Northwest Coast Indians and the Giant Firs

Cleveland Salter Rockwell (1837-1907)
Northwest Coast Indians and the Giant Firs
Oil on Canvas
34¼" x 26"

Born in 1837, in Youngstown, Ohio, Cleveland Rockwell was a marine survey illustrator, topographer, map maker and after the Civil War, a painter on the West Coast, doing coastal, ocean and river scenes in oil and watercolor and ship portraits on commission.

Early in his career, Cleveland Rockwell worked for the Coast Geodetic Department until the Civil War. One of his early projects was a survey of New York Harbor, and then beginning in 1857, he made a mapping tour of South America including the charting of the Magdalena River in Colombia.

He received childhood training in art and studied engineering at the Polytechnic School at Troy, New York and at the University of New York. Before the Civil War in his work for the Coast Geodetic Department, he was spotted as a talented cartographer. In this capacity, he served in the Union Army in many theaters. His service included working with General Sherman during the march through Georgia.

After the War, he rejoined the Geodetic Survey until 1892. Settling in San Francisco from 1868 to 1878 and then Portland, Oregon, he became chief of the Northwest section, conducting surveys in California, Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska. He surveyed the 50 miles of Oregon coast south of Astoria and the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Rockwell also traveled to Alaska, and his watercolors are considered some of the finest nineteenth-century watercolors of southeast Alaska.