All the Difference | Carleton Watkins

All the Difference posts are about those people (and ideas) who dared to step off the busy highway and to follow one less worn for wear. Away from the crowds, these individuals walk to their own beat, with unexpected and singular results that may not always be for everyone, but that, my guess, was never the point.

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Carleton Watkins. Just east of Oregon’s famed Multnomah Falls is a small gorge, named after my hometown, Oneonta, New York. Not looking like much from the Old Scenic Highway, it’s often overlooked; there are no monumental cascades visible from the road like some of the other parking-lot stops, just a dark, narrow, mossy chasm, where icy, rushing water squeezes between what looks like the stems of two basalt toad-stool protrusions growing from the rock walls, one on either side, their caps reaching out across the slippery current, as if about to touch. I always wondered why it was called Oneonta—there are a couple Oneonta’s across the US and I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with my upstate New York birthplace. What did I know?

In 1867, 101 years before my birth, Carleton Watkins, one of the most famed photographers of the Columbia Gorge, and really of the early West, set off on an expedition out of San Francisco to document the Pacific Northwest. His command of landscape photography had long been firmly established by his time spent in Yosemite Valley where his photos so influenced the US Congress that they passed legislation to protect it, thus laying the foundation for the creation of our first National Park. And this over one-half century before Ansel Adams. Carleton Watkins was born and raised in Oneonta, New York.

His era was of the Great Gold Rush, whose call of all the possibilities it entailed he heard there among the rolling hills of our shared hometown, a meeting place of the foothills of the Adirondacks to the north, and the Catskills to the south. The year was 1851. He, along with another Oneontan Collis Huntington (the Oneonta public library must be named after him), who later became one of the four partners of the Central Pacific Railroad, landed in Sacramento where he worked with Huntington until 1854 when he met photographer Robert Vance; the rest, as they say, is history.

Watkins’ contribution to the historical preservation of the Columbia Gorge is phenomenal. His photos show the Columbia River wild and free before any dams slowed it down. Takes viewers back to pristine scenery that, before Lewis and Clark, had been privy only to the Native Americans living there, or to those tribes who from further inland annually set up camp along the Columbia’s shore when the salmon still ran in outrageous numbers—pounded, dried, salmon a major staple and trade item to them.

As far as photographic methods of that time, huge plates had to be carefully transported and developed on the spot—the weather always a foe, especially all that rain in the shadow of Mt. Hood, and the wind that then as now is as relentless—and then carefully returned along the same primitive routes that, if they had not been washed out by the raging river—and this includes the railroad tracks that he later traveled on in his private rail car, courtesy of his friend old Huntington—were not in the least bump-free.

I wish I had my writer’s head together to go into more detail, and the time to do it; to speak to my imagining old Carleton, small and alone out among the tall, dense pines, the land impenetrable, green and thick with plants and shrubbery—would there be as much poison oak? — the ferns whispering in the wind. How he would set up and wait for THE shot, then quickly process the plate and hope he captured the moment, the splendid quiet that surrounded him punctuated by wind gusts or an eagle’s high-pitched cry, the murmur or roar of that untamed river, depending on where he had set up, imprinted in his mind to better endure his time away from it; I wonder if he felt a sense of loss when he left. But I don’t have time—let’s just say it’s been a tough week as a stay-at-home Mama, and, well, I’m tired.

But I’ll say this in closing: Watkins’ images not only give us a glimpse of a time now long past, showcasing some of the United States’ most majestic scenery, most of which we are still able to see as we travel through the Columbia Gorge (albeit now amidst more of a “man-made” setting), they are a testament to a man’s enduring passion, his dedication to what became a life’s pursuit, his courage to step off the beaten path and follow his heart.

If you’d like to read more about and see the work of Carleton Watkins, I highly recommend the recent book of the former and now deceased Portland Art Museum Curator of Photography, Terry Toedtemeier—a man who also walked to his own beat and followed his life dream—and his co-author John Laursen, Wild Beauty, the book of the last show Terry would ever curate at the museum, his life ending way too soon. I wish in the short time I had worked at the museum that I could’ve chatted with Terry about Carleton Watkins. But I didn’t know about Watkins; it’s surprising to me that I did not hear one thing about this man while growing up in Oneonta (just a street named after him, and that street never that wonderful in my time). Odd, really. Or maybe I just wasn’t listening, which isn’t so odd, just some punk-ass kid back then who didn’t care. I’ll probably never know.

I still have to make it all the way back into the Oneonta Gorge, I hear there are some spectacular falls; I have only waded in up to my thighs, trading the idea of a wet butt in that icy water for a dry one, so I didn’t go that far. But I have come as far geographically as a fellow Oneontan, Carleton Watkins, ferchrissakes! I, too, heard the call and left to go West, with hopes and dreams I’m still working on, and maybe have yet to discover, like Carleton. And that, to me, is just fine.