ABSTRACT

A migrant from the Eastern coast of the USA, Withington presided over the first portrait studio in Ione, a tiny frontier gold-rush town in California. The mother of two daughters and wife of a failed businessman, she supported her family by making exquisite ambrotypes aimed at capturing people’s likenesses so they might ‘live on’ after death. She was also one of the first women to produce stereoscopic views recording ‘progress’ in the region, and the first woman in the USA, to publish an essay on the making of landscape photographs. Her own landscape views took the form of stereoscopes for the tourist market that was springing up in California’s Silver Lake region and they featured many of the famous locations to which Kit Carson had given his name when in the 1830s he and his men had crossed the mountains and entered the valley of California attacking the Indians as they came. The chapter emphasises Withington’s dedication to her craft but it also argues that by producing images of the iconic scenery associated with Carson she was implicitly condoning the violence towards Native Americans that made possible the colonial settlement of California.