Colorado: 1870–2000 is a celebration, and an appraisal, of Colorado’s landscapes—the prairies, peaks, and plateaus that have shaped Colorado’s identity for hundreds of years and that still work their magic on the thousands of people who live here, or visit, or hope to. This book and traveling exhibition pair the work of pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson, who made his first Colorado pictures in 1869, with images by the well-known nature photographer, John Fielder, whose travels in Colorado began almost exactly a century later.

The enterprise took shape when Fielder winnowed more than 22,000 Jackson photographs in the Colorado Historical Society’s collection to choose photographs that he found visually interesting and that he hoped would show dramatic changes when compared with new photographs of the same places. After narrowing his choices and studying another two thousand Jackson photographs at the United States Geological Survey, the Denver Public Library, and elsewhere, Fielder picked out three hundred pictures that, in his opinion, encompassed a fair cross-section of the state and offered a representative sample of the kinds of landscapes Jackson saw. For most of 1998, he ranged across the state in his Chevrolet Suburban with copies of the Jacksons in hand, and—through careful research, trial and error, or blind luck—stood as nearly as possible to where Jackson once stood and retook the photographs Jackson made so long ago.

The photographs in Colorado: 1870–2000 foster awareness of Colorado’s landscapes as something more than just pretty scenery. If as the geographer Peirce F. Lewis once wrote, "landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form," then these photographs are evidence of the tastes, values, aspirations, and fears that have driven people in Colorado. Although the photographs withhold some of the information we would find if we visited the landscapes personally—or traveled through time to look over Jackson’s shoulder as he worked—they virtually stop the world and hold it still so that we can look at it slowly, carefully, without concern for the weather or the time.

Scholars, artists, and scientists have practiced an exact, systematic kind of rephotography for a long time, comparing then-and-now pictures to document and study change. We practice an approximate kind of rephotography when, year after year, we line our families up on the porch, in front of the fireplace, or under a favorite tree for a ceremonial snapshot, and vacationers do it unwittingly when they stop at scenic overlooks on Western highways, many of which were favorite picture spots on nineteenth century wagon roads. Whether these pictures are casual or precise, accidental or carefully planned, they draw us into a broad story of human experience; they show us, by direct comparison, where we have been as a society, where we are, and where we are in the process of going.

Rephotography has a long and distinguished history that reaches back almost to the invention of photography itself, yet it is seldom that a photographer of John Fielder’s stature tries it. Perhaps this is because the main object of rephotography, in effect, is to copy someone else’s photograph as faithfully as possible; one has to suppress one’s hard-won, signature style so that aesthetic issues stay in the background and the facts can speak for themselves. If a photographer wants to use rephotography as an expressive platform for his or her ideas on a given subject, then, the best way—perhaps the only way—to shape a project’s editorial content is to choose the original pictures with extraordinary care. Fielder has done this with a keen eye for the most telling then-and-now combinations, and with sympathy and respect for the importance of Jackson’s life’s work.

II.

William Henry Jackson learned photography when he worked in portrait studios in Troy, New York, and Rutland, Vermont, in the early 1860s. After the Civil War, he took up a rather conventional New England life in Rutland where, as a member of the local art and literary society, he acted in plays, read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier, and made pencil sketches of Green Mountain landscapes. By day he worked at the photography studio of Frank Mowry. In his spare time he courted his longtime friend, Caddie Eastman.

Evening and weekend carriage rides were a favorite courting ritual in Rutland, as elsewhere. One day, as Jackson and Caddie Eastman rode down a quiet lane on the outskirts of town, they encountered another couple whom they knew, headed in the same direction on the same road. Somehow Jackson and the other driver decided to race and took off at breakneck speed, endangering themselves, their passengers, their horses, and their rented carriages. Caddie was incensed by Jackson’s recklessness, and told him so; Jackson tried to shrug the whole thing off, and the young couple arrived at a stalemate. Unwilling to apologize or admit wrongdoing, Jackson packed his belongings and left town.

Jackson made his way to New York City, then down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Missouri, then drifted from place to place and from job to job for two years (1866-1868). He worked as a bullwhacker on a Montana-bound wagon train; as a carpenter, farmhand, and art tutor in Utah; and as a wrangler and guard on wagon trains heading eastward from Los Angeles, before he settled in Omaha, Nebraska, and opened a photography studio of his own in 1868.

But Jackson was a wanderer at heart; he handed the studio’s day-to-day operations to his brother so that he could roam the surrounding country to photograph American Indians, landscapes, and frontier life–photographs that distinguished him from the many other Omaha photographers, whose work was limited to portraiture and occasional city views. Jackson’s marriage to Mollie Greer, in 1869, reflected similar impatience with convention; after a six-day honeymoon on a Missouri River steamboat, Jackson sent his new wife to live with her family in Ohio and left on a trip of his own.

Jackson and an assistant named Arundel Hull rode the new Transcontinental Railroad from Omaha to Salt Lake City with a clever scheme: they bought tickets to the next town down the line, where they drummed up all of the photography business they could, printed and delivered all of their pictures, collected their money, and bought tickets to the next town–where they started the process all over again. Jackson (and, apparently, Hull) stopped many times en route to photograph scenery along the route of the new railroad and, in an early example of rephotography, almost exactly copied the work of railroad photographer Andrew J. Russell—who was there only the year before.

This work caught the eye of Ferdinand V. Hayden, the director of the United States Geologic and Geographical Survey of the Territories, or Hayden Survey. The Hayden Survey was a Federally-funded expedition that combed the West each summer from 1868 to 1878 with a mandate to map the region; assess of its resources; study its plant and animal life, and report the results to Congress. Still skittish in the wake of the Civil War, Washington saw this as a way to strengthen its administrative hold on the region’s development; expedition members mainly saw it as a dream come true: the scientists had a unique chance to do field work every summer, while the map makers tested their skills against some of the roughest terrain they would ever know.

But Hayden’s expedition was not alone. Survey teams led by John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, and others were busy in other parts of the West, and everyone competed for Congressional funding. Survey directors turned into lobbyists every fall, using field notes, plant and animal specimens, maps, and photographs or other illustrations to ply Congress for money.

Hayden knew how scientists and topographers prized the camera’s documentary power, but he also knew that armchair explorers throughout the nation craved pictures of outstanding scenery, American Indians, and the survey party at work—exotic, newsworthy photographs that gave vicarious pleasure to the general public. The survey that captured such an audience would have an edge when the budgets were drawn up.

Hayden invited Jackson to join his 1870 expedition to Wyoming as an unpaid photographer–part publicist, part documentarian. The job demanded weeks of strenuous work and the ability to document an igneous intrusion, a tree, a snow-capped peak, or a Cheyenne village with equal skill. Jackson was inexperienced compared with such photographers as Timothy O’Sullivan (on the King Survey that year) or Carleton Watkins (recently detached from the Whitney Survey of the Sierra Nevada), but he had itchy feet and loved a challenge. After convincing his wife, Mollie, to assume management of the Omaha studio, he took the job, headed up the Platte River to Wyoming, and stayed with the survey for ten summers.

Jackson was a self-taught landscape artist of conventional tastes when he joined the 1870 expedition, but he honed his vision and perfected his craft on the job. Gradually, he mastered the vocabulary of a landscape artist, and used it to create photographs of lasting beauty and power. He worked for several hours daily from May through September, scouting for pictures, setting up his equipment, and preparing his materials. The technology of the day forced him to develop his glass negatives on the spot, which required him to carry a portable darkroom and bottles of chemicals everywhere he went, but gave him the advantage of seeing his work immediately—he could take the same picture over and over until nightfall if necessary, making any changes that he wanted to until he was satisfied. Also, he worked side-by-side with other artists who undoubtedly helped him fine-tune his sense of what a good picture should be.

Sanford R. Gifford, an established New York landscape painter, was the survey’s guest in 1870. The two men traveled together most of that summer, helping each other set up their gear and talking about the finer points of landscape art. Their kindrid spirit is obvious in their work along Wyoming’s Chugwater River, where Jackson photographed Gifford at work on his painting, Valley of the Chugwater, Wyoming Territory, an arid landscape that is haunting in its stark simplicity. The next year, Jackson began a life-long friendship with Thomas Moran, whose epic paintings of Western landmarks form a sublime counterpoint to Jackson’s staid, picturesque vision of the region; they visited Yellowstone together in 1871, when Moran produced a series of delicate, captivating watercolor sketches of hot springs and geysers while Jackson photographed them. Jackson emerged from these collaborations with a clear idea of what his landscape art could do.

And fame. Jackson may not have been the first person to photograph Yellowstone’s thermal wonders—technical difficulties may have forced him to buy pictures from a local photographer at the end of his first visit—but he was the first to publish them. In an era when nearly everyone believed that the camera could not lie, Jackson’s views gave documentary evidence that all the wild rumors about Yellowstone really were true. Sets of prints landed on the desks of Congressional committee members just before they voted to make Yellowstone America's—and the world’s-first National Park; others flooded the offices of East Coast publishers, who used them as models for engraved illustrations in newspapers and magazines. Suddenly, Jackson was a photographer with a reputation.

Survey responsibilities kept Jackson in the field each summer, and demanded his presence in Washington during much of every off season. This left so little time for Jackson to spend in Omaha, developing his business there, that when Mollie Jackson became pregnant in the fall of 1871, they sold the Omaha studio. Until the sale, Mollie Jackson was Jackson’s business partner as well as his wife and, while they had been apart much of the time, they had shared a strong and successful alliance. She died in childbirth a few months later.

Although Jackson never indicated his reaction to this tragedy, it appears that he redoubled his increased commitments to landscape photography and the Hayden Survey. In 1873 he married Emilie Painter, the daughter of Dr. Edward Painter, Indian agent for the Omaha tribe. Like Mollie Greer, Emilie Painter had a strong character and an independent streak; she not only thrived in her partnership with her photographer husband, but enjoyed a social and creative life of her own.

Jackson was in full stride again by 1873, when the Hayden Survey shifted its attention to the Central Rocky Mountains and what is now Colorado. Only three years from statehood, home to several burgeoning railroads, and extensively settled after a fifteen-year influx of gold seekers and camp followers, Colorado Territory was hardly a wilderness. Prospectors long since had scoured the mountains for precious minerals, and the leading mining districts and town sites had been fairly well mapped; a skeptic might have believed that the Hayden Survey was too late to serve a useful purpose, or to find wilderness at all. Jackson’s photographs from that year—a panorama of Quandary Peak from the summit of Mt. Lincoln, for example, or luminous views the Blue River, Middle Park, and the Mountain of the Holy Cross—showed a land of epic proportions and profound silence with few signs of habitation.

These exhilarating scenes, and Jackson’s views of rock formations along the Front Range, portrayed Colorado as a tame, inviting wonderland. Combined with glowing press accounts of its scenic beauty and up-to-date amenities, these pictures (and others like them) floated an image of Colorado as a natural playground and tourist mecca that has driven much of the state’s economy—and shaped much of its outlook—since 1859. Other Colorado photographers extolled the state’s mineral wealth; in their photographs, nature was by turns a smorgasbord of raw materials and an annoying physical barrier. The average American saw no conflict in this twin love of natural beauty and industrial progress; he or she craved fresh air, silence, and open space at the same time that he or she demanded progress, development, material wealth. The West seemed so big, and its resources seemed so inexhaustible, that no one imagined they ever could run out.

Jackson’s success earned him considerable freedom (and regular pay) by the time the survey returned to Colorado in 1874, and again in 1875. He ranged through the mountains and canyons of the soon-to-be state, and climbed many of the region’s highest peaks in search of panoramic views. He photographed mines and towns in the San Juan mountains, and was the first person to photograph Indian archaeological sites in the Mancos River basin: Hovenweep, the Mancos and McElmo Canyons, and parts of present-day Mesa Verde National Park.

Congress rolled its competing expeditions together in 1878 to form the United States Geological Survey under John Wesley Powell. Before the Hayden Survey ended, Jackson published catalogs of the survey’s photographs and made hundreds of prints for the survey’s official reports; he prepared elaborate survey exhibits complete with dioramas of cliff dwellings for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and, in his last year with the survey, returned to Yellowstone to make a set of mammoth-plate views. This return to Yellowstone allowed Jackson to summarize all that he had learned about landscape photography and to cap off a series of photographs that reflected Americans’ environmental values.

Nineteenth-century Americans had complicated, often conflicting ideas about their landscapes and deeply ambivalent feelings towards nature. Jackson’s photographs from the Hayden Survey and later reveal his own divided feelings about nature and civilization in the West, and his struggle to resolve them. His photographs reflect this struggle through a series of stylistic decisions that were colored by Jackson’s taste, by the stylistic conventions of the day, and by widespread American attitudes towards the outdoors. But while Jackson refined and strengthened his vision, however, he rarely stepped beyond the limits of conventional landscape art; instead, he consistently made pictures to satisfy public demand.

Jackson often recognized the inhospitable, fearsome, dangerous, aspects of Western landscape in his work: settlements looked tentative and frail under immense blank skies; trees and rocks jutted in from all sides; people looked small and vulnerable. This expressed an ancient Idea—an inherited memory from the Neolithic, perhaps, or from the Middle Ages—of Nature as something wild, untamable, and deadly. Tied in with this was the view that Nature and mankind were locked in conflict, that somehow it was incumbent on man—or on individual men—to subdue wildness and bend it to his will. Landscape artists often suggested the human conquest of Nature by placing triumphant figures on mountaintops, as Jackson did in a view of Long’s Peak and other photographs.

Another widely-held view saw in Nature the awesome reflection of divine power. Painters usually conveyed this through dramatic effects of sun and sky; Jackson’s materials had trouble recording such turbulent skies, however, so he achieved similar moods by letting the foreground drop into an abyss, by dramatizing the vastness of Western spaces, or by recording the sublime force of geysers and waterfalls. His 1873 photograph of the Mountain of the Holy Cross captured the popular imagination because it symbolized Nature’s divinity; Nature was God’s gift to mankind, revered not for itself but for the deity it represented. In this scenario, mankind held dominion over Nature, controlling it and shaping it to his own needs by divine right.

Other Jackson photographs traded alienation and fear for serene acceptance, or reverence. Nature appeared picturesque and benign instead of chaotic and inhospitable, while the human figures in the photographs suggested a reflective, rather than a triumphant, relationship with the Western landscape. In pictures such as Upper Twin Lake, Jackson created an expansive, silent vision of Nature’s refreshing, spiritual or psychological, dimension. This view echoed the American Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as romantic nature poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier or William Cullen Bryant, all of whom believed in the innate goodness of Nature.

Jackson’s growing reputation and the friends he made on the survey stood him in good stead when he moved to Denver and opened a new picture gallery in 1880. He dropped in on his old friend William Byers, for example, to say that he had leased a studio on Larimer Street; a glowing notice appeared in Byers’s Rocky Mountain News the next day. Sometime that year Jackson made several views of the Royal Gorge, on the Arkansas River in southern Colorado, which he sold to the Denver and Rio Grande (D & RG) Railroad, whose motto was "The Scenic Line of America." This led to a major commission in 1881, when Jackson embarked on a grand tour of the D & RG system with two friends from his survey years: Thomas Moran and Ernest Ingersoll. Ingersoll was writing an article on Colorado’s San Juan mining district for Harper’s magazine; Moran was providing illustrations for Ingersoll’s report and for the D & RG’s publicity magazine, Colorado Tourist. Jackson’s role was to photograph for the railroad, and to supply Ingersoll and Moran with reference prints to use as they finished their work for Harper’s.

This project kicked off the next phase of Jackson’s career. He started out modestly enough, living in a rooming house overlooking a tannery on Wazee Street and working with two or three employees (Emilie remained in the East with their young children). As he plied his artistic talent and built on each success, however, the "W.H. Jackson Photo. Co." imprint became synonymous with quality. Jackson grew into a prosperous businessman and a leading promoter of the West; by 1890, he employed a dozen men and women in his fashionable showrooms near the Tabor Grand Opera House, and lived with his family in a comfortable Capitol Hill home.

Jackson took every opportunity to make pictures and expand his clientele. In 1880 he hired a portrait photographer and an assistant to handle that end of his enterprise while he took his camera across the state to photograph scenery. His stock-in-trade included standard views of Denver streets and buildings; picturesque mountains and waterfalls, railroad scenes, and a growing stock of pictures from the boom towns of the Front Range and the mineral belt, such as Colorado Springs, Palmer Lake, and Leadville, Georgetown, Silver Plume, and Ouray.

These were consummate works of Western boosterism. Denver appeared as a substantial modern city with flourishing commerce and culture. The rail and wagon roads carried visitors through breathtaking scenery in safety and comfort. The townscapes showed clean, solid, civilized places that Jackson’s viewers could visit or settle in with perfect confidence. And among these trappings of civilized progress, Jackson’s photographs indicated that Nature was undiminished in its pure, refreshing beauty.

Jackson furnished photographs in every size—from "half stereos" only three inches square to mammoth prints and panoramas up to eight feet wide—to meet the need of every potential customer. Through his showroom and a network of retail agents (bookshops, stationers, hotel lobbies), his photographs reached offices, homes, clubrooms, and libraries throughout North America and Europe. Railroads displayed them in their ticket agencies and club cars; tourists took them home and set them in the parlors, and investors and industrialists showed them off to flog their Western ventures.

Where Jackson’s scenic landscapes shaped the myth of Colorado as a natural paradise and playground, his railroad views defined America’s nineteenth-century love affair with machinery. The photographs that Jackson made from a luxurious private train on the D & RG line between 1882 and 1891 are typical. The train across from Chipeta Falls , for example, is an elegant plaything—a self-contained rolling parlor at the artist’s beck and call; the charming group of men and women (including Emilie) gathered on the flatcar take in the scenery with a smug and leisurely air. In the Canyon of the Rio Las Animas, on the other hand, the train performs a death-defying stunt as it snakes along a sheer canyon wall above an abyss of dim, shining water. Pictures such as these assert the triumph of technology over Nature.

The trademark style of Jackson’s railroad views quickly turned him into one of the most sought-after landscape photographers of the nineteenth century. His successes with the D & RG led to commissions from virtually every major railroad in the western United States and Mexico and most of the minor ones, too. Each assignment demanded that each railroad be cast in its most heroic light to boost tourist as well as freight traffic; Jackson often spent weeks, or even months at a time, photographing the railroads and all of the cities and towns, ranches, factories, and resorts that they served; this gave his clients more than they asked for and built his stock photography archive at the same time.

Jackson regularly collaborated with publishers to create so-called "booster books"—collections of photographic images and text intended to glorify their subjects, invite settlers, tourists, and investors, and create civic pride. He also collaborated with, or furnished photographs to, the leading magazines of the time, including Harper’s Weekly and Leslie’s. Emilie Jackson, too, wrote a descriptive manuscript about travel in Mexico that evidently was meant to be illustrated with her husband’s photographs, but never published.

In order to handle the increasing demands that railroad commissions placed on his time, Jackson resorted to hiring other photographers to do some of his work. In some cases, he just bought negatives from someone else and published them under his corporate imprint. This was common practice at a time when photography often was regarded more as production work than artistry; Jackson conducted business that way as early as his 1869 Transcontinental Railway adventure with Arundel Hull, and used more than eighty other photographers in his lifetime. But Jackson the publisher held editorial control over every print that bore his name, and published what he thought were the best images he could find.

The W. H. Jackson Photo Company prospered throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s until the Silver Panic of 1893 threw Colorado's—and much of the nation’s—economy upside-down. Ore prices fell, railroad freight slowed to a trickle, and Jackson’s steady business all but dried up. In the face of bankruptcy, Jackson accepted a risky, ambitious commission: to travel around the world for the World’s Transportation Commission, a promotional partnership backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., Andrew Carnegie, George Westinghouse, and other leading American industrialists allied with Chicago’s Field Museum to develop a "Museum of the World’s Railways."

From the fall of 1894 to the spring of 1896, Jackson toured the globe, photographing railroads and scenery for the commission and dispatching images to America’s leading popular magazine, Harper’s Weekly. The first leg of his trip carried him through Europe, across North Africa to Turkey and Syria, and across the Indian Sea to India and Ceylon. He took a long loop southward to New Zealand before going to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Manchuria, then returned to Europe by crossing Siberia (by sled, dog cart, and train). Early in the trip, Jackson simply adapted his familiar style to the railroads and scenery he encountered along the way; gradually, however, he turned his lens more and more on the cultures he visited, on people, and on foreign ways of life.

Jackson returned in Denver in 1896 to find his business in a shambles. Jackson had been short-changed by The World’s Transportation Commission when its funds dried up part way through his tour, Harper’s held back some of its fees when Jackson’s deliveries were slow, and his Denver clientele had drifted off without Jackson himself there to hold their interest. At the same time, the photography business that Jackson mastered in the 1880s was in upheaval: relatively cheap, mass-produced, photomechanical prints and books dominated the market, and the demand for fine photographic prints had dwindled to almost nothing.

In this climate, Jackson’s best option lay in an offer he had received on his way home from his world tour in the spring of 1896. By 1897, he arranged to sell all of the negatives owned by the W. H. Jackson Photograph Company to The Detroit Photographic Company (DPC), and to join the Michigan firm as full partner. Formed by the photographer Edwin Husher and William Livingstone, Jr. (son of a leading Midwestern shipping and banking magnate), the DPC was the exclusive North American licensee of the Swiss Photochrom process, a lithographic method that made astonishingly realistic color prints from black and white photographic negatives. To Jackson, this secret new printing process and the company’s aggressive marketing plans symbolized the new, industrial spirit of the photography industry; he moved to Detroit with his family in 1898.

Jackson’s duties with the DPC focused more on acquiring negatives from other photographers than with making new pictures of his own. Although he continued to travel and to photograph–notably in California, upstate New York, Florida, and the Bahamas—for the most part he traded his creative role for administrative and editorial control over the DPC’s far-flung, ever-growing archive of stock imagery. In this capacity, he exercised great power over popular taste: by 1902, the DPC published over seven million photographs of all sizes, from postcards (authorized by Congress in 1898) to gigantic panoramas over twelve feet wide.

The sheer volume of this material speaks to the abiding popularity of Jackson’s world view. One likely explanation is that Jackson’s images—the ones he published and the ones he made himself—were easy to appreciate and enjoy. Beautiful, restful, and inspiring, these views of uncomplicated subjects never raised difficult questions or pointed to things the public did not want to see. They perfectly reflected American optimism at the turn of the last century.

III.

John Fielder’s photographs have the same allure for people of the 1980s and 1990s that Jackson’s had for people a century ago—and the same power to shape our impressions of what Colorado looks like. But the two photographers offer very different views of Colorado.

Fielder’s published work is exclusionary; except for the photographs in this book, Fielder bypasses cultural landscapes in favor of colorful nature studies and wilderness views. In Fielder’s Colorado, moments of transporting beauty—the first glow of sunrise on a sheer rock wall, for example, or the still hush of an alpine lake at dusk—are above everyday human experience, and apart from its clutter and noise.

Jackson’s all-embracing view gives equal weight to nature, industry, transportation, and urban landscapes; he never claims that one has greater value than another. He celebrates Colorado’s economic momentum and physical beauty as parts of a unified whole, where nature and civilization thrive together. Nature often is tame in Jackson’s West, dominated and controlled for human pleasure and enrichment, but it hovers perpetually in the background with its beauty intact.

The Jackson-Fielder rephotography project shifts the emphasis of Fielder’s work away from his trademark images of remote, exotic, and pretty scenery towards the cultural landscape of everyday places and things. In this context, even areas of great natural beauty are cultural artifacts—the places that we could not, and later chose not to develop.

Jackson’s photographs take us back over more than a century of Colorado history to see what our landscapes looked like when mining was the state’s most prominent industry, when transportation meant horses and trains, and when fewer people lived in all of Colorado than now land at Denver International Airport in an average ski season. Fielder’s photographs date from an era of airplanes and sport-utility trucks, rapid population growth, and a booming economy based on computer, cable television, and telecommunications industries, real estate, and tourism. And, because Fielder revisited the same places Jackson photographed, and photographed them again from nearly (and sometimes exactly) the same vantage points, side-by-side comparison of Jackson’s landscapes with Fielder’s views shows us the marks history has left on the land and allow us to see how much Jackson’s Colorado has changed—and how much it has not—in the last one hundred thirty years.

We see, for example, that population growth in El Paso County transformed a pine-and-grassland savannah into a suburban housing tract; and that demands for hydroelectric power replaced a grassy meadow with a drab reservoir . But a Jackson photograph of Arbourville, for example, shows that the impulse to build and to provide creature comforts has shaped the land at least since Jackson’s day; only the scale and technology of that ambition have changed. Bustling towns overwhelmed by new forests suggest how fleeting our aspirations can be, while a landmark such as Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel, set in a wild medley of new buildings, indicates that beauty and tradition can arrest the march of progress. Places whose natural beauty is cherished today as it was in Jackson’s lifetime point to our abiding need for open space and a sense of wildness. These, and the other photographs in Colorado: 1870-2000 urge us to make comparisons, to reassess the changes that we have wrought on Colorado’s landscape, and to take full advantage of that historical perspective as we consider our options for the future of the state.

The essays in Colorado: 1870–2000 wrestle with the same kinds of questions. Ed Marston’s thoughtful reflections on living in the West, and his beautiful, disarming anecdotes about becoming a Westerner, remind us of the modest, human, dimension of political and economic events that have transformed Colorado since 1858, or before. Roderick Nash’s vision of the future, and his reasons for wilderness preservation, carry the weight of convictions borne of long, exhaustive study of America’s environmental history. Perhaps the eve of a millennium is an appropriate time to consider their ideas, to study the photographs in this book [and in the Wheeler/Stallard Museum exhibit] (and the landscapes that each of us know privately), and to reflect on what all of this shows us about our state, and about ourselves.