Carleton E. Watkins 1829-1916

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Description

Carleton E. Watkins
‘north dome, from camp grove. yosemite’

mammoth-plate albumen print, mounted, the photographer’s letterpress label, with the title, series number 813, series title, and his ‘San Francisco’ studio address, affixed to the mount, the collector’s stamp on the reverse, matted, 1878-81

Provenance

The Old Book Store, San Francisco, 1967

Exhibited

Focus Gallery, San Francisco, Early Views of Yosemite and the California Missions: Photographs by Carleton E. Watkins from the Collection of Gordon Bennett, November – December 1973

Catalogue Note

The photograph offered here shows the North Dome, and below it, the Royal Arches and Washington Column. The perspective is similar to that used in two mid-1860s Watkins views, with one exception: in the middle distance Watkins now pictures a low cabin, a series of fences, and a clothes-line, complete with drying laundry. The little settlement is not named in Watkins’s caption, but it may be the home of Galen Clark.

In his chapter, ‘Hotels and Their Keepers,’ Carl Parcher Russell traces the succession of inns and hotels that began to appear, as he puts it, ‘very near the beginning of the Yosemite story.’ Where the Mariposa Battalion made camp in 1851, opposite Yosemite Falls, became the site of ‘The Lower Hotel’ in 1859, and then Black’s Hotel a decade later. Clarence King and his party stayed in cabins at the Lower Hotel, under Black’s proprietorship. Other hotels in the Valley in the 1860s and 1870s were the Upper Hotel (later Hutchings House), Leidig’s, and the Cosmopolitan (op. cit., pp. 90 -102).

For mid-1860s Watkins views taken near the same spot, see Naef and Wood, op. cit., pl. 11; and Fraenkel, op. cit., pls. 19 and 24.