Browse Items (32 total)

Walla Walla is situated between the Snake and Columbia Rivers in eastern Washington State. The text on the verso of "Evolution of the Sickle and Flail" emphasizes the limitless possibilities of farming on a "grand, western scale" and compares the…

The Mormons began their westward migration in 1846 to escape religious persecution. They were largely responsible for settling the Utah Territory and had remarkable success as farmers there, despite the arid climate. In this photograph, likely of a…

Students were responsible for planning the College of New Jersey's first geological survey to the American West in 1877. The highly organized affair led to many discoveries and publications in the fields of paleontology and topography. The students…

Georgetown, Colorado, about fifty miles west of Denver, was established in 1864 as a result of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush (1858-1859). From a settlement consisting of four cabins and a few tents, the "Silver Queen of the Rockies" quickly became the…

Russell, chief photographer for the Union Pacific Railroad, made one of the famous photographs of the ceremony joining the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. Following that event, Russell took an…

Savage successfully operated a photography studio in Salt Lake City by balancing the demand for portraiture with his artistic preference for landscape photography. Savage's landscape work rivaled that of his friends Carleton E. Watkins, William Henry…

Tuell was a self-taught photographer who lived with her schoolteacher husband on Cheyenne and Sioux reservations in Montana and South Dakota. She taught home economics at reservation schools and in her spare time documented the social customs and…

In 1901, Seattle photographer Curtis conceived the most ambitious photographic project to document the lives and customs of American Indians, whom he called the "vanishing race." He received funding in 1906 from American banker J. Pierpont Morgan…

More than five hundred American Indians from thirty-five tribes attended the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. American ethnographer James Mooney (1868-1921) of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology hired Omaha native…

Coastal northern Oregon was the traditional territory of the Siletz Indians. In 1856, the U.S. government forced the Siletz to absorb at least twelve other Oregon tribes on the reservation created from their homeland. Within just fifty years, the…