1800-1860: The Arts: Chronology

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1800-1860: The Arts: Chronology

IMPORTANT EVENTS OF 1800-1860

1800

Itinerant artist Ralph Earl is one of the first American painters to show a great passion for nature, as evidenced in his painting Looking East From Leicester Hills.
24 Apr. Congress establishes the Library of Congress.

1801

François René de Chateaubriand paints Atala, a romantic rendering of the North American landscape and Native Americans based on his six-month visit.

1802

29 Jan. Thomas Jefferson appoints John James Beckley, former clerk of the House of Representatives, to the position of librarian of Congress.
Apr. The Library of Congress issues the first catalogue of books in the United States.

1803

Daniel Bradford publishes The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, the first magazine in the West, in Lexington, Kentucky.

1804

Charles Balthazer Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin paints portraits of five Osage chiefs visiting Washington, D.C.
29 Nov. New York City mayor DeWitt Clinton, Judge Egbert Benson, merchant John Pintard, and botanist David Hosack found the New-York Historical Society.

1806

Jan. Connecticut journalist Noah Webster publishes his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, a book that attempts to standardize the use of English in the United States.

1807

Jan. Washington Irving, James Kirk Paulding, and William Irving begin to publish a series of satirical essays under the title Salmagundi; of the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launce lot Longstuff Esq., and Others; the magazine encourages the formation of a group of writers known as the Knickerbocker School, most of them living in New York, who focus their realistic accounts on American subjects.

1808

The Theatre d’Orleans, a one-hundred-thousand-dollar opera house, opens in New Orleans.
James N. Becker’s play, The Indian Princess, or La Belle Sauvage, is performed in Philadelphia.
12 July The Missouri Gazette is founded in St. Louis, the first newspaper published west of the Mississippi River.

1809

Under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, Washington Irving publishes History of New York, a satirical account of colonial New Amsterdam. The book makes Irving famous in the United States and Europe.

1810

Zebulon Pike publishes Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and Through the Western Parts.

1813

Daniel Bryan, Daniel Boone’s nephew, publishes The Mountain Muse, an epic poem about his uncle.

1814

Nicholas Biddle edits and publishes the first edition of the journals of Meri-wether Lewis and William Clark, who explored the Trans-Mississippi West between 1804 and 1806.
The Library of Congress purchases the seven-thousand-volume library of Thomas Jefferson, which becomes the heart of the national library in its formative period.

1816

John Pickering’s Vocabulary, a collection of five hundred words and phrases native to the United States, marks an attempt to define a distinct American idiom separate from British English.

1819

Samuel Seymour and Titian Peale join the Stephen Long expedition to the Rocky Mountains as painters and naturalists.
William Gibbes Hunt publishes The Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine in Lexington, Kentucky.

1820

James Fenimore Cooper publishes his first novel, Precaution.
Outside of St. Louis, Chester Harding meets and paints two pictures of Daniel Boone, the only portraits known to be done from life.
26 Sept. Boone dies in Missouri at age eighty-five.

1821

Charles Bird King paints the portraits of prominent Kansas, Otos, Missouris, Omahas, and Pawnees who visit Washington, D.C.
James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Spy.

1822

James Hall publishes Letters from the West, a collection of pioneer legends and sketches.
Edwin James publishes An Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, a record of the journey of Stephen Long.

1823

James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking tales that pit the frontiersman Natty Bumppo against the forces of a developing, westward-moving American society.

1826

James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Last of the Mohicans.
Timothy Flint publishes Frances Berrian, generally regarded as the first Southwestern novel.
Thomas Cole paints Daniel Boone Seated Outside His Cabin.
Enrico Causcici’s relief sculpture for the Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., The Conflict Between Daniel Boone and the Indians, depicts Boone defeating two Indians in hand-to-hand combat.

1827

Timothy Flint begins publication of The Western Monthly Review, the first magazine to be published west of the Alleghenies.
James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Prairie.

1828

Charles Sealsfield, a German American writer, records his impressions of the United States in Americans as They Are.
21 Apr. Noah Webster includes seventy thousand entries in his Dictionary of the American Language, a prodigious work that reflects twenty years’ work and includes twelve thousand more definitions than any other dictionary of the English language.

1829

Charles Sealsfield publishes the novel Tokeah, or, the White Rose.

1830

Timothy Flint publishes the novel The Shoshonee Valley.

1831

James Ohio Pattie publishes The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, an early document of travel in the Southwest and California.

1832

Albert Pike writes “The Fall of Poland,” the first published poem in English composed in the West.
George Catlin paints Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, Head Chief of the Blood Tribe of Blackfeet, a picture that highlights Catlin’s desire to show the American public what Western Indians looked like.

1833

Mary Holly publishes the novel Texas.
Timothy Flint publishes Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, one of the most widely read books about a Western character published in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Carl Bodmer witnesses a battle between some six hundred Assiniboines, Crees, and Piegans, and paints Assiniboine-Cree Attack.

1834

William Gilmore Simms publishes Life of David Crockett.

1835

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet publishes the collection of sketches, Georgia Scenes.
Washington Irving reports on his frontier experience in A Tour of the Prairies.
James Freeman Clarke publishes the The Western Messenger.

1836

Washington lrving’s Astoria documents John Jacob Astor’s failed attempt to establish a Northwest trading post and argues for strong federal support of Northwestern claims.
Thomas Cole paints The Oxbow, a natural formation along the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts; the landscape reveals Cole’s ambivalence about the progress of American society.
Cole begins work on his series, The Course of Empire; the last work in the group, Desolation, calls into question the promises of Manifest Destiny.
Davy Crockett, scout, hunter, politician, and subject of various tall tales, dies at the siege of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas.

1837

In The Adventures of Captain Bonneville Washington Irving recounts the travails of Capt. Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville in the Northwest.
George Catlin’s Indian Gallery, a collection of his portraits of Plains Indians, opens in New York.

1838

After eighteen years of research John James Audubon, naturalist and painter, publishes his Birds of America, containing 485 plates.

1839

Caroline Kirkland publishes her novel A New Home—Who’ll Follow?

1840

James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Pathfinder.
Richard Henry Dana Jr. publishes Two Years Before the Mast, the record of his trip around Cape Horn, of South America, and to Spanish California.
Carl Bodmer, after attending the Mountain Man Rendezvous, paints The Trapper’s Bride, an idyllic vision of interracial marriage.

1841

James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Deerslayer.
Charles Sealsfield publishes The Cabin Book.
Thomas Bangs Thorpe writes “Big Bear of Arkansas.”
George Catlin publishes his Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians. Beyond documenting Native American cultures, Catlin also calls attention to the devastating effects of American expansionism.

1842

Dec. P. T. Barnum opens the American Museum in New York City.

1843

Daniel Decatur Emmett composes “Old Dan Tucker” and “My Old Sally.”
Catherine Stewart publishes New Homes in the West, describing life on the Western prairie.

1844

Charles Sealsfield publishes the novel Life in the New World.
Two influential accounts of Western exploration are published: George Wilkins Kendall’s Narrative of the Texan-Santa Fé Expedition and Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies.
Charles Deas paints The Death Struggle, a romantic vision of hand-to-hand combat between a trapper and an Indian.
Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes examines the lives of women in the Midwest.

1845

Johnson Jones Hooper publishes his novel Some Adventures of Simon Suggs.
With Fur Traders Descending the Missouri George Caleb Bingham begins a series of river scenes.

1846

Daniel Decatur Emmett composes “Jimmy Crack Corn.”
Stephen Foster composes “My Old Kentucky Home.”
John C. Frémont publishes Narrative of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year, 1842.

1847

David Coyner publishes his novel The Lost Trappers.
George Copway, an Ojibwa, publishes his autobiography, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh.
George Catlin begins his painting La Salle Claiming Louisiana for France, April 9, 1682, a grand tableau depicting an historic moment in the European colonization of the American West; he completes the picture the next year.

1848

Stephen Foster composes “Oh, Susanna!”
John Nichols composes “Oh, California.”
Rebecca Burlend publishes True Picture of Emigration, a narrative of her fourteen years in Illinois.
Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painting, dies.
24 Jan. James Marshall and John Sutter discover gold particles at a sawmill in Coloma, California, inspiring the gold rush.

1849

Charles Averill publishes his novel Kit Carson, The Prince of the Gold Hunters.
Francis Parkman publishes The California and Oregon Trail, a record of his travels beyond the Missouri River.
George Frederick Ruxton publishes Life in the Far West, an Englishman’s perspective on Western America.
In New York City a panorama featuring a voyage around Cape Horn opens to the public.

1850

Opera debuts in San Francisco with an aria from Verdi’s Ernani.
David G. Robinson publishes “Seeing the Elephant.”
Bayard Taylor, the San Francisco correspondent for the New York Tribune, collects his letters in Eldorado.
Josiah Gregg, explorer and author of Commerce of the Prairies, dies.
James Wilkins creates intense excitement when he exhibits his Moving Mirror of the Overland Trail in Peoria, Illinois.
Frederic Church paints Twilight, Short Arbiter Twixt Day and Night, an epic landscape suggesting the grandeur of the American West.

1851

Dame Shirley (Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe) begins publishing The Shirley Letters, vivid accounts of life amongst the miners.
Mayne Reid publishes the novel The Scalp Hunters.
Stephen Foster composes “Old Folks at Home.”
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, ethnographer, geologist, and Indian agent, publishes the first volume of his History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. Schoolcraft’s work becomes a resource for writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
George Caleb Bingham depicts Daniel Boone as a Moses-like figure in The Emigration of Daniel Boone into Kentucky.
With the Country Election Bingham begins his “Election” series, three paintings depicting the democratic process in the West.
James Fenimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking novels, dies in his home in Cooperstown, New York, the basis for the fictional settlement in Cooper’s The Pioneers.
George Copway briefly publishes a newspaper devoted to Native Americans, Copway’s American Indian.
John James Audubon, naturalist, painter, and author of Birds of America, dies.

1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
San Francisco’s Golden Era, a literary journal, begins publication.

1853

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet publishes his novel, Flush Times.
Old Block (Alonzo Delano) collects his Pacific News articles, humorous sketches of life in gold-rush San Francisco, in Pen Knife Sketches; or, Chips of the Old Block, illustrated by Charles Christian Nahl, well known as the premier artist of the gold rush.
For the first time San Francisco has its own resident opera company, The Pacific Musical Troupe.
Asher B. Durand paints Progress (The Advance of Civilization), commissioned by railroad baron Charles Gould.

1854

Margaret Jewell Bailey publishes The Grains, and John Rollin Ridge publishes The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit.
Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, Or Life in the Woods, a work that would soon have an enormous impact on that way that American writers viewed nature.

1855

Augusta J. Evans publishes the novel Inez, A Tale of the Alamo.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes the poem Song of Hiawatha.
Walt Whitman anonymously publishes a collection of poems titled Leaves of Grass.
John Phoenix (George Horatio Derby), one of the first Far Western humorists, publishes a collection of his sketches, Phoenixiana.
Maria Ward publishes Female Life Among the Mormons.

1857

Alonzo Delano presents his play, A Live Woman in the Mines, one of the earliest dramas written in the West.
Frederick Church paints Niagara, one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century landscape painting in the United States.

1858

Dewitt C. Peters publishes The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, portraying Carson as a gentleman with “no bad habits.”
Currier and Ives, in a series popularizing the image of the mountain men, print a lithograph of Louis Maurer’s The Last Shot.

1859

Washington Irving, best known as the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” as well as three books on the West, dies.

1860

Catherine Soule publishes her novel Pet of the Settlement: A Story of Prairie-Land.
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, reports on San Francisco in Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco.
Frederick Church paints Twighlight in the Wilderness, a painting that echoes the ambivalence that Thomas Colt felt about the future of the United States.
Oct. Thomas Maguire’s lavish Opera House opens the season with a festival of twelve successive nights of opera, each featuring a different production.

American Eras