An Early Photograph of Shoshone Falls: Uncovering a Network of Communities in 1870s Idaho

摘要

A little known nineteenth-century photograph of three men at Shoshone Falls provides insights into photography's role in mediating the public's understanding of the American West and in concealing/revealing the diverse populations and complex network of interconnected relationships that existed in southern Idaho during the 1870s.Regarding the photograph of three men standing on a rock outcropping before Shoshone Falls in southern Idaho (figure 1) - now in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) - evidence does not exist to establish the identities of either the three men or the photographer. Clues in the image lead to the speculation that the figure on the left is William Henry Jackson, arguably the most well-travelled and prolific photographer in the nineteenth-century American West.