Rocky Mountains in the Distance

On November 15, 1806, Zebulon Pike, crossing the plains of what is now Colorado, saw a mountain on the horizon that looked, he wrote, "like a small blue cloud." That is how the Rockies arrive for anyone coming from the east: first as weather, then as a wall.

Later that month Pike tried for the summit, found the snow "middle deep," and turned back, writing that no human being could have climbed it. In July 1820 Edwin James, the botanist on Stephen Long's expedition, reached the top. The peak took Pike's name anyway.

Painters followed the explorers. Albert Bierstadt went west with Frederick Lander's survey party in 1859, and in 1863 he finished The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, a canvas ten feet wide. It sold in 1865 for $25,000, the most anyone had paid for an American painting up to then.

This picture is in the same grand, golden key. Snow-streaked peaks climb on the left and again far off at the center, where the light is strongest. A river winds out of the haze through a valley of dark pines. A log cabin sits at the edge of the trees in the left corner, and on the right a man stands with his horse on the slope, small enough to show the size of everything else.