William Henry Jackson

Photographer, born in Keesville, New York, USA. Photographer for seven US Geological Surveys of the Territories (1870–8), he travelled by mule to take the first pictures of Pike's Peak, Yellowstone, and Mesa Verde Mountain.

William Henry Jackson (April 4, 1843 - June 30, 1942) was an American painter, photographer and explorer famous for his images of the American West.

Jackson was born in Keeseville, New York, on April 4, 1843 (the year, when Francis Scott Key died), as the first of seven children to George Hallock Jackson and Harriet Maria Allen talented water-colorist, a graduate of the Troy Female Academy, later Emma Willard School.

After his boyhood in Troy, New York and Rutland, Vermont, in 1862 Jackson guided by patriotic fillings joined as a private in Company K of 12th Vermont Infantry and fought in the American Civil War, including the battle of Gettysburg, then returned to Rutland, VT, where he eventually got into creative crisis as a painter in post-Civil-War American society.

In 1866 travelling by Union Pacific Jackson reached its end, a point some hundred miles west of Omaha, where he joined as a bullwhacker a wagon train heading west to Great Salt Lake, on the Oregon Trail.

Going off for three or four days as "missionary to the Indians" around Omaha, Jackson made his famous photographs of the American Indians: Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Winnebagoes and Omahas.

In 1869 Jackson won the commission from the Union Pacific Railroad to document the scenery along their route for promotional reasons. Hayden's surveys (accompanied usually by a small detachment of the U.S. Cavalry) were annual multidisciplinary expeditions meant to chart the largely-unexplored west, observe flora (plants), fauna (animals), and geological conditions (geology), and identify likely navigational routes, so Jackson was in a position to capture the first photographs of legendary landmarks of the West.

Jackson worked in multiple camera and plate sizes, under conditions that were often laughably difficult, photography was based on the collodion process invented in 1848 and published in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. Jackson traveled with as many as three camera-types-- a stereographic camera (for stereoscope cards), a "whole-plate" or 8x10" plate-size camera, and one even larger, as large as 18x22".

Preparing, exposing, developing, fixing, washing then drying a single image could take the better part of an hour. His photographic division of 5-7 men carried photographic equipment on the backs of mules and rifles on their shoulders - Siouxess still made scalping - Jackson's life experience (as military, as peaceful dealing with Indians) was welcomed. Once when the mule lost its footing, Jackson lost a month's work, having to return to untracked Rocky Mountain landscapes to remake the pictures, one of which was his celebrated view of the "Mount of the Holy Cross."

Despite these difficulties Jackson came back with photographic evidence of western landmarks that had previously seemed fantastic rumor: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of Yellowstone, Colorado's Rockies and the Mount of the Holy Cross, and the uncooperative Ute Indians. Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone helped convince the U.S. Congress to make it the first National Park in March 1872.

Jackson exhibited photographs and clay models of Anasazi dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Thrust into financial exigencies by the Panic and Depression of 1893-95, Jackson accepted a commission by Marshall Field to travel the world photographing and gathering specimens for a vast new museum in Chicago; Later, in 1936 Edsel Ford backed by his father Henry Ford bought Jackson's 40,000 negatives from Livingstone's estate for "The Edison Institute" known today as Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Eventually, Jackson's negatives were divided between the Colorado Historical Society (views west of the Mississippi), and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all other views).

Jackson moved to Washington, D.C.

In 1942, he was honored by the Explorer's Club for his 80,000 photographs of the American West.