1478
between 1856 and 1860 are not entirely clear. In 1858
he took photographs of the Guadelupe Quicksilver Mine
for a land fraud case. In 1859 and 1860 he was hired by
John C. Fremont and Trenor William Park to photograph
their Mariposa estate. Watkins also took photographs of
the New Almaden and New Indria Mines and Washer-
woman’s Bay at San Francisco. In 1861 his photographs
were used as evidence in U.S. v. D. and V. Peralta. It was
this experience that prompted him to build one of the
earliest mammoth-plate cameras in America, capable of
taking eighteen by twenty inch negatives.
By 1861 Watkins had established a more or less
permanent studio in San Francisco. Although by that
time he had earned a reputation as a competent outdoor
photographer, it was the 30 mammoth-plate negatives
and the 100 stereo-view negatives Watkins took of the
Yosemite area that brought him national and even inter-
national praise. Watkins was not the fi rst photographer
to visit Yosemite (C.L. Weed had taken pictures there
in 1859). He was, however, the fi rst to use a mammoth-
plate camera to achieve incredibly detailed views. In
1862 Goupil’s Art Gallery in New York City featured the
Yosemite photographs in an extremely popular exhibit.
Copies of his Yosemite images won praise from Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and from the
leading American photographic magazine, the Philadel-
phia Photographer. Watkins’s photographs also no doubt
played a part with legislation passed by the United States
Congress in 1864 declaring Yosemite to be “Inviolate.”
Watkins became the fi rst American photographer whose
prints were displayed as fi ne art.
Due to the widespread interest with his Yosemite
pictures, Watkins’s other photographic exploits have
not received as much attention. For three decades he
crisscrossed California photographing railroads, mines,
different species of trees, private estates, old Spanish
missions, the Sierra Nevada mountains, the coastline,
the San Francisco Bay area, and, of course, Yosemite.
In 1867 Watkins also took the fi rst of many out-of-state
trips, photographing Oregon’s coastline, settlements,
mountains, and the Columbia River. On later trips he
photographed the Comstock Lode mines in Nevada
(1871 and 1875), scenes along the Central Pacifi c and
Union Pacifi c Railroads in Nevada and Utah (1873), the
Southern Pacifi c Railroad route in Arizona (1880), the
coastlines of Washington and British Columbia (1882),
and scenes in Idaho, Montana, and Yellowstone National
Park (1884 and 1885). His last major trip was to the
mines in Butte Montana in 1890.
Despite widespread acclaim, poor business decisions
and bad fortune hurt the aging photographer fi nancially.
In the early 1860s he failed to identify and copyright
his work and consequently many of his views were
pirated and reprinted. In the mid-1870s his studio and
collection of negatives were seized by creditors and sold
to a competitor, I.W. Tabor, who reissued many of the
images without credit. As tourism increased in the late
nineteenth-century, his artistic style did not work well
with tourists who wanted cheap and predictable images.
Watkins’ had trouble paying his bills and was forced to
change studio locations on a number of occasions. Fur-
thermore he did not advertise, instead relying on word of
mouth, which no doubt created confusion for his would
be customers. At the brink of almost complete destitu-
tion in the 1890s, his old friend Huntington stepped in
and gave Watkins a small ranch near Sacramento as a
retirement home. He lived at the ranch for several years
before moving back to San Francisco. Unfortunately for
posterity, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed
all of his negatives along with a priceless collection of
early California daguerreotypes. Tragically, this material
was about to be transferred to the state for safekeeping.
After the earthquake Watkins’s health and mind contin-
ued to deteriorate and he died in 1916 at the Napa State
Hospital for the Insane.
Daniel M. DavisBiography
Carleton E. Watkins was born in 1829 in Oneonta, New
York. He moved to Sacramento California in 1851
and worked as a clerk and as a carpenter before being
trained by Robert Vance as a portrait daguerreotypist.
He soon moved to outdoor photography and he took a
variety of commissions around the San Francisco Bay
area between 1856 and 1861. The images that would
make him famous, however, were taken in 1861 of the
spectacular Yosemite region. These photographs won
praise throughout the United States and even in Europe
and were probably the fi rst photographs taken by an
American to be considered fi ne art. Watkins was not
only a technical expert at using a mammoth camera to
produce incredibly detailed and fl awless negatives, but
he also had an eye for composition and light. Although
Watkins is best known for his Yosemite images, he trav-
eled throughout the West Coast and in other western
states in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. These later views
show a sensitivity to the relationships between the
frontier American settlements and the natural resources
that supported them. Although Watkins had a generous
and warm personality, he was a poor businessman. He
suffered a series of fi nancial and personal setbacks,
and at one point he and his family (he married Frances
“Frankie” Henrietta Sneed in 1879) were living in a
railroad car. He was fortunate though to have the support
of Collis Huntington, Josiah D. Whitney and others who
supported him fi scally and encouraged him artistically.
He died in Napa, California in 1916.