Eadweard Muybridge's Scenes of Settlement: The Modoc War Photographs

abstract: A long tradition of scholarship has centered Eadweard Muybridge in American film and photographic history. Despite that centrality, Muybridge's photography of the Modoc War, a campaign to exterminate and relocate the Modoc people, has received scant attention. Drawing on recent historical scholarship on the Modoc War, this article revisits Muybridge's photographs of the war to consider their vision of California's Native people and their ancestral territory and argues that Muybridge's stereographic images laid the generic groundwork for the Western genre's settler-colonial imagination of the nineteenth-century West.