The Harvard Collection

[Diane Merkel]

Harvard has placed two albums of photos online.

The albums came from one part of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, a report of four Lewis and Clark-like expeditions undertaken from 1860 to 1878. The limited-edition volumes were compiled on orders from survey leader Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a physician turned geologist whose energetic ways earned him the Indian name Man Who Picks Up Stones Running.

In a prefatory note to the albums, Hayden called the images “faithful sun pictures” of 25 tribes over 25 years, and he mourned their loss and alteration to the reservation system. “The value of such a graphic record of the past increases year by year,” he presciently wrote.

About a fifth of the album photographs were drawn from images already possessed by the federal government, including daguerreotypes that had to be rephotographed for display. Most came from the collection of English philanthropist William Blackmore. A fraction came from Hayden’s survey photographers, including William Henry Jackson (1843-1942), who assembled the album.

Article (with some images): news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/03/portraits-of-vanished-indian-life/

Online Collection: pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/43032030?n=1&imagesize=2400&jp2Res=0.25&printThumbnails=true

[grahamew]

Thanks, Diane

[gregor]

Hi from germany!

here you can find (and download ) an alternative version of the William Henry Jackson photograph catalog:

archive.org/details/PhotographsOfIndiansSelectedFromTheCollectionInThePossessionOfThe

(It's a PDF-doc about 300 MB, so take some time)

And here is a descriptive catalag of Jackson:

archive.org/details/descriptivecata03jackgoog


Toksha

Gregor