[...]... contributed to one of the most significant enterprises undertaken by the United States in the nineteenth century: the conquering of the West It is the social context that best reveals the importance of the visual culture of death and memory in the second half of the nineteenth century In the early days of many Rocky Mountain towns, the local cemetery developed into one of the first symbols of culture in what... American culture in the “wild west. ” Yet unlike Mt Auburn and other exemplars of the eastern rural cemetery, Rocky Mountain xi cemeteries retained the character of their natural topography and an independent spirit made manifest in some distinctive iconography Pioneer Cemeteries: Sculpture Gardens of the Old West investigates cemeteries as centers of visual culture within this developing western landscape... documentary and physical evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion that the visual culture of western cemeteries contributed to the development of western societies in important ways If allowed to, it will reshape and refine our knowledge of the arts of the American West and the role of visual culture in the development of the western landscape See www.annettestott.com for the complete color illustrations xix... locally produced sculpture and sculpture imported into the region from other parts of North America and abroad The reader will not find a comprehensive survey of cemeteries or a catalogue of all the types x Preface of cemetery art Instead, representative examples illuminate the significance of the community cemetery and its monuments in the region In addition, the visual culture of mountain cemeteries contributed... how original the ideas or how significant its role in society, to date western sepulchral sculpture has found no place in the history of American art It has not been allowed to shape the study of western art or even of the broader category of visual culture in the West Bronze sculptures of cowboys and Indians by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell often xviii Preface stand for all western sculpture. .. Before the advent of art museums, public libraries, or civic sculpture, the western cemetery functioned as a repository of art and history It often began as an unkempt “boot hill,” reflecting the violent early days of mining camps and cattle towns, and quickly grew into a “fair mount,” the western version of a rural cemetery One of the earliest marks of the cemetery as a place of cultural refinement was the. .. few studies of public sculptures, especially twentieth-century pioneer monuments, have joined this canon I hope that the reader will join me in discovering how important sepulchral sculpture was in the formation and promotion of western towns and in the lives of westerners It was arguably more western than most of what is called western art, since it was often made, sold, and purchased by westerners... monument industry that was just then emerging As such, this study of regional cemeteries provides an entry point to the much broader scope of late nineteenth-century American rural cemetery monuments, the rise of a mass market for sepulchral sculpture, and the increased professionalization and commercialization of the monument-making business near the turn of the century The cemeteries under consideration... made the community’s foundations visible Symbolically, as the bodies of pioneers were planted in the earth and monuments rose over them in town cemeteries, the history of this expansionist enterprise was written in stone and metal sculpture Pioneers pointed to their sepulchral sculpture gardens as evidence of their success in replacing what they considered wild people (Indians, trappers, traders, itinerant... between the sculpture in its cemetery setting and figures in American paintings and exhibition sculpture of the time Ultimately, men and women contributed in different ways to the formulation of the cemetery as a feminine gendered space Chapter 4 places Rocky Mountain cemeteries in the context of a national industry that saw the Rockies as another market for the sale of monuments made elsewhere in the United . y0 w0 h1" alt="" Pioneer Cemeteries University of Nebraska Press Lincoln & London Pioneer Cemeteries Sculpture Gardens of the Old West annette stott ©. iconography. Pioneer Cemeteries: Sculpture Gardens of the Old West investigates cemeteries as cen- ters of visual culture within this developing western land- scape. Chapter