Carleton Watkins ventured into Oregon in 1867, possibly under the auspices of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company who may have wished to have Watkins’s images to show off the beauty of the country’s Pacific coast. Whatever the reason for his trip, Watkins seems to have pursued his own agenda, driven by his own highly evolved sense of the landscape and man’s affect upon it.
This print comes originally from an album of Watkins’s views of Oregon owned by the University Club of New York City. This album was offered for sale at Swann Galleries on 10 May 1979 where it sold to Margaret W. Weston of The Weston Gallery, Carmel, for $100,000 – a remarkable price in the early days of the auction market for photographs. The album’s photographs were exhibited the following year in the galleries of The Friends of Photography in Carmel, and illustrated in the accompanying catalogue, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographs of the Columbia River and Oregon, published jointly by the Friends and The Weston Gallery, with an introduction by James Alinder and text by David Featherstone and Russ Anderson.
