This photograph has six people, two mules and a dog in it, but it is always the cow that catches people’s attention. In the Great Plains of the United States it was commonplace for early settlers to build simple houses out of sod to shelter their family until they could afford more substantial homes. In this case, the Rawding family built their soddy into the side of a hill, so the grazing cow is both on the hillside, and on the roof of the house. The people in the image are (left to right) Emma (Leadbetter) Rawding, Sylvester W. Rawding, daughter Bessie, and sons Philip, William, and Harry.

This public domain image was taken in 1886 by Solomon Devore Butcher (1856-1927) near Sargent, in Custer County Nebraska. We profiled Butcher in our post of his photograph of Broken Bow Hardware. Butcher is listed in the 1900 census in West Union, Nebraska, and in the 1910 census in Kearney, Nebraska, still active as a photographer.

This image, and others like it, were tremendously popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They appeared as prints such as this one, and as stereograph images. This is the archetypical image of the South held by northerners — poor black men, women and children toiling in the cotton fields to scratch out a meager living. Sometimes condescending captions were added in mocking imitation of black southern speech patterns.

This public domain image was taken by Edward Warren Day of Charlotte North Carolina, and copyrighted in 1900. Curiously, I could not find any information on him — he was not listed in the 1900 census in Charlotte, and even a web-search failed to turn up any other photos attributed to him.

John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) was the best known and most widely appreciated band leader and composer of marching music in turn of the century America (19th-20th century turn that is). He was conductor of the U.S. Marine Band from 1880 to 1892, then formed his own band. In 1900 his band was chosen to represent the United States at the Paris Exposition, and that is where this public domain photograph was taken, during the band’s performance of Sousa’s composition ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Sousa was always reluctant to play for the radio, but when finally persuaded in 1929, he was an instant hit. Several of his marches were also recorded on record disks, including ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ in 1909.

This public domain image was taken by William Herman Rau (1855-1920) while photographing the Paris Exposition of 1900. A native of Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Rau learned photography as a teen, while courting the daughter of photographer William Bell (1830-1910) who was a daguerreian in Philadelphia before 1850, and had studio there into the 1880s. Rau began photographing for the government in 1874, his first expedition to the south Pacific to observe a transit of Venus across the sun. William H Rau married Louise Bell about 1877. Later he went on expeditions in the West, then opened his own studio in Philadelphia with his brother George. He seems to have loved traveling since he also took photos in Egypt and all over the United States. In the 1890s he was also a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and later the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which enhanced his reputation as a landscape photographer.