- Julia Watkins: On her father, Carleton Watkins: Poppa is an early riser. He believes that some of his best pictures are made at daybreak.
- Carleton Watkins: It still strikes me as a miracle, I mean, making a photograph.
- Narrator: Between 1867 and 1871, four expeditions are sent west by Washington. Known as the Great Surveys, they assemble some of the best scientists of the period... brilliant young men who experience the frontier as a rite of passage. Some fall in love with the wilderness even as they hasten its undoing.
- Dr. Herman Vogel: The American West, with its grand mountains and gigantic vegetation, is still a new world to us. Mr. Watkins' fine photographs so truthfully represent that world that we look upon them with wondering eyes.