145
ested primarily in recording visual information without
any attempt to achieve dramatic visual effect. Bell was
clearly uninterested in exploring the aesthetic potential
of photography, and when he abandoned the expedition
in he also abandoned whatever personal commitment to
the medium he may have had.
Will Stapp
See Also: Gardner, Alexander; and William Bell.Further Reading
Charlton, John. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”:
Alexander Gardner’s Across the Continent on the Union Pa-
cifi c Railway, Eastern Division Photographic Series. Kansas
History, vol. 20 no. 2 (Summer 1997), 116-128.
Colorado College Tutt Library: Special Collections. William
A. Bell Papers: Part 1, Ms 0257 and Part 2, Ms 0306, http://
coloradocollege.edu/library/SpecialCollections/Manuscript/
Bell/html.
Current, Karen. Photography and the Old West. New York: Harry
N. Abrahms, Inc., in association with the Amon Carter Mu-
seum of Western Art, Ft. Worth, TX, 1978), 48–55.
Danly, Susan. “The Railroad and Western Expansion: Across
the Continent.” In Brooks, Johnson. An Enduring Interest:
The photographs of Alexander Gardner. Norfolk, VA: The
Chrysler Museum, 1992, 83–95.
Pitts, Terence. William Bell: Philadelphia Photographer. Master
of Arts Thesis, University of Arizaona, Tucson, 1987.BELL, WILLIAM H. (1833–after 1880)
American photographer
William H. Bell was born near Fredericksburg Vir-
ginia, into a family of photographers—his father and
his four brother brothers were all in the business. The
Bells moved to Washington, DC, in the early 1860s
and opened a studio, F.H. Bell & Brothers, which
employed all the sons at one time or another. Charles
Milton Bell (1848–1893), the youngest son, took over
Bell & Brothers in 1874, and within a short time the
C.M. Bell studio became one of Washington’s leading
photographic fi rms. By 1870, however, William H. Bell
had left Bell & Bros and relocated to Baltimore, where
he opened his own studio. He remained in business there
as a local photographer until at least 1880, when he is
listed in the Federal Census. Nothing further is known
of his life or career.
William H. Bell is a very minor fi gure in the history
of photography, worth noting only because the similar-
ity of their names and the fact that they were both in
Washington, D.C., at the end of the American Civil War
have led some modern historians to confuse and confl ate
him with the British-born Philadelphia photographer
William Bell (1830–1910), a major fi gure because of
his work for the Army Medical Museum (1865–1867)
and the Wheeler survey (1872).
William Stappand made both men very rich. Bell himself founded the
town of Manitou, which became an internationally fa-
mous health resort, and he lived there until 1890, when
he retired to England, where he died in 1921. Briarhurst,
the estate Bell built in Manitou, remains one of the
town’s major landmarks and tourist attractions.
Although William Abraham Bell one of the fi rst to
photograph in the diffi cult conditions of the American
West, it cannot be said that he had a signifi cant impact
as a photographer. He never mastered the wet-plate
process, and in the six months or so he was active as a
photographer, made only a limited number of images,
most of which were imperfect and virtually none of
which were seen by the contemporary public, at least
not as original prints. Only two Bell photographs—the
one of the body of Sgt. Wyllyams and one of an
agave plant—were included in the portfolio of 127
photographs entitled Across the Continent on the Kan-
sas-Pacifi c Railroad (Route of the 35th Parallel) that
Gardner produced for the Kansas-Pacifi c Railroad (and
of the four largely complete examples of this very rare
portfolio known, all but one is missing the Wyllyams
photograph). New Tracks in North America is therefore
the major reference to Bell’s photographs, since its
two volumes are illustrated with lithographs and wood
engravings copied from photographs, many of them
after Bell’s photographs (and so credited), some after
Alexander Gardner’s (but not credited).
New Tracks is the most extensive contemporary ac-
count of Western exploration written by a survey pho-
tographer, but it is primarily an illustrated travel book
that provides disappointingly little information about the
trials and tribulations of photographing in the fi eld that
would have been useful to a contemporary or insightful
to a modern photographic historian. Bell, however, took
pains to acknowledge John C. Browne’s tutelage, and he
included Browne’s formulas for coating and developing
plates and for sensitizing papers in an appendix because
they “did me good service all through my trip,” blaming
the West’s exceptionally dry climate and alkaline water
for the poor quality of his negatives.
Very little of Bell’s work survives. In addition to
the fi ve prints made by Gardner in the extant copies of
Across the Continent, the thirty-seven vintage albumen
prints in the collection of the Colorado Historical So-
ciety (Bell’s own set), the few vintage albumen prints
in the collection of the U.S. Geological Survey, and the
several prints (including vintage enlargements) formerly
in the collection of Arnold Crane and now at the J.Paul
Getty Museum constitute the only known examples
of William Abraham Bell’s original photographs. The
prints at the Colorado Historical Society are all trimmed
to an oval, measure approximately 5 ½ × 3 3/8 inches
(13.5 × 86 cm), and are the work of a photographer inter-