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Oxbow
Oxbow
In early March, 1840, geologist Edward Hitchcock stood atop Mount Holyoke in western Massachusetts, overlooking the Connecticut River as the flood waters rose. In the preceding decades, the area had become a hotbed for landscape tourism, attracting the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson. Guidebooks gushed over the lush valley and fertile fields which surrounded the river—in particular, a notable U-shaped bend. It was known as “The Oxbow” for its resemblance to the curved wooden yokes saddled on the shoulders of oxen.- Though not uncommon in the geological vernacular of the time, the homogenization of the term “Oxbow” anchored to the same location. Four years earlier, painter Thomas Cole depicted a view into the valley in his now famous masterpiece, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow. Splitting the composition diagonally across the canvas, Cole juxtaposed the stormy, untamed wilderness of the early American landscape with a bright, calm pastoral settlement. At the lower center, barely visible, Cole peers back from his sketch directly at the viewer.
- Cole’s presentation reflected the political energies of the time, romancing beliefs of Manifest Destiny which necessitated the American settlers’ expansion into the west. Considered the first true expression of American imperialism, Cole’s work marked the genesis of an ideology which ordained settler Americans with the right to their newfound continent—and ultimately, beyond—pitting peoples against peoples, and civilization against the natural world.