Progressive Wests in 19th-Century Brazil and the US: Tavares Bastos’s O Vale do Amazonas and Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region

The natural resources and wilderness landscapes of the “two giants of the Western Hemisphere” —Brazil and the United States—played a crucial role in the construction of narratives of progress and national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond conceptions of progress based on machines and technology (railroads in particular) representations of natural resources and wilderness geographies were essential to the then peripheral (but emerging) nations of Brazil and the U.S. in projecting a modern image on the international stage. This paper seeks to understand why particular geographies, resources, and regions came to represent modernity and progress over others. The careful classification and presentation of unsettled territories (by the white population) and their resources in expedition reports, booster literature, and international exhibitions contributed to the image of each nation as firmly positioned on the road to progress. At the same time, the U.S. West and the Amazon Basin posed formidable challenges to Euro- American expansion; in the former the lack of water necessitated ambitious irrigation projects and transportation networks, while the latter depended on short-lived cycles of slash- and-burn cultivation that complicated the transformation of wilderness into monetized property. Yet both regions remain powerful symbols of each nation today, eclipsing other landscapes in representations of the nation.