Paintings like these celebrated the natural resources of the early United States and also perpetuated the myth that American land was unoccupied and available to Anglo-Europeans for possession and development. New York-based artist Julie Hart Beers depicted a serene forest with cattle in Woodland Creek. Asher Brown Durand’s painting, full of observed details like the exposed tree roots in the foreground, conveys the artist’s belief that land itself was a divine creation. These forest scenes, likely painted in the Catskill Mountains of New York, exclude the presence of the Lenape (also known as Lenni Lenape or Delaware) people, who had actively stewarded the land for thousands of years. In the 1870s and 1880s, the adventurous Laura Woodward hiked and sketched in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In the 1890s, Woodward moved to Florida, where her paintings of the wilderness assisted oil magnate Henry Flagler (1830–1913) in marketing Palm Beach, Florida—the ancestral homeland of the Guacata people and the Mayaimi people—as a tourist resort for white Americans.