A note for regular listeners of the Memory Palace podcast, I am currently the artist and

residents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And this piece is episode number one of that project.

It's called Recent Acquisition. You're going to listen to this one in gallery 760 in the American

Wing. It's the one with Washington crossing the Delaware. Just ask anyone and they'll help you

find it. I guarantee you won't be the first person to ask them where to find Washington crossing

the Delaware that day. You can wander around while you're listening. You can sit in a bench,

whatever works for you. This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate Demand.

They weren't going anywhere. The people living here in the east. They were tied to the land.

To an American ideal, still so new there in the middle of the 19th century. They were citizen

farmers, tilling the Shenandoah Valley. Fourth generation Yankees now first and second generation

Americans. Stacking their stone walls and claiming the corners of the land. There were new immigrants,

former Europeans, who had traveled as far as the Kaya Hoga River Valley or the Del Marva Peninsula.

And were done traveling. The east was settled and the easterners were settling.

But there was a continent out beyond their well-stacked walls and they knew it.

Even as they tilled intended, as they laid cobblestones and new streets and new cities,

bent hoops for barrels that would carry goods out to a wider world. That few of them were ever

going to see. Now that they'd settled for smaller lives.

Other men were sent to see that world and charted and claim it for the government and

claim it for the mining concerns and land speculators and the lake.

So Westward went expeditions of necessary men. Surveys and cartographers, geologists,

trackers, engineers, riflemen, and artists. Necessary because the settled people in the

settled east wanted to see too. And so when Westward went Ferdinand Hayden to map the Rockies

...