Highlights Archives
An Artist on the Overland Trail
In the summer of 1849, artist James F. Wilkins traveled overland by wagon train from near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the northern California gold fields, a 151-day voyage that he captured in water-color sketches and in notations in his diary. The sketches became the foundation for an enormous panorama depiction of the route known as "The Moving Mirror of the Overland Trail." While the panorama has been lost to history, 50 of Wilkins' sketches, a unique pictorial sequence of drawings, have survived, and are the featured gallery this month from the Society's online image database, Wisconsin Historical Images.
Born in England in 1808, James F. Wilkins came to the United States in the 1830s, living for a time in Peoria, Illinois, New Orleans and St. Louis. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, Wilkins joined the thousands who rushed west in wagon trains. Wilkins was not after gold, though. Instead, he intended to collect the raw material needed to create what he first called a "Panorama of the Plains, from Independence to San Francisco."
At the time, panoramas were all the rage, allowing the armchair traveler to take a voyage around the world through the magic of recently developed machinery that converted the circular panorama of stationary panels, with the viewers walking around a raised central platform, into one that rotated in front of a seated audience. While the giant canvasses moved by, "the artist provided descriptive and informative comment mingled with anecdote and humor, and a young lady at a pianoforte from time to time played appropriate airs." Artists painted these gigantic canvases to entertain, to inform, and to instruct audiences, often reaping huge financial rewards in return.
The news of gold presented Wilkins with an opportunity to make his own panorama. And so, telling no one his real purpose, he set out on the overland trail to California, sketching every object of interest along the way, from Fort Leavenworth to Bear River, while describing the deprivations, discomforts, sickness, near starvation, and exhaustion of trail life in his journal. Once in California, Wilkins stayed only long enough to sketch the gold fields he needed to complete his pictorial documentary. He returned home to St. Louis by ship with nearly 200 sketches and set to work creating a moving panorama canvas roughly 9 feet high and 400 yards long.
Wilkins' panorama had its first public viewing on September 18, 1850, in Peoria. From there it moved to St. Louis, then to several Kentucky cities, and back to St. Louis in March 1851. Beyond that, the history of the panorama is unknown. Wilkins became best known as a portraitist later in his life. He died on his Illinois farm in 1888.
The sketches, 50 of what are originally thought to have been 200, ended up at the Society around 1925, unsigned and unidentified. The drawings were at first variously attributed to Andrew Jackson Lindsay, George Gibbs, and William Henry Tappan. James F. Wilkins, a relatively obscure artist in his own day and largely forgotten by the 20th century, was not identified as the artist until the 1960s, when his previously undiscovered journal came to the attention of experts, who found that the sketches matched exactly the notes in his diary.
Wisconsin Historical Images provides a rich pictorial view of Wisconsin and the United States through photographs, paintings, posters, advertising material, ephemera, and political cartoons. The online images represent only a fraction of the 3 million images housed in the Society's archives. Would you like to receive a monthly update on new featured galleries? The Wisconsin Historical Images newsletter is one of many newsletters offered by the Society. Sign-up for Society E-Newsletters.
:: Posted January 24, 2007
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