Scenic Staycation

ED: While the asylums we just heard about were popular tourist destinations in the mid 19th century, recreational travel was still limited for most Americans. The network of railroads that would soon crisscross the nation was still developing, and sea voyages were expensive and dangerous. But while many Americans couldn’t travel to distant places, far away scenes could come to them through a very popular form of entertainment called panoramas.

BRIAN: Panoramas where large moving paintings displayed in theaters. They took Americans to fantastic scenes all over the world. But one of the most popular panorama subjects was closer to home. It was the great Mississippi River. In the 19th century, Americans saw that river as an American Nile, a natural wonder surpassing anything that Europe had to offer. And in the 1840s and 1850s, five different Mississippi panoramas toured the US and Europe.

Now, imagine you lived in a small isolated New England town, and a panorama claiming to bear the mighty Mississippi rolled into town. You might have read ads that promise to transport you right down to the Mississippi itself. All without leaving the theater. Author Lee Sandlin describes this experience in Wicked River– The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild. We wanted to give you a sense of what those panoramas felt like with a reading from his book.

JOSEPH BROMFIELD: The Mississippi panoramas were most likely around 20 feet tall and a couple of hundred yards long. They were much too large ever to be displayed all at once. Instead, they were shown in theaters by gaslight like primordial movies. Two cylinders were sat on opposite sides of the stage. The panorama was gradually unrolled from one and wound up on the other. There’d be a narrator standing at the side of the stage keeping things lively by telling stories, and cracking jokes, and scoring off hecklers in the audience. There’d also be music, usually a piano or an organ though at the classier theaters there might be a small orchestra.

What the audience saw differed from one panorama to the next. But it took the same general form– a succession of scenes as might be witnessed from a steamboat on a voyage from one of the upper branches of the river down to New Orleans. Vista after vista, spectacle after spectacle, the father of waters unfurled itself in serene majesty. One newspaper reviewer described seeing bluffs, bars, islands, rocks and mounds, points and cliffs without numbers, and a fantastic variety of form. The panorama artists crowded the view with eye-catching scenes of natural drama. Thunderstorms towering over bluffs, blizzards burying forests, prairie fires stretching from horizon to horizon.

There were also scenes of the great calamities and disasters of the day. The desertion of the Mormon city of Nauvoo in central Illinois, for instance. Another favorite was the fire that destroyed the waterfront district of St. Louis in 1849. This was a spectacular scene showing fleeing crowds, desperate companies of firemen, the night sky over the city billowing with black smoke, and showering down lurid red sparks. This image was always greeted with a shocked hush from the spectators before the grand flow of the river resumed.

The panoramas also naturally touched on the hot button political issues of the day. The most heated of these questions was the forcible exile of the Native American populations from the eastern half of the continent into the Great Plains. Against these dark images were set upbeat scenes of new growth. The river valley was being colonized at a furious clip, and the panoramas recorded the signs of occupation everywhere. Settlements hacked out of the wilderness, vistas of deforested and freshly planted farmland, the plantations occupying the swamps, the new steeple spiked towns rising on the highest bluffs.

And above all, there where the world famous steamboats. They were shown bustling everywhere from the great harbors of St. Louis and New Orleans to the lonely reaches of the upper river, pausing at levees and docks to unload cargo, stopping off at remote lumber yards to refuel, puffing out proud billows of smoke as they pressed on down bend after bend of the great river, grandly florid emblems of civilization lording it over the wilderness.

The panoramas were like recruitment posters for the new society rising at the edge of the world. Such images seemed to catch up audiences all over America in a tremendous surge of excitement, one they were barely able to explain or describe. Even a famous skeptic of American triumphalism like Henry David Thoreau could feel it. In his essay “Walking,” he described his fascination with the Mississippi panoramas.

As I worked my way up the river in the light of today and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, still thinking more of the future than of the past or present, I felt that this was the heroic age itself. Though we know it not.

BRIAN: That was actor Joseph Bromfield reading an excerpt from Wicked River– The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin. Earlier we heard from historian Janet Miron of Trent University in Ontario, Canada. She’s the author of Prisons, Asylums, and the Public– Institutional Visiting in the 19th Century.