Who photographed Oneonta Gorge for the first time?
Who would’ve known that the gorge was named after a town called Oneonta in New York, where Carleton Eugene Watkins came from. He photographed it for the first time, back in 1849 when he traveled to California during the Gold Rush. The incredible part of the story is that he knew nothing about photography before moving 3,000 miles across the country,, and yet, thanks to his great photos of the Yosemite Valley, US Congress made the decision to preserve Yosemite as a national park. Sadly he lost his sight in the 1890s. His last commission was from Phoebe Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst, who built the nation’s largest newspaper chain, which then became the subject of the movie Citizen Kane, which Orson Wells co-wrote and won the Academy Awards for Best Screenplay with Herman Jacob Mankiewicz, who worked on the Wizard of Oz but that never got the credit for.
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