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• Samuel Colman(American, 1832–1920)
• About 1872
• Oil paint on board
• William Sr. and Dorothy Harmsen Collection, 2001.1182

This painting depicting panoramas of the American West in the nineteenth century is considered an important visual record of the United States’ expansion. It shows a caravan of American colonists crossing an idealized, romantic view of the Great Plains in covered wagons. At the time, paintings like this envisioned the landscape as an earthly promised land, leading the settlers to naturally embrace westward expansion and conquest. Landscape paintings of the American West were used to encourage settlers to move from south to west, into areas inhabited by Indigenous peoples.