A study of George Drouillard's and John Colter's involvement in the expansion and exploration of the American West. This thesis looks at their contributions as a part of the Corps of Discovery and during the American fur trade. The thesis will also look into why men such as Drouillard and Colter and their contributions have been overlooked in recent history.

The art and art history of the American West has long been uncritically accepted as embodying positive nationalistic values that include courage, optimism, democracy, and individualism. In 1991, William Truettner's The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (1991) became one of the most politically charged western art exhibitions in American history to question and criticize these values and to underscore the ideological content of western art. The exhibition with its accompanying catalogue reinterpreted nineteenth-century images of the American West as expansionist propaganda. In spite of this groundbreaking and controversial exhibition and catalogue, exhibitions continue to promote largely romanticized and idyllic images of pristine landscapes with American Indians living in a harmonious world. The scholarly essay and museum exhibition entitled Lone Wolf (Hart M. Schultz): Cowboy, Actor and Artist, focuses on the artwork and life of Blackfeet artist Lone Wolf, (aka Hart Merriam Schultz, 1882-1970), who was active from 1915 to 1960, painting in Montana at Glacier National Park in the summertime, and wintering in Tucson, Arizona. As a little known and understudied American Indian artist, this exhibition and essay serve to expand awareness of the significant contributions by marginalized artists who successfully negotiated the terrain of the mainstream art world. Lone Wolf exemplifies a unique case study as an artist with American Indian heritage, who actively participated in the creation of stereotypical and romantic images about the American West, while he maintained that his first-hand experience and indigenous knowledge helped him to accurately depict what was considered the authentic American West. The exhibition and essay adds to the growing scholarly interest in the art of the American West and incorporates contemporary theories and scholarship that recognizes the American West and the art devoted to it as distinctly heterogeneous and embedded in a number of discourses that are overshadowed by the lingering romanticism and nostalgia that clings to much art of the American West.

The purpose of this paper is to picture the West as Mark Twain saw it. Many books have been written which describe Twain's Western years, but few have given much consideration to the accuracy of his account of the West in the 1860's. This paper attempts to portray Twain not only as a social and political satirist, but also as a possible historical satirist.

In my artistic practice, I emphasize personal and pan-cultural anxieties regarding civilization and the environment as an impetus for work in sculpture, video, and drawing. By locating marginal microcosmic subject matter that tellingly exhibits macrocosmic global dread, I seek to capture and distill our overwhelming eco-socio-political anxiety into a portrait of a society at a point in its history when the specter of nameless impending disaster weighs pressingly on the collective psyche. This thesis is supplementary to my work of sculpture in the Graduate School of the Arts Thesis Exhibition at the Anderson Gallery opening on April 27th, 2007. The work was entitled Busted Butte Or the Evening Deadness in the West, and images of it are contained within the text. This document was created in Microsoft Word 2004.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / Kevin Blake / The American West is a land of great diversity and stark contrast. It is also a landscape marked by rapid change as a result of such forces as globalization, population growth, and heightened interest in natural resources (either for recreation or extraction). This dissertation investigates these changes to the region through a repeat photography analysis. Between 1982 and 1984, Thomas and Geraldine Vale traveled along U.S. Highway 89 from Glacier National Park, Montana to Nogales, Arizona. Their subsequent work, Western Images, Western Landscapes: Travels Along U.S. 89 (University of Arizona Press, 1989), contained fifty-three photographs from this journey, representing a cross section of the West from border to border. Nearly every facet of the region was represented, from the remote prairie landscapes of Montana to the bustling Phoenix downtown, and from the largest open pit mine in the world to seldom visited corners of Yellowstone National Park. Between March 2009 and August 2010, I retraced the steps taken by the Vales and successfully rephotographed all of the locations contained within their book. The observed continuity or change is examined thematically in order to address the landscapes and cultures of the West in greater detail. Specifically, chapters within this dissertation visually and textually describe changes that have occurred along national borders, within Native American reservations, throughout the rural landscapes and national parks of the region, within the many resource extraction industries, and within towns and cities of every size. Significant findings, which are well depicted in the photographic pairings, include heightened national security along the borders, problems of overuse in many parks and protected areas, the transition of traditional small towns into communities increasingly dependent upon tourism for survival, and both beautification and revitalization efforts taking place in the urban cores of Phoenix and Salt Lake City. By painting a vivid picture of recent Western geography, this research provides for greater ability for residents and scholars of the region to understand the forces at work within their communities and surroundings.

I have produced two distinct bodies of work, landscapes and portraits. In both, I investigate my relationship to the subject. My role as the photographer fluctuates between the time I spend by myself and the time I spend with others. The landscape series promotes the act of looking and obscures my presence as photographer. Responding to the saturation of images in the media today, I hope to recalibrate viewers to a slower pace. I look for spaces at the edge of a controlled wilderness that are still accessible to the general public and mimic the identity of my childhood home in Northern California. Both color and black and white photographs sentimentalize manicured nature in ordinary locations. These landscapes facilitate reflection through consideration of similarities and differences. In doing so, these locations lose their specificity and approach a generalized sense of the sacred. The second body of work is a series of photographic collaborations I make with my autistic friend, Will Johns. He selects the subject matter and operates the light meter. His autism informs his methods, which then affects my methods. His idiosyncratic choices force me to photograph subject matter I wouldn’t be drawn to and compose in a new way where I must consider Will as author, subject and subject matter. In these images Will stands with the light meter, his posture gaze and facial expressions explicitly make reference to our relationship and reveal the complexity in separating subject matter from subject and the difficulties artists face with issues of exploitation and authorship. / text

This dissertation combines theories of nationalism and discourse analysis modeled on Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha with Kenneth Burke's dramatism to demonstrate that political states are constituted as meaningful, exclusionary communities through legislative discourses, literary representations, and practices of historiography. Although a number of scholars have acknowledged the importance of state identifications in the complex of cultural and symbolic nationalism, there has been limited examination of the composition of what I call "statist"-- as related to but distinct from "nationalist"-- identities in their own right. Using Wyoming as a case study, this project examines the unique and deeply significant affiliations formed within individual states in the United States of America. Wyoming provides an interesting lens for this discussion for several reasons. First, Wyoming's attainment of statehood in 1890 marks an important figurative closing of the frontier acknowledged in the census of that year and remarked upon as significant among many scholars of Western history. This coincidence of timing also places Wyoming's territorial period and attempts to articulate the state as an independent cultural and political entity during the period of colonialism. Many scholars, including Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha as well as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, consider this the period during which modern nationalism flowered. Finally, Wyoming presents a useful template for this analysis precisely because of its unremarkableness in legislative terms; the language of its constitution draws heavily on the models provided by earlier states as well as the US Constitution and is quite similar in this respect to many that followed. Although the symbols and narratives that circumscribe the Wyoming imaginary are unique, the process by which they are constituted is not and could be observed in some form in any state in the Union.

In 1976 two young photographers, Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, and a photo-historian named Ellen Manchester came together with an idea to rephotograph sites in the American West that had originally been documented by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan. By the spring of 1977 and with the support of various organizations they began a project that spanned the next three years and would eventually become known as the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP). In many ways, the RSP represents an important moment in the history of photography and the representation of the American West. Through analysis of their work, archival documents, contemporary sources, and interviews with the original members of the RSP and several others, this dissertation examines the activities of the project and its various members, which also included Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus. More than the RSP, this dissertation also focuses on the growing culture of photography that boomed in the 1970s. Photography was no longer seen as an outsider to the world of art but was benefiting from newfound opportunities and growth. Without such a culture, this work argues, it would not have been possible for the RSP to take place. By the end of their project, however, photography was undergoing another important transition as modernism was giving way to the more critical climate of postmodernism. When the RSP finally published their work In 1984, their project and the community of photography that fostered their ideas was undergoing profound changes. This study also closely examines the RSP's fieldwork in the American West and the various discourses that the project encountered in this meaningful space. Like photography, the West was undergoing significant changes that the RSP was able to observe and document. Through their process that matched images from the past with photographs of their present, the RSP was able to record diverse landscapes that had or had not changed over the subsequent century. Furthermore, it also provided insight into the ways in which the West had been represented and perceived over time and in a new history of the West.

The Pacific Crest Trail has become increasingly popular since Clinton Clarke first envisioned such a trail in the 1930’s. By comparing the original motives and experience of the trail to the realities of the trail today, the trail’s fluid narrative becomes apparent. While this narrative is ever changing, over the course of the trail’s history one theme has remained constant – a notably problematic relationship with wilderness rooted in an exaltation of the sublime and post-frontier ideals. This thesis focuses on how the Pacific Crest Trail’s development over the past eighty years has created an experience that, on the surface, is notably different from Clarke’s original vision for the trail, but is still influenced by a perception of wilderness born from a romanticization of nature and a pursuit to preserve the western frontier. Chapter one, The Historic Trail, investigates Clarke’s manners and motives behind promoting the trail. Chapter two, The Popular Trail, examines the visual culture surrounding the trail, from nineteenth century landscape painting to the trail’s presence in social media today. Chapter three, The Trail Community, focuses on the growth of a strong community of hikers, and what this means for the future of the trail.

State officials, between 1882 and 1888, exchanged three million acres of Texas Panhandle property for construction of the monumental Capitol that continues to house Texas government today. The project and the land went to a Chicago syndicate led by men influential in business and politics. The red granite Austin State House is a recognizable symbol of Texas around the world. So too, the massive tract given in exchange for the building, what became the "fabulous" XIT Ranch, also has come to symbolize the height of the nineteenth century cattle industry. That eastern and foreign capital dominated the cattle business during this period is lesser known, absorbed by the mythology built around the Texas cattle-trail period - all but at an end in 1885. This study examines the interaction of Illinois Republicans and Texas Democrats in their actions and efforts to create what have become two of Texas's most treasured symbols.