This image depicts a view of Beaver Lake within the surrounding landscape of Conejos Cañon in the state of Colorado. Timothy O’Sullivan took this photograph in 1874, while a member of the Wheeler Expedition’s geological survey of the topography of the American West. While many of the photos from this expedition depicted expansive, mammoth rock formations and land masses, the image of Beaver Lake depicts a more idyllic version of the expansive American West. Rather than depicting something that Americans in the East had probably never seen before, this image of Beaver Lake evokes sentiments of early rural America and its serene natural atmospheres a la Walden. In a period of increasing industrialization, urbanization, and mechanization, Americans probably viewed this image with nostalgia and may have been inspired to harken back to a time before the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War.