Jackson, William Henry
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Wikipedia-Article "William Henry Jackson"
- See Honoré Jackson for the Canadian revolutionary.
William Henry Jackson (1843 - 1942) was an American photographer, painter and adventurer famous for his images of the American West.
After his boyhood in New England, Jackson fought in the American Civil War, including the battle of Gettysburg, then joined a wagon train heading west on the Oregon Trail in 1866-67. In 1869 he won the commission from the Union Pacific Railroad to document the scenery along their route for promotional reasons. The following year, Jackson got a last-minute invitation to join the U.S. government survey of the Yellowstone River and Rocky Mountains led by Ferdinand Hayden. Painter Thomas Moran was also part of the expedition, and the two artists worked closely together to document the Yellowstone region. Hayden's surveys were annual multidisciplinary expeditions meant to chart the largely-unexplored west, observe flora, fauna, and geological conditions, 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. He traveled with as many as three camera-types-- a stereographic camera, a "whole-plate" or 8x10" plate-size camera, and one even larger, as large as 18x22". These cameras required fragile, heavy class plates, which had to be coated, exposed, and developed onsite, before the wet-collodion emulsion dried. Without light metering equipment or sure emulsion speeds, exposure times required inspired guesswork, between five seconds and twenty minutes depending on light conditions. Preparing, exposing, fixing, washing then drying a single image could take the better part of an hour. He carried his equipment on the backs of mules. The weight of the glass plates and his portable darkroom limited the number of possible exposures on any one trip, and these images were taken in primitive, roadless, and physically challenging conditions. Once when his 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 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. He continued traveling on the Hayden Surveys until the last one in 1878. He later established a studio in Denver, Colorado and produced a huge inventory of national and international views. Commissioned to photograph for western state exhibitions at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, he eventually produced a final portfolio of views of the just-shuttered "White City" for Director of Works and architect Daniel Burnham. 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; his pictures and reports were published by Harper's Weekly magazine. He returned to Denver and shifted into publishing; in the early 1900s, he sold his entire stock of negatives and his own services to the Detroit Photographic Company, a mass-producer of pictures ranging from postcards to mammoth-plate panoramas. The company failed in the '20s, and Jackson's negatives eventually 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 1924, and produced murals of the Old West for the new U.S. Department of the Interior building. He also acted as a technical advisor for the filming of Gone with the Wind. In 1942, he was honored by the Explorer's Club for his 80,000 photographs of the American West. Jackson died at the age of 99. Recognized as one of the last surviving Civil War veterans, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.