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Sights Once Seen: Daguerreotyping Frémont's Last Expedition Through the Rockies

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In 1853-1854, John C. Frémont, "The Great Pathfinder" and soon-to-be the Republican Party's first candidate for President of the United States, led the fifth and last of his expeditions of exploration of the Rocky Mountain West. The purpose was to prove the viability of a "central" route for the proposed transcontinental railroad, near the 38th parallel. (It was feared, justifiably, that a southern route would favor the economic development of the slave states.) And what better way to illustrate to those back in Washington, D.C. the merits of the central route than to use the new technology of photography - in its "beta" format, i.e., daguerreotypy. So Fremont included in his party Solomon Nunes Carvalho.

Carvalho was a devout Sephardic Jew leading a citified life in New York City as a portraitist, both in oil paints and by daguerreotype. He had never before even saddled a horse. But when asked he immediately joined what turned out to be one of the more arduous expeditions into the American West, one which he almost did not survive. Lost and struggling through winter snows in the mountains of Utah, the party was reduced to eating its dying horses and Frémont and Carvalho had to abandon the heavy daguerreotype equipment. But they continued on with the 300 daguerreotype photographs (weighing 25 pounds) that Carvalho had already taken, and, close to both starving and freezing to death, straggled into a remote Mormon community in southwest Utah.

Frémont's fifth expedition did have the unanticipated result of nailing down the coffin lid on a central route for the transcontinental railroad, but Frémont never got around to publishing a report on the expedition and all but one of Carvalho's 300 daguerreotypes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1881. As a consequence, both the fifth expedition and Solomon Nunes Carvalho had become quite dim in the lights of history.

Enter author/daguerreotyper Robert Shlaer. He conducted painstaking research and detective work reconstructing the route of the fifth expedition and then, over the course of four years, took his own daguerreotypes of scenes along that route that Carvalho probably had recorded by daguerreotype, might have recorded, or should have recorded. The result is SIGHTS ONCE SEEN.

The book itself is handsomely produced. But its audience probably is rather limited. It will not wow those enamored with glossy, high-definition, vividly hued coffee-table-book photographs of the Rocky Mountains, since that simply isn't possible with daguerreotypes. Daguerreotype photography also is devilishly tricky, with "failed" plates just as likely as successful ones. Because Shlaer, as a rule, did not go back to try to improve his failures - to do so "would have been untrue to the spirit of the endeavor" - the book includes many less than perfect images (presumably, just as the now-lost collection of Carvalho plates did). Shlaer's discussion of the fifth expedition is interesting, though at times it bogs down in details or is over-written. And a lot of attention is given to Shlaer's detective work, which many readers probably could do without.

SIGHTS ONCE SEEN is an unusual book, and a quixotic one. I cannot recommend it to the general reader. But it should be of relatively high appeal to two groups: (a) those interested in photography and, particularly, daguerreotypes, and (b) students and scholars of the American exploration of the Rocky Mountain West.

This comprehensive walk-through in text and in Shlaer's modern dageurreotypes follows John Fremont's 1853-1854 expedition out West. There is a great deal of information about Fremont's previous four expeditions, but a good deal of emphasis is placed on the fifth expedition, for which Fremont engaged the services of dageurreotypist Solomon Carvalho. While Carvalho's dageurreotypes no longer exist, Shlaer took four years to retrace the path that Fremont took to Utah and to reimagine with his modern dageurreotypes what Carvalho saw and "photographed." This beautiful book exhibits many color images (insofar as dageurreotypes have lovely limited color such as sepia, gray, and solarized blue) and it has also many black and white illustrations from contemporary artists (including earlier artists to have accompanied Fremont). As a piece of American history, as an art/photography book, and for its ability to inspire one to take up dageurreotypy, this is a welcomed book. I highly recommend it.