Troy's Contribution to the Wild West
By Don Rittner

William Henry Jackson is well known as one of the most respected landscape photographers of the American West. Jackson took more than 50,000 photographs of the West between the years 1880 through 1920. He also found time to write and publish more than 50 books, articles, albums, manuscripts, and his autobiography.

Born on April 4, 1853, in the Adirondack village of Keeseville, New York, he was only four years old when the announcement of photography was made.

His early interest in photography came from his father, George Hallock
Jackson, a blacksmith in Keeseville, and who was the first to buy a camera. After losing interest in the new medium, he gave it to his young son. His mother Harriet was a painter and instilled in young William an appreciation for art. In 1844, the family moved to Georgia and nine years later, in 1853, the family moved to Troy. His father became a wagonmaker at 7 Fulton Street.

While a teen in Troy, young Jackson took his drawing talent and designed display cards for a local pharmacy and other stores, and painted landscapes on screens. He was hired in 1858 by the ambrotypist (early photographer) Christopher C Schoonmaker (282 River Street) as a retouching artist. Here he learned his craft until he landed another job in Rutland, Vermont, for the photographer Frank Mowry where he also retouched photographs and learned to tint them in full color as well as the entire photographic process.

Jackson cut his career short in 1862 to join the Twelfth Vermont Infantry during the Civil War but resumed his tinting and creating original oil paintings after the war. He was hired for $25 a week by the leading photographer of Burlington Vermont, but left Vermont after breaking up with his fiancé.

He moved to New York City in 1866 but soon headed west with a Civil War buddy Ruel Rounds, finally landing in Omaha, Nebraska where he became an assistant in Hamilton's Gallery, which he later purchased along with another. After inviting his brother to join him, they joined the two studios into one company, Jackson Brothers, Photographers. It was the same time he began photographing the first images of the Pawnee, Otoe, Omaha, Winnebago, Ponca and Osage Indian tribes. Some 3000 glass plate negatives of these were given later to the Smithsonian Institute.

Jackson Married Mollie Greer in Omaha on May 10, 1869 and six days later left for Cheyenne to begin photographing. He was commissioned in 1869 by the E. & H.T. Anthony & Company to supply them with 10,000 stereoviews of the American West. The following year, he joined Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, head of the US Geological Survey as official photographer and stayed with him until 1878. During this period he photographed for the first time the Old Oregon Trail, Yellowstone, Mammoth Hot Springs, Tower Falls, the Rocky Mountains, and Mesa Verde, to name a few.

It has been written that because of his images of Yellowstone, Congress established that Yellowstone should be set aside forever as a national park. President Grant signed it into law on March 1, 1872. Jackson continued for the next few years traveling and photography and compiled a tremendous set of images including 30,000 negatives of just railroads.

In 1883, he became his own corporation, the W.H. Jackson Photograph and Publishing Company, Inc. and published several volumes of images on Mexico and Colorado. While traveling with the World's Transportation Commission to the Near and Far East and other parts of the world, from 1894-96, he was known as the "Great American ambassador." In 1897, he was offered a job with the Detroit Publishing Company, a well-known publisher of stereoviews and postcards. He became a major stockholder and chief photographer of the company and was instrumental in bringing the Swiss invented Photochrom process (an elaborate way to print color on postcards) to America. The Detroit firm was the only American company to license the process. However, by 1903, he put his camera away to become supervisor of more than 40 people until 1924 when the company experienced financial difficulties.

He relocated to Washington D.C. and later NYC to become the Research Secretary for the Oregon Trail Memorial Association, and later hired by the Roosevelt administration to paint murals of several surveys of the 1870s 80s. He continued producing paintings, selling his negatives, and even acted as a technical advisor in the filming of the classic movie Gone with the Wind. He died from complications of a fall on June 30 1942, at the age of 99. His work, which includes photographs, watercolors, oils, and sketches, continues to be revered today.