What can we learn from an old photograph, a moment in time captured on a glass plate negative? In the case of the image above—taken by Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan on September 19, 1862, two days after the Battle of Antietam—the answer is quite a bit. It appears to be a burial detail, but we will discuss this more later. The granite outcropping and boulders piled on it make the identification of this site straightforward. It is marked today by the unique 90th Pennsylvania Infantry monument of three stacked rifles supporting a water or coffee bucket with the inscription: “Here fought the 90th Penna (Philadelphia) Sept 17, 1862 A Hot Place.”

The last three words of the inscription are an apt description of this spot on September 17. Few locations on the Antietam battlefield saw more sustained combat than what swirled around this point. It is located about 50 yards south of David Miller’s famed Cornfield. The camera is facing slightly southwest with the Cornfield directly behind the viewer. The woods visible behind the group of four living soldiers on the right are the West Woods. Midway between the outcropping and the West Woods the line of occasional brush marks a fence line that ran east-west from the Hagerstown Pike to the southern tip of the East Woods and was used as cover by Colonel Marcellus Douglass’ Georgia brigade in its fierce engagement with the Union brigades of Brig. Gens. Abram Duryée, John Gibbon, and George Hartsuff.

The first troops heavily engaged near this point were the 97th, 104th, and 105th New York of Duryée’s 1st Brigade in Maj. Gen. James Ricketts’ 2nd Division, 1st Corps. They would be relieved by the 12th Massachusetts, part of Hartsuff’s brigade, also in Ricketts’ division. Around this outcropping, they engaged the 13th and 60th Georgia, and Brig. Gen. Harry Hays’ Louisiana brigade, which launched a counterattack that was repulsed with significant losses. “Never did I see more rebs to fire at than that moment presented themselves,” recalled Corporal George Kimball of the 12th Massachusetts—hit hard, too, with 49 killed, 165 wounded, and 10 missing.

Typically, struck soldiers drop their weapons and/or equipment (belts, canteens, cartridge boxes, haversacks, etc.), lose their hats, tear off pieces of clothing to locate their wounds, or grab for blankets to help carry wounded to the rear. Walking this ground on September 21, physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. found it “strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat.” We can see in the foreground what Holmes is referring to. The ground is literally covered with discarded clothing and gear.

There are seven dead bodies and, on the far right, what looks like a dead horse. All appear to be Confederates, but who? Numerous Rebel units passed this point or fought in its immediate vicinity: the 2nd and 11th Mississippi of Evander Law’s Brigade; the 1st and 3rd North Carolina of Roswell Ripley’s Brigade; and the 28th and 23rd Georgia of Alfred Colquitt’s Brigade. All had high casualty counts—the 3rd North Carolina suffered an appalling 116 killed or mortally wounded and the 1st 50 in this area alone. Illustrating just how lethal the fighting was, the 3rd North Carolina at one point had to change front to the northeast to counter an advance by the 128th Pennsylvania, a maneuver in which seven of the regiment’s 10 companies had every officer killed or wounded.

What seems odd is that no dead are visible beyond the outcropping, but they may already have been picked up for burial, or buried, by the time the photographers arrived. That no Union dead appear in the image is evidence that burial details had already been at work here.

We can presume that the five living soldiers looking upon the dead are a burial party, but unlike another set of soldiers Gardner and O’Sullivan photographed near the Miller Farm, these men have no tools. Jeff Dugdale, who produced a fascinating book about Confederate uniforms during the Maryland Campaign, believes the two men sitting and crouching in front of the two men on top of the outcropping are prisoners, based on their clothing. If they are Confederates, which might explain the one Union soldier behind them holding his musket, they may have been stragglers, captured when the Army of Northern Virginia retreated the night of September 18 and put to work gathering the dead for burial. Perhaps the four bodies in front of them had been moved, laid out in a rough line. The other three bodies seem to have remained where they fell or where they were dragged by comrades during the fighting.

It is remarkable that members of the burial detail—if that is what this is—seem grim but otherwise unaffected by the carnage before them. September 19 was warm—75 degrees—and the rapidly decomposing bodies were emitting an offensive odor. A Massachusetts soldier in a West Woods burial party described the work that day as “very unpleasant,” that he “tasted the odor for several days.” And according to civilians from Lancaster, Pa., who visited immediately after the battle, “the stench…from the decomposing bodies was almost unendurable.” The soldiers here have made no effort to ward off that odor by covering their mouths or noses with a handkerchief or bandanna. Perhaps they believed it would make no difference, as the smell penetrated everything.

Because the photographers made no known effort to identify either the living or the dead in this image, we are left to speculate, which perhaps makes it easier for a viewer to remain emotionally detached from the scene. It is horrifying, but we do not know who the dead are. One conceivably is Anson W. Deal, a 25-year-old private in Company B, 3rd North Carolina, who in the summer of 1862 had been conscripted from his family farm in Duplin County, N.C. Deal was initially listed as missing and presumed captured, and his family surely held out hope that he had survived. Months later, though, the remarks on his fate were changed to “supposed to have been killed in battle at Sharpsburg” and then to “killed at Sharpsburg.” He was almost certainly buried as an unknown soldier in a mass grave with other Confederates. His name, and the family that grieved his death, are a reminder that every anonymous body we peer at in photographs from that fateful day had a story to tell and deserves to be remembered as a person and not a prop. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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The romance of ranching is a myth. The reality of ranching is work. The people who live and work Wyoming’s ranchlands, no matter the location, are a hardy breed. When it is snowing and the wind is blowing—winter conditions common throughout the “Cowboy State”—they simply don a few more layers of clothing before venturing out to tend livestock, forking hay to cattle and seldom begrudging passing deer or elk from also eating a mouthful or two. 

Photographs from Ranchland: Wagonhound, by Anouk Masson Krantz, The Images Publishing Group, 2022.

Historical photographs appear alongside Krantz’s images below, showing Wyoming ranch life then and now.

Ranchers might dub a major weather front a “million-dollar storm,” referring to the costs it wrings in lost crops or livestock. Perhaps it’s a storm that deposits more than a foot of heavy, water-laden snow on crop and pastureland just when grass needs to start growing, or one that drops snow deep in the fall or during calving season, weakening and killing newborn animals. Ranchers perpetually worry about the weather they cannot control, and about the animals they tend and depend on for a living.

Ranch work is often generational. Many of the men and women riding for such big ranches as Wagonhound—the 300,000-acre spread outside Douglas, Wyo., depicted on the following pages—learned their craft riding alongside their fathers or mothers and sometimes grandparents. Many then share the work and lifestyle with their own children and grandchildren. The best hands care for the land and stock as if they owned them. They do the work with excellence because they love the land and ride for a brand.

A French-born photographer from New York may seem an unlikely person to document life on a Wyoming ranch, and Anouk Krantz admits she initially came to Wagonhound with little understanding of what she saw through the viewfinder. “All my knowledge about the cowboy around this Western way of life were all sort of misconceptions,” she came to realize. “Once I put my foot through the door, I realized this culture wasn’t dying, but was very much still alive.” Wyoming’s wide-open ranchlands, “the power of nature, these amazing landscapes,” proved her inspiration.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

It took photographer Krantz most of a day to fly from her hometown of New York City to Denver and then to drive north to the Wagonhound in east-central Wyoming, which she deems “one of the most isolated, remote places in the country.” The familiar welcome she received is akin to that captured in her image above of a group of riders returning to waiting fellow hands at the ranch bunkhouse. Anouk’s connection to Wagonhound “started with one piece of paper with one phone number of one rancher in Texas. He introduced me to his friends, and they introduced me to their friends.” Though a stranger to ranch life, she soon found a “connection with this land, freedom, independence.” Wagonhound headquarters is about an hour west of Douglas in the midst of an isolated landscape “like the wilderness.”

Come and Get It

Though a ranch’s mobile kitchen may be better equipped today than when the cowboys at left in Rawlins, Wyo., spread out behind their waiting chuck wagon, eating grub from a tin plate is a ritual that carries over from the 1870s–’80s heyday of open range trail drives. “Cookie” is still expected to dish out hot meals on time for busy cowboys to eat while spread out on the ground, their horses at the ready. Anouk soon earned their respect when she proved willing to follow them at all hours. “When you are thinking about what these people are doing from dark to dark,” she says, “they are caring for their herds, but they have to do it within their surroundings. I wanted to bring that into my pictures.”

Riding for the Brand

A cowhand’s tasks—corralling, roping, castrating, branding—haven’t changed much from time of the 1890s Wyoming roundup captured below. Neither has the clothing or gear. A hand doesn’t choose clothing based on style but practicality. You’ll never see cowboys at a branding wearing short sleeves. Likewise, they’ll have on sturdy jeans, work boots and, more so today, a pair of leather chaps like those above to protect their legs from kicking calves, rope burns and the stray hot branding iron. Hat styles have become more of an individual choice, but wide brims remain necessary to shield one from the sun or keep rain from running down one’s neck. 

In Wyoming, by the way, the term “cowboy” is gender neutral, as applicable to the women and girls as the men and boys who ride, rope and work cattle. That said, on the Wagonhound most ranch wives work as teachers or nurses in town. They may throw in a hand at brandings, but the daily operations are mostly men’s work. The two years Anouk spent at the Wagonhound allowed her to follow these busy men and women as they gathered and branded and otherwise did their daily chores. “I was able learn how they run a ranch, how hard they work, how much it takes to do all this,” she says. “And their deep affection and love for the land, for the animals, the cows, the calves, their dogs and their horses. It all works together in such a harmony.”

Follow the Wagon Ruts

The ranch itself inspired every photograph in the book. “It’s the scale of the land, the sky, the air we breathe and mother nature,” Anouk says. “The land came first, and then we came. To me it’s very important. I think that is what still inspires people from around the world to connect with the American Western landscape.” In the 1800s hundreds of thousands of emigrants drove and followed covered wagons across these foothills along the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. The ranchers who staked claims after approval of the 1862 Homestead Act and the cattleman who trailed the first herds north from Texas into Wyoming also used wagons to haul food and supplies. Wagonhound’s true expanse is revealed above, as pickups and horse trailers crossing the ranch in line seem like child’s toys. 

Learning the Ropes

Ranch life is multigenerational. Often a roundup or branding crew includes grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, sons and daughters, all riding and working side by side. Little ones might ride saddles their own parents used when they were small. The best babysitter on a ranch remains a steady, older horse named Dunny or Brownie or even Sweet Pea. The best such horses can be depended on to be gentle around kids but still able to manage quarrelsome steers. If a kid doesn’t know how to push cows down a trail or out of brush, but the horse does, then that’s a partnership that will get the job done. When adults involve their children in the chores—the kids usually consider it fun—they are not only passing on a legacy, but also instilling a work ethic and an appreciation for stewardship of the land, work animals and livestock. Among Anouk’s revelations as she photographed the Wagonhound were how hard people work and how they work together as a community with their families and neighbors. But her biggest discovery was how much they truly cared for the land. “How they use pasture rotation, a wonderful way to let the earth breathe, rest,” she says. “What they are doing for our earth is unknown to most people.” 

Candy Moulton, executive director of the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame, was reared on her grandparent’s homestead near Encampment, Wyo.

Photographer Anouk Masson Krantz’s book, Ranchland: Wagonhound, received the 2023 Western Heritage Award for best art/photography book from National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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I grew up only 25 miles north of Gettysburg, and the battlefield has been a second home to me. In February 2012, I created a Facebook page, “Michael Waricher’s Gettysburg Perspectives” to share photography of the Gettysburg battlefield I had been collecting.

The period that most captivated me was the Commemorative Era, generally defined as 1864 through the battle’s 50th anniversary in 1913. During that time, veterans returned to visit with their families and for reunion encampments. Monument dedications were frequent, and a large portion of the battlefield infrastructure was built. The park was transitioning from the grassroots oversight of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (1864-1895) to that of the federal government’s War Department (1895-1933).

Bringing Gettysburg photographs back to the light of day and endeavoring to share the stories they depict has been an enjoyable 11-year journey for me. The daily process of researching facts and details to accompany an image has made me a more thorough historian. As a result, the page has grown and become more engaging. I find it a unique means of perpetuating the memory of the battle’s veterans while also retelling the story of the battlefield itself and its builders.

This collection of images offers an appealing Commemorative Era sampling from a variety of locations. In some photographs, things appear starkly different, and in others they look quite similar to today. We are seeing the battlefield evolve through a half-century of intensive toil and expenditure.

The next time you’re on the battlefield, take a moment to look around you. That monument, cast iron sign, gun carriage, or the avenue on which you are driving were all products of the Commemorative Era at Gettysburg. It truly was a golden age for the park.

Devil’s Den

The curious, oversized jumble of boulders known as Devil’s Den was a popular destination for late 19th-century visitors and a lucrative spot for local photographers to ply their trade. Tourists found the opportunity to have a family photo taken in front of the massive formations tremendously appealing.

This circa 1895 photograph captures a typical summer’s day of the time. The camera gazes across a gently flowing Plum Run toward Devil’s Den’s northern approach. Neatly situated below the looming Round Tops, carriages deliver passengers for an afternoon of leisurely exploration. Here, stands of mature trees grow with random abandon among the diabase boulders while the grounds present a carefully maintained appearance. A worn network of footpaths and wagon traces pass through the rocks to various points of interest.

The precariously balanced “Table Rock” peeks from between the trees at the left-center portion of the image, its face marked by white chisel gouges resulting from recent efforts to remove years of accumulated graffiti. In the right-center of the photo, the white tip of the 4th Maine Infantry obelisk defies a tree’s best effort to obscure it. Survivors of the 4th Maine dedicated and presented the monument to the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association on October 10, 1888.

154th New York Monument

On July 1, 1890, the surviving members of the 154th New York Infantry gathered in a trimmed field east of North Stratton Street to dedicate a memorial to their actions 27 years prior. On this spot, as the 11th Corps lines crumbled to the north, they and their brigade comrades commanded by Colonel Charles Coster had courageously attempted to slow the enemy’s rush.

The 154th had numbered nearly 600 men before the Battle of Chancellorsville. As a testament to the severity of their actions in that battle, only 239 were present at Gettysburg. On July 1, 1863, they suffered 200 casualties, most captured while attempting to extricate themselves from the Confederate assault that afternoon.

By 1890, monuments were rapidly dotting the battlefield, and the avenues to carry visitors to those sites were either being planned or in the early construction stage. It was a high point of the Commemorative Era for the battle’s veterans. The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, the park’s oversight entity, had purchased a parcel of land on the outskirts of Gettysburg’s northern limits to further their work. Nearly the length of a football field and a mere 20 yards in width, Coster Avenue would provide the land for the brigade’s tributes.

Stevens’ Knoll

Photographer William H. Tipton meticulously documented the Gettysburg battlefield’s development. In 1888 or early 1889, he captured this view to the west while standing on Culp’s Hill’s northwest slope.

The most prominent features of Tipton’s image are the recently reconstructed earthworks of the Iron Brigade, running east to west through the center of the photograph toward Stevens’ Knoll. The earliest commemorative features on that hill are the artillery pieces of Captain Greenlief T. Stevens’ 5th Maine Battery. A closer inspection also reveals the finished base for that unit’s yet-to-be-completed monument. Major General Henry Slocum’s equestrian monument is still 13 years from its appearance on the hill.

This unique perspective yields a remarkable, richly detailed glimpse of Cemetery Ridge on the horizon. The conspicuous two-story house beyond the knoll is the Wright House (today’s park law enforcement office), and the white structures to its left are Lydia Leister’s house and barn—Maj. Gen. George Meade’s headquarters during the battle.

A striking aspect of this view is the open landscape, as a returning veteran would have witnessed during the battle’s 25th anniversary. In this instance, it’s a vista long lost to modern visitors through changing land use and management practices.

Little Round Top

The monument in this 1885 image was dedicated by 91st Pennsylvania veterans in 1883. Six years later, the monument moved onto a flat, etched stone dedicated to the memory of Brig. Gen. Stephen Weed and Lieutenant Charles E. Hazlett, both mortally wounded nearby. In 1889, the Pennsylvania veterans would erect an impressive 25-foot granite specimen at the site of the original.

In May 1885, the GBMA ordered 30 iron gun carriages from the Navy Department, at a cost of $20 per piece, like those seen here. Such carriages began to be phased out in the late 1880s when the park contracted with the local Gilbert & Smith Foundry for 30 more realistic iron models. Examples of these Gilbert & Smith carriages remain on the battlefield.

East Cemetery Hill

This early 1880s photograph depicts East Cemetery Hill and the guns of the New York and Pennsylvania batteries that had defended it. With the exception of the small, white marker at the center of the photo, East Cemetery Hill was relatively devoid of monumentation. The veterans of Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Artillery (Cooper’s Battery), placed this marble-capped memorial in 1879. It was the first artillery marker on the battlefield.

The wooden observation tower was constructed in the spring of 1878. It stood 50 feet tall with viewing platforms at its midpoint and peak. The observatory would gradually deteriorate before being sold and dismantled in 1895. The Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock equestrian monument would stand on its footprint the following year.

Railroad Cut Bridge

By the mid-1880s, the monumentation of the Gettysburg battlefield was burgeoning, and the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association provided avenues to accommodate the growing visitation.

The ferocious fighting that had taken place on McPherson’s Ridge and the surrounding lands made it an attraction for both returning veterans and visitors to the battlefield.

At the request of the GBMA, historian John Bachelder conceived Reynolds Avenue, running along the spine of McPherson’s Ridge, in May 1885. Its eventual completion provided a main north-south artery for battlefield traffic between Hagerstown Road to the south and Buford and Wadsworth Avenues to the north. The only obstacle along this nearly mile-long straightaway was the second ridgeline cut of the Western Maryland Railroad. At 19 feet deep and with a span of roughly 50 feet, a bridge would be needed to facilitate a seamless traffic flow.

At a February 25, 1886, meeting of the GBMA’s Executive Committee, they agreed to contract with the Gettysburg foundry of Calvin Gilbert and Joseph Smith to construct the necessary bridge, a 14-foot wide, iron truss-style span with oak plank flooring for a sum of $635.

The Detroit Publishing Company photograph seen here dates to the early 1900s. The image looks from the northeast bank of the railroad cut to the west and captures the first of the four bridges that have spanned this gap between 1887 and 2023. The image also depicts the original depth of “the cut” and the 6th Wisconsin, 95th New York, and 14th Brooklyn monuments on its southern bank.

Wheatfield Trolley

Gettysburg National Military Park has faced its share of challenges since its inception. Few would prove as controversial as the appearance of an electric railway on battlefield land in 1893.

Fully operational by May 1894, the eight-mile “trolley” circuit, which cost $170,000, emanated from the heart of Gettysburg and made seven stops while crossing over some of the most sacred lands of the second and third day’s battlefields.

Ohio photographer Albert Kern captured a portion of the “electric road” at the Wheatfield stop below The Loop in this late 19th-century image. Note the planking for passenger boarding and unboarding. From this point, the trolley continued southward to Devil’s Den and Little Round Top.

A groundswell of opposition to the trolley quickly arose, led by former Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, veterans, and popular newspapers. Harper’s Weekly led the charge, running an article, “The Gettysburg Desecration” in its July 1, 1893, edition. Lamented battlefield historian John Bachelder in the article: “The railway cuts straight through lines of battle, forest trees are levelled, boulders and ledges blasted…and the whole character of the field is changed.” Harper’s Weekly author John Reed Scott emphatically declared, “The trolley vandals have hewed their course of destruction, and all the pristine beauty is gone forever, the victim of corporate greed.”

But the trolley proved popular with tourists for a time. Ultimately, the rise of the automobile, improved park roads, and the general deterioration of the trolley infrastructure would drive the electric railway’s demise in 1916. Traces of the trolley route remain discernible on the battlefield today.

Michael J. Waricher, a Carlisle, Pa., native, is a professional artist and lifelong student of the Battle of Gettysburg. Through his Facebook page, “Michael Waricher’s Gettysburg Perspectives,” he shares his research of the battlefield’s history through photos.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Photographer Robert Hanley “Bob” Willoughby parlayed his beloved boyhood hobby into a kaleidoscopic career as a maker of indelible images. He was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Calif., shortly after his parents, Cyril and Antoinette, divorced. Nettie Willoughby raised her son in West Hollywood. Cyril, a doctor, was not much present, but for the boy’s 12th birthday he gave his son a 35mm Argus C-3 rangefinder camera that quickly became a prominent fixture in Bob’s life. A neighbor taught the youth darkroom basics in exchange for babysitting. The sole class at school to hold his interest was art. When he was in junior high, a stroke disabled his mother, who never relented in her support for her son’s photographic ambitions. He converted the home garage on Marvin Avenue into a darkroom functional only at night owing to light leaks. He processed film and made prints to the tune of jazz broadcast by a San Francisco radio station whose AM signal reached southern California after sunset. Upon graduating from Louis Pasteur High in 1946 he apprenticed with a series of Hollywood photographers, earning $5 a week sharpening and expanding his skills. In night classes at USC, he studied under film designers and artists Saul Bass, Slavko Vorkapich, and William Cameron Menzies. He dove into LA’s vibrant music scene, photographing jazz and R&B performers. Dance magazine ran his pictures. He was 22 when his portrait of model Ann Baker graced the cover of the January 1950 US Camera; later that year eclectic label Fantasy Records recruited him to provide LP cover art. In 1951 he signed with Globe Photo, which wrangled assignments from feature and fashion periodicals. To analyze and absorb clients’ unique styles, he haunted used periodicals stores, assembling an archive in which to steep himself in technical and aesthetic nuance. Mixing faith and commerce, he shot for Catholic magazine Jubilee; it would be easier to list the mainstream publications he did not work for than those he did. Under the spell of master magazine photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Irving Penn, he took on ever more fashion and feature work, at the same time establishing a toehold in and eventually a remarkably strong and creative grip on the arcane and demanding specialty of photographing Hollywood productions as they were being made, recording candid moments and scenes as shot. He first worked on contract with magazines seeking to illustrate stories about actors and coming attractions and eventually came to be relied on by studios for his unobtrusive expertise. To facilitate these efforts, he developed innovative camera brackets and electronically controlled flash systems. His facility at documenting decisive moment upon decisive moment led a commentator to label him “the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion-picture still.” In 1957 he visited Ireland for the first time, forging a connection that lasted all his life. Through work he and Audrey Hepburn became long-time friends. At Elizabeth Taylor’s request, he photographed her and Eddie Fisher’s wedding in 1959. Soon after, he met Scottish flight attendant Dorothy Quigley aboard a transcontinental flight she was working. They fell for one another, wed, and raised three sons and a daughter, sometimes traveling and living abroad en famille thanks to Bob’s movie work. Over the decades, he photographed 100-some feature films on sets and at locations around the world. In 1973, he retired. Seeking a pastoral routine away from the high life, the Willoughbys relocated to County Cork, Ireland, where they bought a castle and began a 17-year stay during which Willoughby produced books of verse and photos, including a 2001 memoir. Bob Willoughby was 82 when he died in 2009 in Vence, France. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among many others. Now, with an introduction by son Christopher, Chronicle Books has published a rich and varied survey of his oeuvre titled Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life. —Michael Dolan

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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This portfolio is excerpted from the new, comprehensive monograph of Bob Willoughby’s work, Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life published by Chronicle Books in November 2022.

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The Summer 2023 issue of Aviation History magazine will feature some classic photography by Alfred Palmer, who shot scores of images while working for the Office of War Information during World War II. There wasn’t enough room in the print magazine to include all the images we wanted to feature, so here’s another selection, just in time for Women’s History Month.

During the war, 6.5 million American women entered the workforce, filling jobs that opened up when men joined the military. Women workers were necessary at a time when American was ramping up to become the arsenal of democracy, cranking out munitions, ships, tanks, landing craft—and airplanes. As FDR said in a speech on Columbus Day in 1942, “In some communities employers dislike to hire women. In others they are reluctant to hire Negroes. We can no longer afford to indulge such prejudice.”

“The men were all being drafted,” said a Chicago woman named Lois Wolfe. “They were taking them right and left, and even those that had been exempt in the beginning were being called, and they desperately need people to fill their jobs. That what we girls did, we filled men’s jobs.” Wolf went to work making parts for the Consolidated B-24 Liberator at a plant in Melrose, Illinois.

Some women started working out of patriotism. Others did it for economic reasons. Some did it out of a combination of both. “Suddenly, the standard idea of seeing women as fragile creatures, ill-suited for work outside the home, much less for hard labor, seemed like a peacetime luxury,” wrote Emily Yellin in her 2004 book Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. “Like never before America asked women to take up the slack—to join in producing the vital machinery of war.” The aircraft industry was among the biggest employers of women, who made up around 40 percent of its workforce. Douglas Aircraft alone employed around 22,000 women.

The enduring symbol of women in the workforce is Rosie the Riveter, a character that emerged in a song by the singing group the Four Vagabonds and later made indelible as the subject of a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell and in a government-issue “We Can Do It!” poster. One worker who became even more famous than the fictional Rosie was the very real Norma Jean Dougherty, who packed parachutes at a factory in Burbank, California. After the war she dyed her hair, changed her name, and became the film icon Marilyn Monroe.

When men began returning from the war, women began leaving work. Some left voluntarily; others were forced out. But something had changed. In her book, Yellin quotes a woman named Katherine O’Grady, who said, “After the war, things changed, because women found out they could go out and they could survive. They could really do it on their own.”

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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When Mark Watson and his partner Hana Black set off on a dream long-distance bicycling trip through Southeast Asia, they weren’t quite prepared for what they would find in Laos and Vietnam. Evidence of the Vietnam War was vividly apparent—in everything from the landscape to people’s farms, home decor, and innovations created from former weapons of war from decades past.

As a journalist, photographer, adventurer, and military history enthusiast, Watson is no stranger to harsh environments and former battlefields, but what he experienced on his journey caught him off guard. He was especially surprised by what he saw in Laos.

“It’s remarkable how you can visit a place and be so blown away by what you’re seeing. As an adult who’s grown up reading books, watching the news and filling my mind with history, I could still go to a place like this in 2011 and witness something that’s far greater than anyone can imagine in terms of the impact it’s had on the land and people’s lives,” Watson told Vietnam magazine in an interview.

“The country is so much living under the shadow of this carnage, and yet it’s not something you really hear about.”

Mark Watson

Traveling from China into Laos, and from there into Vietnam, Cambodia, and eventually into Thailand, Watson rode along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and explored villages, noticing traces of UXO (unexploded ordnance) and documenting it in his photography.

“It was an amazing adventure,” he said. “After I experienced this, I longed to go back, because there is just so much there to see.”

“Since I was a boy I’ve had more than a passing interest in war history, so I was very aware of what took place in Vietnam during the war, but not so much in regard to Laos,” said Watson. “I had no idea there was still so much evidence of what took place there during the ’60s and ’70s.”

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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The Library of Congress in November debuted an online exhibit mapping hundreds of portrait photographs from the Liljenquist Collection to events of the Civil War, including images of soldiers linked to the battles where they fought and died. The interactive map encompasses more than 100 battles, from Gettysburg and Antietam to lesser-known skirmishes. The faces of nurses are connected to the sites where they cared for the wounded. Prisoners of war are associated with the camps that confined them.

Some of the portraits are mapped to more than one location, if, for example, the person was present at more than one battle. Likewise, there might be more than one portrait of the same person mapped at a location if multiple photographs of them exist in the collection.

The Liljenquist Collection at the Library of Congress features more than 3,000 portrait photographs, including ambrotypes and tintypes, and small card photos known as cartes-de-visite of the men and women who served during the war for both the Union and Confederacy. Among those represented are African Americans, sailors, nurses, veterans, and soldiers posed with family members.

The Liljenquist family began donating its collection to the Library of Congress’ Prints & Photographs Division in 2010 with an initial gift of more than 700 ambrotypes and tintypes. Since then, Liljenquist and his three sons—Jason, Brandon, and Christian—have continued to build the collection to include albumen photographs and cartes-de-visite, manuscripts, patriotic envelopes, letters, and artifacts related to the Civil War.

The interactive map allows users to zoom in to view locations in more detail and click to see associated portraits. Locations on the map show places where people in the images were and not where the photographs were taken, in most instances. For more information about each photograph, users can click on the thumbnail image to view details about the item.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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On October 28, 1943, photographer Ansel Adams drove through the front gate of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Set in the inhospitable desert of Owens Valley, California, Manzanar housed 10,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry forcibly “evacuated” from the western states after Pearl Harbor and interned at Manzanar. Barbed-wire fences enclosed the 814-acre camp, and the rifles in the guard towers were pointing in.

Over the next two months, Adams—known then as now for dramatic black and white landscape images—photographed the camp’s residents. In 1944, he published Born Free and Equal, a book about Manzanar. In its pages, Adams tacitly offered a perspective opposed to the anti-Japanese hysteria that had brought on the internment of loyal Americans. He celebrated the resiliency of the men, women, and children who endured this unwarranted hardship. Born Free and Equal, which never attained the stature of Adams’s many other books, demonstrated his great humanistic spirit and willingness to stand with the disenfranchised during a time of severe national stress.

Besides plunging THE UNITED STATES into World War II, Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor crystallized hostility against the Japanese abroad and at home. As shocked West Coast residents were reading and hearing initial news reports about the sneak attack, California deputy sheriffs and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were already rounding up “Japanese suspected of subversive activities.”

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to designate geographical areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Suspect individuals would be “evacuated” to residential camps where they were to receive “food, shelter, and other accommodation”—and be kept under guard. The order, a mandate separate from those stipulating controls on foreign enemy aliens, who also were to be interned, specified no nationality, but there was no doubt about its target. Anti-Japanese hysteria had exploded, fed by rumors starring insurgents and saboteurs. Investigators testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities claimed that on the West Coast Japanese agents were strapping cameras to homing pigeons and setting the birds loose to fly over and document restricted areas. The Committee recommended that anyone in the United States of Japanese ancestry be moved 500 miles inland from the Pacific. (See “Days of Infamy”).

Three days after Roosevelt signed Order 9066, the FBI swept up 500 “enemy aliens” who, the Los Angeles Times reported, had “guns and ammunition, cameras, binoculars, flashlights, radios and alien flags.”

These “first triumphs of the war in the Pacific Coast States” were arrested in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego. Similar raids snared suspected saboteurs in Seattle and along the Oregon coast. The need for incarceration facilities spurred construction of “local detention centers” and “inland concentration camps.” In 1988, a congressional commission concluded that these arrests “were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented by the Commission.”

Japanese victories in the Pacific theater heightened concern about a West Coast invasion. On February 24, 1942, the Los Angeles Times shocked readers with a story about a Japanese attack on oil fields at Ellwood, California, a coastal town 12 miles north of Santa Barbara. Japanese submarine I-17 lobbed 16 poorly aimed rounds into the facility, causing minimal damage. Witnesses swore that they had observed Japanese on the beach at Ellwood using signal lights to direct the barrage. Frightened Angelenos clamored for the removal of all people of Japanese descent, fearing they comprised a fifth column. “We must move the Japanese in this country into a concentration camp somewhere, some place, and do it damn quickly,” Representative Alfred J. Elliott (D-California), who represented Tulare in the San Joaquin Valley, told Congress.

On March 3, 1942, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, announced plans to relocate thousands of “enemy aliens.” As Java was falling to the Japanese, American officials were hastening to secure Pacific Coast states. The army listed three categories of people to be removed from exclusion zones: individuals suspected of espionage, immigrants born in Japan (issei), and second- or third-generation Japanese Americans whose parents or grandparents had been born in Japan (nisei). All parties in these categories were to relocate to one of 10 camps being readied in the American interior. Two weeks later General DeWitt announced the first “voluntary” relocation, set for March 23. The government was to ship 1,000 people of Japanese descent from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley, 224 miles northeast. DeWitt warned those affected to settle their affairs quickly. “I want it made unmistakably clear,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “that evacuation will be continued with or without cooperation.”

Archie Miyatake remembered internment unfolding quickly. “We heard rumors that our government was going to start evacuating everyone of Japanese ancestry,” he wrote later. Miyatake was 16, a student at East Los Angeles High School. The son of Toyo Miyatake, Manzanar’s unofficial photographer, he chronicled his experience in an edition of Born Free and Equal. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, how can they do that?’ I just couldn’t believe that they would do such a thing.”

By the end of March relocation was under way. The government forced affected citizens to sell their residences and businesses, pack, and move to relocation centers. To document the operation, the Wartime Relocation Authority, a civilian agency created to oversee the project, hired photographer Dorothea Lange, a star of the Depression-era Farm Security Administration photo unit. The wartime agency seemed to be expecting Lange’s work to complement favorable propaganda run in West Coast newspapers. Los Angeles Times stories went on about how smoothly the roundup was going, and how grateful those being displaced were for their government’s lenience: “The evacuees spoke highly of the government policy of keeping families together at Manzanar, explaining that such procedure [sic] meant the least possible interruption in their daily routine.” Coverage painted soldiers as kindly: “May I carry your bag, ma’am?” a Times staffer reported hearing an army lieutenant ask an older Japanese woman.

Lange was supposed to illustrate the benevolent treatment of happy internees, but the reality of the government action and her role in it horrified the photographer. “In contrast to her earlier work for a government social program to aid the poor, Lange now found herself photographing the execution of a government order to incarcerate American citizens based on their ancestry,” historian Jasmine Alinder writes. Lange rebelled, pointing her camera at scenes of dislocation and hardship: piles of luggage, “For Sale” signs in windows of abruptly closed stores, hand-lettered placards in shop windows announcing “I am an American”—disturbing parallels to increasingly familiar images from Europe of Nazi anti-Semitism.

Disheartened, the photographer left the WRA in July 1942. The agency locked away her photos until after the war. “I fear that intolerance and prejudice is constantly growing,” she wrote to Adams in November 1943. “We have a disease. It’s Jap-baiting and hatred. You have a job on your hands to do to make a dent in it—but I don’t know a more challenging nor more important one. I went through an experience I’ll never forget when I was working on it and learned a lot, even if I accomplished nothing.” In a 1961 interview Lange said the WRA had “impounded” and classified her negatives and prints from her days with the agency.

A San Francisco native, Ansel Adams, 41, found wartime frustrating. Though successful starting in the early 1920s with a balance of commercial, editorial, and personal work, he yearned to focus on artistic projects, particularly landscapes. In the 1930s, he had founded the f/64 group with kindred spirits Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. He published books, had museum and gallery shows, and worked for corporate clients. World War II interrupted his burgeoning career. The market for his landscape photography dried up; buyers were not interested in beautiful pictures. He was too old to enlist or serve as a combat photographer. In a letter to Nancy Newhall, acting curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he described his wartime contribution as “photographing Army convoys that visit Yosemite,” training military photographers at Fort Ord, California, and taking “Navy patients out for photographic sessions here in the valley….I have tried unsuccessfully to get into some work relating to the war effort…I certainly would like to be of use. So many things are at stake.”

In autumn 1943, Ralph Palmer Merritt, Manzanar’s new director, contacted Adams. The men had met as members of the Sierra Club. Merritt asked if Adams would be interested in photographing Manzanar residents. The idea, Adams wrote Nancy Newhall, was “to clarify the distinction of the loyal citizens of Japanese ancestry and the dis-loyal Japanese citizens and aliens (I might say Japanese-loyal aliens) that are stationed mostly in internment camps.”

Both categories, noted Adams, faced intense hostility on the West Coast. The project was an opportunity to remind people that America was not at war with all people of Japanese descent—just those who supported Japan’s belligerence. Merritt’s putative project had no funding—Adams would not be working for the WRA. “I cannot pay you a cent,” Merritt told Adams. “But I can put you up and feed you.”

Adams also would have to get to and from Manzanar. Rationing regulations sharply curtailed civilian driving by limiting access to fuel and tires. Once his local rations board authorized Adams to obtain “ample fuel and adequate tires for the hundreds of miles of driving between Yosemite and Manzanar,” he arrived at the camp late in October 1943.

“My first impression of Manzanar was of a dry plain on which appeared a flat rectangular layout of shacks, ringed with towering mountains,” Adams wrote in an autobiography. “Under a low overhang of gray clouds, the row upon row of black tar shacks were only somewhat softened by occasional greenery.” Barbed wire fencing enclosed the camp, and a gatehouse garrisoned by armed guards emphasized its prison-like nature. First glances showed him much of what he had imagined when previsualizing the project, a process he had developed early in his career to enhance his literal and figurative focus no matter what the assignment.

Meeting with Merritt, Adams requested to talk to camp representatives to ask permission for his undertaking. “The world famous photographer,” wrote the Manazanar Free Press, the camp newspaper, “expressed deep interest in doing an accurately representative pictorial of the evacuees, with particular emphasis on the loyalty of the niseis in the center.”

Warmly welcomed by internees, Adams unpacked his camera, a Graflex 4×5—so called because it took a single 4” by 5” sheet of film—and set to work. “He is the man you see wearing jeans and a windbreaker,” the Free Press wrote, “setting up his tripod and camera anywhere and anytime he finds a good subject to snap—be it at the hospital, nursery, mess hall, potato field or baseball field.” Adams was impressed with the center, continued the newspaper, and “his impression of the place far exceeded anything he expected.”

Adams quickly saw past the externals. Yes, those tarpaper shacks signaled “concentration camp,” but within them life was blooming. “The interiors of the shacks, most softened with flowers and the inimitable taste of the Japanese for simple decoration, revealed not only the family living spaces but all manner of small enterprises,” he wrote. “A printing press that issued the Manzanar Free Press, music and art studios, a library, several churches (Christian, Buddhist, and Shinto), a clinic-hospital, business offices, and so on.”

Adams had imagined possible photographic themes: unjust oppression by a government of its citizens, or possibly a propaganda piece illustrating the fine job the WRA was doing. He realized neither of these matched the complex reality of what he was seeing in the camp. The story was the people, and their resilience, a characteristic that allowed a despised and feared minority to adapt to unjust treatment and amid difficult circumstances get on with life. “With admirable strength of spirit, the Nisei rose above despondency and made a life for themselves, a unique macro-civilization under difficult conditions,” Adams wrote. “This was the mood and character I determined to apply to the project.” His subjects were so intent on making the best of their situation that Adams had difficulty documenting life as internees were living it; residents insisted on straightening up any setting he proposed to photograph.

After several sessions photographing at the camp, Ansel returned to Yosemite, processed his sheet film, and made 80 prints examining community life at Manzanar. The first exhibition of this work took place at the camp, where the prints were up for a week in January 1944. “Adams’s interest in the problem of minority racial groups,” wrote the Free Press, “and his desire to present an accurate story of the residents have produced results which depict Manzanar as it exists.” The work and the photographer’s commitment to it touched residents. “For a person like Ansel Adams to come to an internment camp to photograph camp life, where people are pretty bitter for being there, I thought, my gosh, this man is sympathetic to this situation, to the Japanese American people,” wrote Archie Miyatake. “I thought he was quite a man to be doing what he did at the time.”

Angry letters, some from parents of sons lost in the Pacific theater of operations, accused Adams of disloyalty.

After the Manzanar show, the photographs moved east. Nancy Newhall, of the Museum of Modern Art, agreed to exhibit the portfolio. On November 10, 1944, a 61-image series, Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of [the] Loyal Japanese-American Relocation Center, opened at the gallery and ran until Christmas Eve—but without enjoying pride of place. The museum, bowing to anti-Japanese hostility, barred use of the main exhibition space. The photographs were relegated to the museum’s auditorium galleries.

In a press release, Newhall endorsed documentary photography as a tool for healing racial divides: “With the coming of peace, photographers will undoubtedly play an increasingly significant role interpreting the problems of races and nations one to another all over the postwar world.” Adams, she wrote, had taken on that task and was avoiding “the formulas that have developed in documentary and reportage photography… has approached his subject with freshness and spontaneity.”

In time, Newhall was proven correct, but in the short term an America at war was not ready to reconcile with anyone. The exhibition received little media attention. The New York Times buried a short paragraph about the opening on page 17 of a Friday edition but ran no review.

As Adams was preparing for his MOMA show, Tom Maloney, publisher of the U.S. Camera magazine, offered to publish the Manzanar portfolio as a book. Debuting on the exhibition’s heels, Born Free and Equal developed the show’s theme; namely, that those behind the wire at Manzanar and other relocation camps were American citizens, legally indistinguishable from counterparts going about their lives. The book—“the story of loyal Japanese-Americans”—invoked the 14th Amendment’s declaration that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens and shall not be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Adams also quoted Abraham Lincoln: “As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty.” His choice of Lincoln’s remarks suggest Adams regarded the internment of Japanese American citizens as a threat to democracy and a refutation of American ideals.

A turn of the page revealed Manzanar resident Yuri Yamazaki, grinning into the camera, her portrait cropped so that her face fills the frame. She could be any reader’s daughter. Adams captioned the image, “An American School Girl.” There followed a portrayal in words and pictures of a cross-section of American life—newspaper editors, farmers, soldiers, doctors and nurses, accountants and electricians. Subtract the guards and barbed wire, and the reader would find a community that, in nearly every way, was indistinguishable from any American town. To hate this population was as irrational as hating your own neighbors. “Americanism is a matter of mind and heart,” Adams wrote beneath one of his photographs.

Other than his opening references, Adams refrained from commenting directly on the relocation action, though he also quoted Manzanar director Ralph Merritt: “I have not said that the evacuation was JUST, but that it was JUSTIFIED.” Adams chose not to litigate. “Our problem now is not to justify those things which have occurred, but to establish a new and civilized rationale in regard to these citizens and loyal supporters of America,” he wrote. “To do this we must strive to understand the Japanese-Americans, not as an abstract group, but as individuals of fine mental, moral and civic capacities, in other words, people such as you and I…I want the reader to feel that he has been with me in Manzanar, has met some of the people, and has known the mood of the Center and its environment.”

Born Free and Equal was not a success. “It was poorly printed, publicized, and distributed, perhaps to be expected in wartime,” Adams wrote. Distribution was spotty; Ansel accused his publisher of printing too few copies. Even so, the book attracted admirers. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt praised it in her newspaper column: “In case you have not seen it, there is a publication by the United States Camera Publishing Corp. which is worth your looking through…it is one of the publications designed to temper one of our prejudices, and I think it does it very successfully.” Copies of the first edition regularly appear on offer online, some selling for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

After the Supreme Court ruled detention of loyal Japanese American citizens illegal (In re Mitsuye Endo, December 18, 1944), the Pittsburgh Press published a full-page montage of Adams’s Manzanar photos and captions. “The recent order permitting the return of loyal Japanese-Americans to the West Coast brings to an end an unprecedented and poignant chapter in American History,” the afternoon daily declared in an editorial. “After many months of adjusting themselves to camp life, the Nisei must now try as best as they can to shuffle their way back into the stream of American life.”

Adams’s advocacy enraged many countrymen; reports circulated of bookstore customers buying copies of Born Free and Equal in order to burn them. Angry letters accused him of disloyalty, some sent by parents of sons lost in the Pacific theater of operations.

“They were bitter and incapable of making objective distinctions between the Nisei and Japanese nationals,” wrote Adams. “How can you adequately reply to a couple who lost their three sons in the Pacific War?”

Adams also drew fire from friendly quarters. Dorothea Lange derided his project as a whitewash, softening the horror of unjust incarceration with beautiful pictures. In a 1961 interview, Lange faulted Ansel for being ignorant when it came to social justice issues, although she admitted that Born Free and Equal had been a big step for him.

Modern historians tend to echo Lange’s critique, categorizing Ansel’s effort as little more than government propaganda and accusing him of doing far too little for the residents of Manzanar.

These anachronistic readings overlook two points. Although scholars applaud Lange’s adversarial stand against the government, her intransigence resulted in the censorship of her photography. Her work was not published until after the war ended. As an advocate for an oppressed minority, Lange was a failure. Adams’s images enjoyed a MOMA show, were printed in newspapers, and circulated in a book. It was Adams, not Lange, who shaped opinion and won sympathy for Manzanar’s residents.

Adams had little to gain and much to lose by inserting himself into the relocation debate. Wartime America remained virulently hostile toward the Japanese. It took great moral courage to wade into the hysteria and align with the supposed “enemies” interned at Manzanar, a choice that could have blighted the rest of his career. Knowing his unpopular stand threatened both reputation and livelihood, Ansel Adams still took the difficult path, striking a blow against injustice and irrational prejudice.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

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In 1839, Robert Cornelius took the first photographic self-portrait. What in the Philadelphian’s era was an enforced moment of somber motionless reflection, lest blink or breath blur the image being exposed on a chemically treated silver-coated plate, today is casually snapped in a fraction of a second by billions in the form of “selfies.” An innovator in photographic method, Cornelius established a successful portrait studio in Philadelphia at 8th and Market Streets. He soon returned to work at his father’s lighting and lamp firm, but his brief stint as a photographer opened doors, technical and aesthetic, to a revolution in the new medium. Cornelius also had a career as a metallurgist that traces the rise and fall of innovations in another product involving light: lamps.

Cornelius, born in 1809, was son of Christian Cornelius, a watchmaker’s son turned expert in silver plating who at 13 had emigrated from the Netherlands to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is said to have started out in Philadelphia in 1827 by melting down the family silver dishes. The company would create brass lamps, chandeliers, and candlesticks, including a spring-driven candlestick that cleverly kept a wick and its flame at a constant level. The elder Cornelius later moved into more elaborate lighting apparatus. His business enabled him to send son Robert to private schools that trained the youth in chemistry, geology, and drawing. In 1831, Robert, 22, started working for his father.

The young man developed a sideline in 1839 upon learning how French inventor Louis Daguerre had developed a technique for capturing images on pieces of silver-plated metal.

The earliest photographic images necessarily were Parisian cityscapes because the plate needed many minutes to register a sharp exposure on its treated surface; animals and passersby moving across the frame appeared as ghostly smudges. Samuel Morse, seeing an early Daguerre image, wrote in April 1839, “…the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it.” Details of the spectacular process soon reached the United States, where the younger Cornelius may have read about it in the August 1839 issue of the journal of the Philadelphia-based Franklin Institute. He and kindred spirits immediately began experimenting.

Working in his home with a tin box and lenses meant for opera glasses, in October or November 1839 Cornelius exposed and chemically stabilized, or fixed, an image of himself on a silver-coated plate of his own devising. Recognized as the first photographic portrait, this artifact is remarkable not only for its technical excellence—due to its creator’s expertise at fashioning and polishing a fine silver plate—but for the way in which the 30-year-old Cornelius, young and vibrant, seems to be catching himself in the moment, tousled hair, popped shirt collar, and all. Casually positioned in front of the camera, he has used one hand to uncover the lens and then kept still to immortalize himself.

Others were tinkering as well, and newly minted photographers were soon producing what became known as daguerreotypes—images on metal plates about 5”x7” in size set in wood or gilt metal frames. But for an image to be its sharpest, a subject had to be inanimate or able to sit utterly still for five, even ten minutes, producing a stiff and unnatural look. Some photographers had subjects sit with eyes closed or head gripped by an armature; others dusted subjects’ faces with flour to heighten contrast.

While fellow experimenters were working on contrast, Cornelius was tackling the chemistry of recording light.

His circle included Dr. Paul Goddard, who aided Cornelius in figuring how to dramatically cut exposure time. Photographic plates produced images on a thin layer of silver coated with iodine crystals that reacted to light. Goddard suggested adding bromine, which reduced exposure time to as little as 30 seconds.

The men shared the discovery with the local scientific society—once they had cornered the local bromine market—and opened a studio in Philadelphia in May 1840. Two large mirrors positioned outside the studio were angled to direct light within, filtered through purple glass to reduce glare.

Customers needn’t be rich. A daguerreotype could be had for $5, a fraction of what a painted portrait cost. Yet photographs seemed not to reduce demand for painted portraits, and painters often took daguerreotypes of subjects for reference instead of putting customers through hours-long sittings. Rival studios opened.

Perhaps tired of the medium and dismayed by competition, Cornelius closed his studio in 1842. His output is unknown, but a recent survey identified 54 Cornelius daguerreotypes in museums and private collections.

A recent survey of Cornelius images found there to be 54 of them in the collections of private individuals and museums.

Philadelphia became a bastion of studio photography, by 1849 counting more than 40 studios in the city center, where photographers converted lofts to studios with reflective white walls and large windows to direct light.

Cornelius returned to the family business, which was thriving by manufacturing large lamps renowned for their brightness, sturdiness, and beauty and often were fueled by whale oil in a reservoir surrounded by prisms to intensify the glow. The 1840s saw the beginning of whaling’s heyday. Spermaceti, a dense slippery substance from a sperm whale’s head, burned bright and long and was one of the prime products of the hunt. Spermaceti eclipsed a succession of other substances—beeswax, beef tallow, pork lard, colza oil (from rapeseed), oil from whale blubber, and camphene, a derivative of turpentine—during 1840-1870 becoming the preferred lamp fuel.

Cornelius patented a type of solar lamp, said to rival the sun for brightness, that burned lard and salvaged kitchen grease. He was granted more than 20 patents. As gas light gained popularity, the Cornelius company adapted, manufacturing large gas-powered lamps, chandeliers, and ostentatious assemblages known as girandoles, from the Italian for “to turn.”

Christian Cornelius retired in 1851, and Robert Cornelius and relatives carried on. By 1855, the Cornelius company was employing 500 workers in two large factories in Philadelphia. The enterprise is most remembered as the premier manufacturer for grand girandoles marketed worldwide.

Cornelius lamps, installed in state capitols and in the U.S. Senate and three rooms at the White House, were a million-dollar business.

With the discovery in 1859 of petroleum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, much of the market for table lamp fuel shifted to kerosene made from petroleum. According to historical lighting expert Dan Mattausch, one Robert Cornelius patent was for a kerosene table lamp, but a competitor brought out a far cheaper version that won consumers’ favor. In 1877, Cornelius retired, and with him, perhaps, the spark of innovation. The company continued to make showy gas fixtures, sometimes depicting American icons such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson, or a generic hunter.

Robert Cornelius left his mark nonetheless. As he put it in 1839, “I made a likeness of myself, and another one of some of my children in the open yard of my dwelling, sunlight bright upon us, and I am fully of the impression that I was the first to obtain a likeness of the human face.”

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

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General George S. Patton Jr. (November 11, 1885—December 21, 1945), America’s best-known World War II battle commander, was famously nicknamed “Old Blood and Guts” for his aggressive and daring leadership style—an image deliberately cultivated through ostentatious uniforms and profanity-laced “motivational” speeches to his troops. Patton led American soldiers to victory in campaigns from November 1942 to May 1945 in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany.

However, to gain some insight into how Patton himself viewed the war, the Library of Congress’s Patton Papers includes six boxes of photos and negatives that Patton personally took during the war and sent home to his wife, Beatrice.

The 11 “coffee table-sized” photograph albums Beatrice created and donated to the library provide a fascinating snapshot of what caught Patton’s eye as images worthy of capturing in personal photographs. Here’s a look at how George Patton saw World War II.

On September 17, 2022, Historic Congressional Cemetery dedicated The Mathew Brady Memorial, near the famed photographer’s final resting place in the cemetery. The memorial, spearheaded by historian Larry West, celebrates Brady’s work as a photographer, but also reflects the diversity of his subjects and the Washington community. The memorial includes life-sized bronze statues of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, along with a life-sized porcelain photo of Mathew Brady and a bronze replica of his camera.This year, 2022, marks the 200th anniversary of Mathew Brady’s birthday. Brady might fairly be called the father of American war photography.

Although his exact birthday is unknown, Brady is estimated to have been born between 1822 and 1824. This year marks a starting point for recollecting the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Born to Irish immigrants in New York, Brady experienced a meteoric rise in fame thanks to his skill at producing daguerreotype photography, the first publicly accessible form of photography, which was then in high demand. Acclaimed for his remarkably crisp and striking style of photography, he created portraits of many notable people.

Brady’s skills had arguably the most significant impact when applied to war photojournalism. After the Civil War broke out in 1861, Brady became determined to capture the war in photos. Rallying his staff and other photographers, Brady doggedly followed the troops. Alongside the soldiers, Brady experienced the hardships of military life and was even forced to retreat with Union troops to Washington in the wake of the First Battle of Bull Run.

The most haunting wartime images associated with Brady were taken at Antietam. Brady’s associates Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson photographed the carnage left behind from the battle, emphasizing the bodies of dead soldiers left twisted and scattered across the lonely battlefield. Brady shocked — and deeply moved — members of the public when he chose to show these images in an exhibit called “The Dead of Antietam” in his New York gallery in 1862.Brady’s exhibition marked the first time that photographs of war dead on the battlefield were shown to the American public. This changed the way the public viewed the ongoing struggle and arguably altered their perceptions of war and its consequences.“These pictures have a terrible distinctness,” wrote a New York Times correspondent on Oct. 20, 1862. “By the aid of the magnifying-glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished.”

A pioneer of war photojournalism, Brady died in 1896 in New York and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images taken by Brady and his staff during the Civil War, which continue to provide vivid glimpses into the history of war and conflict.

It is one of the most famous photographs in Western history. Five well-dressed outlaws gaze into the camera—two of them destined to be immortalized 69 years later in the Paul Newman–Robert Redford film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They since have been dubbed the “Fort Worth Five,” as they sat for the portrait in a Fort Worth, Texas, studio. But the identity of the photographer and the story of how the picture became a national phenomenon are equal parts myth and misinformation. Interviewed in the August 2008 Wild West, the late Bob McCubbin, a noted collector of Old West photographs and then president of the Wild West History Association, repeated the old canards that the photographer had placed the image “in his studio window” and made copies “for distribution to law enforcement around the country,” neither of which is true. Following is the real story, told for the first time, of how five outlaws came to have their picture taken in a Fort Worth studio on a November day in 1900—and why a sixth man and seventh man were just as important toward making that photograph an icon of Western history.

‘laying low’ in fort worth

It all started with the robbery of the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nev., at noon on September 19, 1900, by a trio of men, members of a gang loosely styled the “Wild Bunch.” The nucleus of the gang consisted of Harvey Logan (aka “Kid Curry”), George “Flat Nose” Currie, Ellsworth “Elzy” Lay, Robert LeRoy Parker (aka “Butch Cassidy”) and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (aka “the Sundance Kid”). Historians have called them the last and greatest Western outlaw band. For roughly five years (1896–1901) the Wild Bunch bedeviled law enforcement, eluding pursuit by some of the most respected lawmen of their day, including Joe LeFors, Lowell Spence, Charles Siringo and William Pinkerton. Although there was some mystery at the time about the identities of the Winnemucca robbers, all evidence points to Butch, Sundance and newcomer Will Carver. (There is no credible evidence that a fourth outlaw, Ben Kilpatrick, was waiting with fresh horses outside of town.) As the robbery involved a national bank, it brought in not only state and local authorities but also the feds; the gang could not just ride across the border into Utah or Idaho to make its getaway.

The boys headed south to drop out of sight and enjoy a little R&R with their loot—more than $32,000 in gold coins. They found their way to Fort Worth via the Fort Worth & Denver City Railway. Fort Worth in 1900 had almost 27,000 people and two busy train stations. The boys could easily have slipped into town without being noticed. In fact, Butch and Sundance, posthumous fame to the contrary, were almost unknown to Texas lawmen at the time.

It was in the little city on the Trinity that the Fort Worth Five came together. Joining Butch, Sundance and Carver were Ben Kilpatrick (aka “the Tall Texan”) and Harvey Logan. At the time Logan had the biggest reputation, being wanted for murder, armed robbery and jailbreaks in no fewer than seven Western states or territories. Everyone, it seemed, was after Logan, if not his confederates, and Fort Worth was a good place to lie low until the heat died down.

The boys spent several weeks (November–December) together in what was part reunion and part “howdy” affair. While they knew each other by reputation, they had never all worked together on the same job, so getting acquainted was an important element of their visit. They made the most of it, partaking of Fort Worth’s lowbrow pleasures, specifically, the girls and the saloons. While making the rounds, they holed up at a nondescript boardinghouse named Maddox Flats. The boys could have afforded any of the city’s first-rate hotels, but they were more comfortable staying in the sort of cheap walk-up favored by those who crave anonymity.

They felt safe on the streets of Fort Worth, 1,600 miles from the scene of their latest crime, and had no reason to suspect that either the Pinkertons or Wells Fargo could track them there. They could carouse in public, throw around money and sleep in real beds. Following their usual pattern, sooner or later they would blow all their illgotten loot or just get antsy to get back to “work,” whereupon they would hit the road and disappear as mysteriously as they had arrived.

An indication of just how safe they felt is that Will Carver tied the knot with Callie May Hunt (aka “Lillie Davis”), a well-traveled prostitute then working for a local madam. Their marriage license is dated December 1, 1900. The other boys preferred to keep their amorous options open at this point.

an ill-considered pose

For reasons unknown, on November 21, a Wednesday, the boys decided to dress up and have their portrait taken in one of the city’s professional studios. (There is no doubt about this date, as it is printed on the individual mug shots subsequently reproduced for the Pinkerton circulars.) They seem not to have been celebrating any particular occasion, unless it was Will and Callie May’s engagement. Perhaps they wanted to hit some of the high-tone uptown saloons such as the Palais Royal, which admitted only “gentlemen.” Or they may have sat for the portrait on a lark, as a keepsake of their visit to Fort Worth. Regardless, such an appalling lapse in judgment must have been liquor-fueled.

The portrait studio they picked was John Swartz’s gallery at 705½ Main. (The 700 block was on the edge of Hell’s Half Acre, an area of cheap saloons and bawdy houses; the “½” part of the address indicates it was upstairs.) Fortytwo-year-old Swartz and brothers David and Charles had been working in the city as photographers since 1885. In 1888, after a three-year apprenticeship with eldest sibling David, John had struck out on his own, and by 1896 he had established himself as a respected photographer. Like many professional photographers of the day he favored an upstairs location to take advantage of natural lighting. John considered himself an artiste, not just a technician, and guaranteed that customers would find his portraits both “artistic and attractive.”

Swartz’s medium was the cabinet card, which had been around since the 1860s. The image was mounted on heavy stock with the photographer’s logo and other information often printed on the front. It was the preferred format for a formal sitting, and John was a master of the studio portrait. In February 1900, Eastman Kodak had introduced the dollar Box Brownie camera, which allowed any yahoo to become a photographer. If the boys had simply bought a Brownie and snapped away, they could have spared themselves a lot of grief. But they opted for the old-fashioned formal studio portrait.

Swartz’s gallery sat above Sheehan’s saloon, which may have been where the boys hatched the portrait idea over a few rounds. The fancy duds they wore did not represent much of an investment for a bunch of high rollers living off stolen loot. They could have purchased the outfits off the rack and added the bowlers for no more than $3 or $4 dollars per man. The nicest men’s clothing store in Fort Worth at the time was Washer Brothers, at Eighth and Main streets, where they would have been treated like gentlemen and still gotten a good price. Regardless of where they got their attire, these were not rented or borrowed clothes.

The boys climbed the stairs on the side of the building to the second floor and entered Swartz’s well-appointed waiting room. There they must have admired examples of the photographer’s work on display. Swartz was running one of his periodic specials, 12 pictures for $1.75. The cost for the same pictures in Kansas City or St. Louis would have been anywhere from $2.50 to $5 per dozen. The boys probably ordered a dozen, took two prints each, and in a burst of generosity let the photographer keep one or two for himself. Or perhaps Swartz just liked the five- man portrait so much he made a copy for himself.

Dressed to the nines and well lubricated, the boys were ready for their close-up and would have agreed with the subsequent assessment of a newspaper reporter that they were a “dudishlooking” bunch. All Swartz had to furnish for the shoot were three chairs and a painted canvas backdrop. He arranged his subjects (although they may have had some say in the matter) with Longabaugh, Kilpatrick and Cassidy seated in front, left to right, and Will Carver (left) and Harvey Logan (right) standing behind them. It’s possible Carver and Logan stood because they were the big shots of the gang, as 19thcentury photographers commonly had the most important member(s) of any grouping stand for a portrait. If that was the case, it is ironic, given how the relative status of the Fort Worth Five later turned upside down. Regardless of his importance at the time, Logan, eyes unfocused and a bowler pushed back on his head, looks about three sheets to the wind.

The boys may have returned the next day to pick up their prints. Swartz probably never saw them again after that, as they skipped town after Will and Callie May got hitched. Perhaps they were beginning to feel the heat of the national manhunt, or maybe they had just grown bored and were ready to move on. In any event they had scratched their itch to pose for posterity. The boys had indulged their collective vanity, had some fun and had no reason to pay a third visit to the studio. For his part, Swartz was so impressed by his portrait of the five strangers that he made the fateful decision to display a copy in a prominent place in his waiting room.

the portrait goes public

Most of the story to this point is conventional. Now, however, the tale enters previously unexplored territory. Wild Bunch aficionados have always claimed that John Swartz placed the photo in his front window, where either a passing Pinkerton operative or Wells Fargo detective recognized the outlaws and arranged to distribute their mug shots across the West. There are two main problems with this scenario. First, no one has ever been able to provide the name of the alleged Pinkerton operative much less explain what he was doing in Fort Worth. Early Wild Bunch historian Charles Kelly suggested the agent was Wells Fargo’s Fred Dodge, but Dodge never makes such a claim in the detailed diaries he kept. Second, no passerby on the street could have seen any photo through the window of Swartz’s second-floor studio; the only way to see examples of the photographer’s work was to go upstairs and enter his waiting room.

Western historians do agree that John Swartz took the picture and that it was the key element in the downfall of the gang. The real story of how the portrait went national is more interesting than either the Pinkerton or Wells Fargo scenario. The first person to recognize the importance of the photo was Fort Worth detective Charles R. Scott, a 21-year veteran of the Fort Worth Police Department who had started out as a beat cop and worked his way up to chief detective by 1900. Scott was in charge of the department’s “Rogue’s Gallery,” mug shots of every perpetrator booked in town, as well as photos sent to Fort Worth by other agencies. To obtain mug shots, city police had to escort prisoners to a professional studio. Swartz was the photographer of record for the department in 1900. It was not glamorous or artistic work, but it provided a steady little income.

It was Scott’s job to take perps down to 705½ Main for their sittings and then return later for their mug shots. He was on one such run when he caught sight of the Wild Bunch photo displayed in Swartz’s waiting room. As a veteran detective and keeper of the FWPD Rogue’s Gallery, he had seen enough wanted circulars of Harvey Logan and Will Carver to recognize them. Scott once boasted to a newspaper reporter, “There is not a thief or smooth man in the country who can drop in here [Fort Worth] without being spotted at once.” On top of that, he had a good secondhand description of the pair from his brother Hamil Scott, who had been the Wells Fargo express agent on the Texas Flyer when it was held up near Folsom, New Mexico Territory, on July 11, 1899, by the Ketchum Gang (Sam Ketchum, Elzy Lay, Will Carver and Harvey Logan). Two of the three were not masked (Carver and Logan?), and as Hamil Scott told superiors afterward, “I would know them anywhere.”

Now something clicked in Charles Scott’s memory. Taking the photo from Swartz’s waiting room, he rushed back to headquarters to check it against his files. He knew or could guess at the identities of three of the men in the photograph (Logan, Carver, Kilpatrick), either from the Folsom robbery or their Texas connection. Someone else would have to identify the other two. Elated at his discovery, Scott quietly raised the alarm. The first thing he learned was that “the birds had already flown the coop.” All he could do was get word out to those who could use the information.

Scott wired the nearest office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, in Denver, whose operatives were definitely interested in his lead. The portrait was what one Pinkerton man, interviewed later by The San Antonio Light, called their “first real break” in tracking down the Wild Bunch. Scott forwarded the photo to them, though not until he had shown it around town, bragging about breaking the case. Pinkerton was not ready to celebrate just yet. It issued the first wanted circulars on May 15, 1901. The only three outlaws from the group portrait to appear on that first circular were Parker, Longabaugh and Logan—each in a cropped mug shot with such vital information as height, build, complexion and eye color. It was thanks to the Pinkerton agency (not John Swartz) that “every law officer and hundreds of watchful civilians got copies of the photograph,” stated one of its operatives years later.

mug shot to manhunt

How significant was the Fort Worth Five photograph? In August 1902 (Mich.) Times The Bay City did a little early-day “Photoshopping” to pull just Longabaugh and Cassidy out of the original, labeling them “the two most desperate bandits in the country.” Four years later The Lexington (Ky.) Herald reprinted the original portrait but added the known fates of the five, their names printed beneath the image. From Texas to the Great Lakes, John Swartz’s photograph had become national news. Who knows how long the Wild Bunch might have continued to operate with impunity if not for the outlaws’ impulsive visit to his studio.

The photo didn’t just break the Wild Bunch manhunt wide open; it also became part of Fort Worth lore, and for years local historians searched old newspapers for anything to confirm the provenance of the picture. Focusing on the period 1901–02, they drew a blank. One mystery was why the Fort Worth papers made no mention of the outlaws’ historic 1900 visit, even after authorities fingered three of them as the men who had held up the Winnemucca bank and pulled other jobs throughout the West. The silence in the newspapers was deafening—and inexplicable. The question of the photo’s provenance became more than just a scholarly debate; it had the potential to cause Fort Worth great embarrassment, given that its multimillion-dollar business district, redeveloped in the 1980s, was dubbed “Sundance Square” in tribute to one-half of the infamous outlaw duo.

Now we can at last verify the Fort Worth provenance of the John Swartz studio portrait: The proof comes from a November 23, 1902, Fort Worth Telegram article naming detective Charles Scott as the man who discovered the photograph and adding that the tip-off for Scott was recognizing Harvey Logan among the group. This newspaper item in turn calls for re-examination of the very history of the Wild Bunch, particularly the pecking order of the Fort Worth Five. It was later writers and filmmakers —starting with Charles Kelly and his 1938 book The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch—who first crowned Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the gang leaders, relegating Logan and Will Carver to supporting roles. But the lawmen who chased the boys in 1900 considered Logan the true head of the Wild Bunch.

Like most newspaper articles, the November 1902 Fort Worth Telegram item scrambled some of the facts. It placed the date of the gang’s visit a year later—after the July 3, 1901, Wagner, Mont., train job—and mentioned only “three pals” in the picture with Logan, not four. But it is clear nonetheless the reporter is referencing the celebrated Swartz portrait.

credit where credit is due

It’s not hard to figure out why the true story behind the famous photo was lost to time. Detective Scott died on April 7, 1902, seven months before local papers broke the story of the outlaws’ historic visit, and by year’s end the gang itself was finished. Authorities in Sonora, Texas, cornered and killed Will Carver on April 2, 1901. Ben Kilpatrick was arrested in St. Louis on November 5, 1901, convicted of passing stolen federal banknotes and sentenced to 15 years in the penitentiary. (He served 10.) Harvey Logan was arrested near Jefferson City, Tenn., in December 1901, escaped from jail in Knoxville in June 1903, then was shot down near Parachute, Colo., in June 1904 after robbing one more train. At the time he was, as historian Jay Robert Nash puts it, “the most hunted outlaw in America.” Butch and Sundance, with the Kid’s paramour Etta Place, wisely skipped the country in early 1901, sailing to South America, where both likely died in a shootout with Bolivian soldiers in November 1908. Their downfall all began with the Fort Worth photo. It’s no wonder a Pinkerton agent dubbed it the “bad-luck picture.”

As for poor Charles Scott, he never got the credit he deserved for putting the soon-to-be famous photo into circulation. In a testimonial by Fort Worth Police Chief Bill Rea at the time of Scott’s death, Rea stated he could not recall “any great cases in which Mr. Scott was responsible for bringing criminals to justice.” Rea did, however, provide the key as to how Scott was able to break the Wild Bunch case wide open: “He knew by sight almost every professional thief in the Southwest.” Unfortunately for Scott’s legacy, by the time the authorities connected all the dots and smashed the Wild Bunch, the detective was no longer around to explain his role in stopping the gang.

As for the other uncredited star of the case, John Swartz continued to operate his photography studio in Fort Worth until 1912 (see another of his photos on P. 16 of this issue), but those were not happy years. He was falling ever deeper into debt, and his marriage was crumbling, leading him finally to sell out to a rival, lock, stock and glass plates. Sometime after 1920, his wife and children gone, he decided to get out of the business completely and leave Texas, returning to the family farm in Mount Jackson, Va., where some 40 years earlier the young man had dreamed of going West to become a professional photographer. Now he was a broken man with no family and no career, only a roof over his head provided by older brother Lemuel. On January 17, 1937, Swartz, 78, died at Manassas, Va. The following year historian Charles Kelly published The Outlaw Trail.

The Swartz brothers left behind a substantial if unacknowledged body of work, all of it Texas-focused. When researchers sought the story behind John’s Fort Worth Five portrait, they always looked in the wrong direction, crediting either the Pinkertons or Wells Fargo with breaking the case and focusing on San Antonio instead of Fort Worth. William Pinkerton even traveled to San Antonio to interview notorious Madam Fannie Porter, reputedly a confidante of the gang, and she filled the famous detective with lots of blarney. He spent no time in Fort Worth. Pinkerton’s flawed investigation became the starting point for waves of Wild Bunch historians who followed—some respected, some not so respected. None could ever fit all the pieces together.

An iconic, if infamous, image

The parade passed by Charles Scott and John Swartz. The only folks ever to cash in on the Fort Worth Five have been the dealers and collectors who buy and sell the copies of the photograph that occasionally come on the market. No one knows how many first-generation images exist, but everyone agrees it’s a seller’s market. The latest sale of an “original” Wild Bunch photo went in 2000 to a Canadian collector for a cool $85,000.

Today the legend of the photograph is too big to be killed off. It will keep its hold on the public consciousness long after this article has been forgotten. That’s the way collective memory works. And, like every legend, it has many versions. The Smithsonian Web site floats the preposterous tale that the boys sent a copy of the photo to the Pinkertons. They were never that drunk. The Web site also relates the more credible story that the boys had the effrontery to send a copy to the Winnemucca bank along with a thank-you note from Butch. The number of copies of the photograph in public and private hands today seem to support the conclusion that the five Wild Bunch members purchased Swartz’s “12-fora-dollar-seventy-five” special.

In 1999 the Smithsonian named the picture one of the iconic images of the American West, and today it resides proudly in the holdings of the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Denver Public Library’s Western History Collection and the University of Oklahoma Libraries’ Western History Collections, among other repositories. Historians frequently request the image as they churn out a never-ending stream of words about the gang. TheWild Bunch shares that rare kind of cult following in Western history enjoyed by such figures, events and places as George Armstrong Custer, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the Alamo.

So give Charles Scott his due as the sharp-eyed detective who first recognized the importance of the picture, but also give credit to photographer John Swartz. Without the iconic image he created with his camera—perfectly capturing the spirit, the look and the defiant confidence of the Wild Bunch— there would be no legend of the Fort Worth Five. Swartz created five timeless celebrities that day. WW

Wild West frequent contributor Richard Selcer and co-author Donna Donnell write from Fort Worth. Suggested for further reading: Butch Cassidy: A Biography, by Richard Patterson; and The Sundance Kid: The Life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, by Donna B. Ernst. Originally published in the December 2011 issue of Wild West.

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The Amos Humiston story resonates like few others from Gettysburg. On July 1, 1863 — Day 1 of the epic, three-day battle — a local resident discovered the body of the 154th New York Infantry sergeant near John Kuhn’s brickyard, north of the town square. The soldier clutched in his hand an image of three children. He carried no identification.

To identify the children and thus reveal the soldier’s name, a doctor had hundreds of cartes-de-visite of the photograph created and distributed. “Whose Father Was He?” read the headline above a story about the image in The Philadelphia Inquirer and other Northern newspapers. The publicity effort worked. Months after the battle, Humiston’s widow identified him after reading a detailed description of the photograph of the children in a religious publication.

More Gettysburg Photo Mysteries

But the Humiston saga wasn’t the only mystery involving Gettysburg photographs. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, burial crews discovered other poignant images — a torn portrait of a fiancée, a blood-spattered image in a captain’s stiff fingers, a baby’s likeness smeared with blood and many others — among bodies, Bibles, scraps of letters, clothing, and weaponry.

In November 1867, a daguerreotype of a woman — in her early 20s with “dark hair, combed back and falling loosely over her shoulders” — was unearthed, along with a soldier’s remains and a cartridge box containing 43 bullet, near the Emmitsburg Road at Gettysburg Based on the location on the battlefield, the grave was believed to belong to a fallen Confederate. As one newspaper reported: “We have been particular in describing the daguerreotype, as it may lead to its identification.”

Identification of this soldier and the image of the young woman, however, were not ascertained. The names of other subjects in photographs found on the battlefield also have been lost to history.

CLoser to Answers

But enough clues have surfaced for us to inch closer to solving two other Amos Humiston-like Gettysburg mysteries. Each involves a Confederate soldier, whose remains — like Humiston’s — were found with a mysterious photograph. We don’t have all the answers yet.

So, jumpstart your brains, log on to genealogy sites, and scour old newspapers. More than 158 years after one Gettysburg photo mystery was settled, you can assist in solving two more.

A Bloody Souvenir

At about dawn on July 4, 1863, the 87th anniversary of the creation of the United States and the day after Pickett’s Charge, Russell Glenn of the 14th Connecticut Infantry searched the battlefield with comrades near the Bloody Angle. The soldiers found a “terrible valley of death”: bloodied and battered enemies, body parts, and the detritus of war.

While some of Glenn’s comrades assisted wounded Rebels, others searched for war trophies, a common activity of soldiers following a battle. Then the 19-year-old corporal happened upon a Confederate lying face up near a boulder, his blue eyes wide open as if staring at the sky.

He is handsome — even noble-looking — and so lifelike that he appears he can speak, Glenn thought to himself about the fallen enemy, perhaps a teen. Then he noticed the gruesome, bloody hole in the Rebel’s chest, perhaps from a bullet or canister, and knew death must have come quickly.

When Glenn stooped to examine the curly-haired Confederate, clad in a gray blouse and coat, he noticed something in his hand, near his left breast. He broke the death grip and examined the object, a daguerreotype of a young woman in her late teens or early 20s. She was clad in a high-necked dress with what appeared to be a brooch pinned near the top. Her hair, parted in the middle, formed a bun. With a Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile, she stared straight ahead. The case was battle-damaged, but the image itself remained unscathed.

Glenn wondered if the photograph was a sweetheart: Did this man stare at the image as he died? Using the Confederate’s coat, the teen wiped blood from the photograph’s glass cover and slipped the souvenir into his coat pocket. Burial crews tossed the remains of the unknown soldier — perhaps from the 16th North Carolina or an Alabama regiment — into a long trench with dozens of his comrades.

Glenn After the Find

Glenn was slightly wounded in the head and face at Gettysburg, severely wounded in the breast at Hatcher’s Run, near Petersburg, and suffered two other war wounds. By February 1865, he had become a 1st sergeant for the hard-fighting unit that had seen action at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Morton’s Ford and elsewhere. But Glenn survived the war and returned to Bridgeport, Connecticut.

As a civilian, Glenn served as a police officer and a truant officer and became an influential member of veterans’ organizations. The war — and the Gettysburg photograph he had brought home with him — remained seared into his brain. In 1911, Glenn gave such a graphic description of Pickett’s Charge to a Grand Army of the Republic gathering that “the audience had but little difficulty in seeing why” Confederates “gladly surrendered after their awful experience.”

Two years later, weeks before Glenn attended a 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg with 14th Connecticut comrades, a Bridgeport newspaper made the daguerreotype subject of a page-one story. “Glenn’s Trophy Tells Tragedy of the Civil War,” the headline read, followed by “Worn Daguerreotype Is Token of Romance Blighted by Conflict” and “Bridgeport Soldier Has Not Sought to Restore It Fearful of Causing Heartaches.”

Concluded the newspaper: “This little incident of a terrible battle, one of a thousand too trivial to be noticed by the historian yet a mighty reason why there should be no more war, remained to be told by the camp-fire and after the war about the fireside.”

After the war, the story explained, Glenn tried to find the young lady in the daguerreotype, which had remained in the veteran’s possession since its discovery. “A woman who lost [a] father, brothers and [a] sweetheart at Gettysburg is believed to be the original of the picture,” the newspaper reported. Glenn was certain of her identity, but he was “fearful of reopening an old wound [and] he refrained from communicating with her.”

Frustrating future historians and amateur detectives, the newspaper offered no name or other clues that could lead to the identification of the woman or the fallen Confederate found with the photo.

In 1906, a copy of the image appeared in the 14th Connecticut regimental history. In the accompanying text, Glenn called the photograph “the most valuable relic of his war experience.”

On Nov. 29, 1919, the morning after he attended the funeral of a friend, Glenn died of heart disease at 74. He left a widow and two sons. No mention of the veteran’s prized Civil War souvenir appeared in his obituary in The Republic Farmer, a local newspaper.

The fate of the image, as well as the names of the subject and owner, remains unknown. Perhaps with deeper research, more information will surface about Glenn and the photograph that had such an impact on his life. He, of course, wasn’t the only veteran to have an extraordinary experience involving an image found on the battlefield.

Postwar Discovery

On a warm day in late July 1878, as Confederate fallen were exhumed on William Blocher’s farm north of Gettysburg, a skull surfaced from a grave; so did a “C.S.A”-stamped belt buckle, a brass “3,” “1,” and “F” from a kepi, and other accoutrements. And, as a Civil War veteran Henry Mark Mingay watched the tedious work, a remarkable artifact appeared between two rib bones: an ambrotype — a photograph produced on a glass plate — of two girls and a young lady.

The woman, with jet-black hair and red-tinted cheeks, appeared to be in her late 20s. The children, between 4 and 10 years old, had the same features as the young lady. Newspapers published contradictory reports on how the photo ended up with Mingay, who was visiting Gettysburg with comrades.

“The case had decayed,” a Gettysburg newspaper reported days after the discovery, “but the picture is still perfect, showing features, clothing, coloring and gilding with the clearness of recent taking.”

Based on the etching on an old grave marker and the company and regimental designations from the kepi, the Confederate served with the 31st Georgia. (Another newspaper account noted that the fallen Rebel served with the 7th Georgia, but Blocher said he was a 31st Georgia soldier.)

On July 1, the 31st Georgia fought across the Blocher Farm north of Gettysburg. But no identification was found with the fallen soldier in Company F, a unit raised in Pulaski County. Could the soldier’s wife and children be the subjects in the ambrotype — “their last gift to papa,” as a Pennsylvania newspaper speculated days after its discovery?

The Story Behind the Blocher Farm Photo

Like Russell Glenn’s relic, the Blocher Farm photograph has a tantalizing history — one intertwined with Mingay, a diminutive man with a keen sense of humor. “A natural ham,” a newspaper reporter once called him.

Born on Dec. 3, 1846, in Filby, England, Mingay immigrated to the United States with his family in 1850, eventually settling in Saratoga, New York. In 1860, he left school to become a shoe shiner and a “printer’s devil” — an apprentice in a newspaper’s printing department. In April 1861, he heard news of the shelling of Fort Sumter from a telegrapher, who told him to sprint like hell to deliver word to his employer.

On Aug. 29, 1864, 17-year-old Mingay enlisted as a private in Company D of the 69th New York — part of the famed Irish Brigade — and served through the rest of the war. In June 1865, he mustered out as a sergeant.

After the war, Mingay was active in veterans’ organizations — it was at Grand Army of the Republic event in Gettysburg that he acquired the ambrotype, possibly from Blocher, who reportedly witnessed the 31st Georgia soldier’s burial by U.S. Army soldiers in 1863. Mingay took the treasure home to Penn-Yann, New York, intent on returning it to the fallen Georgian’s family.

In August 1878, a Gettysburg newspaper reported Mingay planned to “have the facts [about the image] well published, with the view to the restoration of the picture to the family of the deceased.” According to another Pennsylvania newspaper, the photograph was taken to Philadelphia, where copies were to be made and then sent to Georgia “in the hope of discovering the relatives of the dead soldier.” But it’s unknown whether the ambrotype ever made it to Philadelphia or any copies were made and distributed.

In 1897, the photograph’s trail picks up in Colorado, where Mingay had moved 12 years earlier. By the late 1890s, the successful newspaperman was interested in finding a home for his collection of other war relics — mementos that included not only the photograph, but a piece of the tree near where a bullet fatally wounded Union Maj. Gen. John Reynolds at Gettysburg; a penny dug up at Dutch Gap Canal in Virginia; a pen-holder Mingay used at Petersburg; slivers of the 77th New York’s regimental and battle flags; and a piece of overcoat, with the button attached, from the 31st Georgia soldier’s grave.

In August 1897, Mingay donated artifacts — including the prized ambrotype and the button attached to the overcoat— to the State of Colorado for inclusion in a display of war relics at the state capitol in Denver. Even 34 years after the battle, Mingay hoped the soldier’s relatives might claim the photograph.

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Colorado Clues

In the Rocky Mountain News on Aug. 16, 1897, a story about the veteran’s donations included an illustration of the ambrotype with this description: 

“The center person is a lady of apparently 30 years of age, with dark hair, and wearing a check dress, with a white collar. She wears a gold breast-pin and a ring on the third finger of her left hand. On either side of her are two girls … one with dark hair of a lighter tint …. Each of the girls has a gold chain around her neck.”

The frame of the ambrotype was “somewhat discolored,” the newspaper reported, “but the features of the sitters in the portrait are still distinct.”

The day of the story’s publication, the custodian of Colorado’s war relics mailed a copy of the Rocky Mountain News article to Georgia’s adjutant general with a letter seeking assistance in identifying the subjects of the portrait. “I was a soldier in the federal army,” wrote Cecil A. Deane, “and know how greatly the ambrotype will be regarded if its rightful owner can be found. It will afford me great pleasure to assist in restoring it to such person.”

A week later, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reprinted the illustration with details about the ambrotype’s discovery. “Who Claims This Picture?” read the headline. The answer was in the veteran’s own backyard.

In a front-page story in The Denver Post on November 24, 1897, “Mrs. Frank Smith” wept as she stared at the ambrotype during a visit to the war relic museum in Denver. Those are my sisters, the Como, Colorado, woman declared. The soldier it was found with is my brother. One of the sisters in the ambrotype also lived in Como. The newspaper did not report the whereabouts of the other sister.

In 1861, “Mrs. Smith’s brother enlisted in the Confederate army, taking with him the picture answering identically this description of this one,” the Post reported. Added the newspaper: “A peculiar feature of this case is the fact that the man who found the picture, and two of the women whose portraits are on it, live in Colorado.”

But the Post left out many vital details, including: Who was Mrs. Frank Smith? What was her maiden name and names of her sisters and fallen brother? Neither the News nor the Post followed up on their Gettysburg photo stories.

At Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, only three soldiers in the 31st Georgia in Company F — the “Pulaski Blues” — suffered mortal wounds: Privates Samuel Jackson and Thomas Lupo and Sergeant George H. Gamble. Could one of these soldiers be linked to “Mrs. Frank Smith”? Searches on ancestry.com and other genealogy sites have failed to yield a definitive answer. 

In 1914, Mingay — one of the men who inspired this hunt — moved from Colorado to California. Thirty-one years later, the blind widower married again, after a 12-year courtship — his new bride was 68; he was 98. “I’m the luckiest boy in the world,” the oldest member of the Nathaniel Banks Grand Army of the Republic Post of Glendale, California, told reporters after the nuptials.

When Mingay died at 100 in 1947, the local celebrity left behind a daughter, three grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and a Burbank (Calif.) elementary school that bore his name. Like the fallen 31st Georgia soldier, the “Three Young Ladies in the Gettysburg Grave” photograph remained an enigma.

A Big Clue in 2021

In 2021, the most tantalizing clue of all surfaced online — the location of our mystery photograph was revealed as the History Colorado Center museum in Denver. An examination of the image could uncover a name on the plate or another clue. But like wisps of gun smoke on a battlefield, the photograph has disappeared in the museum’s collection. “[A digital copy] of the image that you have requested and paid for is inaccessible to us at this time,” wrote a museum representative.

John Banks is the author of two Civil War books and his popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com). Banks, who never misses an episode of the crime show “Dateline,” loves mysteries. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Tim Page, a photojournalist acclaimed for his work during the Vietnam War, died August 24 at age 78 of cancer in New South Wales, Australia.

Born in Turnbridge Wells, England on May 25, 1944, Page grew up under the care of a foster family after his father, a sailor, was killed in a submarine attack. He left the United Kingdom in 1962 at age 17 to travel the world, leaving a note for his adopted parents saying, “Dear Parents, am leaving home for Europe or perhaps Navy and hence the world. Do not know how long I shall go for.”

A self-taught photographer, Page made his way to Laos, where he became a freelance photographer for UPI during the Laotian Civil War. Mentored by notable photographers Larry Burrows and Henri Huet, he moved to Saigon and began covering the Vietnam War, accompanying U.S. troops on missions and to dangerous locations. He worked on assignment for various major media outlets and publications, such as AP, UPI, and Paris Match.

“The role of war-photographer suited Page’s craving for danger and excitement,” according to his website. Known for his flamboyant personality, he embraced counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s. He is said to have been the inspiration for the drug-tripping photojournalist character portrayed by Dennis Hopper in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” In his famed 1977 book “Dispatches,” author Michael Herr described Page as one among many “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam who festooned his field gear with “freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”

Page was wounded four times in Vietnam. In the wake of an explosion in 1966, Page was badly injured and taken to a military hospital, where pieces of a grenade were removed from his face. He later wrote, “a chunk of grenade was dislodged from my nose, a spiral coil from my temple, and four more bits from lower down.” He was pronounced dead in 1969 after being wounded by the blast of a landmine explosion, but eventually made a full recovery.  

After the war, Page styled himself as a “Gonzo photojournalist,” covering rock music and drug culture. He also continued to cover conflicts, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He later became an adjunct professor of photojournalism in Brisbane, Australia.

He later wrote of his time in Vietnam: “I am not sure if most, even in the depth of the soul-searching hawk and dove debates, really weren’t out there mainly for the hell of it, for the kicks, the fun, the brush with all that was most evil, most dear, most profane… the camaraderie, the sheer adventure of it all, were the biggest isms that could ever frag our hearts and minds.”

The tiny islet of Betio, part of the Pacific atoll of Tarawa, looks every bit the hellscape it was when this photo was taken on Nov. 22, 1943. The sandy hill hid a Japanese blockhouse that U.S. Marines — following the example of 1^st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr., shown at the top of the log stairs — were storming, flamethrowers in hand.

It’s one of the last known photos of Bonnyman, who died on the hill that day. But the charge ultimately succeeded, and Bonnyman was awarded a Medal of Honor. Says his grandson, Clay Bonnyman Evans: “Atop that bunker on faraway Tarawa, he saw himself as simply a Marine with a job to do, like any other.”  

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Featured on this Civil War carte-de-visite are members of the 101st Pennsylvania’s drum corps. The photo’s exact date is unknown, but “Whitehall” on the flag behind the boys means it was taken after the Dec. 16, 1862, Battle of Whitehall, North Carolina. Drummer boys played a vital role during the Civil War. Drumbeats governed Civil War soldiers. Over the din of the battlefield, drum calls were used to transmit commands — the long roll, for instance, was the signal to fall in under arms. In camp, drummer boys summoned the regiment to meals, to muster, drill, and sick call. When on the march, drummers kept up a lively cadence to boost men’s morale.

Learn more about drummer boys and see a portfolio of drummer boy images in our story about Civil War drummer boys.

Photo: Courtesy of Mike Medhurst

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It is perhaps Canada’s most famed photograph from the Second World War. A young boy has broken free of his mother’s restraints to run after his father marching in formation heading off to war.

Captured by Claude P. Dettloff, the photograph, dubbed “Wait For Me, Daddy,” was picked up by the Associated Press and LIFE magazine and came to symbolize familial love and the heartbreak of wartime separation.

It was the last photograph of the family ever together.

“That’s probably the last time we were together as a nuclear family, as they put it today,” Warren “Whitey” Bernard told CTVNews. “We were never together again as a family after that moment.”

While Bernard’s father, Jack, survived the war, his parent’s marriage did not.

Jack was a sergeant in the local militia in Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, but his unit wasn’t activated. So he dropped his rank and enlisted as a private with the British Columbia Regiment, Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles.

“Therein lies the rub,” said Bernard, noting his mother didn’t want his father to join up.

“He was 33 years old, he had a dependent child, and she was madder than a hornet and she wanted him to wait until the BCDs, the B.C. Dragoons, were called up as a regiment and then he would have gone into the army as a sergeant, and of course a sergeant’s pay was twice what a buck private’s pay was,” Bernard continued.

Jack Bernard went on to land at Juno Beach, Normandy, on D-Day and fought in France and in the Netherlands.

He survived World War II, but the marriage didn’t survive the rift.

Jack returned to Canada in October 1945 and, as his train pulled into the station, Dettloff’s photography came full circle when he managed to capture the happy reunion of father and son.

“The day dad came home, my grandfather picked me up and took me to the station,” Bernard wrote in The Guardian. “That was probably the happiest day in my 10-year-old life.”

IT WAS SOME OF THE WAR’S most hellish fighting. On September 13, 1943, with just a few hours’ notice, the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division jumped near the front line to support the Allied landings at Salerno, Italy. Two battalions dug in on the commanding high ground around the town of Altavilla Silentina and withstood withering German counterattacks. 

With casualties mounting, a superior officer suggested that the unit withdraw. The 504th PIR commander, Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, barked back: “Hell no! We’ve got this hill and we are going to keep it.”

That was typical of the action endured by the 504th PIR—which later adopted the nickname “Devils in Baggy Pants.” The aftermath of these moments are captured in photos taken by then-paratrooper Carl Chamberlain. The sergeant from Schenevus, New York, was in the thick of the fighting at Altavilla, which helped secure the beachhead at Salerno and allowed American and British soldiers to move inland. He also made a combat jump in Sicily in 1943 and took part in an amphibious landing at Anzio in 1944, where he was injured, before being transferred to an aerial resupply unit, the 334th Quartermaster Supply Depot Company.

When the fighting had ceased, Chamberlain took photos of the carnage around him with a Kodak camera he had bought just before jump school. The young soldier snapped images of devastated landscapes, destroyed equipment, downed warplanes, and roadsides lined with graves of the fallen across Italy and France, where he saw action with the 334th. His photos also depict American soldiers at rest, villagers celebrating liberation, and Allied tanks rolling through Italian and French hamlets. All told, the photos offer a fresh and personal view of Europe at war.

Chamberlain, who died in 1993, left his 900-plus wartime photos to his son, Michael, who recently donated them to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Those images are now being conserved and cataloged so they can eventually be posted online. For information about the Veterans History Project, visit www.loc.gov/vets. 

Michael Chamberlain hopes to learn more about the photos shown here, including the names of soldiers and details about the locations. If you recognize someone or someplace, contact him at: Carl.Chamberlain.WW2@gmail.com.

With the 504th in Sicily and Italy and the 334th in France, Carl Chamberlain, like so many others, did his part to ensure victory—and left behind the photos that prove it.

we salute you

Sicilian children stand in celebration with American soldiers atop a destroyed German tank. The photo was taken in Sicily, likely in March 1944, after Chamberlain returned there by convoy to pack up the 504th’s left-behind gear and belongings.

GROUNDED

Chamberlain’s image of a skeletal German Heinkel He 111 bomber missing its mid- and tail sections is probably also from Sicily in March 1944. The damage was likely the result of an airfield bombing.

TREASURE LOST…

Forlorn-looking English grave markers dot a hillside in Italy near Monte Cassino 

…AND FOUND

Civilians clamber on a dead German tank at an unknown location in France in fall 1944. By then, Chamberlain had been transferred to the 334th Quartermaster Depot Supply Company. 

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME

Two unidentified G.I.s pose with an unexploded bomb in front of a damaged German airplane in Sicily.

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BIG MOUTH

A vehicle emerges from the hold of LST-994 on August 16, 1944—the day after the invasion of southern France began.

FROM THE SHADOWS

Members of the French Resistance—by then known as the French Forces of the Interior—assemble on a street in Nice, France, after the city’s August 28, 1944, liberation.

PILING ON

An American reconnaissance vehicle from an as-yet unidentified army unit receives a raucous welcome in Dole, France, in September 1944.

FOR THE FRONT

Men of the 334th—from left to right: Sergeant Robert Hall (standing), Corporal Cyrus R. Peters, Corporal Pisky, and Private O. P. Peter (full names unknown)—pack .30-caliber ammunition at their base in Dole in February or March 1945 in support of the Seventh Army’s advance across Germany’s Rhine River.

HOMEWARD

Chamberlain (right) and technical sergeants Price and Hale wait to board a train in eastern France. Their destination: the port at Marseille—and home.

All images: Estate of D. Carl Chamberlain © 2022, except where noted

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Since the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft in 1903 and the first wartime use of aircraft for reconnaissance and bombing in 1911, military aviation has grown exponentially. With that rapid development has come a plethora of designs intended for an ever-expanding menu of roles. As the state of aircraft technology has advanced, so has the quest for greater size, speed, maneuverability, range, armament and load capacity.

The field of aircraft design continually reinvents itself to accommodate innovations in structure and engines. In the case of military aircraft, the fundamentals of flight must coexist with the need to incorporate cameras, bombs, guns and/or missiles. When the emphasis falls on the military task, aeronautical considerations are sometimes of secondary importance.

Thus it was perhaps inevitable that both factors—basic airframe and payload—could inspire deviant and even grotesque designs that in retrospect left posterity scratching its head. These examples represent but a fraction of the eccentric aircraft initially perceived as game changers only to fall by the wayside of advances in military aviation.

“What were the designers thinking?” one might ponder. Often the answer was war—or at least a Cold War—during which the quest for a military edge prompted air forces to give any promising proposal a whirl. The failure of many such experimental designs was no doubt attended by that universal excuse, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” MH

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Bears: The Mighty Grizzlies of the West, by Julie Argyle, Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2021, $50

On my rambles west I have seen a dozen or more bears relatively close-up. Almost every time it has provided the right kind of adrenaline rush, as none of the bruins charged me, and I walked away feeling rewarded. One time, though, in northern Montana, the bear I saw a few bushes away had the pronounced shoulder hump and “dished” facial profile of a grizzly. No, it didn’t charge, but my nervous system still went into overdrive, releasing waves of adrenaline as I fled. In short, this particular bruin scared the $#*& out of me.

Today I’m not into hiking, let alone camping, in grizzly country. I am, however, still into grizzlies and respect anyone helping to ensure they’re around for future generations. Like many people, most far braver than me, I find these iconic symbols of power and strength fascinating. A few years ago I did see a mother grizzly and two cubs on a hillside in Yellowstone National Park—albeit through a telephoto lens set atop a fellow visitor’s sturdy tripod. Perfect. Seeing Julie Argyle’s stunning, mostly close-up shots of grizzlies in Yellowstone is the next best thing for one who, apparently unlike this professional photographer, has had a few grizzly nightmares (never mind the research suggesting a person is far more likely to be killed by a bee than a bear).

No detailed grizzly history here or photos of grizzlies terrorizing anyone on two legs. But the author does introduce readers to Grizzly 791 (born in 2011), whom Argyle witnessed taking down a six-point bull elk in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley. The author also presents a few named grizzlies—including Raspberry, to whom the book is dedicated (“The one who will be embedded in my heart forever.”); Snow (“What a blessing it was to have watched her grow from that little cub into a beautiful adult grizzly”); and Snaggletooth, who has a genetically deformed mouth. Argyle’s stunning photos send the message loud and clear this intelligent, impressive species deserves our protection. I doubt anyone who leafs through this handsome book will experience an adrenaline rush, but they likely will feel rewarded, and they won’t even need bear spray.

—Editor

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