After witnessing the “intolerable” “negro legislature” of the Reconstruction era, which his services as a chemist for the Confederate Government during the Civil War were ineffective in preventing, Joseph LeConte was relieved to accept a position as a professor of geology at the newly-founded University of California in 1868 (LeConte and Armes 1903, 238). In the fall of 1869 LeConte left his job at the University of South Carolina and journeyed to the burgeoning state of California. From 1869 until his death in 1901, Joseph LeConte taught at the University of California as a professor of geology, botany, and natural history. Not content with leading an urban life in Berkeley, LeConte made a name for himself in Yosemite as one of the first white men to explore the Yosemite Valley and the surrounding Sierra Nevada.
Recently, both historians and the Sierra Club itself, which LeConte helped found, have acknowledged LeConte’s scientific racism; the Sierra Club explained that LeConte “adopted and elaborated on theories of racial inferiority that he used to rationalize the disenfranchisement and segregation of African Americans” (Sierra Club Webpage undated; Stephens 1982; Warma 2018). LeConte’s opinion that African Americans were racially inferior to Anglo-Americans was undoubtedly shaped by his upbringing on his father’s plantation in Liberty County, Georgia, which relied on the compulsory labor of over 200 enslaved people. Upon his father’s death in 1844, LeConte was bequeathed “a portion of” this human property, which he retained until 1865 (LeConte 1892, 350).
However LeConte did not return to his father’s plantation in 1844, for he was studying medicine at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons when his father passed away. He graduated in 1845 but found that he did not enjoy being a medical practitioner (LeConte and Armes 1903, 126). In 1850 LeConte decided to leave his medical practice in Macon, Georgia behind and join his cousin who was traveling to Cambridge, Massachusetts to “become a pupil” of the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (LeConte and Armes 1903, 126). Thus, it was LeConte’s upbringing in the antebellum South, combined with his training in Northern educational institutions and his close work under the tutelage of the European scientist Louis Agassiz, that created LeConte’s now-acknowledged scientific racism.
At Harvard, Agassiz was a professor of both zoology and geology. His dual expertise in these two subjects reflects the moment in nineteenth-century science when zoology and geology, along with biology, natural history, and botany, were co-constitutional fields. For the burgeoning field of anthropology, to which Agassiz contributed, all of these subjects were deployed to help explain the origins and evolution of Man. This explains why, as I will reveal, Agassiz was just as comfortable using the shells of mollusks, the growth rates of coral reefs, and photographs of human beings to prove his theories of evolution and variation; for both Agassiz and LeConte, the lines between zoology, geology, and the science of Man (and much more) were blurred, and thus mollusks, coral reefs, and human beings could be compared and cross-referenced in order to arrive at a better understanding of the laws of nature (LeConte and Armes 1903, 130; Wallis 1995, 45).
The rapport between these varied fields is often neglected in the historiography, leading to gaps in our understanding of the origins and proliferation of racial science. Thus, this article argues that we need to more fully examine the various arenas which nineteenth-century actors pulled from to make sense of their racial theories, so that we can better understand how a place like Yosemite, a rich laboratory of geologic science, could become racialized and how racial science could acquire legitimacy. In the late eighteenth century geology had led natural scientists to re-consider the history of the planet itself, challenging Biblical interpretations of human origins and ensnaring both living and dead humans into the study of “the laws of nature,” a term that would later be used to help explain evolution but also the supposed limitations of non-white peoples (Chakrabarty 2020).
As historians have shown, the emerging field of geology was often used by anthropologists and ethnologists to paint certain races as vestiges of the past, akin to fossils of long-dead species and destined to the same fate of extinction (Chakrabarty 2020; Stocking, Jr. 1991; Qureshi 2011). Adding on to that understanding, I argue that LeConte’s and Agassiz’s shared “method of comparison” between specimens—and thus between fields—and their understanding of the natural world as interrelated and interdisciplinary explains how LeConte was able to interpret the sheer glacial cliff sides of Yosemite as evidence of his racialized theory of evolution (LeConte and Armes 1903, 148).
Agassiz was a vocal proponent of the polygenist theory of evolution. This theory posited that the various human “races” on earth arose from different and entirely unrelated ancestors (Wallis 1995, 42). LeConte would break from Agassiz’s theory of polygenism in the late 1860s and begin to agree with the monogenist view that humans shared a common origin (Stephens 1982, 149). However, George W. Stocking, Jr. argues that for nineteenth-century scientists like LeConte, adopting a Darwinian theory of evolution did not necessarily require a full rejection of theories about racial evolution inspired by polygenists. He writes that, when considering “antipodal man,” one could regard differences in appearance “…as products of changing environment or immutable heredity, as dynamic or static, as relative or absolute, as inconsequential or hierarchical” (Stocking, Jr. 1968, 45). LeConte chose hierarchical. Throughout his career he retained his belief that races existed in varying grades of “race evolution,” with the “higher” races existing on a higher “intellectual and moral elevation” than the “lower” races (LeConte 1892, 359). He believed that both higher and lower races would continue to follow their own individual evolutionary paths; the higher towards ascension and the lower towards extinction. In Yosemite, I argue, LeConte turned the land into a site of and an argument for the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and its continued ability to evolve—something the “lower” races were unable to accomplish. This argument then acts as a call to action: historians must re-examine the visual material produced and consumed by LeConte and his contemporaries within the context of the era’s scientific racism.
Photographs were central to the federal government’s decision to preserve Yosemite Valley, for they revealed the awe-inspiring magnitude of the place and enabled white Americans across the nation to visualize the land as part of their Manifest Destiny (Sailor 2014; Sandweiss 2000). Historians such as Weston Naef have argued that photographs of Yosemite taken by the landscape photographer Carleton Watkins in 1861 played a significant role in prompting Abraham Lincoln to make Yosemite a protected space (Naef 2008, 5). Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864, making Yosemite, and the nearby Mariposa Grove, the first federally-protected piece of land in the nation. This act would intensify the already-violent removal and dispossession of Indigenous Californians in Yosemite. Thus photographs of Yosemite were tools in settler colonialism, but here I hope to reveal that they were also tools of settler science.
The same understanding of photographs as objects of evidential authority that helped convince Lincoln to preserve Yosemite Valley influenced Louis Agassiz’s commission of fifteen daguerreotypes of enslaved people in June of 1850 (Rogers 2010; Wallis 1995, 40). Agassiz hoped that the photographs of seven enslaved persons—Alfred, Delia, Drana, George Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—who lived and labored on a South Carolina plantation would serve as the evidentiary basis for his theory of polygenism. He believed that these photographs would prove the distinct racial origins of the photographic subjects by revealing their differences in appearance from European-Americans. Art historian Brian Wallis argues that Agassiz’s motivation for commissioning his daguerreotypes was to fulfill “calls in contemporary European scientific journals for the creation of a photographic archive of human specimens, or types” (Wallis 1995, 45). If photographs could be used in this way, as scientific evidence in their own right, we must consider landscape photographs of Yosemite Valley as more than persuasive devices. Often capturing geologic formations, these photographs must be understood as part of the interdisciplinary science of a racialized evolutionary geology. Not only, then, were landscape photographs of California’s “natural” spaces ideological tools for the state’s ongoing process of settler colonization, they also served as a repository of visual evidence for the science of white supremacy. By considering photographs of Yosemite through the episteme in which LeConte lived and looked, we will expand both our archive and our understanding of nineteenth century racial and racialized science.
Scholars Brian Wallis and Molly Rogers both explained how and why Louis Agassiz believed that taking photographs of the descendants of various African tribes would prove that they stemmed from a unique racial “type,” separate from and less evolved than people of European origin (Rogers 2010, Wallis 1995). Aligning with Daston and Galison’s argument that the epistemic virtue of “mechanical objectivity” achieved through still photography arose in the mid-nineteenth century, Rogers writes that photographic images were revered as “objects capable of conveying truth and reality” (Daston and Galison 2007; Rogers 2010, 33). In “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” Wallis similarly writes that Agassiz’s daguerreotypes aligned with the mid-nineteenth century’s investment in measurement, sorting, identification, and depersonalization, all of which spurred new attempts at racial classification. Like his scientific peers of the time, Agassiz understood photography as a tool with which to objectively capture the classifications and details of the natural world (Wallis 1995, 44).
For Agassiz, the daguerreotypes he commissioned from studio photographer Joseph T. Zealy in Columbia, South Carolina, were a step in the direction of proving that each racial type must have had separate origins, given their distinct visual markers of difference. Agassiz felt that he had “found enough to satisfy him that they have differences from the other races” after seeing the photographs (Wallis 1995, 45). Though these images were seen as objects that could prove that there were different types of humans, they were just one form of evidence used to prove polygenist evolution.
They would have been considered alongside, and in relation to, evidence from the many other subjects that informed theories of polygenesis. The daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, George Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty were taken in June of 1850 (Wallis 1995, 45). Just two months later, in August, Agassiz returned to Cambridge, where he welcomed his new pupil: Joseph LeConte. LeConte entered under Agassiz’s direct supervision and was joined by one other student, his cousin Lewis Jones. In his autobiography, LeConte recalls the first assignment Agassiz gave them both: he “pulled out a drawer containing from five hundred to a thousand separated valves of Unios [mussels], of from fifty to a hundred different species, all mixed together, and said, ‘Pair these valves and classify into species; names no matter; separate the species’” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 128). Agassiz, having just returned from his trip to South Carolina, was clearly still dedicated to sorting and classifying the natural world in the same way he had attempted to do in Zealy’s photography studio. He considered the human beings he photographed as scientific specimens to be sorted and classified, and, like the mollusk shells he gave to LeConte, Agassiz hoped to “separate the species” of human beings through the visual medium of photography. The mollusk shells and the enslaved subjects of his photographs would have been read together, for Agassiz tried throughout his career to unite different sub-disciplines into an argument for polygenesis.
Joseph LeConte studied directly under Agassiz for fifteen months; this study included an expedition with the United States Coast Survey to Key West, Florida, where LeConte, Jones, and Agassiz studied the structure of islands, collected zoological specimens, and observed the growth rates of the Floridian coral reefs. LeConte recalled that, “…for fifteen months I was associated with [Agassiz] in the most intimate personal way, from eight to ten hours a day, and every day, usually including Sundays. I was his companion in all of his excursions; geological, with Hall in the fossiliferous fields of New York, and zoological along the shores of Massachusetts and on the reefs of Florida” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 130). The way LeConte recalls his experience with Agassiz, as they followed multiple lines of study, is indicative of his general approach to scientific knowledge making. LeConte lamented later in his autobiography, “One of the great evils of modern life and modern education is overspecialization, and consequently the loss of sympathy between men of different pursuits. Society is thus broken up into intellectual cliques, and is in danger of falling apart for want of cohesive sympathy between its constituent parts” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 262). Here, LeConte followed in his mentor’s footsteps by criticizing the siloing of knowledge domains into disparate scientific disciplines.
Speaking in San Francisco at a memorial held one week after Agassiz’s death in 1873, LeConte described Agassiz’s innovations in geology, first mentioning his theories of glaciers and then transitioning smoothly to his theories of evolution. Agassiz, LeConte told the crowd, did not simply jump seamlessly from discipline to discipline; he proposed a novel comparative, interdisciplinary method for understanding life itself. In his memorial speech, and in publications, LeConte celebrated the “great method of organic science” that Agassiz founded for studying life through multiple disciplines (LeConte and Armes 1903, 148). Agassiz’s “method of organic science” involved observing the three phenomena that explain the conditions of life in their simplest form, resulting in three series: the “natural history series,” the “embryonic series” and the “geological or paleontological, or evolution series” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 148). LeConte explained, “Now it has been by extensive comparison in each of these series up and down, and by extensive comparison of the three series with each other, that our knowledge of organisms has gradually become scientific…This is what is called the method of comparison—the great method used in the science of life” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 148). Agassiz’s perfection of the method of comparison, LeConte continued,
“prepared the whole ground and laid the whole foundation for the modern doctrine of evolution. The idea of the similarity of the three series mentioned above—the natural history, the embryonic, and the paleontological—and therefore the light which each sheds on the others…forms the whole scientific basis, and comparison in these three series, the whole scientific method, of the theory of evolution.” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 150, italics in original)
LeConte then concluded, “Evolution is development. Evolution of the organic kingdom is development of the organic kingdom through geologic times. No one insisted so long and so strongly on development of the organic kingdom through geologic times as did Agassiz” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 150). LeConte experienced Agassiz’s comparative method firsthand as his pupil, and would continue to praise it into the 1890s, just as he would continue to teach his own students the principles of natural history, geology, and evolution (LeConte 1891, 32). For nineteenth-century scientists such as LeConte, geology was inextricable from evolution, which was inextricable from race. LeConte therefore must have thought about race when he encountered the glacially-carved granite that framed Yosemite Valley.
LeConte did not wait long after arriving in Berkeley, in 1869, to venture into Yosemite. He embarked on his first trip in the summer of 1870, when he was invited by eight students and one professor from the University of California on a five-week camping trip. While on his trip LeConte kept a detailed diary, which was published locally in 1875 under the title A Journal of Ramblings Through the High Sierras of California by the “University Excursion Party.” In the preface, LeConte explains that he agreed to join the students because he “longed to enjoy the glories of Yosemite and the beauties of the Sierra, and, more than all, to study mountain structure and mountain sculpture, as exhibited there on a magnificent scale” (LeConte 1875, i). Yosemite’s mountain structure and sculpture, he imagined, would inform and affirm his studies in geology.
Yosemite’s most well known advocate, John Muir, had suggested in the 1860s that Yosemite Valley had been created by glaciers in the age when California had been covered in ice. LeConte was an early supporter of Muir’s glaciation theory, which drew from the Ice Age theory that Agassiz had touted since the 1840s (Sheats 1985). In fact, it was on LeConte’s 1870 trip through Yosemite that he and Muir first met and discussed Muir’s theory of glaciation, as LeConte examined the geologic evidence for himself. LeConte, observing the meadows, waterfalls, and lakes of Yosemite Valley, decided then and there that Muir was right: “a glacier once filled Yosemite” (LeConte 1875, 70).
Perhaps because earlier race scientists, including Agassiz, had already laid the groundwork of classifying races, LeConte took very little interest in studying the Indigenous Californians—most likely Ahwahneechee people—he encountered in Yosemite. When he does describe them, he does so narratively rather than scientifically, such as when he writes, “Several Indians visited us while at dinner. This is a favorite time for such visits. They know they will get something to eat. Two younger Indians were full of life and good-nature, but one old wrinkled fellow was very reticent, and stood much upon his dignity” (LeConte 1875, 82). Judging from the way the Indigenous Californians in Yosemite are mentioned anecdotally (and in line with contemporary stereotypes of “the noble savage”), and despite his proclivity for noting the race of each person he encountered on his “ramblings,” LeConte did not find much scientific value in the actual people he encountered in Yosemite Valley. Yet, throughout his career, LeConte did theorize about Indigenous Americans, specifically in regard to their place on the evolutionary ladder and their racial fate. Ten years after his first trip to Yosemite, LeConte published “The Effect of Mixture of Races on Human Progress,” in which he wrote,
“…with the advance of commerce, contact with other primary races must continue and increase. For the lower race there are but two alternative results of such contact, viz., extermination or absorption by mixing. But if mixing is disastrous; if such mixed races are feeble and tend to die out, then extermination in some form seems inevitable—then are the lower races already doomed by the laws of nature.” (LeConte 1880, 101)
The following year, in his 1881 publication “The Race Problem in the South,” LeConte specifies that it is Indigenous Americans specifically who are “doomed by the laws of nature,” and contributes to the scientific legitimization of the trope of the “vanishing Indian” by writing:
“We have said above that the inevitable result of such contact is either subordination of some kind or degree, or else extermination. Which it will be, depends on the character of the two races, especially the lower. If it be in the early stages of race-evolution, and therefore plastic, docile, imitative, some form of subordination will be the result; if, on the other hand, it be highly specialized and rigid, extermination is unavoidable. The Negro is probably the best type of the former and the American Indian of the latter.” (LeConte 1892, 360-361)
How did LeConte come to these conclusions, if not by studying the Indigenous Californians he encountered in Yosemite Valley? I argue that LeConte extrapolated his pre-existing racial prejudices with his understanding of geology, combined with the influence of Agassiz’s own geologic theories, in order to come to this understanding of racially-stratified rates of evolution. If Yosemite Valley was the work of glaciers rather than the work of God, it held true that men were the result of millions of years of environmental, evolutionary shaping. The groundwork laid by Agassiz, who classified each race into unique types, allowed LeConte to theorize that these types, though evolved from the same origin, had evolved differently, the results of which were observable and continuing in his own time. Within this framework, old racial stereotypes allied with modern race science to form the hypothesis that Black Americans were plastic while Indigenous Americans were rigid. Although LeConte wrote and theorized about race, he did not venture into the fields of ethnology or anthropology. His scientific views on race were, instead, a combination of his knowledge of and professorships in botany, geology, and natural science. He drew from these subjects to support his theories of a slow but fixed process of racial evolution. Therefore, on his first visit to Yosemite in 1870, his view of Indigenous Americans was reinforced through geology, legitimized by the glacial evidence left behind in Yosemite Valley, rather than through ethnology or anthropology.
But what of photography? LeConte’s party did not bring a camera with them on their first trip in 1870—cameras at the time would have been too difficult to carry on a trip in which the party did not even bring tents. However, they did have their photograph taken by John James Reilly, a Scottish-born stereograph photographer who they met in Yosemite Valley (Hickman 1987; LeConte 1875, 33). The photograph of LeConte and his camping party was seemingly an important part of his trip, as LeConte takes care to describe the circumstances and arrangement of the photograph, detailing the decision to have their photograph taken and describing each man’s position and pose. It was included as the frontispiece of the 1875 publication of the Journal of Ramblings, therefore representing the trip itself. This photograph would have been understood as a “social document”—a way to prove, to themselves and to readers, that LeConte and his party had indeed stood in the grand Valley (Hickman 1987, 71). Given LeConte’s views that “lower” races would be “exterminated,” this image could have also been read as evidence of the evolutionary timeline that LeConte believed in, one where Anglo-Americans were destined to inherit the earth; in this photograph, they appear as though they already have.
Jarrod Hore argues in Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism, “Nature, for settler photographers and their audiences was not only beautiful, ancient, and empty, but an object that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance” (Hore 2022, 6). Popular landscape photographs of Yosemite in the mid-nineteenth century virtually never included Indigenous Americans. This certainly was a colonial perspective, but was it also a scientific one? In the photograph, LeConte and his students stand alone, in front of the very cliffs and waterfalls that LeConte drew upon to argue for the evolutionary superiority of his own race.
Proponents of evolution and racial science, such as Agassiz and LeConte, assumed that the extinction of the American Indian was inevitable, and likely would have read empty landscape photographs of Yosemite not just for evidence of geologic theories, but also as objects of future-casting, where this imminent extinction had already come to fruition. We know from LeConte’s numerous descriptions of Indigenous presence in Yosemite that this photograph, where no Indigenous Californians are pictured, betrayed a false reality. Just as the daguerreotypes of “Papa Renty” and his fellow enslaved people were produced “in service of a regime of violence,” this image is both an object and a representation of a violent racial science that legitimized the attempted physical and visual erasure of Ahwhaneechee people (Azoulay 2021).
One of landscape photographer Carlton Watkins’ more allusive photographs taken in Yosemite is of Agassiz Column, a small and straight rock column named after Louis Agassiz. In this celebration of a figure so important to the field of geology, not only is Yosemite cast into a “recognizable form” of whiteness, but, specifically, into a recognizable form of white science, a science that used geology to prove white supremacy. Looking over the same waterfall that LeConte and his party posed in front of, Agassiz Column looms over the Valley as if the scientist himself were observing the geological formations below him. In The Autobiography of Joseph LeConte, published two years after his death, the editor William D. Armes included a photograph taken in Yosemite Valley of a dome, now named “Mount Starr King.” In this photograph, however, the dome is labelled “LeConte Dome” (LeConte and Armes 1903, 267). It is unclear who took the picture, and it is likely that the name “LeConte Dome” was never official. Nevertheless, geologic features were quite commonly named after geologists, sometimes because they were the ones to “discover” them and sometimes because those who “discovered” them wanted to honor a prominent scientist, such as was the case with Agassiz Column.
The very act of re-naming rocks after white scientists, as scholars such as Kathryn Yusoff have pointed out, is an act of settler colonialism and settler science (Yusoff 2018). Photographing these rocks and captioning them with their Western names visually reiterates both. The photograph of the dome, a visual representation of the processes of glaciation and therefore evolution, literally imparts the scientific theories of LeConte onto the landscape of Yosemite Valley by virtue of its contents—visual evidence of glaciation—and its caption—a connotation with geologic science.
Photographs of Yosemite’s wide valleys and towering geologic structures such as the ones above were part of the same scientific episteme that inspired Louis Agassiz to commission fifteen photographs of enslaved human beings, and thus should be considered in our studies of nineteenth century racial science. Although LeConte himself was not a photographer, he was a student of Yosemite, and as a student he likely would have trusted in the educational powers of photography as most scientists of the time did. While LeConte was privileged enough to observe the mountains of Yosemite himself, other students used images of rocky landscapes, such as the “scientific views” taken by the US Geological Survey, to “view” geological formations for themselves (Smith 2013, 118). Agassiz’s “method of comparison,” so admired by LeConte, meant that landscape photographs, as representations of Agassiz’s “geological or paleontological series,” were meaningful when they stood alone, but even more meaningful when compared with images in the “natural history series” and the “embryonic series.” For students of racialized geology, these images, like Zealy’s photographs of Alfred, Delia, Drana, George Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty, served as part of the visual repertoire they could pull from to make sense of their racial theories. If these connections were not on the conscious minds of students, then, at the very least, photographs of Yosemite that featured its geologic structures were reminders of the sciences of geology and evolution, and thus the evolutionary destiny of the “lower races” that geologists such as LeConte preached.
In Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Martin Berger writes that, “in analyzing visual texts that contain no links to racial subjects (and often no sign of human beings)…whites used the logic of race as a powerful, comforting mold for casting both human products and the natural environment into recognizable forms” (Berger 2005, 7). Might whites, especially white scientists, have used the logic of race science to do the very same? If we are to understand the level of proliferation of racial science in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, spurred by scientists like Agassiz and LeConte, at institutions like Harvard and the University of California, we must expand our source base to be congruent with the sources that would have been relevant at the time. Since LeConte and Agassiz would have incorporated more than just humans in their search for evidence of their racial theories, historians of science and anthropology must look towards new subjects as well; for instance, the racialization of space and natural sites. The lack of specialization and the crossover between disciplines in the episteme during which Agassiz and LeConte worked meant that photographs, too, carried overlapping and interrelated messages. Moreover, it meant they were loaded with meaning and advanced a great deal of theoretical work. Beyond the value of mere metaphor, landscape photographs could serve as actual scientific proof that evolution could and did happen, and, consequently, that the mortal destiny of each race was written in stone.
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This piece was edited by Patrícia Martins Marcos, Cameron Brinitzer, and Madalyn Grant.
