The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed much of the history of the West, but Tyler Green pierces that curtain of smoke in this innovative biography, recreating the life of photographer Carleton Watkins. 'It was during one of the darkest hours' of the Civil War, wrote Frederick Law Olmsted, that Watkins's pictures 'had given to the people on the Atlantic some idea of the sublimity of the Yosemite, and of the stateliness of the neighboring Sequoia grove.' Watkins helped to create a 'cultural Unionism, ' Green argues, that bound the West to the national cause. In these pages, Watkins emerges as a pivotal artist, a key player in the preservation of what is now Yosemite National Park, and a creator of the American environmental imagination.--T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Tyler Green's achievement here is monumental. This book takes the familiar narrative of the formation of the American West and brings an entirely new perspective to it, beautifully positioning Watkins's work within the history of California, and indeed the nation.--Corey Keller, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Tyler Green's great contribution is not only to directly link Carleton Watkins to the great empire building of the West but also to insist on his importance in joining the West, specifically California, to the nation as a whole. Green does this in a cinematic fashion, meticulously recreating San Francisco and the West as they were settled and photographed by Watkins. It is a bravura merger of formal analysis with real world applications and results. The writing is lively and witty, peppered with dry humor and twenty-first-century colloquialisms, which help to make this nineteenth-century story feel vivid and fresh.--Christine Hult-Lewis, coauthor of Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs