The American Silverscape: Art, Extraction, and Sovereignty (1848–1893)

Abstract

Silver has long operated as the aesthetic medium of empire within the Americas, mediating geographical, economic, and political discourses of territory and extraction. This study reconsiders the fraught tension between the performance of US Empire and the realities of extraction in the late nineteenth century through close examination of silver objects that gesture toward emerging mining landscapes within the Intermountain West. Following the Mexican Cession of 1848, the industry of mining became both a symbol of past empire and national futurity, materializing in the fabrication and distribution of silver artworks—e.g. sculptures, medals, dining services, and jewelry—that were part of an emerging theater of extraction-based nationalism. Lacking any material indicator of its previous life as ore, these amalgamated objects were often displayed in elite spaces far from the mines that supplied the material. Financial panics and the rise of the mining industry strained structures of political and social power, drawing attention to mines, finished silver objects, the imperceptive production chains that link them. Rooted in this specific historical context, I develop the framework of the silverscape to reveal silver’s ecologies and center histories of environment, Indigenous sovereignty, and mobility within extractive sites often overlooked in the field of art history. This framework is historically specific to the nineteenth-century Intermountain West where silver politics were explicitly territorial.

This dissertation is structured temporally around the entire arc of extraction, intentionally revealing connections between territorial disputes and mining mediated by art objects. Chapter One introduces the geological, historical, and political stakes of silver in the nineteenth-century United States by examining displays of silver sculpture in the Mines and Mining Building at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Chapter Two examines the designs and materiality of the Lincoln Indian Peace Medal (minted in 1863) through treaties for mineral rights that the US government pursued with the Confederate Ute bands of western Colorado. While the design of these medals was informed by assimilationist policies of the period, I also explore how the reflective qualities of these medals illuminate sustained paths of diplomacy in the face of extraction. Chapter Three considers the Mackay silver dining service (1876–1878) and the theme of foodways not through the space of the Gilded Age dining room but rather through its origins within the Comstock Lode, anchoring the material history of the service within the homelands of the Washoe and Northern Paiute peoples. Chapter Four analyzes the of Diné silversmith Béésh-łigaii il’ini Alt’so’sigi (Slender Maker of Silver) during the rise of coin-based silver jewelry fabricated on the Navajo Reservation in the late nineteenth century. Early Diné jewelry articulated broader narratives of mobility to help Diné leaders resist reservation controls and illegal prospecting in the 1890s. “The American Silverscape” aims to recognize how silver’s formal and material qualities operated as a multi-vocal interface between concepts of nationalism, the local realities of extractive industry, and a struggle for sovereignty in this period.