The Road to Oregon:
Manifest Destiny and National Ideology

"When I think of the Oregon Trail , I think of Lewis and Clark going out west. You could choose your own adventure. The Oregon Trail game was the only fun and educational game we played in school." -Layla, Senior Click here for more memories

Manifest Destiny: Our National Adventure
The national psyche during the era of manifest destiny and the Oregon Trail are traced in the national artwork of the time. Roger Aikin stresses that the movement towards the pacific was embedded in the national consciousness and that “the west was the compass point that still stands metaphorically for national destiny as well as for good prospects, freedom and personal rebirth” [1].

The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny was not unique to only writers and politicians. Western migration in the mid nineteenth century and manifest destiny led to expansions of cultural and artist depiction of America’s movement westward. The ideology of Manifest Destiny, as coined by John O. Sullivan, framed a national and spiritual mission that, “Americans were destined by Divine Providence to expand their national domain to the Pacific Ocean” [1]. The West and westward movement held magical sway over the national psyche. The West was not just a place but also the dream at the center of our national myth. Manifest Destiny held that Americans were “exceptional” and blessed by God with divine mission to claim and inhabit the west” [1].

The symbols of liberty were fused in the work by Jon Gast who's illustrations of bison, telegraph wire, bear, Indians, railroads and wagons depict American progress. The effect of directional landscape in Gast’s artwork provided an “allegorical bird’s eye-view of the entire North American continent. The more panoramic or maplike they look the more likely they are to move right-to-left.” [1].

John Gast's American Progress
http://history.csuci.edu/Experiment/American%20Progress%202.jpg

Depiction of Manifest Destiny in Artwork

The journey westward would prove to be an important and constant theme in American artwork. The emotional and spiritual guidance of Americans was evident in the artwork of the time through a strong and consistent visual representation of the idea of progress as a right-to-left directional orientation. The directional spacing of images in the artwork produced during and about the era of Manifest Destiny are important points of cultural analysis. Aikin points to Albert Bierstadt’s The Oregon Trail as a painting that “sweeps strongly leftward and westwards in wagon trains, bring plump cattle and sheep toward a golden setting sun, oblivious to the bleached bones of buffalo, the wreckage of pervious wagons, and the small Indian encampment ahead” [1]. The zeal of romanticism fused in Bierstadt’s painting supplemented the intellectual discussion of the time about the ideas of manifest destiny and westwards expansion. Aikin comments that, “the setting sun in The Oregon Trail serves not only to indicate direction by also to symbolize the West itself and the westward yearning of the nation” [1].

http://artroots.com/art/bierstadt.jpg

According to Aikin, Asher Duron was another leading figure of the time who contributed to paintings of America’s spiritual journey westward. Preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of art, Imaginary Landscape: Scenes from Thanaposis illustrates from “the gaze from the grazing sheep in the right foreground to the setting sun at the upper left, which symbolizes spiritual redemption, as well as the future, progress and good “prospects,” a word that meant both a pleasing “view” and material wealth” [1].

 

Work Cited:
[1] Aikin, Roger. Painting of Manifest Destiny. Mapping the Nation. American Art. Vol 14. No.3. (Autumn, 2000). 78-89.