4/3/96 BOZEMAN -- The American West was an intriguing mystery to armchair travelers of the early 1800s.
Not many Easterners knew, after all, what it was like to struggle up the Missouri River and stumble through the mountains like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. How many could say they had gasped at the sight of a geyser that would later be called Old Faithful?
When "Harper's Monthly" started publishing in 1850, the magazine began revealing the secrets of the American West to the educated elite, said William Wyckoff, professor of geography at Montana State University-Bozeman. But the magazine did more than document the West for curious readers.
"The images offered Americans a changing panorama of Western scenes that both reflected, as well as molded, popular views of the region," according to Wyckoff and former student Chantelle Nash.
Wyckoff and Nash examined almost 900 illustrations to find out how "Harper's Monthly" portrayed western communities and landscapes between 1850 and 1900. They decided to study "Harper's Monthly" because it was one of the largest mass circulation magazines in the United States, Wyckoff said. It also covered the entire last half of the 19th century before the age of radio and television.
"People back then got their opinions and images ... from magazines like Harpers," Wyckoff observed.
Wyckoff and Nash looked at 50 years of issues for several reasons, Wyckoff continued. Fifty years was a round number, but the magazine also seemed to get less visual after 1900. Besides that, the researchers were mainly interested in the formative years of the frontier.
"By 1900, the frontier in many ways had evolved, and in many ways, it had closed," Wyckoff said.
In studying the "Harper's Monthly" illustrations, Wyckoff and Nash found that they depicted California 39 percent of the time. Colorado was shown 17 percent of the time, Nevada 10 percent, Arizona 9 percent and New Mexico 8 percent. Oregon and Washington were each at five percent. Idaho, Utah and Wyoming were each shown two percent of the time. Montana was the subject of fewer than two percent of the illustrations.
In those illustrations, Wyckoff and Nash discovered that "Harper's Monthly" presented six distinctive views of the West between 1850 and 1900. The first 20 years of the magazine emphasized dangerous adventures that were unsuitable for casual tourists. Some illustrations showed violent mining camps, for example, with saloon brawls and tunnel explosions. Others depicted stagecoach robberies or primitive, threatening Indians.
"This was not a West for the casual sojourner and sightseer," Wyckoff and Nash wrote in an award-winning article for "Journal of the West."
After years of describing the West as dangerous and frightening, the magazine started focusing on western scenery, Wyckoff said. In subsequent years, the magazine started promoting tourism, switched to scientific discoveries, went on to portray the West as a homeowner's dream, and finally finished the century by romanticizing the West's distant past.
He was intrigued with how quickly "Harper's Monthly" changed its portrayals of the West, Wyckoff said. The West that had been so dangerous in the mid-1800s suddenly became a viable destination for John and Jane Doe America after the transcontinental railroad was built. Once travelers felt safe, the magazine felt free to romanticize the past with Native Americans and Hispanics.
The magazine also changed in the way its illustrations portrayed western scenery, Wyckoff said. Illustrations at first included generic scenes that could have come from the eastern United States. As time went on, the scenes became more accurate and realistic.
"I thought it was fascinating," Nash said of the study that took her through hundreds of dusty magazines in the MSU-Bozeman library.
Even today, outsiders often hold inaccurate or incomplete impressions of the western geography, continued Wyckoff who is on sabbatical to pursue other western-related projects. Too many people, for example, think of the West as being nothing but arid wasteland. They don't pay enough attention to mountains and the impact they had on early pioneers. Mountains restricted travel, but they also offered lush islands of moisture and concentrated resources, Wyckoff said.
Wyckoff was a co-author and lead editor of a book that focuses on those neglected mountain environments. "The Mountainous West - Explorations in Historical Geography," was published last summer and is being promoted now throughout the country. The book contains 13 essays from scholars who wrote about the importance of mountains in the history and settling of the West.
"The West is a dry place, but the book suggests if you start looking at the mountainous part, you will get different history, settlement patterns and human geography," Wyckoff said.
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