Archives West Finding Aid

William J. Brings was born July 17, 1881, in Cross Plains, Wisconsin. His parents were German immigrants and sharecroppers. His father had come to the United States in 1860 while in his early teens. The family moved from Cross Plains to South Milwaukee where William Brings worked in a machine shop and a horseshoe factory. From there he went to Racine, Wisconsin, where he got a job in a bicycle factory. After leaving the bicycle factory, he apprenticed with a photographer in South Milwaukee by the name of Smoot and then started his own photography business in Racine. A postcard depicting The Brings Studio in Racine, postmarked August 1907, survives as evidence of this business venture.

Brings left Wisconsin for Montana in 1908. He arrived first in Billings and then worked odd jobs in Hysham and Sanders before going to Hardin, where he worked as a roofer. He later established himself as a photographer in Hardin, taking photographs there and on the Crow Indian Reservation during the period 1908-1910. His fiancé, Anna E. Condon, followed him to Hardin and they were married at St. Xavier Mission by Father Thomas Grant in July 8, 1909.

By 1910, Brings moved to Laurel, Montana, where he opened a studio. It may have been the lack of business in Laurel, the homestead fever, or a combination of the two, but Brings soon decided to give up the photography business and became a farmer. He homesteaded on 320 acres of dry land overlooking Laurel and the Yellowstone Valley. He first had a homestead shack and later built a house after "proving up." His move to the homestead was probably an unfortunate decision, since mechanization was already beginning to make wheat farms of this size unprofitable.

By the fall of 1918 the family was forced to move to Billings where Brings worked at various jobs during the next four or five years. In about 1923 he decided to make another try at farming and moved back to the homestead, but in the fall of 1926 he gave up the venture and moved to Oregon. He never got back into photography again except during the summer of 1924 or 1925, when he worked several months for a photographer in Red Lodge.

In Oregon, Brings worked in a sawmill until 1942 when he and Anna moved to Santa Cruz, California. Brings died in Santa Cruz on August 26, 1958, at the age of 77.