Archives West Finding Aid

William Henry Jackson was arguably the premier frontier photographer of his age. Jackson's photographs helped convince congress to create Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and introduced Eastern America and Europe to the landscape of the American West. The 40,000 photographs he took during his lifetime remain an unmatched record of the expansion of the West in the last part of the nineteenth century.

Jackson was born in 1843 and grew up with a love of art and photography. He served as an artist during the Civil War and afterwards worked as a bullwhacker running from St. Joseph Missouri to Montana. Jackson obtained employment in an Omaha, Nebraska photo gallery before opening his own portrait studio with his brother, Edward. In 1869 he photographed construction along the route of the Union Pacific Railroad with Arundel C. Hull. His photographs of the railroad and his studio portraits of local Indians captured the attention of Ferdinand V. Hayden who asked Jackson to accompany him on his 1870 expedition into the Utah and Wyoming Territories. Jackson would receive no salary during the expedition, only expenses, but he became a paid government employee the following year. Jackson remained with the Hayden Survey until 1878. This collection represents only a handful of the more than 2,000 photographs taken during those years.

Jackson went on to document the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, and the ever-expanding empire of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in Colorado and Utah. His fame propelled him into a photographic expedition in 1894-95 that took him to England, Egypt, India, Australia, New Zealand, the East Indies, China, Japan, and Russia. Jackson later turned to historical and landscape painting before he died in 1942 at the age of ninety-nine.