J

765

JACKSON, WILLIAM HENRY

(1843–1942)
The photographs which earned William Henry Jack-
son an important place in photographic and American
history were made in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, but he continued an active life well into the
next century with his images reaching an ever wider
audience through color post cards, publications, and
exhibitions. Unlike other pioneer photographers of the
West, Jackson became a living legend.
Born in Keeseville, New York, on April 4, 1843,
Jackson credited his mother with providing watercolor
instruction and with introducing him to Chapman’s
American Drawing Book. Following school graduation
in 1858, he became a retoucher and colorist for a Troy
photographic studio, and two years later he was similarly
employed in Rutland, Vermont.
With the onset of the Civil War, Jackson enlisted in
a Vermont regiment and served as a staff artist. Honor-
ably discharged in 1863, he returned to the Rutland
studio, but the following year he became a studio artist
in Styles’Gailery in Burlington, Vermont. Here, his
cultural horizons broadened, but a broken engagement
resulted in an abrupt departure for New York, where he
and two buddies then headed westward toward Montana
silver mines. He drove oxen, worked as a farm hand
in Utah, and unsuccessfully sought work in California
before abandoning the mining quest to head eastward.
After driving wild horses to Julesburg, Wyoming, and
boarding them on a freight train to Omaha, Nebraska,
he found a job in that city as a colorist in the Hamilton
Gallery. With help from his father, he bought out this
photographic studio along with the competitor in 1867,
and the next year he formed Jackson Brothers, Photog-
raphers, with his brother Ed.
Realizing that studio work was not his forte, Jackson
photographed both landscapes and Native Americans

as he followed the route of the yet unfi nished Union

Pacifi c Railroad in 1868. He used the cumbersome wet

plate process.

The Union Pacifi c and the Central Pacifi c tracks fi -

nally met at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869,

but Jackson was in Omaha that day marrying Mollie

Greer. Dr. Ferdinand V. Hayden, Director of the U. S.

Geological and Geographical Survey saw Jackson’s

work, and the following year included him, without

salary, on the 1870 expedition along the Old Oregon

Trail through Wyoming.

Hayden, like fellow surveyor and geologist Clarence

King, followed John Ruskin’s aesthetics, so he viewed

Jackson’s detailed work as both scientifi c document

and artistic statement. Painter Sanford Gifford was also

with the Survey. For the 1870 Wyoming expedition,

Jackson used a whole plate (6½" × 8½") camera, and

photographed both views and Native Americans, as

Hayden wanted records of what was wrongly believed

to be a vanishing people. Jackson usually photographed

Indians in a straight-forward manner, though sometimes

with studio props. His later photographs of the Moquis

pueblo show the native people in their environment.

Some of Jackson’s most memorable photographs were

made on the 1871 expedition to Yellowstone. Accom-

panying the party was the painter Thomas Moran, who

like Gifford, infl uenced Jackson’s photography. Jackson

photographed the geysers and hot springs with a stereo-

scopic camera and with an 11" × 14" camera (imperial

plate size). One of the legends surrounding Jackson was

that the Yellowstone photographs swayed legislators to

vote in favor of making this area the fi rst National Park.

Howard Bossen, however, has effectively demonstrated

that Jackson’s photographs were but one factor in a

powerful lobbying effort to preserve these lands.

Salaried since 1871, Jackson remained with the

Hayden projects until the Survey was disbanded in