Carleton Watkins A Delicate Balance
River a few miles south of Marysville (R.V. 100). The photographer was on sufficiently personal terms with Sutter and his family that he had access to the interior of the Hock Farm residence to make a view “from the top of the house” (R.V. 99).
Locally, Sutter was so famous that personal references were required to secure an audience with him. Such an introduction would have been possible for Carleton through his Otsego County friend, Collis Huntington (see Chapter Three), who had established a general merchandise business in partnership with Daniel Hammond, at 34 K Street, Sacramento. Both Huntington and Hammond were rising members of the Sacramento business establishment.[17] However, the visual narrative, as it unfolds in the “Catalog” sequence, does not proceed from Sutter’s Fort to the gold fields, but rather continues to Sacramento, providing an overview of the area around J and K streets (R.V. 124-123) where the Huntington & Hammond business was located.
When the Vance descriptions are analyzed, many elements coincide with Carleton’s biography. For example, views made from hotels and scenes surrounding hotels were frequent subjects for the Vance daguerreotype project(R.V. 125, 123).[18] Carleton came from a hotel family; his father was a hotel manager and his mother’s family established the first hotel in his birthplace, Oneonta, New York (see Chapter Two). In the future, hotel keepers would turn out to be some of Carleton’s most reliable clients.
In the range of items between R.V. 129 and R.V. 94 we see that in comparison to Sacramento and environs, as many or more daguerreotype views were made in Marysville, a town forty miles north of Sacramento, and the immediately surrounding area. There is a possible reason for this spike since Carleton was listed as a Butte County taxpayer in the tax-year 1850-1851. According to Collis Huntington’s wife, Elizabeth, Carleton was a regular visitor to the Huntington Sacramento residence on his travels between Marysville and Sacramento.[19]
We must once again draw attention to the textual clues that Robert Vance was not present when these pictures he described were made. If he had spent any time in Sacramento, he would not have called “J” Street “Jay” street (R.V. 125, 123, 96), nor would he have left the identification of R.V. 119 blank; if he had made the daguerreotype he would know its subject. Moreover, we find the out-of-place location of six Latin American views in this sequence (R.V. 103-109) and the out-of-step position of R.V. 128 as