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Wyoming Revisited
Rephotographing the Scenes of Joseph E. Stimson
By Michael A. Amundson University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2014 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-305-1
CHAPTER 1
J. E. Stimson, Wyoming Photographer
Between 1889 and 1948, Joseph Elam Stimson of Cheyenne photographed Wyoming and the American West, producing more than 7,500 images of scenic landscapes, mining, railroads, community life, ranching and farming, and tourism. Most of these shots were made on 8 x 10-inch glass plates and are artistically composed and incredibly sharp. They are not a cross-section of the Progressive Era West but instead are promotional photographs, specifically composed and created for Stimson's various employers, including the Union Pacific Railroad, the Wyoming State government, and the Bureau of Reclamation. On many of the images, Stimson placed a small stamp, circumscribed by the boundaries of a sun, that proclaimed "J. E. Stimson, Artist, Cheyenne, Wyo." He was indeed an artist, as he carefully composed and then often hand-colored his prints in an era long before the advent of color film.
J. E. Stimson was born in Virginia in 1870 and spent most of his childhood in the southern Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina. At age thirteen he moved with his family to Pawnee City, Nebraska, southeast of Lincoln, near the Missouri and Kansas borders. Three years later he left for Appleton, Wisconsin, to work as an apprentice for his cousin, photographer James Stimson. While in Appleton, he learned the requisite skills of portrait photography and the details of both the wet-plate and the newer dry-plate negative processes. In 1889, J. E. Stimson left Wisconsin and moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, probably at the suggestion of two brothers who worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. He was only nineteen. Wyoming became a state in July 1890, and by that October, Stimson had made a deal to purchase the studio and equipment of Cheyenne photographer Carl Eitner. He renovated the studio and within two weeks began running advertisements in the Cheyenne Daily Leader that read "Go to Stimson the Photo Artist for Pictures." Four years later he married Anna Peterson, and in 1895 they had the first of what would be three daughters.
Throughout the 1890s, Stimson worked primarily as a studio portrait photographer. According to biographer Mark Junge, his clients included the area's earliest citizens, as well as folks from outlying farms and ranches. An early account ledger indicated that Stimson often scheduled up to six sittings in a single day and sometimes traveled to patrons' homes to photograph them. Although most of these glass plates were accidentally broken in the 1930s when a shelf collapsed, the small surviving sample shows the usual small-town portrait assortment, including individuals, families, and groups such as cowboys on roundups, politicians, fraternal organizations, athletic teams, and social clubs.
Although George Eastman had introduced his flexible-film, handheld Kodak to the masses in 1888, professional photographers like Stimson relied on a large-format, 8 x 10-inch view camera that captured images on dry-emulsion glass plates. For Stimson, this meant a wooden camera mounted on a heavy tripod. To take a picture, he would set up the camera, select the lens, open the diaphragm to a wide aperture to let in the most light, and then step under a black cloth behind the camera to compose and focus the image on the 8 x 10-inch ground glass. Once the composition was secure, he would slide a holder containing two covered sheets of unexposed glass into the camera's back, stop down the diaphragm and set the shutter speed for the correct exposure, remove one of the glass plate covers, and trip the shutter. He would return the plate's cover to protect his latent image, remove the plate holder, and then start the whole process over for the next image. The process was slow and deliberate. All exposures were more or less staged.
No records describe Stimson's exact development and printing processes, but standard practices of the time are basically the same ones used by generations of black-and-white photographers right up to the digital era. After making his exposures in the field, Stimson carried his glass negatives back to Cheyenne and developed them in his studio darkroom. After mixing his chemicals to a predetermined temperature and pouring them into large tanks, he would have had to turn off all his lights to work in total darkness. Development began by removing the exposed glass plates from their holders and securing them into hangers. He then set about ten hangers in the first tank that contained developer. After a set amount of time, he would have removed the hangers and plates from the first tank and placed them for a brief time into a second tank containing water that halted the development process. He then moved the hangers and plates into a third tank that contained sodium hyposulfite, or "hypo," which "fixed" the image onto the glass. At this point Stimson could turn on the darkroom lights and finally inspect the images he had made sometimes weeks prior. After a wash in a fourth tank containing water, Stimson would have let the plates dry, removed them from their hangers, and prepared them for printing.
Printing glass plates would also have been remarkably similar to the black-and-white film printing process still used today. The one main difference was that because Stimson shot with 8 x 10-inch glass plates, he did not have to use an enlarger for 8 x 10-inch prints but could simply "contact print" his images by setting his negative plate on top of a piece of photographic paper, exposing it to light for a predetermined period, and then developing it. At that time, printing paper came in different contrast grades, so to increase the contrast he would have had to select a different sheet of paper. When he wanted larger sizes, Stimson would have placed a plate into an enlarger and projected the negative onto a big piece of photographic paper, exposed it, and then developed the print. Either way, once the photographic paper was exposed, Stimson, working under red safelights, would have dipped the paper through a series of trays containing once again a developer, water, hypo, and a wash bath. He would then have hung the paper to dry.
Select images were colored by hand. This process involved taking the final dried print and applying oil- or water-based paint onto the image, using either fine brushes or a hand-pumped airbrush. This process was based on Stimson's recollection of what the particular place looked like in real color, and he could either make "lifelike" images or purposely change the color palette of an image to suggest a different season. Stimson then mounted and framed the final prints and hung them in his shop on display.
Properly exposed images thus made contained a great deal of visual information stored in the large-format light-sensitive plates. Although extremely fragile, the images were exceptionally sharp at 8 x 10, and Stimson often enlarged his images to 30 x 44 inches without losing resolution.
Such a format was perfect for capturing the new State of Wyoming. Its previous life as a territory, starting in 1868, had been one of booms and busts, including railroad construction, cattle, and — on a smaller scale — gold mining. To balance its economy, the territory had distributed its government institutions — and their assured payrolls — all along the railroad, with Cheyenne getting the capital, Laramie the university, Rawlins the penitentiary, and Evanston the asylum. To the north, the end of the Plains Indian wars in 1877 opened lands for settlement, although the native Shoshone and Arapahos were placed on a central reservation along the east side of the Wind River Range. The federal government designated Yellowstone National Park in the northwest corner of the territory in 1872 and created an adjacent forest reserve east of the park in 1891. Further east, to the Big Horn Mountains and beyond, coal mining, ranching, dry-land farming, and eventually the tourist trade, including dude ranching, became the lifeblood of the region.
When Stimson set up shop in 1890, Wyoming's population was only 60,000; its largest city, Cheyenne, had just over 11,000 residents. Laramie and Sheridan were the only other towns with more than 8,000 citizens. The state's economy focused on the railroad, government, ranching, and coal mining in the south and cattle ranching, farming, and tourism in the north. Of these, the Union Pacific Railroad and its coal mining subsidiary had the largest impact, especially in the southwest corner of the state. Irrigated farming had also begun, with small community-based efforts in the Mormon communities in the state's western areas and a few state-federal projects, such as in Eden Valley, just under way under the Carey Act, named for Wyoming senator Joseph Carey. According to longtime state historian T.A. Larson, the period between the end of the Spanish American War in 1898 and the start of World War I in 1916 was one of "optimism, belief in progress ... and eagerness for economic development [that] possessed Wyoming citizens as never before nor since." Wyomingites had reason for optimism. During this time, the sheep industry tripled in size and soon matched the state's booming cattle production. Dry-land farming and irrigated agriculture expanded, with the number of farm units doubling. The miles of railroad track increased as the Union Pacific double-tracked its main line and other railroads such as the Burlington entered Wyoming. Coal mining grew, and a small copper boom developed in the southeastern part of the state. Oil production was just beginning around Casper. Overall, the state's population grew by more than 50,000, from 92,000 in 1900 to 146,000 ten years later. Of this number, most of the new citizens settled in the northern half of the state. The federal government's influence also expanded with the creation of Teton Forest Reserve in 1897 and, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the designation of Devil's Tower as the country's first national monument and Shoshone Dam as one of the first federal reclamation projects.
Other historians see a more complex place. Journalist Samuel Western views this period as one in which large cattlemen cemented their standing against small ranchers and farmers, creating an unsustainable economy. Western further suggests that through promotional literature and images, including some of Stimson's, Wyoming promoted itself as a place of rugged individualism — expressed especially through its bucking bronco logo — at the same time that its failed economy became increasingly dependent on federal largesse in the form of national parks, forest reserves, and reclamation projects. Similarly, University of Wyoming history professor Phil Roberts, in his "Readings in Wyoming History" and "A New History of Wyoming," identifies ten "organizing concepts" for understanding the state's history, including its continued boom-and-bust economy, federal control, environmental debates, water development, its role as a route to someplace else, diversity and women's rights, intra- state sectional debates between the southern and northern parts of the state, and its relationship to the world. Finally, through all of this, Roberts looks more deeply at Wyoming's seemingly simplistic cowboy logo, which symbolizes individualism and freedom in an increasingly complex world.
Regardless of how historians see it, Wyoming's first decade of statehood offered a photographer such as Stimson an exciting array of progress, development, and federal largesse to document beyond his studio. Several events during this period moved Stimson's career path from studio portraiture to landscape photography. In 1894, Wyoming state engineer Elwood Mead, later commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation and for whom Lake Mead was named, came into Stimson's studio asking if some glass plates he had made on a recent irrigation study in the Big Horn Mountains could be developed. When Stimson obliged, he was impressed with the scenery and was surprised to learn that such beautiful landscapes existed in his adopted state. The following summer, Mead brought Stimson along on another excursion to the Big Horns. The twenty-five-year-old photographer loved the scenery, but his first pictures were overexposed. Four years later Albert Nelson, Wyoming's first game warden, took Stimson to visit the Jackson Hole area and the picturesque Teton Range, a place that came to be Stimson's favorite.
These last images of the Tetons were better and were marketable, and they led Stimson to pursue more scenic photography. In 1898 the Sheridan Post ran a small ad for Stimson's "beautiful pictures of Mountain Scenery" in sizes from 8 x 10 to 30 x 40 inches. The photographer then traveled to nearby Wheatland and to the Shoshone Indian Reservation in central Wyoming to make portraits. He also photographed the beginnings of Cheyenne's famous rodeo, Frontier Days. By the turn of the century, Stimson had begun presenting magic lantern slide shows of his images and selling small portfolios and albums based on his growing collection of negatives. Newspaper announcements describing "Stimson's Indians" appeared in Cheyenne papers around Christmas 1900 and described the work as a "fine collection." They also reported that the photographer was receiving album orders from "all over the country for his celebrated photographs of the Grand Teton mountains and other scenics in the vicinity."
Around this time, a Union Pacific Railroad agent obtained one of these albums and hired Stimson as a publicity photographer for the railroad. Reorganized in 1897 by Edward H. Harriman, the Union Pacific (UP) was in the midst of rebuilding and modernizing the nation's first transcontinental railroad by operating bigger trains, straightening its many curves, and double-tracking the entire route. The UP needed an energetic photographer to document its efforts and contracted Stimson to photograph the line not just in Wyoming but throughout the West. Under the open-ended terms, the railroad paid Stimson four dollars for the first 8 x 10-inch print, one dollar each for the next ninety-nine, and seventy-five cents apiece for every print thereafter. He had no restrictions placed on the subjects he photographed or on the number of images he made as long as they promoted the railway. Further, any negatives made for the UP could also be printed and sold for his own gain. In addition, the railroad provided Stimson with free transportation either by train or, more often, through the use of a small gas-powered one-seat rail motor car.
Over the next decade, Stimson photographed such railroad landscapes as depots, train wrecks, bridges, tunnels, and new lines from Omaha to California. More important, he captured adjacent UP cities and towns, as well as farms, ranches, timber outfits, dams, and mines nearby. Stimson also shot Wyoming's beautiful scenery, including Yellowstone National Park, for the developing tourism industry. As an artist, Stimson often enlarged his prints and then hand-colored them using paints to produce beautiful, one-of-a-kind color prints. The Union Pacific agreement provided the young photographer with the means to travel the West, as well as a ready buyer for his photographs. It also exposed his work to others. The June 1903 issue of Leslie's Weekly magazine featured six of his images. The magazine stated that Stimson had a "keen eye for the picturesque and an artistic sense of position and proportion" and called him "one of the best scenic photographers in the United States."
The State of Wyoming soon discovered Stimson and began a relationship with the photographer that would last nearly fifty years. In June 1903 the Wyoming Commission of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition hired Stimson to photograph the state for display at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Under this agreement, the commission paid the photographer $875 to produce 182 hand-colored prints from across Wyoming. More specifically, he was to make a dozen 8 x 10-inch images from each of the state's twelve counties plus another twelve scenes from Yellowstone National Park. In addition, Stimson would provide one 30 x 40-inch print of the state and another of the park. Although the contract called for the photographer to cover all of his own expenses for travel, printing, coloring, framing, labeling, and boxing the images, Stimson felt the pay was reasonable because, as with the UP agreement, he would retain ownership of all negatives so he could print and sell them for himself while working on the state contract.
The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis commemorated the 100th anniversary of the acquisition of much of the American West, including most of Wyoming. The official guidebook for what has been called the 1904 World's Fair proudly stated that "this Exposition has already rendered an inestimable public service by awakening a universal popular interest in the story of the Louisiana Purchase and its glorious results." Like previous such fairs, the 1904 expo featured elaborate grounds and promotional displays from nearly every state and many foreign countries. The exposition also hosted the 1904 Olympics.
Although the Wyoming Commission of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition hired Stimson to promote the state through his photographs, it did not construct its own state building at the fair. Instead, its $25,000 appropriation was devoted entirely to exhibits in the Palaces of Mines and Agriculture. Stimson's photographs, like his work for the Union Pacific, would promote the state through photography. To do this, Stimson was to "travel all over the state, consult with boards of county commissioners and local industrial committees, and make views best calculated to show [the state's] varied resources and magnificent scenery."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wyoming Revisited by Michael A. Amundson. Copyright © 2014 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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