Carleton Watkins “Ho! For California!”
Scholars have long believed that Vance’s authorship of the Catalog of Daguerreotype Panoramic Views in California meant that he was the maker of the daguerreotypes referenced therein as well as being their cataloger.[22] However, there is no evidence that in 1850 Vance practiced any type of photography other than studio portraiture. This reality is one of several reasons to doubt the possibility that Vance was the maker of the daguerreotypes that he catalogued in 1850. This leads us to a “what if?” scenario.
What if the daguerreotypes were put for storage into a container, say, a slotted wooden box commonly used to house uncased daguerreotypes, roughly in the sequence as they were made. And what if the maker of the daguerreotypes was not the same person as the cataloger (who was Vance)? When it came time in mid-1851 for Vance to catalog the magnificent hoard of daguerreotypes for the New York exhibition, the work could have been done in New York where he had no point of reference to check the facts if the handwriting was hard to decipher. Vance’s process could have been to remove the items one-by-one from the container where they had been housed by their maker starting at the front where the most recent ones (those made in San Francisco in May-June, 1851) were found. The cataloging process would continue to the back of the box where the earlier ones were positioned (those made in Valparaíso in the first half of 1850 [R.V. nos. 131, 130, 109] and on the journey to California in the second half of 1850 [R.V. nos. 108, 105, 106, 107, 103, 104]).
Such a procedure would account for the sequence of Vance’s “catalog” being generally in reverse chronological order with the ones made on the journey to California assigned higher numbers than the ones made in San Francisco in May and June, 1851 (for example R.V. nos. 2, 8). These two views were created just prior to Vance’s departure for New York and have the lower numbers found at the top of the list.
The caption information could have been recorded by the maker of the daguerreotypes on slips of paper adhered to each plate such as that of Girault de Prangey and the slip of paper found with a half-plate study of Edward A. Flint with his horse [Fig. 6] made by Carleton in Copiapó, Chile, in 1852 (more on this in Chapter Twelve).[23] Sometimes the handwriting is illegible as in the Copiapó plate where the word “engineer” in the second line or “construction” on the bottom line could easily be misread. When transcribing handwritten labels written by someone else there were many