This expedition was a great opportunity. On his return from the West to New Bedford with his magnificent representations of the American West, he became the city’s most prominent artist. Bierstadt brought the West alive to people all over the world. All along the way in the Landler expedition, Bierstadt sketched Indians, pioneers and the majestic mountains.

They crossed Nebraska and journeyed into western Wyoming. Bierstadt and Lander separated, and he stayed in the Wind River Mountains for three weeks to paint. Bierstadt’s first Rocky Mountain exhibition took place in March, 1860 and immediately established his reputation as a great landscape painter. His paintings were enormous, vivid, and they romantically portrayed the West in a mystically delirious way that simply enraptured people of the day. They offered a glimpse of total serenity in a time of total confusion and pain.

The 1859 expedition led by Lander was a surveying and an Indian peacekeeping mission (the expedition included four wagons full of gifts worth 5,000 dollars for Shoshone tribesmen whose trade would be disrupted by the new route), and it was also invested broadly in the arts. Lander rebuilt and improved sections of the road in 1859, and a California correspondent called the Lander Trail the “model emigrant route of America.” 13,000 emigrants reportedly crossed the Lander Road in its first season. Lander was later an esteemed war hero and also a writer and poet.

Artist Emanuel Leutze, 1816-1868, also went on the expedition. A German-born Philadelphian also trained in Düsseldorf, he helped with the artists’ preparations. Leutze, most famous for his painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, and Bierstadt were already acquainted. A photographer was also hired by Bierstadt as well as Artist Seth Frost and Henry Hitchings, skilled in lithography and watercolor. Hitchings, Bierstadt and Frost ironically all later died within the same year as one another.

For Americans who had never seen the American West, Bierstadt’s paintings were awesome. Some of his canvases were so large and detailed that viewers stood a distance from the painting and used opera glasses to focus on small sections. By bringing attention to the grandeur of the West, Bierstadt even influenced the establishment of California’s Yosemite National Park as a way to protect such national treasures. His paintings were an enormous success and sold for unparalleled prices.

Bierstadt planned to travel west again immediately, but the beginning of the Civil War delayed his next trip until 1863 and by then he also had to obtain permission to accompany an army unit because of the danger of Indian attacks. He couldn’t find an accommodating army unit, however, so in May of 1863, he and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, writer and art critic at the New York Evening Post, set out for California from St. Joseph, Missouri, from there to hopefully proceed to Canada. Bierstadt and Ludlow thought they could mutually benefit and promote each other by their respective skills. Ludlow is best-known for his autobiographical book The Hasheesh Eater, 1857, in which he explores altered states of consciousness. Ludlow’s descriptions of their trip were of great interest back in the East. He describes a scene they witnessed in Nebraska:

“A very picturesque party of Germans going to Oregon... they had a large herd of cattle and fifty wagons, mostly drawn by oxen, though some of the more prosperous “outfits” were attached to horses or mules. The people themselves represented the better class of Prussian or North German peasantry. A number of strapping teamsters,in gay costumes, appeared like Westphalians. Some of them wore canary shirts and blue pantaloons; with these were intermingled blouses of claret, rich warm brown, and the most vivid red. All the women and children had some positive color about them, if it only amounted to a knot of ribbons, or the glimpse of a petticoat. I never saw so many bright and comely faces.... The whole picture of the train was such a delight in form, color, and spirit that I could have lingered near it all the way to Kearney.”

Bierstadt was very successful for the next decade, and he made two additional western journeys, first in 1863. Meanwhile, by late in 1864, Ludlow’s marriage had fallen apart apparently from mutual infidelity and Ludlow’s struggles with opium addiction. He and his wife Rosalie obtained a divorce in May of 1866 and she ended up marrying Beirstadt a few months later. The next trip for Bierstadt was from 1871 to 1873. In this latter trip, Bierstadt traveled north and south from San Francisco and opened an art studio in San Francisco.

There he met the noted photographer Edward Muybridge. Together, Muybridge photographed and Bierstadt sketched the native American culture they encountered. The Indians they met gathered in small, self-contained political units which would later be referred to as “tribelets” by anthropologists. Soon, in 1869, the trans-continental railroad was completed, and made the emigrant wagon and other aspects of the great, mysterious West a part of history.

From the start, Bierstadt was very successful financially. After Colonel Lander died in the Civil War, Bierstadt named one of his famous paintings “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak.” The painting sold for $25,000 in 1865, a very hefty sum then. Later, it is said he bought it back and gave it to his brother. Bierstadt was well received both at home and abroad, where he maintained various studios.

For the next decade his spectacular pictures of Western scenery, with the fantastic play of light and color, continued to enthrall people. He built a magnificent mansion overlooking the Hudson river and named it Malkasten. He and his wife toured Europe, mingled with the elite and even met with Queen Victoria. His wife Rosalie needed to live in a warm climate for health reasons and stayed in Nassau, where her husband also began to paint the tropics. Bierstadt was well respected and especially generous with various charities. By 1880, his reputation in the art world substantially declined as the novelty of the Western theme of his paintings waned. Malkasten burned down in 1882 and his wife died in 1893. Bierstadt, the son of a Solingen barrel maker, died rich and suddenly in 1902.

There was H.B. Möllhausen, who not only wrote over 45 extensive personal narratives describing his exploring trips in the West, he made many sketches. Some of his novels were in multiple volumes.

He tackled Indians, the plains, Utah, Mormons, gold, California, the Santa Fe Trail, the Civil War, the South, and the Great Lakes. He was sometimes called “the German (James F.) Cooper.” Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, Frederick Wislizenus, Rudolph Kurz, Friederich Gerstäcker, Julius Fröbel, Friedrich Strubberg, Capitain B. Schmölder and George Engelmann were others who contributed to the early exploration, natural history and literature of the USA.

Arthur Schott was a German-born scientist, artist and musician who was appointed as a “special scientific collector,” to gather botanical, geological, and zoological data and make notes and drawings of the land of the remote Southeastern regions and its flora and fauna. His images Indian tribes, including Seminole, Lipan Apache, Yumas, and Kiowa, were valuable contributions.

Friedrich Richard Petri, 1824-1857, was a painter from Dresden who spent 11 years at the Academy of Fine Arts where he met artist Hermann Lungkwitz. Petri and Lungkwitz immigrated with their families to the hill country of Texas in 1851. His Indian work documents the native people precisely, with no stereotypical “savages.” His paintings contribute pictorial evidence of the overall friendly relationship between most German settlers and Indians. Petri accidentally drowned in 1857. Lungwitz became a well-known landscape painter.

Franz Hölzlhuber, 1826-1898, was a curious Austrian who visited the U.S. from 1856 to 1860, sketching his observations as he travelled. He spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, the Mississippi River Valley and Canada. After his return home to Austria, he used his sketches for larger drawings. He supposedly introduced America to the joys of the Linzertorte after he lost his luggage during one point in his journey and had to temporarily work as a baker. After he returned to Vienna, he headed the Austrian railway’s museum and library.

Johann Georg Kohl, 1808-1878, was commissioned by congress to duplicate his drawings for a catalog of early American maps in 1856. Between 1855 and 1857, he completed a landmark study of the history of the North American coastline, showing hydrographic and orthographic descriptions, route charts and accounts of expeditions and maps. Kohl’s drawings were the most comprehensive collection of cartographic reproductions in America at that time.

The Bavarian emigrant Christian Barthelmess, 1854-1906, photographed the life of the Cheyenne Indians around 1880.