Carleton Watkins The Living Present
indigenous peoples. The Spaniards brought African slaves who fathered children with the Native Americans and Spaniards resulting in mixtures of race and dialect unlike anything seen in New York State of their times. Marriage as a union between one man and one woman "'til death do us part" was not required of the indigenous and mixed-race inhabitants, nor were there proscriptions against same-sex alliances until later in the nineteenth century. There is no specific documentation of men consorting with men, but the social barriers to such activity that existed back home were totally absent.
Panama during the Gold Rush was an anything goes culture driven by the daily satisfaction of the primal needs. One reason why the written record is silent is the possibility that the Otsego County boys could not write home about their most memorable isthmian experiences because their family and friends would not have understood or approved. Even actions by the leadership were doubted. In addition to Collis Huntington's honesty being questioned by a commission of the U. S. government as a result of his actions in Panama, we find that Jessie Benton Frémont was also the subject of gossip: "Her behavior was commented upon unfavorably by a British army captain who repeated gossip that her behavior was not admirable," wrote Jessie's biographer.[21]
In the writing of history it is accepted that later events inform on earlier ones[22] and such is the case with the life of Carleton Watkins. The prime clue to where nineteen-year-old Carleton spent more than a year after leaving Panama City in mid-May, 1949, can be found in a later event--something he told his first biographer, Charles Turrill, in a series of interviews that took place in San Francisco, California, around 1900.[23] When Turrill asked Carleton how and where he learned photography he was told it was from ". . .R. H. Vance, who had a gallery in San José."[24] Turrill inferred that it was the city of "San José" in California where the alliance with Vance took place. However, it has been established that Vance never lived in San José, California, nor did he ever operate a photography studio there.[25] One of the most interesting questions in the entire history of photography is, Where could Carleton Watkins have learned the art of photography as an apprentice to Robert H. Vance if it was not in San José, California?
[21] Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography, New York, Franklin Watt, 1987, pp. 193-4.
[22] Paul A. Roth, "The Pasts," History and Theory, 51 (October 2012), p. 313
[23] Charles B. Turrill, "An Early California Photographer: C. E. Watkins," News Notes of California Libraries 13(no. 1), pp. 29-37, which constitutes an edited summary of the interviews.
[24] Turrill, p. 30.
[25] Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographers of the American West, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press and the Amon Carter Museu, 1983, p. 6, note 11.