Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Preface

Epigraph

1. BANVARD’S FOLLY

2. THE CLEVER DULLARD

3. SYMMES HOLE

4. THE MAN WITH N-RAY EYES

5. IF ONLY GENIUSES KNEW HOW TO SCHEME

6. 22,000 SEEDLINGS

7. PSALMANAZAR

8. THE PNEUMATIC UNDERGROUND

9. HE BEING DEAD YET SPEAKETH NOT

10. A DEDICATED AMATEUR OF FASHION

11. A. J. PLEASONTON’S BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL

12. YOUR GLORIOUS DAY IS COMING

13. WALKING ON THE RINGS OF SATURN

Further Readings

Acknowledgments

Praise for Banvard’s Folly

About the Author

Copyright

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY PREDECESSORS:

Van Wyck Brooks

Isaac D’israeli

Stewart Holbrook

Edmund Pearson

AND TO ANY PUBLISHER WHO WILL PUT THEIR WORKS BACK IN PRINT.

PREFACE

Peruse the documents of any era—newspapers, bills of sale, wills—and you find nothing but forgotten names. A famous name brings an almost electric shock of recognition, that in these crowds of nobodies and once-were-somebodies is a person you can attach a face and a reputation to. The collector and the historian value those rare documents. But I always find myself wondering about the other people. And buried in these footnotes of history are brilliant, fatally flawed thinkers who rose to dizzying heights of intellect and even fame, only to come crashing down into disaster, ridicule, or just the utter silence of oblivion.

Occasionally, I find others who share my predilection for the forgotten ephemera of genius. There’s the Dead Media web site, devoted to the numerous experiments that died on the barbed wire of technological advance. The Edison kinetophone. Gaumont’s Chronophone. The synchronoscope. The movietone. Phonofilm. The graphophonoscope. The vitaphone… There are fellow antiquarians like Edmund Pearson and Van Wyck Brooks, whose books I can scarcely open without feeling the need to give the secret handshake for the Universal Brotherhood of Collectors of Obscurity. And there’s my old college roommate, Shawn Lani, now the senior exhibit designer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He contracted a collector’s mania for household photos—anonymous black-and-white photographs from yard sales or old wire service archives, many lacking a date or even a name, but occasionally capturing a serendipitous genius in their composition. We are all curators at heart, I suppose, of items that we fear no one else will have time for.

Why write about such things?—you may ask.

And if it’s not you, surely someone will ask this question. The man or woman of promise who has nothing but excuses and regrets to offer at the end of the day—these people we do worse than despise. We avert our gaze and excuse ourselves from their presence.

And why not? We are also a nation of successes. This, at least, is what every demagogue, advertiser, and con artist tells us. We want to believe that we are good people, and that opportunity is there for those with the spirit to achieve it. Yet we laud men and women who have no better quality than the possession of money, and who achieve their success on the backs of the swindled and disdained. We want to believe that there is something more to their success than mere greed and luck. Even more than a moral loser, we cannot bear the thought of an immoral success.

There are moral successes, of course. But for each person credited with a winning innovation, there are the losers who pursued a similar path to failure. Perhaps their timing was wrong. Maybe they lacked the ruthless force of personality that propels the winners of history. In the end, they might even have been undone by weaknesses in character that had little to do with the merits of their ideas.

And so I began this book, an account of those who have fallen in their pursuits. Whole books could be unearthed on each of their lives—and I hope that happens someday. But for now, these excavations may suffice.

HAVE YOU HEARD THAT IT WAS GOOD TO GAIN THE DAY?

I ALSO SAY IT IS GOOD TO FALL, BATTLES ARE LOST

IN THE SAME SPIRIT IN WHICH THEY ARE WON.…

VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D!

AND TO THOSE WHOSE WAR-VESSELS SANK IN THE SEA!

AND TO THOSE THEMSELVES WHO SANK IN THE SEA!

AND TO ALL GENERALS THAT LOST ENGAGEMENTS, AND ALL OVERCOME HEROES!

AND THE NUMBERLESS UNKNOWN HEROES EQUAL TO THE GREATEST HEROES KNOWN!

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

1

BANVARD’S FOLLY

Mister Banvard has done more to elevate the taste for fine arts, among those who little thought on these subjects, than any single artist since the discovery of painting and much praise is due him.

—THE TIMES OF LONDON

The life of John Banvard is the most perfect crystallization of loss imaginable. In the 1850s, Banvard was the most famous living painter in the world, and possibly the first millionaire artist in history. Acclaimed by millions and by such contemporaries as Dickens, Longfellow, and Queen Victoria, his artistry, wealth, and stature all seemed unassailable. Thirty-five years later, he was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in a lonely frontier town in the Dakota Territory. His most famous works were destroyed, and an examination of reference books will not turn up a single mention of his name. John Banvard, the greatest artist of his time, has been utterly obliterated by history.

What happened?

*   *   *

IN 1830, A fifteen-year-old American schoolboy passed out this handbill to his classmates, complete with its homely omission of a 5th entertainment:

BANVARD’S

ENTERTAINMENTS

(To be seen at No. 68 Centre street,

between White and Walker.)

Consisting of

1st. Solar Microscope

2nd. Camera Obscura

3rd. Punch & Judy

4th. Sea Scene

6th. Magic Lantern

Admittance (to see the whole) six cents.

The following are the days of performance, viz:

Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Performance to commence at half-past 3 P.M.

JOHN BANVARD, Proprietor

Although his classmates were not to know, they were only the first of more than two million to witness the showmanship of John Banvard. Visiting Banvard’s home museum and diorama in Manhattan, they might have been greeted by his father, Daniel, a successful building contractor and a dabbler in art himself. His adventurous son had acquired a taste for sketching, writing, and science—the latter pursuit beginning with a bang when an experiment with hydrogen exploded in the young man’s face, badly injuring his eyes.

Worse calamities lay in store. When Daniel Banvard suffered a stroke in 1831, his business partner fled with the firm’s assets. Daniel’s subsequent death left the family bankrupt. After watching his family’s possessions auctioned off, John lit out for the territories—or at least for Kentucky. Taking up residence in Louisville as a drugstore clerk, he honed his artistic skills by drawing chalk caricatures of customers in the back of the store. His boss, not interested in patronizing adolescent art, fired him. Banvard soon found himself scrounging for signposting and portrait jobs on the docks.

It was here that he met William Chapman, the owner of the country’s first showboat. Chapman offered Banvard work as a scene painter. The craft itself was primitive by the standards of later showboats, as Banvard later recalled:

The boat was not very large, and if the audience collected too much on one side, the water would intrude over the low gunwales into their exhibition room. This kept the company by turns in the un-artist-like employment of pumping, to keep the boat from sinking. Sometimes the swells from a passing steamer would cause the water to rush through the cracks of the weather-boarding, and give the audience a bathing.… They made no extra charge for this part of the exhibition.

The pay proved to be equally unpredictable. But if nothing else, Chapman’s showboat gave Banvard ample practice in the rapid sketching and painting of vast scenery—a skill that would eventually prove to be invaluable.

Deciding that he’d rather starve on his own payroll than on someone else’s, Banvard left the following season. He disembarked in New Harmony, Ohio, where he set about assembling a theater company. Banvard himself would serve as an actor, scene painter, and director; occasionally, he’d dash onstage to perform as a magician. He funded the venture by suckering a backer out of his life savings; this pattern of arts financing would haunt him later in life.

The river back then was still unspoiled—and unsafe. But the troupe did last for two seasons, performing Shakespeare and popular plays while they floated from port to port. Few towns could support their own theater, but they could afford to splurge when the floating dramatists tied up at the dock. Customers sometimes bartered their way aboard with chickens and sacks of potatoes, and this helped fill in the many gaps in the troupe’s menu. But eventually food, money, and tempers ran so short that Banvard, broke and exhausted from bouts with malarial ague, was reduced to begging on the docks of Paducah, Kentucky. While Banvard was now a toughened showman with several years of experience, he was also still a bright, intelligent, and sympathetic teenager. A local impresario took pity on the bedraggled boy and hired him as a scene painter. Banvard, relieved, quit the showboat.

It was a good thing that he did quit, for farther downriver a bloody knife fight broke out between the desperate thespians. The law showed up in the form of a hapless constable, who promptly stumbled through a trapdoor in the stage and died of a broken neck. With a dead cop on their hands, the company panicked and abandoned ship; Banvard never heard from any of them again.

*   *   *

WHILE IN PADUCAH, Banvard made his first attempts at crafting moving panoramas. The panorama—a circular artwork that surrounded the viewer—was a relatively new invention, a clever use of perspective that emerged in the late 1700s. By 1800, it was declared an official art form by the Institut de France. Photographic inventor L. J. Daguerre went on to pioneer the diorama, which was a panorama of moving canvas panels viewed through atmospheric effects. When Banvard was growing up in Manhattan, he could gape at these continuous rolls of painted canvas depicting seaports and A Trip to Niagara Falls.

Moving into his twenties with the memories of his years of desperate illness and hunger behind him, Banvard spent his spare time in Paducah painting landscapes and creating his own moving panoramas of Venice and Jerusalem. Stretched between two rollers and operated on one side by a crank, they allowed audiences to stand in front and watch exotic scenery roll by. Banvard could not stay away from the river for long, though. He began plying the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers again, working as a dry-goods trader and an itinerant painter. He also had his eye on greater projects: a diorama of the infernal regions had been touring the frontier successfully, and Banvard thought he could improve upon it. During a stint in Louisville, he executed a moving panorama that he described as INFERNAL REGIONS, nearly 100 feet in length. He completed and sold this in 1841, and it came as a crowning success atop the sale of his Venice and Jerusalem panoramas.

It is not easy to imagine the effect that panoramas had upon their viewers. It was the birth of motion pictures—the first true marriage of the reality of vision with the reality of physical movement. The public was enthralled, and so was Banvard: he had the heady rush of an artist working at the dawn of a new media. Emboldened by his early successes, the twenty-seven-year-old painter began preparations for a painting so enormous and so absurdly ambitious that it would dwarf any attempted before or since: a portrait of the Mississippi River.

*   *   *

WHEN WE READ of the frontier today, we are apt to envision California and Nevada. In Banvard’s time, though, the frontier still meant the Mississippi River. A man setting off into its wilds and tributaries would only occasionally find the friendly respite of a town; in between he faced exposure, mosquitoes, and, if he ventured ashore, bears. But Banvard had been up and down the river many times now, and had taken at least one trip solo as a traveling salesman. The idylls of river life had charms and hazards, as he later recalled:

All the toil, and its dangers, and exposure, and moving accidents of this long and perilous voyage, are hidden, however, from the inhabitants, who contemplate the boats floating by their dwellings and beautiful spring mornings, when the verdant forest, the mild and delicious temperature of the air, the delightful azure of the sky of this country, the fine bottom on one hand, and the romantic bluff on the other, the broad and the smooth stream rolling calmly down the forest, and floating the boat gently forward, present delightful images and associations to the beholders. At this time, there is no visible danger, or call for labor. The boat takes care of itself; and little do the beholders imagine, how different a scene may be presented in half an hour. Meantime, one of the hands scrapes a violin, and others dance. Greetings, or rude defiances, or trials of wit, or proffers of love to the girls on shore, or saucy messages, are scattered between them and the spectators along the banks.

Banvard knew the physical challenge that he faced and was prepared for it. But the challenge to his artistry was scarcely imaginable. In the spring of 1842, after buying a skiff, provisions, and a portmanteau full of pencils and sketch pads, he set off down the Mississippi River. His goal was to sketch the river from St. Louis all the way to New Orleans.

For the next two years, he spent his nights with his portmanteau as a pillow, and his days gliding down the river, filling his sketch pads with river views. Occasionally he’d pull into port to hawk cigars, meats, household goods, and anything else he could sell to river folk. Banvard prospered at this, at one point trading up to a larger boat so as to sell more goods. Recalling those days to audiences a few years later—exercising his flair for drama, of course, and referring to himself in the third person—he remembered the trying times in between, when he was alone on the river:

His hands became hardened with constantly plying the oars, and his skin as tawny as an Indian’s, from exposure to the sun and the vicissitudes of the weather. He would be weeks altogether without speaking to a human being, having no other company than his rifle, which furnished him with his meat from the game of the woods or the fowl of the river.… In the latter part of the summer he reached New Orleans. The yellow fever was raging in that city, but unmindful of that, he made his drawing of the place. The sun the while was so intensely hot, that his skin became so burnt that it peeled from off the back of his hands, and from his face. His eyes became inflamed by such constant and extraordinary efforts, from which unhappy effects he has not recovered to this day.

But in his unpublished autobiography, he recalled his travels a bit more benignly:

[The river’s current was] averaging from four to six miles per hour. So I made fair progress along down the stream and began to fill my portfolio with sketches of the river shores. At first it appeared lonesome to me drifting all day in my little boat, but I finally got used to this.

By the time he arrived back in Louisville in 1844, this adventurer had acquired the sketches, the tall tales, and the funds to realize his fantastic vision of the river he had traveled. It would be the largest painting the world had ever known.

Banvard was attempting to paint three thousand miles of the Mississippi from its Missouri and Ohio sources. But if his project was grander than any before, so were the ambitions of his era. Ralph Waldo Emerson, working the New England public lecture circuit, had already lamented, Our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts … the northern trade, the southern planting, the Western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination.… The idea had been voiced by novelists like Cooper before him, and later on by such poets as Walt Whitman. When Banvard built a barn on the outskirts of Louisville in 1844 to house the huge bolts of canvas that he had custom-ordered, he was sharing in this grand vision of American art.

His first step was to devise a tracked system of grommets to keep the huge panorama canvas from sagging. It was ingenious enough to be patented and featured in a Scientific American article a few years later. And then, for month after month, Banvard worked feverishly on his creation, painting in broad strokes: trained in background painting, he specialized in conveying the impression of vast landscapes. Looked at closely, this work held little for the connoisseur trained in conventions of detail and perspective. But motion worked magic upon the rough-hewn cabins, muddy banks, blooming cottonwoods, frontier towns, and medicine-show flatboats.

During this time he also worked in town on odd jobs, but if he told anyone of his own painting, we have no record of it. Fortunately, though, we have a letter from an unexpected visitor to Banvard’s barn. Lieutenant Selin Woodworth had grown up a few houses away from Banvard and hadn’t seen him in sixteen years, and he could hardly pass by in the vast frontier without saying hello. When he showed up unannounced at the barn, he was amazed by what maturity had wrought in his childhood friend:

I called at the artist’s studio, an immense wooden building.… The artist himself, in his working cap and blouse, pallet and pencil in hand, came to the door to admit us.… Within the studio, all seemed chaos and confusion, but the life-like and natural appearance of a portion of his great picture, displayed on one of the walls in a yet unfinished state.… A portion of this canvas was wound upon a upright roller, or drum, standing on one end of the building, and as the artist completes his painting he thus disposes of it.

Any description of this gigantic undertaking … would convey but a faint idea of what it will be when completed. The remarkable truthfulness of the minutest objects upon the shores of the rivers, independent of the masterly, and artistical execution of the work will make it the most valuable historical painting in the world, and unequaled for magnitude and variety of interest, by any work that has been heard of since the art of painting was discovered.

This was the creation that Banvard was ready to unveil to the world.

Banvard approached his opening day with the highest of hopes. Residents reading the Louisville Morning Courier discovered on June 29, 1846, that their local painter had rented out a hall to show off his work: Banvard’s Grand Moving Panorama of the Mississippi will open at the Apollo Rooms, on Monday Evening, June 29, 1846, and continue every evening till Saturday, July 4. A review in the same paper declared, The great three-mile painting is destined to be one of the most celebrated paintings of the age. Little did the writer of this review know how true this first glimpse was to prove: for while it was to be the most celebrated painting of the age, it did not last for the ages.

Opening night certainly proved to be inauspicious. Banvard paced around his exhibition hall, waiting for the crowds and the fifty-cent admission fees to come pouring in. Darkness slowly fell, and a rain settled in. The panorama stood upon the lighted stage, fully wound and awaiting the first turn of the crank. And as the sun set and rain drummed on the roof, John Banvard waited and waited.

Not a single person showed up.

*   *   *

IT WAS A humiliating debut, and it should have been enough to make him pack up and leave. But the next day saw John Banvard move from being a genius of artistry to a genius of promotion. He spent the morning of the 30th working the Louisville docks, chatting to steamboat crews with the assured air of one who’d navigated the river many times himself. Moving from boat to boat, he passed out free tickets to a special afternoon matinee.

Even if they had paid the full fee, the sailors would have got their money’s worth that afternoon. As the painted landscape glided by behind him, Banvard described his travels upon the river—a tall tale of pirates, colorful frontier eccentrics, hairbreadth escapes, and wondrous vistas, a tad exaggerated, perhaps, but it still convinced a hallful of sailors who could have punctured his veracity with a single catcall. When he gave his evening performance, crew recommendations to passengers boosted his take to $10—not bad for an evening’s work in 1846. With each performance the audience grew, and within a few days he was playing to a packed house.

Flush with money and a successful debut, Banvard returned to his studio and added more sections to the painting, and then he moved it to a larger venue. The crowds continued to pour in, and nearby towns chartered steamboats to see the show. With the added sections, the show stretched to over two hours in length; the canvas would be cranked faster or slower depending on audience response. Each performance was unique, even for a customer who sat through two in a row. The canvas wasn’t rewound at the end of the show, so the performances alternated between upriver and downriver journeys.

After a successful shakedown cruise, Banvard was ready to take his Three Mile Painting to the big city. He held his last Louisville show on October 31 and then headed for the epicenter of American intellectual culture: Boston.

*   *   *

BANVARD INSTALLED HIS panorama in Boston’s Armory Hall in time for the Christmas season. He had honed his delivery to a perfect blend of racy improvisation, reminiscences, and tall tales about infamous frontier brigands. The crank machinery was now hidden from the audience, and Banvard had commissioned a series of piano waltzes by Thomas Bricher to accompany his narration. With creative lighting and the unfurling American landscape behind him, Banvard had created a seemingly perfect synthesis of media.

Audiences loved it. By Banvard’s account, in six months 251,702 Bostonians viewed his extraordinary show; at fifty cents a head, he’d made about $100,000 in clear profit. In just one year, he’d gone from modest frontier sign painter to famous and wealthy man—and probably the country’s richest artist. When he published the biographical pamphlet Description of Banvard’s Panorama of the Mississippi River (1847) and a transcription of his show’s music, The Mississippi Waltzes, he made more money. But there was an even happier result to his inclusion of piano music—the young pianist he’d hired to perform it, Elizabeth Goodman, soon became his fiancée, and then his wife.

Accolades continued to pour in, culminating in a final Boston performance that saw the governor, the speaker of the house, and state representatives in the audience unanimously passing a resolution to honor Banvard. His success was also the talk of Boston’s intellectual elite. John Greenleaf Whittier titled a book after it (The Panorama and Other Poems) in 1856, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about the Mississippi in his epic Evangeline after seeing one of Banvard’s first Boston performances. Longfellow had never seen the river himself—to him, the painting was real enough to suffice. In fact, Longfellow was to invoke Banvard again in his novel Kavanaugh, using him as the standard by which future American literature was to be judged: We want a national epic that shall correspond to the size of the country; that shall be to all other epics what Banvard’s panorama of the Mississippi is to all other paintings—the largest in the world.

There is little doubt that Banvard’s Three Mile Painting was the longest ever produced. But it was a misleading appellation. John Hanners—the scholar who almost single-handedly has kept Banvard’s memory alive in our time—points out: "Banvard always carefully pointed out that others called it three miles of canvas.… The area in its original form was 15,840 square feet, not three miles in linear measurement."

But perhaps Banvard was in no hurry to correct the public’s inflated perceptions of his painting. His fame was now preceding him, and he moved his show to New York City in 1847 to even bigger crowds and greater enrichment; it was hailed there as a monument of native talent and American genius. Each night’s receipts were carted to the bank in locked strongboxes; rather than count the massive deposits, the banks simply started weighing Banvard’s haul.

With acclaim and riches came the less sincere flattery of his fellow artists. The artist closest upon Banvard’s heels was John Rowson Smith, who had painted a supposed Four Mile Painting. For all Banvard’s tendencies toward exaggeration, there is even less reason or evidence to believe that his opportunistic rivals produced panoramas larger than his. Still, it was a worrisome trend. Banvard had been hearing for some time of plans by unscrupulous promoters to copy his painting and to then show the pirated work in Europe as the genuine Banvard panorama. With the United States success behind him, Banvard closed his New York show and booked a passage to Liverpool.

*   *   *

BANVARD SPENT THE summer of 1848 warming up for his London shows with short runs in Liverpool, Manchester, and other smaller cities. In London, the enormous Egyptian Hall was booked for his show. He began by suitably impressing the denizens of Fleet Street papers with a special showing. It is impossible, the Morning Advertiser marveled, to convey an adequate idea of this magnificent [exhibition]. The London Observer was equally impressed in its review of November 27, 1848: This is truly an extraordinary work. We have never seen a work … so grand in its whole character. Banvard was rapidly achieving a sort of artistic beatification in the press.

The crowds and the money flowed in yet again. But to truly bring in the chattering classes, Banvard needed something that he’d never had in the United States: the imprimatur of royalty. After much finagling and plotting by Banvard, he was summoned to Windsor Castle on April 11, 1849, for a special performance before Queen Victoria and the royal family. Banvard was already a rich man, but royal approval could make the difference between being a mere artistic showman and an officially respected painter. Banvard gave the performance of his life, delivering his anecdotes in perfect combination with his wife at the piano; at the end, when he gave his final bow to the family assembled at St. George’s Hall, Banvard knew that he had made it as an artist. For the rest of his life, he was to look back upon this as his finest hour.

His panorama show was now a sensation, running for a solid twenty months in London and drawing more than 600,000 spectators. An enlarged and embellished reprint of his autobiographical pamphlet, now titled Banvard, or the Adventures of an Artist (1849), also sold well to Londoners, and his show’s waltzes could be heard in many a parlor. He penetrated every level of society; after attending one show, Charles Dickens wrote him in an admiring letter: I was in the highest degree interested and pleased by your picture. To the other dwellers of this island nation, whose experience of sailing was often that of stormy seas, Banvard offered the spice of frontier danger blended with the honeyed idylls of riverboat life:

Certainly, there can be no comparison between the comfort of the passage from Cincinnati to New Orleans in such a steamboat, and to a voyage at sea. The barren and boundless expanse of