California Calls You: Early Travel Images in California

Pre-pandemic I hadn’t considered a time when it might not be possible to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. How do you cope when that freedom is your form of therapy, a source of strength, self confidence and personal expression? How do you appreciate home when there is no opportunity to miss it? The concept of getting away, both literally and existentially, becomes more profound when your horizons are diminished. “It’s always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are”, Sinclair Lewis wrote in The Innocents. For those of us who feel the most stable when in motion, the ability to go somewhere else is vital. I imagine what it would be like to be born of a time when leisure travel and photography were reserved for the rich and risk taking types. Being neither of those things, I am thankful that all that is required of me today is my truck and an iPhone.

Here in California the documentation of leisure travel goes back over 100 years, and the development of the state parallels the development of two important travel related industries: the road and the camera. The result is the rise of the road trip. The earliest road trippers in California had to be fairly self-reliant, and pre-automobile, were limited to destinations that could be reached by horse and carriage via dirt roads. Travel literature and roadside services would have been scarce and unreliable. The earliest photographers had to lug around large view cameras, delicate glass plate negatives, and the makings of a portable darkroom. It was not for everyone.

One group of early travel enthusiasts in California called themselves The Merry Tramps of Oakland. The Merry Tramps were an informal group of outdoor adventure lovers who took advantage of increasingly accessible settlements up and down California. Beginning in the 1880’s they took well provisioned and lengthy trips to places like Sonoma County, Yosemite, and Mt. Shasta. Among them were several professional and amateur photographers including Frank Bequette Rodolph. Rodolph was born in Wisconsin and made the trip overland to California in 1850. He established printing businesses in Oakland, but traveled extensively throughout California photographing landmarks and natural attractions. Rodolph often signed his photographs with an anchor symbol, and he posed his fellow Tramps lounging atop fallen redwoods and perched on lakeside fences. 

Another itinerant photographer of the time was Martin Mason Hazeltine. In 1850 Hazeltine followed his brother George out west. When gold mining didn’t work out, he began a photography business. Nicknamed “The Traveling Photographer”, his fully equipped horse-drawn mobile darkroom allowed him to develop his images on the spot. He photographed all over the west, but lived mainly in California, operating studios in both Mendocino and Yosemite. Hazeltine marketed his photographs as stereograph cards, the social media platform of the day. Stereo cards were mass produced and affordable. The technology allowed the viewer to witness the world in 3-D, using an apparatus akin to a 19th century View Master. Hazeltine issued his cards in series with titles such as “Hazeltine’s Gems of the Pacific Coast” and “On the Line of the Southern Pacific Railway”.

Publishers like Lawrence & Houseworth and Isaiah West Taber were successful in marketing scenic views by photographers like Hazeltine, Charles Weed, and Eadweard Muybridge. Travelers collected the photographic views as souvenirs to show friends and to keep in albums. The Edward H. Mitchell publishing company in San Francisco produced over 10,000 different picture post card scenes between 1898 and 1920, primarily featuring California. The company also produced photographic souvenir ‘view books’, calendars and even playing cards. At the same time, the railroads expanded their reach, linking popular destinations together and making sight-seeing more accessible. Attempts to lure consumers resulted in publications touting the scenic and cultural wonders of California, and illustrated with photographs. Sunset Magazine began in 1898 as a promotional magazine for the Southern Pacific Railroad, an entity highly invested in the development of the West. Inside pages featured a seven page spread on Yosemite National Park with photographs by Joseph Nesbit LeConte but noted that “only by actual experience can the splendor of Yosemite be realized."

Booklets with titles like The Road of a Thousand Wonders: The Coast Line--Shasta Route of the Southern Pacific Company from Los Angeles Through San Francisco, to Portland, a Journey of One Thousand Three Hundred Miles (1907) promise to “...Tell of This Region and Its Wonders, of the Varied Charms of Sea and Sky, of Mountain and Valley, Field and Forest and of Climatic Features Which Make Pleasant All the Year; of Numberless Resorts Attractive for Health-Seeking Idling Enjoyment, and All Out-of-Door Recreation.” California Calls You, a pamphlet published by Union Pacific Railroad (1913) reproduces photographs of California’s missions, its mountains, lakes and famous giant trees, its beaches and bays, and its growing cities. 

As much as the railroad opened up the state to tourism, freedom seekers like to be drivers, not passengers. Funnily enough, the major impetus for building good roads was the proliferation of the bicycle, not the automobile. Prior to the creation of the Bureau of Highways in 1895, road building in California had been left to individual counties and private landholders, resulting in slow building projects and isolated roads of varying quality. The Good Roads movement began in Rhode Island in 1880 with the founding of the League of American Wheelmen (the group is still active as the League of American Bicyclists). The League was a prominent advocacy group for the improvement of roads and highways in the United States. Its members were organized and wealthy. Good Roads Magazine started publishing in 1892. It’s cover included a quote by American theologian Horace Bushnell published in his 1846 sermon The Day of Roads, “The Road is that physical sign, or symbol, by which you will best understand any age or people. If they have no roads, they are savages; for the Road is a creation of man and a type of civilized society.” By 1895 the magazine had over a million subscribers. The League held conferences and influenced legislation regarding the responsibility of road building and maintenance. The motto of the California Chapter of the L.A.W. was, "We want good roads in California." They gained the support of merchants and farmers who relied on roads to sell their goods. In addition, the League convinced the railroad and steamship companies that road building would allow them to extend routes and expand their businesses. The campaigning worked and in 1895 the California legislature created a new state agency called the Bureau of Highways.

At the time there were few, if any, automobiles in the state. The agency’s three employees, Marsden Manson, R.C. Irvine, and J.L. Maude (along with a dog and a camera), traveled 16,830 miles via horse and wagon in order to inventory California’s existing road system. They reported to Governor James Budd, “The conditions of highways in California today is the result of generations of neglect and apathy”. Their survey and subsequent recommendations are the beginnings of the California state highway department. Early efforts centered on taking over maintenance of the Lake Tahoe Wagon Road. The road ran fifty-eight miles over the Sierra Nevada mountains from Placerville to the border with Nevada. In June 1897 the Sacramento Daily Union published “Lake Tahoe Wagon Road: Recommendations as to How It Should be Improved. Result of the Inspection Made by Members of the State Highway Department.” It stated “We hold the members of this commission ready at any time to render all the assistance possible to the Commissioner of the Lake Tahoe wagon road. We regard the road as one of the most important in the State and one that deserves the exercise of the very best of skill in good road building. This road above all others in California is destined to be the line of travel for pleasure seekers who seek the cool and refreshing summer climate of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Its course is replete with scenery from its beginning to its terminus. It traverses a country noted for its small valleys and verdant pastures, where many of our thrifty stock raisers drive their herds to feed during the summer months. It is the connecting highway over which must pass the inhabitants of the one State to the other who travel by wagon or other vehicles. It is a road over which the bicyclist may pass without fear of excessive grades, and possessing all of these important functions, we therefore regard it as of sufficient importance to justify the State in its maintenance.” While the agency’s recommended improvements were vast, funding was scarce. In 1901 a new stone bridge was built over the South Fork American River at Riverton, but much of the maintenance involved simply sprinkling the road with water to keep the dust down. 1910 voters approved an 18 million dollar bond for the construction of a state highway system, and the first California Highway Commission convened in 1911. In 1912 the department began its first construction project, paving the section of El Camino Real between South San Francisco and Burlingame.

The same bicycle craze that spurred good road maintenance also transformed the role of women in society, giving them personal mobility that allowed their accepted roles to move outside of the privacy of the home and into the community. Susan B. Anthony stated in 1896: "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” The role of women in the Good Roads Movement is under discussed, but Ben Blow, Manager of the Good Roads Bureau of the California State Automobile Association, dedicates his book California Highways : A Descriptive Record of Road Development By the State and By Such Counties As Have Paved Highways (1920), “To the women of California, who have helped more than any other agency in the fight for good roads”.

Various iterations of automobiles began appearing in California at the turn of the century. The first car to enter Yosemite National Park came in 1900, ten years after the park was created. It was driven by photographer Oliver Lippincott. According to the Locomobile Company of America, Lippincott’s steam powered Locomobile “made an extended tour in the Yosemite and climbed to the tops of the highest mountains without difficulty or accident.” Despite this the park subsequently banned automobiles, only to remove the ban in 1907. By then there were approximately 6,500 cars registered in California. Ford Motor Company released the Model T in 1908, making car travel affordable to middle class Americans. By 1918 car registration in California had increased to 365,000 automobiles. Some of the earliest drivers in California were women. Women won the right to vote in the state in 1911. Campaign methods included traveling by car in order to distribute literature, hold rallies and to encourage communities to form local groups. Car campaigns were also successful in attracting the press to report on the movement's activities. The Northern California chapter of The College Equal Suffrage League utilized a seven-seat touring car known as the “Blue Liner” for a variety of campaign activities, including road trips into the country. When it came time to campaign nationally, New Yorkers Nell Richardson and Alice Burke (and their cat Saxon), took to the roads to campaign for the cause. Sponsored by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, they drove 10,000 miles over 5 months in 1916. Their auto, dubbed “the Golden Flier” became a symbol for women's suffrage. In the west their route included the entire length of California as well as Oregon and Washington.

Once the roads came to California it didn’t take long for an industry of support services and interesting new destinations to emerge. As roads were built so were the motels, gas stations, and resorts that allowed people to travel for fun and for freedom. Likewise, camera technology had evolved in a way that now allowed tourists to take their own photographs. The Kodak Brownie, introduced in 1900, was hugely popular and by 1905 a third of American households had a camera. The ‘snapshot’ changed the way people recorded the world. They began photographing their everyday lives-their families, their communities, and their trips. In 1903 Horatio Nelson Jackson, Sewall K. Crocker (and a dog named Bud) made the first successful cross-country road trip from San Francisco to New York City in a Winton touring car. Among their provisions: rubber protective suits, sleeping bags, blankets, canteens, pots and pans for cooking, a water bag, an axe, a shovel, a telescope, tools, spare parts, a block and tackle, cans of extra gasoline and oil, a rifle, a shotgun, pistols, and a Kodak camera. The July 9, 1916 Sunday Oregonian reported suffragists Richardson and Burke packed their Golden Flier with a tiny sewing machine, a typewriter, electric iron, evening gowns, ten shirtwaists, four dinner and afternoon dresses, lingerie, stockings, sweaters, blankets, and a Kodak camera.

As roads and cameras became omnipresent, photographer/travelers in California began documenting and marketing their adventures as inspiration and guides for others. Alice Iola Hare was born in 1859 in Pennsylvania and moved west with her husband and children, settling in Santa Clara in 1895. She picked up photography and by 1901 was advertising in the Santa Clara News, her logo stating "Unmounted Views a Specialty". Over the subsequent years she contributed several photographs to Sunset. Using a Kodak Brownie, she photographed scenes to market as postcard views. Often hand colored, they were printed with enticing captions that highlighted the beauty and significance of her subjects. In 1903 she published San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, a collection of twenty one photographs, including such subjects as San Jose's St. James Park, the Glazenwood Roses, and the Santa Clara Mission. In 1906 her garden scenes were included in Road of a Thousand Waters, a photographic essay of El Camino Real. Hare was active in the communities in which she lived, belonging to many local and statewide clubs concerned with the history, environment, and arts of California. Her subjects were diverse, and quotidian- images of the architecture and industry around her, how people lived and worked in California. Her motivation seems to be simply pride of this place, to guide others toward the things she thought were interesting and beautiful and worthy of attention. Her captions point to a freedom seeking and poetic personality. In one photograph a woman, perhaps herself, sits atop a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch. Hare quotes Henry David Thoreou’s Walden, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion”. She often highlights the road, the act of going there, with image titles like “The dreamy depths of the charming 17 Mile Drive, Monterey, California”.

After a honeymoon trip to California and the Southwest in 1902, Charles Francis Saunders and his first wife Elisabeth moved to California permanently, settling in Pasadena in 1906. Back home in Pennsylvania they were avid naturalists and collaborated on horticultural publications, Charles doing the writing and Elisabeth, the illustrations. After their arrival in California, they shifted their focus to travel writing. Saunders tripped extensively throughout California, both with Elisabeth and with his second wife Mira. All were amateur photographers. Saunders had work published in magazines like Travel, Country Life in America, and Sunset. He would go on to write over a dozen books on California, illustrating them with the photographs taken by him and his wives. His publications include titles such as Under the Sky in California (1913), Finding the Worthwhile in California (1916), The Southern Sierras in California (1923). As much of a pyschological guide to California as a practical one, Saunders dedicates Under the Sky in California “to the Tenderfoot, whom California loves to educate”, encouraging travelers to venture off of the beaten track. Saunders preferred a horse and carriage to an automobile, but he still relied on roads and he includes detailed instructions for following them. Hired horse Gypsy Johnson features frequently in the chapter titled “Spring Days in a Carriage” in which Charles and Elisabeth take a road trip based on Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 classic novel Ramona. In his chapter “The Deserts'' Saunders writes rapturously about the spiritual gifts given to those that seek a true connection to nature, and footnotes it with his entire packing list.  

“On this experimental trip we learned some simple fundamental facts about the desert. Its most beautiful hours are from dawn until ten in the morning, and from four or five in the afternoon until nightfall. During these periods at the season of the year when we were there, the atmosphere was more of heaven than of earth. The glowing sky, radiant with sunrise and sunset glories; the unspeakable opalescent tints on distant mountains; the brilliant flowers blooming upon the sands at one’s feet; a sense of largeness and indifference to petty things-these are the gifts of the desert’s mornings and evenings never to be forgotten. Then, to crown all, there is the night-serene, starlit, full of peace, its solemn stillness broken only by the lament of some owl far or near, or the cry of coyotes hunting. And over and beyond these recitable matters there is an unutterable something that tugs at the heart of the true desert lover, and makes him long evermore for its silent places. For it is not merely what the outward eye takes in that urges us on to visit certain regions-it is the residence there of intangible influences that feed our spirits with manna from the secret storehouses of the universe, making us for the time partakers of an unseen feast of life with the Master Himself. During these night watches on the desert, the veil between this world and the spiritual seems thinner than elsewhere, and in some measure comprehends why prophets of all time have found inspiration and strength in desert regions. Here in these waterless wastes, the wine of a spiritual kingdom is poured abundantly and the awakened soul hears the summons to a new life....Then when the sun has gone to his setting, there is the drive home in the quiet afterglow, with the palpitating light of the first star burning in the twilight sky, and all the earth baptized for a brief space into a heavenly peace, before the night shall shut in.“

Saunders was a member of an informal group of like minded artists/writers/wilderness lovers in Southern California now referred to as the Creative Brotherhood. The group included painter Carl Eytel, commercial photographer Avery E. Field, biologist Edmund Jaeger, as well as writer/photographers Joseph Smeaton Chase and George Wharton James. They built a colony of cabins at the base of Mount San Jacinto, traveled together, and philosophized about the glory of nature. In California, Romantic And Beautiful (1914) George Wharton James writes, “I have watched Carl [Eytel] on the desert, racked with a hacking and persistent cough, tramping miles and miles over the weary, hot, sandy plains, and then so eager to transcribe for the world the glory of colour revealed only in these secret places that he would tremble with the glory and passion that had taken possession of him.” The men often published each others work. Jaeger’s Denizens of the Desert (1922) contains illustrations by Wright M. Pierce, Eytel, Edwin A. Field, and Smeaton Chase. In 1915 Saunders collaborated with Smeaton Chase on California Padres and Their Missions. 

J. Smeaton Chase emigrated to California from London in 1890. He was 25. Drawn to isolated areas, he did much of his traveling by horse. He traveled the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains with his burro, Mesquite, in 1915. In California Coast Trails: a Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon, Smeaton Chase describes approaching the Pacific from the San Lucia mountains, “Higher still, and near the crest, I came into a region of magnificent yellow pines and redwoods. It was sundown, and the view was a remarkable one. The sun shone level, and with a strange bronze hue, through a translucent veil of fog. Below the fog the surface of the ocean was clear, and was flooded with gorgeous purple by the sunset. On the high crest where I stood, a clear, warm glory bathed the golden slopes of grass and lighted the noble trees as if for some great pageant. There was a solemnity in the splendor, an unearthly quality in the whole scene; that kept me spellbound and bareheaded until, fatefully, imperceptibly, the sun had set.” Smeaton Chase’s other books include Cone-bearing Trees of the California Mountains (1911), Yosemite Trails: Camp and Pack-train in the Yosemite Region of the Sierra Nevada (1911), The Penance of Magdalena: And Other Tales of the California Missions (1915), California Desert Trails (1919), and Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun (1920). He also contributed photographs to John Van Dyke’s The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1918).

The Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Company was once the largest publisher of art calendars in the world. Its namesake founded the company in 1900 in Red Oak, Iowa. The calendars proved to be a popular novelty and by 1910 the company had expanded into London, with sales being made in Holland, France, and Belgium. Mr. Murphy was a fan of art, and of driving. He had strict technical guidelines for his calendars, and took great pride in the artwork he featured. Murphy acquired reproduction rights to work by artists like Thomas Moran, famed landscape painter of the West, first to illustrate his calendars and later his travel books. In 1908 Murphy published his first book British Highways and Byways From a Motor Car: Being A Record of a Five Thousand Mile Tour in England, Wales and Scotland. In 1910 he followed with In Unfamiliar England: A Record of a Seven Thousand Mile Tour by Motor of the Unfrequented Nooks and Corners, and the Shrines of Especial Interest, in England, With Incursions Into Scotland and Ireland. Murphy also reproduced photographs, seeking out the finest examples of the medium. In his European guides he includes only a general note regarding the photographs, and no images are credited to photographers. In Unfamiliar England, he writes “The sixteen color plates reproduce the work of some of the most noted contemporary artists, and the duogravures are the most perfect English photographs—no country on earth surpasses England in photography—perfectly reproduced.” In On Old World Highways: A Book of Motor Rambles in France and Germany and the Record of a Pilgrimage from Land’s End to John O’Groats in Britain (1914) he gives a similar assurance, “In this book, as in my previous ones, the illustrations play a principal part. The color plates are from originals by distinguished artists and the photographs have been carefully selected and perfectly reproduced.” Murphy acknowledges photographer Frank Jay Haynes and the Pillsbury Picture Company in Three Wonderlands of the American West (1912). But when Murphy turns his wheels toward California in On Sunset Highways: A Book of Motor Rambles in California (1915), the photographs receive a more significant shout out. In the preface of the book Murphy writes, “In making acknowledgement to the photographers through whose courtesy I am able to present the beautiful monotones of California’s scenery and historic missions, I can only say that I think that the artistic beauty and sentiment evinced in every one of these pictures entitles its author to be styled artist as well as photographer. These enthusiastic Californians-Dassonville, Pillsbury, Putnam, and Taylor-are thoroughly in love with their work and every photograph they take has the merits of an original composition…I heartily recommend any reader of the book to visit these studios if he desires appropriate and enduring mementos of California’s scenic beauty.” 

The photographers Murphy references- William Dassonville, Arthur C. Pillsbury, Putnam and Valentine, and Harold Taylor, were indeed artists. Like Murphy, they were also lovers of road trips. Putnam & Valentine were early contributors to the Automobile Club of Southern California’s member magazine Touring Topics, which began publication in 1909. Arion Putnam was the official photographer for a 1922 auto expedition to Death Valley and the Mojave Desert sponsored by Pacific Mutual and the Franklin Automobile Company. Also included in On Sunset Highways is Arthur C. Pillsbury. In 1895, while a mechanical engineering student at Stanford University, Pillsbury rode his bike to Yosemite. Inspired by the trip, over the next sixteen years he invents the first circuit panorama camera; photographs the Klondike Gold Rush after both he, and his gear, survive a shipwreck off the coast of Cape Fox; documents towns along 2,000 miles of the Yukon River for the Census Bureau alone, via canoe loaded with 700 lbs of provisions and the 36”x10” glass plates required of his pano camera; establishes photo departments for William Randolph Hearst; photographs Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir in Yosemite National Park in 1903; works as a photojournalist for the San Francisco Examiner; travels up and down the western United States and Canada; builds the Pillsbury Picture Co., the largest distributor of picture postcards in the West; survives/documents the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire; returns to Yosemite to fulfill his lifelong dream of opening a studio there; and designs a time-lapse motion picture camera in order to film the wildflowers there that he believed were threatened with extinction from excessive mowing, earning himself the moniker “The Wildflower Man of Yosemite”.