Pictures from Wonderland

First—thanks to Roxanne C, for your comment last week. Contact me at reginascott@owt.com. I know you mentioned you had a copy of the book you won. Let’s see what else I can find you.

The heroine of A Distance Too Grand, Meg Pero, is a photographer, specializing in stereographs, those double pictures that allowed people to approximate three-dimensions in her time. But when I was researching Yellowstone National Park for the second book in my American Wonders Collection, Nothing Short of Wondrous, I discovered another early photographer had made his mark there.

Frank Jay Haynes was born in Michigan in 1853. He didn’t do well at his first profession, traveling salesman, so, when he went to live with family in Wisconsin, he took the opportunity to apprentice as a photographer. F. Jay opened his own studio in 1876 in Moorhead, Minnesota. But he wasn’t content to stay there. It seems that traveling part of his salesman’s job stayed with him throughout his life.

Less than a year later, he started taking his equipment on the road, traveling via stagecoach from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Deadwood, South Dakota, taking pictures of the scenery and the people along the way. The next year, he traveled from Bismarck to the Pacific Ocean and followed that up with a tour down and up the Missouri River. His pictures made excellent prints, postcards, and, yes, stereographs.

Perhaps because his popularity was growing, he won a contract with the Northern Pacific Railroad to take publicity shots along the line to Bismarck. With a free pass to ride any train, he could go where he liked, when he liked. Along the way, he met then Yellowstone superintendent Philetus Norris, who invited him to come tour Wonderland and photograph its scenic beauty. During his two months in the park in 1881, F. Jay shot more than 200 pictures. And he came back the next year to shoot more.

Again, his stature grew, to the point that, in August 1883, he was chosen to accompany President Arthur in touring Yellowstone and serve as the official photographer. He still found time to photograph the golden spike ceremony of the Northern Pacific in Montana. But Yellowstone had so impressed him that he applied for and won a concession to be the park’s first official photographer. His studio opened in 1884.

But Yellowstone was only really accessible from May through September. What do to the rest of the year? F. Jay purchased a Pullman car from the Northern Pacific and refitted it as a traveling studio, calling it the Palace Studio Car. He traveled all over the west for the next 20 years in that car, taking pictures of local places and local folks. He was part of the one of the first winter tours of Yellowstone in 1886 and photographed the journey from my native Tacoma to Glacier Bay, Alaska, in 1891 for the Puget Sound and Alaska Steamship Company.

When he passed away in 1921, his son Jack, who had been helping him, inherited his business and carried on the tradition until his death in 1962.

And if you’d like to experience a little of Yellowstone, hop over the Goodreads, where you can enter a giveaway of a print copy of Nothing Short of Wondrous, due out October 20, 2020. 

Picture perfect!

The (Al)lure of the Selkie

In Tuesday’s post announcing Skin Deep’s release I mentioned something about always having had a thing for selkies, so I thought it might be fun to take a look at selkie legend and folklore.

For those who aren’t familiar with them, selkies are a type of shape-shifter, a magical creature that can take the form either of a seal or a human.  They’re a Celtic creature, from the islands and west coast of Scotland as well as the east coast of Ireland. But unusually for shape-shifters, they don’t just change from one form to another: in order to assume his (or her) human form, a selkie takes off his or her skin and puts it on again when it’s time to return to the sea. In human form they’re said to be very beautiful, dark-haired with shining eyes—so beautiful that humans who see them often fall madly in love with them. But they also often have rough skin on their hands as well as webbed fingers.

The most common stories about selkies usually involve a human happening upon them at one of their dances, for selkies were said to gather on beaches at the full moon to take off their skins and dance together in the moonlight. Smitten by their beauty, the human (usually a fisherman out late at night to check his nets) would sneak over to where the selkies had left their skins and steal the one belonging to the fairest selkie maid, forcing her to remain in her human shape. Though she would beg for him to return her skin he always refused, and would somehow convince her to marry him (maybe she figured that if she stayed close to him she would be able to find her skin again.) They would marry and raise a family together...but years later the selkie would find the place where her husband had hidden her skin  (often led there by one of her own children, who has no idea what the soft furry cloak he or she has found is) and snatch it away to return to the sea...though in some of the stories she would return to visit her children.

It’s a beguiling image, isn’t it—the beautiful selkies, laughing and smiling as they dance on the beach with the sea glittering beyond them in the moonlight, the smitten fisherman watching them from behind a boulder, perhaps? I’m not sure if that’s the image that drew me, or the fact that seals are pretty neat creatures to begin with...but the selkie legend has always held a strong fascination for me, so it was inevitable I’d write about them one day.  But in Skin Deep, I’ve turned the selkie legend more than a little upside down...and given it a happily ever after ending.  Want to find out how?  You can find it in ebook format at Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo...and in print also at Amazon. Or if you’re feeling lucky, you can take a chance at winning one of ten copies I’m giving away through Goodreads.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Skin Deep

by Marissa Doyle

Giveaway ends May 15, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Any fellow selkie fans out there? Or is there another shape-shifter legend that has you fascinated?