Sites Unseen: Interpreting Bierstadt’s Land Speculations

This paper reconstructs Bierstadt's land speculations in Eastern California, using them as a lens to reappraise his approach to landscape painting. Beginning in 1872, in the aftermath of the violent conquest of Owens Valley by U.S. military and vigilante forces, Bierstadt began purchasing silver mining claims in the nearby Inyo Mountains. Relying on tips from local Army officers, he acquired properties sight unseen, often targeting remote areas that lacked verifiable topographical information in the hopes of securing promising mining lands before they became known to rival speculators.

Previously unknown to scholars, these land deals shed new light on how Bierstadt encountered, valued, and portrayed expropriated Indigenous lands. Considering Mount Corcoran (1876-77), a picture geographically tied to Bierstadt’s Inyo investments, this paper argues that Bierstadt’s pictorial style is best understood as a creative engagement with the social and representational modes of late nineteenth-century real estate speculation. In Mount Corcoran, Bierstadt created a picture whose subject could be claimed through the bureaucratic mechanisms of the land market rather than through established conventions of naturalism. To accomplish this, he devised a novel pictorial strategy that allowed his picture to function as a form of claimable property, both in terms of what it depicted and how it circulated within the market. By considering Bierstadt’s landscape paintings and land speculations in tandem, this paper underscores the extent to which the artist’s creative life was imbricated in real estate economies that worked to turn western spaces into exchangeable commodities.