Bird’s-eye View of 19th-century Mining

If a miner wrote back East of his adventures, he may have sealed his message inside a pictorial lettersheet depicting a bird’s-eye view of the company he worked for or the boomtown he had traveled to in hopes of striking it rich. Unlike photographers whose images portrayed Western towns with warts and all, lithographers were free to exaggerate a town’s prowess in aerial views that they drew without ever leaving the ground. The same was true for drawings of up-and-coming ore refineries, su