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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2020-04-14 at 5.55.19 PM.png 2020-04-23T00:45:08+00:00 Nature 11 Denise Johnson essay plain 2020-05-27T23:23:40+00:00 Shafer’s imagery is linked stylistically and conceptually to the works of French landscape painter, Claude Lorrain, the English Romanticists, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, and Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand who’s works appeal to an agrarian past that was quickly being subsumed through industrialization. Equally important to the development of the American tradition of landscape painting, and the context of Shafer’s photographs, is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential Transcendentalist belief that all things are connected to the “Universal Being” and thus, the truth need not be divinely revealed, as it is altogether possible to find truth and creative inspiration through direct experience with nature. Emerson expounds in Nature (1836),

  In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (13).

  
  In this way, for American landscape painters, as well as the early photographers who quoted their canvases, representing the land was equivalent to a religious experience. In the contemplative field work necessary to capture and create such views, artists found themselves by articulating an identity for the young nation. Lamentably, in short order, these ideas would be transmuted into the gloss that offered opportune justification for settler colonial theft of Indigenous homelands via Manifest Destiny policies.
  
  
  Many American children remember playing various versions of The Oregon Trail game as part of their elementary school curriculum. The game romanticized the journey, and helped to support ideas of American ingenuity, independence, and resolute work ethic. As with photographs and media of the day, the game avoided critical analysis of false stereotypes of Indigenous peoples along the trail, assuming the credibility of dramatic and overblown accounts of violent encounters with the peoples who had lived in the landscapes that the United States worked to claim during the 19th century. The Oregon Trail game is best played using Firefox or Google Chrome as your browser. If you prefer to play in full screen, link here to the Internet Archive.