YOLONDA YOUNGS ON GRAND CANYON POSTCARDS Postcards are a popular yet often overlooked source of visual information about historical landscapes in national parks. They are more than a readily available and inexpensive way to keep in touch with family and loved ones at home; post- cards are also a powerful and persuasive medium for disseminating visual information about nature and culture. 1 Before they reach the mailbox or souve- nir stand, postcards undergo a complex creation process. Postcard production and manufacturing alters the visual information included in these images and ultimately shapes how and what places are represented in each scene. The four postcards analyzed in this essay are not innocent documents or perfect facsimiles of the environment they depicted; instead they are altered representations of nature and culture at the Grand Canyon. Examined chrono- logically according to the years they were produced, the postcards tell a story about the evolution of the Grand Canyon’s cultural landscape from a frontier outpost in 1905 to a recognized tourist destination in 1938. Additionally, these postcards are a popular medium through which artists and manufac- turers, either intentionally or unconsciously, represented changing ideas about nature in the United States. Through the use of color, framing, and subject selection, postcard manufacturers created a selective view of nature at the Grand Canyon, one centered on the south rim and its development of tourist services. This essay explores postcard representations of one of the most popular tourist sites at the Grand Canyon. It is based, in part, on a larger content analysis of thousands of postcards, photographs, and other historic images of the Grand Canyon found in popular media sources. 2 The four postcards selected for this essay reveal aspects of the canyon’s evolving cultural land- scape and shifting meanings of culture and nature at the Grand Canyon. The subject of each postcard is limited to one location, the El Tovar Hotel. Like Katsushika Hokusai’s meditation of Mount Fuji in Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji, this essay offers images of the same subject viewed from different angles. In each, the El Tovar Hotel is a constant but the ideas and implications behind the scenes change. These images promoted certain aspects of nature at the canyon and shaped visitor’s perceptions of the environmental canyon. 3 These postcards depict two phases in the evolution of the canyon’s cultural landscape from a frontier outpost to an established tourist destination. Yolonda Youngs, “On Grand Canyon Postcards,” Environmental History 16 (January 2011): 138–147. doi:10.1093/envhis/emr028 © 2011 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com by guest on May 17, 2011 envhis.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from