. There’d also be music—usually a piano or an organ, though at the classier theaters there might be a small orchestra. (The piano score for one of the panoramas survives: “The Mississippi Waltzes, to Accompany Banvard’s Three-Mile Painting”; it was on sale in the lobby after each show.) A complete viewing generally took around two hours.

What the audience saw differed from one panorama to the next, but it took the same general form: a succession of scenes as might be witnessed from a steamboat, on a voyage from one of the upper branches of the river down to New Orleans. (Actually the voyage went downriver at one showing and upriver at the next, to save the trouble of rerolling the canvas.) The panoramas rendered the river in the boldest and most gorgeous colors. Vista after vista, spectacle after spectacle, the Father of Waters unfurled itself in serene majesty. One newspaper reviewer described seeing “bluffs, bars, islands, rocks and mounds, points and cliffs without number, and of fantastic varieties of form.” The panorama artists crowded the view with eye-catching scenes of natural drama: thunderstorms towering over bluffs, blizzards burying forests, prairie fires stretching from horizon to horizon. There were also scenes of the great calamities and disasters of the day: the desertion of the Mormon city of Nauvoo in central Illinois, for instance (this was a night scene, with the dark rooftops and steeples of the empty city silhouetted eerily in the moonlight). Another favorite was the fire that destroyed the waterfront district of St. Louis in 1849. This was a spectacular scene showing fleeing crowds, desperate companies of firemen, the night sky over the city billowing with black smoke and showering down lurid red sparks; then there followed a scene of the morning after, revealing the charred wrecks of steamboats on the levee and the gutted stumps of buildings behind, with groups of survivors posed here and there in the rubble. This image was always greeted with a shocked hush from the spectators, before the grand flow of the river resumed.

Each vista came with some story attached. A tiny silhouetted figure on a distant bluff, for instance, would prompt the narrator to tell the legend of Winona’s Cliff, where an Indian maiden jumped to her death rather than marry a man she didn’t love. A view of the skyline of Dubuque, Iowa, would lead to a story about the town’s founder, who tricked the local Indian tribes into revealing the location of their secret lead mines. The panoramas also naturally touched on the hot-button political issues of the day. The most heated of these questions was the forcible exile of the Native American populations from the eastern half of the continent into the Great Plains. The panoramas seem to have reflected the divided feelings about these expulsions in the country as a whole. Smith’s panorama, going by the descriptive pamphlet that was sold at its showings, was robustly scornful of the Native Americans and pictured them as useless primitives who were getting no better than they deserved. The world-famous Indian wigwam, the pamphlet says at one point, was in reality “scarce built with the skill displayed by the beaver in the formation of its home.” But Banvard’s “Three-Mile Painting” was more elegiac. It showed the Native Americans as proud and statuesque figures of myth; it even took a detour away from the river to survey a new Sioux settlement in the prairie, with scenes of a war dance and children at play and a view of the Sioux’s mysterious “village of the dead.”

Against these dark images