This image shows nine men dressed in traditional Native-American costume, in front and on top of a reconstruction of a Six-Nations Long House. There is also a gentleman in the background wearing a sheriff’s badge. The image is captioned ‘Indians from N.Y. State Reservation’. It was taken in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York.

The photographer was Charles Dudley Arnold, whom we profiled in an earlier post on the Temple of Music building at this same exposition.

This distinguished looking gentleman is James F Queen, a Philadelphia lithographer. A biographical sketch lists his birth year as 1824, but census records suggest 1818 or 1820. That same biographical notation says he died ca 1877, but he is listed in the 1880 census. His occupation is listed in the 1850 census is Lithographer, 1860 Designer, 1870 Lithographic Artist, while in 1880 it is Chromo Artist. This photo was probably taken right around 1880.

The photographer who took this public domain image is Adolph Newman (ca1845-aft1920). Son of photographer Christian Newman, Adolph was born in Germany, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1857. By 1870 they were living in Philadelphia, with both Christian and Adolph listed as photographers. Adolph is listed again in 1880, but by the time the 1890 City Directory was compiled, his occupation has changed from Photographer to Frames. In the 1900 census he is listed as a Fine Art Dealer. He is listed in the 1920 census, but in 1930 his wife is shown as a widow.

This photo is identified as being Bill Drennan, Indian Scout and Companion of Kit Carson, and is supposed to have been taken about 1880. But it is attributed to Noah Hamilton Rose, who was born in 1874, and didn’t begin taking photos until about 1892. Rose was known to have copied old photos, but the quality of this image, and the setting, look very much like a ca. 1900 image to me. So is it Bill Drennan? Probably. Rose’s family is said to have lived in Ballinger Texas at one time, and there in the 1900 census we find William T Drennan, born May 1846 in Texas, occupation Liquor Dealer. Was he a ‘companion’ of Kit Carson? Well Kit Carson died in 1868, so it is just possible, but not too likely.

There are only two William Drennan’s listed as living in Texas in the 1860 census; one an 8 year old boy is probably the William T Drennan mentioned above — it is not unusual for his age to be off by 6 years some 40 years later in the 1900 census, the one nearer his birth is more likely correct. The second is his father, also William Drennan, born about 1798 in South Carolina. The elder Bill Drennan is a better candidate for ‘companion’ of Kit Carson, being only nine years older than Carson. But even if the original photo was taken in 1870, this Bill Drennan is too young to be born 1798 — so the image is more likely his son. Either the story got transferred from father to son, or the term ‘acquaintance’ might better replace ‘companion’.

Here we see the United States Capitol Building in Washington DC, shortly before completion of the second dome. The original dome had an outer layer of copper-plated wood, and was too small in relation to the size of the building after several expansions were added to the original structure. The current dome was begun in 1855, and we see it here on June 28th, 1863, nearly complete. In December 1863 it was finished, and the statue of Freedom was added to the top.

The photographer of this public domain image was Andrew Joseph Russell (1830-1902), an army Captain during the Civil War and an official photographer for the U.S. Army. He is best known for his images of the Civil War and his later work for the Union Pacific Railroad, including images of the meeting of the rails in Utah in 1869, which was also photographed by Charles R. Savage and A. A. Hart. Many of his views of the Union Pacific route from Cheyenne to Promontory Point (1868 and 1869) were published as stereo-views by Russell in the early 1870s. Then about 1875 O. C. Smith purchased the negatives, and published them under his own name (a common practice before photographic copyright was well defined) 1878 and later.

In this image we seem to be looking down on the boy, probably the son of a poor Newhaven fisherman, who is standing next to a large basket with some vegetable matter in it. Perhaps it’s a moss used to keep the fish damp on their way to market. This image is a calotype, the contemporary process of the daguerreotype that was invented in England by Talbot (and hence is sometimes called Talbotype). In this process, a negative was produced on thin, waxed, sensitized paper, then printed on another sensitized paper. The grain of the paper negative prevented really sharp images. That and other difficulties with the process prevented it from becoming as popular as the daguerreotype, and it was soon replaced by glass-plate based negatives.

This public domain image was taken by the famous Scottish photographer David Octavious Hill (1802-1870) in 1845. He was educated at Perth Academy, and later the Edinburgh School of Design, and became a well respected artist, producing oil paintings and lithographic sketches for book illustrations. In 1843 Hill joined with Robert Adamson in opening a photographic studio, where they took portraits of many of Edinburgh’s leading citizens, as well as outdoor portraits and landscapes. Adamson died in 1848, and although Hill kept the studio alive for a few months, he soon abandoned it — the business end of things conflicted with his artistic temperament. He continued to produce prints from existing negatives, and used many of them as the basis for further paintings.