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!
