Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.Princeton University historian Martha Sandweiss, then at Amherst College, was researching a book of her own on early photography in the West.
The Jones family offered the sketchbook for sale after learning it was not the work of their ancestor, but of his employee Quesenbury. John Carter and Eli Paul of the Nebraska State Historical Society launched an effort to bring the book to the state.
John Gottschalk, then president and chief executive of The World-Herald, recognized the sketchbook's value to Nebraska. The World-Herald Foundation purchased the book to be conserved, exhibited and published by the state historical society.
The sketchbook was exhibited at an Omaha Club reception in 1994. It later was treated for preservation at the historical society's Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha. --David Hendee
Scenery, Curiosities, and Stupendous Rocks: William Quesenbury's Overland Sketches, 1850-1851
By David Royce Murphy, with contributions by Michael L. Tate and Michael Farrell
Hardcover, 304 pages; 157 black and white illustrations, 13 maps
University of Oklahoma Press, 2011
$48.15, including sales tax, at the OWHStore. Also available at bookstores.
Publication support from the Ronald K. and Judith M. Stolz Parks Publishing Fund at the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation.
See a photo showcase of Quesenbury's sketches.
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An Arkansas farmer who went bust as a gold miner in California hit pay dirt as an artist in the high Plains of Nebraska.
But William Quesenbury's big strike — sketching the North Platte River wilderness on his way down the Overland Trail to his home back east — remained hidden for nearly 150 years.
Quesenbury, a self-taught artist, couldn't have imagined that his 1851 sketches of what is now western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming would survive, much less be rediscovered and published in a large-format book for the world to see, said David Royce Murphy of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
After a brief, failed fling as a gold miner, Quesenbury (pronounced Cush-en-berry) bounced from job to job in Arkansas and Texas — newspaperman, Confederate officer, politician, art teacher — and lived a life of desperation. He died in 1888 in Missouri.
"The fact that he would be known today for his Overland sketches would probably surprise him to no end,'' Murphy said.
Quesenbury's greatest work was his role as one of the first and most skilled sketch artists to depict Chimney Rock, Courthouse Rock and other iconic buttes, hills and plains of the Overland Trail, Murphy said.
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The sketches have been owned by The World-Herald since 1994, shortly after they were rediscovered. They are on loan to the state historical society.
The Quesenbury story and his 71 pencil sketches are featured in "Scenery, Curiosities, and Stupendous Rocks,'' published last month by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Essays by Murphy, a senior historical society researcher; Michael L. Tate, a University of Nebraska at Omaha historian; and Michael Farrell, a Nebraska Educational Telecommunications producer, set Quesenbury's depictions in historical context.
Impresario John Wesley Jones hired the 28-year-old Quesenbury to accompany a troupe gathered in California to produce drawings and daguerreotypes of the West's "scenery, curiosities, and stupendous rocks.''
Quesenbury had sketched scenery across Kansas, Colorado and elsewhere on his journey west the previous year. Some of the drawings are in Murphy's book.
"Quesenbury probably was ready to come back, and here comes a guy willing to pay him to ride back east and make drawings,'' Murphy said.
The party left Sacramento in July 1851 and traveled across the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains to the high Plains.
One of Quesenbury's first drawings in the surviving sketchbook is of Devil's Gate, a narrow cleft carved by the Sweetwater River in central Wyoming. The landmark was visible to westbound emigrants from 15 miles.
He sketched Independence Rock, the North Platte River near present-day Casper, Laramie Peak and the great North Platte canyons in Wyoming.
The visual enchantment continued in what is now western Nebraska in September 1851.
The Jones-Quesenbury party happened upon a sprawling encampment of American Indians gathered along the North Platte at Horse Creek for the Fort Laramie Treaty Council of 1851.
Quesenbury turned his pad sideways and sketched a rough, 13-inch-wide outline of the southern horizon, the creek bank and dozens of inverted "V'' shapes.
"You get a sense from the little chicken scratchings that they are teepees,'' Murphy said. "You can stand at the exact spot where he stood and see the same horizon line. You get goose bumps knowing how massive that encampment really was. It would have been completely awesome if he had been able to finish it.''
Quesenbury's sketch is the only known image of the event, the largest gathering of Plains Indians to that date.
The travelers went through Robidoux Pass, and Quesenbury sketched panoramas of the Wildcat Hills, Haystack Rock, Dome Rock, Chimney Rock and Courthouse Rock and Jail Rock as they moved down the valley. Two Chimney Rock views are detailed drawings depicting a tall and intact column.
Quesenbury's last drawing is an incomplete sketch of Ash Hollow, the entrance to the river valley for westbound travelers.
"Even though it wasn't finished, the sketch tells us more what it looked like back then,'' Murphy said.
The journey down the valley occurred three years before Congress created the Nebraska Territory and 16 years before Nebraska statehood.
Quesenbury apparently turned over his sketchbook to Jones when the travelers reached St. Joseph, Mo., and never saw it again.
Jones produced a series of scrolling panorama paintings first presented to theater audiences in 1852. Jones is believed to have developed the scrolls not from Quesenbury's sketches but from daguerreotypes, an early form of photography using silvered copper plates.
Jones apparently used the sketches to keep the daguerreotypes in sequential order and as a personal memento of the journey, Murphy said.
Jones' "Pantascope of California, Nebraska & Kansas, Salt Lake & the Mormons'' was wildly popular on Boston and New York City stages, Murphy said.
Quesenbury's sketches are all that remain of the project. That the drawings survive is a wonder, Murphy said. Jones' descendants believed the sketches were his work, until a researcher tracked down the family and discovered the drawings in the early 1990s.
Murphy said it was common for military explorers of the West to have map makers and artists — collectively known as topographers — depict the landscape.
Quesenbury did more than simply draw what travelers were seeing, Murphy said.
"They don't have the drama that a fine artist would give the scenes, but when you stand where he stood, you realize that he was showing a section of landscape that evoked dramatic spaces — rocky formations jutting up in front of big horizons.''
Quesenbury's work is part of the discovery of nature by ordinary Americans through words and paintings in the middle of the 19th century, Murphy said.
Murphy said he wonders if Quesenbury ever heard again from Jones, or knew of the success of the pantascope show — or if he was paid well for the sketches.
"That was a huge amount of work to give up,'' Murphy said. "He seemed to have been born to do that.''
Contact the writer:
402-444-1127, david.hendee@owh.com
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