Gold Hill, Nevada, 1867

A timber trestle on braced wooden legs crosses the middle of the frame, above the roofs of Gold Hill, Nevada. The photograph is sepia-toned, taken from high on a hillside, looking down and across a narrow valley to bare hills and, beyond them, a line of distant mountain ridges under an empty pale sky. The town fills the valley floor and climbs the lower slopes: dozens of small wooden buildings, most of them single-storey, with gable roofs and board walls, packed close together and set at various angles rather than on a grid. Beneath the trestle, a mine dump of pale broken rock spills down the slope.

Left of centre, on a rise, stands a larger two-storey white-painted building with a pitched roof and many windows, beside a long dark shed with a flagpole. A bare road curves up the hillside toward it. On the right of the town, several tall chimneys or stacks rise from among the roofs, and a thin haze or smoke hangs there. The foreground at the lower right is a steep bare slope of loose rock and stones, with a few low shrubs and no grass. Lower left, a patch of pale ground reads as tailings or a cut. A track runs along the hillside in the left foreground; another climbs toward the white building.

At this size, no people can be made out. No animals, no wagons, no trees of any height appear anywhere in the frame. The hillsides are bare.

The King Survey's mount

The print is an albumen photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, made in 1867. O'Sullivan, who lived from 1840 to 1882, was the photographer for the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, the survey directed by Clarence King, whose name is printed on the mount as geologist in charge. The photograph was made for that survey. An embossed seal at the top centre of the mount reads “War Department — Corps of Engineers U.S. Army,” around an eagle and shield. The expedition was an army operation; the photograph is a government document as much as a picture.

Below the print, in printed capitals, the mount reads “Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. Clarence King, Geologist in Charge,” and, in smaller type, “T.H. O'Sullivan, Phot.” The number “44” is written twice in pencil, once just under the print and once lower on the mount. “#128” is written in pencil near the bottom, and “Gold Hill Nevada” is handwritten in ink at the lower right — the town's name added by hand, not by type. The catalogue record, kept by the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division, gives the maker, the year, and the medium: one photographic print, albumen, eight by ten and five-eighths inches, on a mount sixteen and three-quarters by twenty-one and three-quarters. It does not say which mine the trestle served, what the white building was, or in which month the plate was exposed. The print sits on a tan-coloured paper window inside a larger cream mount, its corners held by paper mounting corners.

No ore, no miner, no month

What the frame shows is a town at work. The trestle, the mine dump, the chimneys, the smoke — nothing in the photograph is ornamental. Every structure serves the ground beneath it, and the ground is bare of grass and trees. The roofs lie at different angles, set by the slope more than by any plan. The pale patch at lower left reads as tailings, the mark of men rather than of weather. The season cannot be read from the print; the record gives 1867 but no month, no hour, no weather. The sepia tone is the process, not the day.

What the frame does not show is the ore. Gold Hill was a silver town on the Comstock; the rock under the town carried the metal, and the photograph shows the works above the ground and none of the shafts below it. No miner appears in the frame; no animal, no wagon, no street life. The camera stands away from the town on the bare slope and looks down at roofs, so the town appears as a cluster of structures rather than as a crowd of people. The survey that sent O'Sullivan was a geological exploration, and the photograph reads the town as part of the ground: a deposit of rock with a timber structure built across it. The record does not say what ran on the trestle, only that the trestle is there. Beyond the ridges at the top of the frame, nothing can be seen.