Man versus Nature

As industry and transportation developed, the countryside was being transformed. The progress westward was recorded and viewed in painting and photography with exultant enthusiasm. The very surveys that laid the groundwork for expanding the railroads, building highways, planning new towns, clearing land for farms, exploiting natural resources and organising recreation provided crucial records of what would be lost.

These images would also indelibly stamp into the popular imagination both national pride and an identity stemming from the geography of the two countries. Jasper Francis Cropsey, Carleton E. Watkins, A.Y. Jackson, Darius Kinsey, Thomas Moran, William Notman, Benjamin Baltzly, Charles Horetzky, William Brymner and others recorded the creation of dams, railways, bridges and roads, as well as the felling of the primeval forests and giant redwoods, as these activities permanently alter the visual character of the  land.