The Jolly Flatboatmen

~~This chapter has two stories to tell. One is of how late nineteenth-century American still-life painting made men of its viewers or at least encouraged them to think of themselves as such. The other concerns the nostalgia of these viewers for an era that was disappearing before their eyes, although in their rush to embrace the...

The Yankee yeoman, because so familiar, was comical, but the frontiersman who explored the West, or anyone who moved westward, was an unknown quantity. Just what did characterize the typical Westerner? At stake, as an educated and urban (and Eastern) American elite seemed to see it, was the relationship of politically empowered but uneducated human beings to the wilderness. What, these Easterners pondered, were the social implications of the new setting for at least part of the sovereign …