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This richly composed plate by Karl Bodmer offers a visual anthology of the strange and monumental landforms encountered along the upper Missouri River during the spring and summer of 1833. The aquatint draws from sketches Bodmer executed while traveling with Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied on the steamboat Yellowstone, heading northwest through present-day South Dakota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana.
The sheet assembles more than two dozen vignettes of eroded sandstone formations: castellated buttes, isolated pinnacles, steep bluffs, and bizarrely balanced “mushroom” rocks. Numbered sequentially and arranged in panels, the views chart a continuous unfolding of terrain as seen from the river, capturing the varied, almost architectural shapes sculpted by wind, frost, and flowing water. Bodmer’s original watercolor studies, made on site in 1833, were later refined in his studio in Koblenz, from which Louis Salathé prepared this etched version. The aquatint printing was executed in Paris by Bougeard.
Beyond its documentary value, the plate is among the earliest and most sensitive visual records of the region now known as the Missouri Breaks. Bodmer’s attention to stratification, coloration, and form reflects both a naturalist’s eye and a Romantic sensibility. The plate offered European readers not only a glimpse of the sublime and unfamiliar landscapes of the American interior but also an implicit invitation to view the West as a site of geological wonder and scientific curiosity, at a time when such imagery was reshaping the European imagination of the New World.
States
First state: Lacks a date inscription.
Second state: Date inscription, "November 1th [sic] 1839".
