William Henry Jackson: Snowmelt, Glass Plates and Proof of Yellowstone

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

William Henry Jackson was born in 1843 in Keeseville, New York, and learned painting from his mother, a skilled watercolorist; by 19 he was known as a prodigy. He enlisted in the 12th Vermont Infantry in 1862, guarded a supply train at Gettysburg and mailed home sketches of camp life. After a broken engagement to Caroline Eastman he went west, worked as a bullwhacker on the Oregon Trail, and in 1867 opened a photography studio in Omaha with his brother, photographing Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, Ho-Chunk and Omaha people. Union Pacific hired him in 1869, and Ferdinand Hayden brought him on the 1870 and 1871 surveys.

Using the wet plate collodion process with glass plates as large as 18 by 22 inches, he washed plates in 160-degree hot springs at Yellowstone and in melted snow in the Rockies. His photographs and Thomas Moran's paintings went to Congress, which made Yellowstone the first national park in March 1872. After the Panic of 1893 he toured the world with the World's Transportation Commission, then sold some 10,000 negatives to the Detroit Publishing Company and managed its photochrom plant. He painted murals for the Interior Department, advised on Gone with the Wind, and died in 1942 at 99.

• A pack mule fell on a trail and shattered a month of negatives, so he went back and reshot them, including the Mount of the Holy Cross.
• Exposures could run from five seconds to 20 minutes, judged without a light meter.
• From 1894 to 1896 he took more than 900 photographs across North Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia, East Asia and Russia.
• Detroit Publishing printed up to seven million images a year from limestone blocks, one per color, before entering receivership in 1924.
• At 95 he attended the 75th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg, and Mount Jackson in Yellowstone bears his name.