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27 vast territories to the west and were likewise tenacious in their resistance. Western forts were not mighty cita- dels but often nothing more than a series of single-story buildings surrounding a rectangular parade-ground, perhaps enclosed by a palisade if timber was nearby. Warfare was personal, defined by speed and mobility in hit-and-run tactics. While I have found no evidence that Eastman visited Fort Rice (North Dakota) or Fort Defiance (Arizona), he would have been familiar with the character of these posts. His paintings combine a topographer's precision with a painter's eye. He would have had no ground for concern about some congress- man calling him on the carpet because a house or tree was in the wrong place. The aerial perspective used in his depiction of Fort Defiance is reminiscent of popu- lar townscapes published between the 1870s and 1890s for mass consumption. Eastman drew on at least one government report for one of his paintings: a lithograph of Fort Defiance (fig. 20) based on drawings produced by the Kern Brothers, artists accompanying the John M. Washington expedition from Santa Fe to Navajo Country in 1852. 14 There can be no doubt that this image inspired Eastman's painting. His painting of Fort Rice reprises the familiar western trope of the trading post on a riv- erbank, an outpost of enterprise and progress, as repre- sented in 1833 by Karl Bodmer's views of Forts Pierre and Union, on the upper Missouri River. Army posts on the northern plains followed a plan nearly identical to that of fur-trading establishments such as Fort Union (North Dakota), painted by George Catlin, or Fort Laramie (Wyoming), painted by Alfred Jacob Miller. soldier—arTisT—eyewiTness Fort Mackinac (see cover of this issue) was built by the British in 1781 on Mackinac Island and occupied by United States forces in 1796. It was captured by the British in 1812, one of the first American losses in the conflict. Eastman appears to have visited the site and the ruins of an earlier fort built by the French in 1715. His drawing of its ruins is reproduced as a plate in School- craft's compendium (see fig. 7). Traveling by water between the eastern seaboard and northern Minnesota, the indefatigable draftsman would have passed the site and presumably landed there at least long enough to produce a sketch. In his drawing, we are looking north across the straits now spanned by the Mackinac Bridge. In the foreground scattered timbers mark the location of the French fort, which had been abandoned in 1763. Eastman's Fort Tomkins, perched atop a bluff on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano Narrows, tow- ers above Battery Weed, which is portrayed larger than life. This disparity in scale creates an illusion of depth, enhanced by the fictive proximity of the distant shore- line. For comparison, we might consult a more factual view of the Narrows, painted by Jasper Francis Cropsey in 1868 and now in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The sweeping vista from La Tourette Hill looks across the Narrows to Fort Lafayette, standing slightly offshore from Fort Hamil- ton. On the near shore to the right stands Fort Tomkins. Compared with Crospey's view, Eastman's is inventive, romantic, and elegiac. Eastman exercises greater artistic license again in his painting of Fort Snelling (fig. 21)—a place he knew intimately. He had produced numerous drawings of the site, in which the terrain can almost be read like a map. He compresses the foreground to transform the fort into a soaring presence, reminiscent of Cole's view of Fort Putnam. Intimately acquainted with the New York Harbor Forts—Forts Mifflin, Snelling, and West Point—the confidence Eastman derived from that Fig. 21. Seth Eastman, Fort Snelling, Minnesota, 1870– 1875. Fig. 20. Seth Eastman, Fort Defiance, New Mexico (now Arizona), 1870–1875. THE CAPITOL DOME