Currier and Ives - American Homestead Autumn

Between the years 1834 -1907 the printmaking firm Currier and Ives mass produced thousands of prints of pictures such as the one above - American Homestead Autumn 1869 - which was part of the wildly popular American Homestead series. 

American Homestead Autumn depicts a family collecting that years harvest, with the baskets over running with fruit because the harvest was so bountiful, it paints a romantic vision of the West which was extremely popular in the East Coast. In fact you could argue that this print, distributed by Currier and Ives, is a form of propaganda, it was published a post-Homestead Act and post-Civil War era, in which one of the main focuses was the idea of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, that it was their God given right to rule from coast to coast, and they were trying to get people to travel West to fulfill this. The romanticised feel of images such as American Homestead Autumn - and the whole series which depicts the West as idealistic - can be seen as an attempt to try and encourage people in the East to travel West by suggesting that life will be happy and God will provide them with bountiful harvests, which was far from the reality of life on the Great Plains: pre-railroad era: and farming was much harsher than the pictures promised. 

However the romantic and idealistic feel of the print, and the whole series, (as well as their popularity) could be attested to the public trying to recover from the horrors that they had endured in the Civil War, and the damage it had done to the American Psyche - after all it had been split into 2 separate countries for 4 years - and the romanticism promised by believing in the myths and legends associated with the West provided such relief and comfort for the public - perhaps suggesting why the Western has such a long lasted legacy since the frontier was closed in 1890 but new Westerns are still being made in 2012 - Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained for example.

Also omitted from the picture, along with the true hardships of living out on a homestead in the middle of nowhere, are the Indians, which are omitted from all the American Homestead series, suggesting that the American's believed the idea of the West being virgin land totally untouched, and also suggesting perhaps that the public, since the prints were mass produced, didn't really like thinking about the Indians with it being the height of the Indian Wars and the atrocities that came with it and preferred to adopt this idea of the land being untouched as so to avoid accepting the genocide that was happening concurrently.