ASU Research E-Magazine: Before the Crowds

In 1852, artist Henry Cheever Pratt rendered one of the first watercolor views of a fertile Southwestern river valley dotted with Pima Indian villages. A few years later, Pratt developed that original watercolor into a large oil painting that he called View from Maricopa Mountain near the Rio Gila. It was exhibited in Boston. Pratt’s painting provided most mid-19th century Americans their first view of an area that eventually would become metropolitan Phoenix.

The view Pratt relied on to create his painting is long gone. Today, the view from a similar vantage point is filled with sprawling cities, eye-burning brown clouds, vanishing swaths of natural desert landscape, and a growing population that now exceeds 2.4 million people.

Pratt’s painting was just one piece in Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S. Mexico Boundary Survey, an exhibition mounted earlier this year by The Albuquerque Museum. The exhibition included visual images completed by Pratt and artist Seth Eastman, and works by John Russell Bartlett, the boundary survey’s commissioner.

In 1850, two years after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican War, Congress funded Bartlett’s three-year survey of the arid borderlands that stretched for 2,000 miles between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. By 1853, the expedition was decried as a government boondoggle that nearly led to a second war between Mexico and the United States.

“But the art and literature resulting from the expedition were of great significance,” says Gray Sweeney, professor of art history at Arizona State University. Sweeney initiated the project with The Albuquerque Museum and spent three years bringing the art exhibition to fulfillment. Locating oil paintings by Pratt took lots of time. Most of the paintings had not been gathered together since the 1870s.

“The artists visually depicted the borderlands with their sketches, wood-cuts, drawings, watercolors, and paintings. They were the first to bring the alien yet wondrous desert landscapes of New Mexico and the Southwest to easterners,” Sweeney says.

Pratt’s drawings and paintings depicted the Salt and Gila river valleys a good 50 years before white settlers in any great numbers arrived in Arizona. The Gila and Salt river valleys were particularly important to Bartlett’s expedition because they were thought to offer the best route for a future transcontinental railroad. The abundant water also held forth the promise of wide-scale agriculture.

Prior to 1850, the American Southwest was a remote, alien land for easterners. “Yet it was exactly the strangeness of the Sonoran Desert, particularly the giant saguaro cactus, and the ancient aboriginal and later Hispanic cultures of the region that made it a fascinating territory for the learned Bartlett,” Sweeney wrote in the exhibition catalog. “The sublime landscapes and Spanish colonial architecture of the region were subjects of great interest to the landscape painter Pratt.”

Dominating the surrounding desert landscape, and the foreground of Pratt’s View from Maricopa Mountain, are towering 30-foot high saguaro cacti. “To Bartlett, the strange plants suggested the ruins of a majestic palace, the columns alone of which were left standing,” Sweeney adds.—Conrad Storad