It is tempting to read the sudden nineteenth-century vogue for wilderness landscapes as a spontaneous awakening to nature's beauty. The timing, however, is suspicious. The taste for untamed scenery surged precisely as industrial cities were rendering such scenery scarce and as railways were making it, for the first time, conveniently reachable. What presented itself as pure aesthetic sensibility may have been the cultural byproduct of scarcity and access working in tandem — a longing manufactured by the very forces that seemed to threaten its object.