William Henry Jackson – Photographing America
William Henry Jackson, a name synonymous with the visual exploration of 19th-century America, was far more than just a photographer. He was a painter, an explorer, a chronicler of the West, and a documentarian of a nation in transformation. He left behind an unparalleled body of work that shaped the American perception of its own vastness and beauty. He was the first to photograph the wonders of Yellowstone and other places in the American West and to document the Civil War in several sketches.
Born on April 4, 1843, in Keeseville, New York, William Henry Jackson was the eldest of seven children born to George Hallock Jackson and Harriet Maria Allen. His mother, Harriet, was a talented watercolorist and a graduate of the Troy Female Academy, later known as the Emma Willard School. It was from her that young William inherited his artistic inclinations. From a tender age, he was drawn to drawing and painting, mirroring his mother’s passion. By the age of ten, he was receiving formal artistic training, learning the fundamental principles of perspective, form, color, and composition, refining his natural talent. This instruction allowed his drawings to evolve, acquiring a more realistic and sophisticated quality.
His initial foray into the professional art world, however, was not as glamorous as one might expect. In 1858, at the young age of 13, William Henry Jackson secured a position as a retoucher in a photographic studio in Troy, New York. He remained there for two years, gaining valuable experience in the burgeoning field of photography.
His task involved "warming up" the stark black-and-white portraits that were the standard of the time. He accomplished this by delicately tinting them with watercolors, breathing life and color into the images. He also used India ink to enhance details, adding definition and depth to the photographs. During this period, he absorbed the technical aspects of photography, learning how to operate cameras and master darkroom techniques, skills that would prove invaluable in his future endeavors.
The outbreak of the Civil War brought significant changes to the young man’s life. In October 1862, at the age of 19, William Henry Jackson enlisted as a private in Company K of the 12th Vermont Infantry of the Union Army. However, his military service was not characterized by intense combat. Aside from occasional guard duty, his days were relatively uneventful. He filled his time by sketching portraits of his fellow soldiers and depicting scenes from army camp life. These sketches, sent home to his family as assurances of his safety, were carefully preserved by his mother. They survive today as a poignant record of an ordinary infantryman’s experiences in the Union Army.
In June 1863, Jackson’s regiment participated in the pivotal Gettysburg campaign. However, he was not directly involved in the fighting, as he was assigned to guard a supply train during the engagement. His regiment was mustered out on July 14, 1863, and he returned to Rutland, Vermont. He found employment with a photographic studio, earning a good salary. A year later, he became engaged to a young woman from a prominent family. However, the couple broke up in 1866, and the heartbroken Jackson decided to leave Vermont and seek his fortune in the silver mines of Montana.
He, along with two friends, headed towards Nebraska City, Nebraska Territory, a well-known departure point for freight caravans traveling west. The three friends quickly found work as bullwhackers for a freight company heading to Montana. Even though he was inexperienced with oxen or freight hauling, Jackson quickly became proficient in managing the powerful animals.
Before long, Jackson reverted to his old habit of sketching the sights he witnessed and the people he encountered. Abandoning his aspirations of striking it rich in the mines, Jackson left the freight train near South Pass in Wyoming and traveled south towards Salt Lake City, Utah, and eventually California. His experiences in the West resonated deeply with him, and he began to understand that documenting the settling of the frontier could become his life’s purpose. William Henry Jackson would become a visual storyteller of the American West.
In 1867, he settled in Omaha, Nebraska, with his brother Edward Jackson. With his father’s help, he established his own photographic studio.
He started photographing American Indians from the nearby Omaha reservation and the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. His lens captured the faces and stories of a changing nation.
On May 10, 1869, Jackson married Mollie Greer in Omaha. After a six-day honeymoon on a Missouri River steamboat, Jackson sent his new wife to live with her family in Ohio. He left for Cheyenne, Wyoming, on what Jackson considered his first “photographic campaign.” As his reputation grew rapidly, he was commissioned in late 1869 by E. & H. T. Anthony and Company to furnish them with 10,000 stereoviews of the American West, and he soon set up a satellite business in Wyoming.
In this capacity, he soon drew the attention of Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, who was organizing an expedition that would explore the geologic wonders along the Yellowstone River in Wyoming.
Hayden recognized the value of having a photographer to record their discoveries. When Jackson was offered the position, he eagerly accepted.
His new wife, Mollie Greer Jackson, capably managed the business in his absence, proving to be even more skilled than his brothers. Jackson joined the expedition in August 1870 at Camp Carlin, an Army supply depot outside Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The task of transporting delicate camera equipment and glass plate negatives across the rugged terrain of the West would have daunted many, but Jackson’s experience as a bullwhacker proved invaluable. The images he captured and brought back to the East were a sensation. For years, tales of geysers and waterfalls in the Yellowstone region had been dismissed as exaggerations, but Jackson’s photographs provided irrefutable proof of their existence. The public’s fascination with these images played a significant role in the U.S. Congress officially designating Yellowstone as a National Park in 1872. William Henry Jackson’s name became a household word, forever linked to the preservation of one of America’s most treasured landscapes.
Survey responsibilities kept Jackson in the field each summer and demanded his presence in Washington during much of every offseason. This left so little time for Jackson to spend in Omaha, developing his business there, that they sold the Omaha studio when Mollie Jackson became pregnant in the fall of 1871. and Mollie to Washington, D.C., where she was closer to the survey’s headquarters. She died in childbirth a few months later.
Although Jackson never indicated his reaction to this tragedy, he redoubled his increased commitments to landscape photography and the Hayden Survey. In 1873, he married Emilie Painter, the daughter of Dr. Edward Painter, an Indian agent for the Omaha tribe. Like Mollie Greer, Emilie painter had a strong character and an independent streak; she not only thrived in her partnership with her photographer husband but also enjoyed a social and creative life.
For seven years, Jackson collaborated with Dr. Hayden for the United States Geological Survey, exploring and documenting numerous unique and unexplored locations, including Mesa Verde, Colorado, and Yosemite, California. He produced thousands of photographs, each a testament to the beauty and grandeur of the American West.
His most iconic image was captured on August 24, 1873. For years, stories had circulated about a mountain with a large cross etched into its side, but it was not until Jackson risked the arduous climb up Colorado’s western slope of the Rocky Mountains that the existence of the Mount of the Holy Cross was definitively proven.
Within months of its publication, Jackson’s photograph of the Mount of the Holy Cross became a popular adornment in thousands of American homes. His work for the United States Geological Survey concluded in 1878. He continued to work in the West, opening a studio in Denver, Colorado, returning to portrait photography, and documenting railroad construction in mining towns in the Rockies.
From 1890 to 1892, Jackson produced photographs for several railroad lines, including the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the New York Central Railroad. In 1893, many of Jackson’s photographs were used by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in their exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition.
From 1894 to 1896, Jackson was a member and photographer for the World’s Transportation Commission, organized by Joseph Gladding Pangborn, a railroad publisher. Jackson produced more than 900 photographs for the commission.
During the Panic and Depression of 1893-95, Jackson accepted a commission by Marshall Field to travel the world photographing and gathering specimens for a vast new museum in Chicago.
In 1897, he became a partner in the Detroit Photographic Co., which had exclusive rights to the photochrom process for the American market. This process allowed color enhancement of black-and-white photography. He joined the company in 1898 as a part-owner. His estimated 10,000 negatives provided the core of the company’s photographic archives, from which they produced pictures, postcards, and large-plate panoramas. In 1905, the company changed its name to the Detroit Publishing Co.
In about 1910, the company expanded its inventory to include photographic copies of art. At its height, it drew upon 40,000 negatives for its publishing effort and sold seven million prints annually. At this time, it also employed about 40 artists and more than a dozen traveling salesmen.
However, during World War I, competing firms developed new and cheaper printing methods, and the company began to decline. In 1924, it went into receivership, and eight years later, in 1932, its assets were liquidated.
The year the Detroit Publishing Co. failed – 1924, Jackson moved to Washington, D.C., laid down his camera, and picked up a paintbrush. Though he was 81, he began to produce murals of the Old West for the new U.S. Department of the Interior building. His eye for composition, coupled with the fact that he had experienced the transformation of the West firsthand, added credibility to his work.
Soon, his paintings of Western scenes were in demand for illustration in books and articles. Jackson completed approximately 100 paintings, mostly dealing with historical themes such as the Fur Trade, the California Gold Rush, and the Oregon Trail.
During this time, he revisited many of the sites he depicted in his paintings to paint them as accurately as possible. For those scenes that predated his own lifetime, he sought out and interviewed surviving participants.
In 1936, Edsel Ford, backed by his father, Henry Ford, bought Jackson’s 40,000 negatives from the estate of William A. Livingstone, who had owned the Detroit Publishing Co. The negatives were purchased for The Edison Institute, now known as Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Eventually, Jackson’s negatives were divided between the Colorado Historical Society and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
On June 30, 1942, William Henry Jackson died at the age of 99 at a New York City hospital from complications and injuries received from a fall. He left one son, two daughters, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. He was recognized as one of the last surviving Civil War veterans and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His long and active life paralleled the formative years of Westward Expansion in the United States, and his many contributions as a soldier, bullwhacker, photographer, explorer, publisher, author, artist, and historian have left a lasting legacy on the nation.