Fine Books & Manuscripts

JACKSON, William Henry, photographer (American, 1843–1942). A large photograph album of 224 albumen silver prints of picturesque North American scenery along the “Santa Fe Route” Railways. Denver: W. H. Jackson & Co., [ca. 1882–1894]. Oblong folio (356 x 406 mm). Photographs include large (330 x 254 mm and 273 x 171 mm), medium (114 x 165 mm), and small (102 x 76 mm) format sizes. Each neatly mounted on 23 leaves of heavy card stock, both on rectos and versos (occasional foxing at or near margins), many captioned in manuscript and printed in plate. The trip embarks with views of the San Francisco Mountains as seen from the Atlantic and Pacific Railway. The tracks meander into the Grand Canyon and down to the Diamond River. Next on the stop, are birds eye views of downtown Chihuahua, Mexico and its architecture by way of the Mexican Central Railway. Traversing back north across the border on the Santa Fe Railway are scenes from New Mexico and various towns across southern Arizona that include Pueblo Indian villages, native peoples and ruins of cliff dwelling cities. Traveling further north, the photographs depict city life in Utah and abandoned mine shafts in Washington. The final stop on the journey, and the most extensive of the collection, takes the viewer through the snowy mountain ranges of Colorado, into its dangerous canyons and scenic rock formations, stopping at sleepy mining towns and ending the journey at a towering waterfall known as Timberline Falls in Estes Park. Bound in full grain leather with a central leather title label lettered in gilt and onlaid to upper cover titled: “North American Scenery. Photographs of Points of Interest Along the ‘Santa Fe Route,’ The Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe R. R. and Connecting Lines, Between San Francisco and the Atlantic Coast”, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers (uneven sunning to upper cover). Provenance: “This is one of a number of copies made for the director of the Santa Fe Railroad about 1875” (penciled notation on ffep verso). ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT WESTERN AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHERS OF ANY CENTURY.“His mountain ranges were longer and higher, his vistas stretched farther, his terrains were wilder, more rugged, and more filled with a sense of wonder than conventional topographic views, highlighting a wilderness that was waiting to be tamed and made available to the American citizen.” (Brown, The American West p. 209). Jackson’s career spanned decades photographing the western territories which promoted expansion to the unclaimed land. He quickly rose to prominence as being the official photographer for the noted Hayden surveys (1870–78) including the famed Yellowstone survey which, because of Jackson’s striking photographs, Congress established that Yellowstone be set aside as a National Park. Familiar with the photographer’s fieldwork, the railroads hired Jackson in 1881 to capture the territories surrounding the railways for promotional purposes thus creating some 30,000 negatives over a 15-year period which were later donated to the Library of Congress.