Six Square Feet of Canvas

Six square feet. Hold on to that number, because it's smaller than a card table, and it's all the man asked for. Spring of eighteen seventy one. Thomas Moran is a Philadelphia artist, and a magazine needs pictures for a story about this Yellowstone country. So he draws them, on wood, for the engravers, out of other men's words. He has never laid eyes on the place. That summer Ferdinand Hayden's government survey is headed for the real thing, and Moran wants in. He has no business going. What he has is a friend at Jay Cooke and Company, the bankers selling the Northern Pacific Railroad. The office manager writes Hayden a letter. Mister Moran will pay his own way, it says. He'll be almost no trouble at all. And it would be a great accommodation to the bank and the road. All he needs is the cavalry's protection and, the letter says, six square feet in some tent to sleep in. So that's how he got here. A favor to a railroad, under another man's canvas. And then he stood at the rim of that canyon you just left, and it beat him. The account of the trip has him crying out, with a kind of regretful enthusiasm, that those colors were beyond the reach of human art. A man who has drawn the place from hearsay finally sees it, and that's what comes out of his mouth. He went home early, and he did what a stubborn man does when he's been told something can't be done, even if he's the one who told him. He took on a canvas seven feet by twelve. He wrote Hayden that he was casting all his claims to being an artist into this one picture of the Great Canyon, and that he was willing to abide by the judgment on it. Everything he was, on one piece of cloth. You'll hear it said that painting made the park. It didn't. His watercolors went around Congress with Jackson's photographs, and that counted for something. But the big oil wasn't finished when the Yellowstone Act was signed, on the first of March, eighteen seventy two. He wasn't saving anything. He was only trying to get it right. Congress paid ten thousand dollars for the painting, and it made him one of the leading landscape painters in the country. It hung in the Capitol. General Sherman saw it there, and he'd seen the canyon, and his whole review ran like this. The painting by Moran in the Capitol is good, but painting and words are unequal to the subject. Other folks chided the man for laying on the color too thick. He'd told the truth about this country, and they took it for a stretcher. You met another fellow like that at the start of this road. Years on, in the nineteen fifties, when the park built the new village at Canyon, the people out here wanted that painting. They figured it belonged by the canyon. The real one was hanging in a conference room at the Interior Department in Washington. They couldn't get it. They settled for a copy. He came out here asking for six square feet of canvas to sleep under. Back East his canyon hung bone dry on a wall, and the real one is out here in the rain.