How the Canyon Became Grand by Stephen J. Pyne

Author:Stephen J. Pyne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

William Henry Holmes was an ideal foil to Thomas Moran. He stands to Moran as Dutton does to Powell. Among them the four men mark the ordinal points of the heroic age; they contain the compass of the Canyon’s meaning. If Dutton fused aesthetics with geology, Holmes bonded science to art.

He was in many ways typical of those untypical travelers from high culture who set out for the High Plateaus in the 1870s. He was a master of the panorama; a craftsman with line, recalling the horizontal linearity that typified much of American painting at mid-century; and a self-taught naturalist, who specialized in the material artifacts of geology and archaeology. But most important, he was a splendid specimen of the artist as traveler, illustrator, and reporter so typical of the Second Age. Holmes’s panoramic landscapes, fusing enthusiasm with exactitude, belong with Audubon’s encyclopedia of wildlife, George Catlin’s portfolio of Indians, and Frederick Catherwood’s inventory of Mayan ruins. At the Grand Canyon a man who specialized in representational art met a landscape that needed only full-scale representation.

Formally trained in art, Holmes was recruited as an illustrator for the Hayden Survey and sent west from 1872 to 1877. His keen eye soon made him a competent geologist and, from his experiences on the Colorado Plateau, a fine archaeologist, attracted particularly to the hard shape of landforms and artifacts. Later he worked for the Geological Survey, then transferred into the Bureau of American Ethnology. From there he spent three years as curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago before returning to the Smithsonian Institution, where he remained for twenty-three years and continued his passion for exploration by directing the Armour Expedition to the Yucatán. When Powell died in 1902, Holmes succeeded him as director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. His Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities (1919) immediately established itself as the standard reference. A remarkable career in all, yet it was art that glued the various shards together, art, his first love, as William Goetzmann notes, “to which he always in some fashion returned.” Appropriately his administrative tenure ended in 1920, when at age seventy-four, he became director of the National Gallery of Art. He remained for twelve years.48

Rehired by the Geological Survey, Holmes went to the Grand Canyon in 1880 to assist Dutton. Like his other professional work, his drawings were functional. In the Atlas to the Tertiary History, sandwiched between geologic maps, the panoramas give texture where the maps, lacking a suitable topographic contour base, show only the symbolic color of geologic eras and the gross structure of faults and uplift. The pictures give visual texture as well to Dutton’s prose. What makes the Tertiary History more than a collection of sketches is what also makes the Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities more than the riprap of pothunters and the impressions of dilettantes in search of the picturesque: it communicates ideas as well as images. The same principles of natural history that inform Dutton’s text shape Holmes’s mighty panoramas as well.

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