10181018
O’SULLIVAN, TIMOTHY HENRY
exposure) required fi eld photographers to travel with
portable darkrooms, or dark tents. In order to make
large photographic prints, large glass negatives were
needed, and traveling across the countryside by wagon
with chemicals, large wooden cameras, and many sheets
of glass made the process of photography quite burden-
some by today’s standards.
Throughout his career, in addition to single views,
O’Sullivan made stereographic views of his war and sur-
vey subjects. These stereographs, which were collected
widely in Victorian America, display two nearly identi-
cal images side-by-side, mounted on a small card.
Designed to imitate human binocular vision, they are
best seen in a special viewer, called a stereoscope, which
blocks out peripheral vision and creates the illusion of a
three-dimensional image. Since these images are created
with a special camera featuring two lenses separated
by the same distance as human eyes, O’Sullivan had to
travel with even more photographic equipment in order
to make stereographic views.
In 1867, O’Sullivan was appointed to the Geological
Explorations of the Fortieth Parallel by Clarence King,
the United States Geologist in Charge. The survey had
two explicit concerns: to study the natural resources
along the Union and Central Pacifi c Railroads, and
to document the geology of a section of the West one
hundred miles wide from the Sierra Nevada Mountains
to the Rocky Mountains. Unstated, but implicit in the
goals of the survey, was that this research would help
to promote the future development of the region by
white settlers. This meant identifying possibilities for
economic development, recording the local fl ora and
fauna, evaluating the opportunities for mining, and as-
sessing Indian hostilities. For King, as a geologist, this
survey was also an important opportunity to produce
not just a geological section, but a geological history,
which would support his fervent belief in the concept
of Catastrophism. This theory asserted that geological
features of the earth’s surface were created by a se-
ries of catastrophic and violent events, such as fl oods
and earthquakes, rather than by slow evolution. King
intended for O’Sullivan’s geological photographs to
illustrate his survey report, and therefore to visually
demonstrate Catastrophism.
O’Sullivan had his photographic supplies shipped
ahead, and then traveled to San Francisco by way of
the Isthmus of Panama. Once there the party gathered in
Sacramento, California, and set out on July 3, 1867. The
going was arduous—King’s men endured steep, snowy
mountain passes, hot desert basins, and rough rivers.
Most of the men caught malaria, O’Sullivan being one
of the few to avoid it. While little has come down to us in
O’Sullivan’s own words, one of the rare written records
of a survey expedition is a story that was published in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in September 1869.
The article, entitled “Photographs From the High Rock-
ies,” does not mention O’Sullivan by name, but scholars
believe the story relates his exploits on King’s survey.
In one colorful episode the article recounts how the
photographer’s boat became lodged against some rocks
while descending the Truckee River, which fl ows from
Lake Tahoe in California to Pyramid Lake in Nevada.
Concerned that the boat would be dashed to pieces by
debris crashing along in the rough water, O’Sullivan
stripped off his clothes and dove into the raging river.
From the shore, he maneuvered ropes to free the boat
and brought it to safety. This story suggests the danger
and adventure that were an inherent part of exploring
and photographing the rugged Western country for
members of the nineteenth-century survey expeditions
like King’s.
The fi rst season, in 1867, O’Sullivan photographed
in Western Nevada and made his now-famous and other-
worldly image of the tufa domes in Pyramid Lake. The
King party spent that winter in Virginia City and Carson
City, Nevada, and in the former O’Sullivan made pho-
tographs of the gold and silver mines, several hundred
feet under ground. Not only were conditions unbear-
ably hot, with temperatures reaching more than 130
degrees Fahrenheit, but the darkness of the mine shafts
required O’Sullivan to use a magnesium fl are to make
his exposures. Despite these diffi cult circumstances, he
produced many photographs of miners and the interior
of the mines. In 1868, O’Sullivan continued to work in
Western Nevada, and also photographed Mono Lake,
California, and the Snake River and Shoshone Falls
in southern Idaho. O’Sullivan returned to Washington
D.C. in the winter of 1868-9 to print his fi rst survey
photographs, which were used internally but not pub-
lished. In fact, throughout his career as an expedition
photographer, O’Sullivan never printed in the fi eld. He
made negatives as he traveled, and only saw his results
later, when he printed back in the East. Also upon his
return to Washington D.C. in 1868, O’Sullivan began his
courtship of Laura Virginia Pywell, whom he would later
marry. By May of 1869 he was back in the West, on his
third survey season with Clarence King, photographing
the mountains near Salt Lake City, as well as northern
Utah, and southern Wyoming.
In January of 1870, during a lull in the surveying
while King waited to see if future appropriations would
be forthcoming, O’Sullivan photographed on the Atlantic
side of the present-day Isthmus of Panama (then the Isth-
mus of Darien, in the State of Panama in Colombia). This
position with a Navy Department survey, whose mandate
was to identify a canal route, yielded photographs of the
ship and crew, along with some views of native Indian
villages, coastline and architecture. The region’s dense
foliage and the high humidity, however, prevented the
topographical views that were the survey’s goal. After