OUTDOOR SOUTHWEST - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

EDWARD M. KERN
The
KERN BROTHERS
and
THE IMAGE OF THE WEST
The Kerns were topographic artists with the Fremont Expeditions. They
sketched the West as they saw it, but in spite of their best efforts, the
image of the West was to remain a Romantic one almost into our own
day. It was a garden in its valleys, with gossamer clouds on its sharp
peaks. No desert existed which given water would not bloom; no
denuded hill which did not conceal some color and mystery.
1 ORTY-TWO ARTISTS applied for
the job; the wonder was there were not
more. John Charles Fremont by vividly
reporting his first two western expeditions
had kindled immense general excitement
about his third, and in 1845
the artists appeared particularly susceptible
to the call. From this horde of
eager artistic aspirants Fremont chose
a lanky Philadelphia art teacher, Edward
Meyer Kern, known as Ned. Kern
was a personable young man, full of
humor, loving a joke and a good bottle.
He idolized Fremont, and within him
flamed a passionate curiosity about the
American West, based, however, on a
20 / Desert Magazine / October, 1961
By ROBERT V. HINE
Assistant Professor of History, University of California at Riverside
(This article is reprinted through the courtesy of the Utah Historical Quarterly)
very hazy picture of what it was really
like.
For most men the land beyond the
Ohio and the Mississippi was pure fancy.
The unimaginative simply read Ohio
rivers or Mohawk Indians into the blank
spaces, but the imaginative had used
the prose of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon
Pike "to create a multiform and
fantastic West."
George Catlin and Charles Bodmer
helped to correct and sharpen the image
in the 1830s. Their drawings
proved that Mandans hardly looked like
Mohawks and that the landscapes along
the Missouri were as much like the
banks of the Ohio as chalk like cheese.
Following them in the 1840s the headstrong,
intense, soft-spoken lieutenant of
the Topographical Corps, John Fremont,
would four times ride west from the
Mississippi. On each trip he included
an artist to record the scene and to adorn
his reports. The controversies that later
swirled around Fremont—in the conquest
of California, in the campaign for
President, in the contretemps with Lincoln—obscured
the fact that his finest
contributions lay in further shaping the
early picture of the West.
In this work one of his chief aides
was to be Edward Kern, who, however,