Here we have a car full of Eskimos. The car looks like something from the late 1910s, but that is just because it is ahead of its time. This public domain photograph, and the car, were produced in 1905. The car is a Rolls Royce, and in those days way ahead of its competitors in style. This was probably the first automobile in Nome, Alaska, and the photographer had the stroke of genius to fill it with Eskimos for this image. They look like they are having fun.

The photographer was Frank H Nowell (1864-1950), born in New Hampshire. Frank’s father Thomas Nowell moved to Alaska and took up some mining claims, and in the mid-1880s Frank joined him there. He came back south in the 1890s, met a Michigan girl (Elizabeth Helen Davis) vacationing in Florida, and married her in 1894, and soon afterward took up photography as a hobby. By 1900 they were on the outs and he is found living in California, and lists his marital status as Divorced, and his occupation as secretary of a mining company (his father’s).

Luckily, the couple reconciled, as it is said she brought his camera with her when she joined him in Alaska, where he had gone late in 1900. He began to document Alaskan life, and set up a studio in Nome. In 1909 the family moved to Seattle Washington, and Frank opened a studio there. We find them listed in the 1910 and 1920 censuses in Seattle. His biography claims he had a photographic studio up until he retired in the late 1940s, but the 1930 census shows his occupation then was as a distributor for an oil company. He was 66 years old by then, it seems unlikely he continued operating a photographic studio into the late 1940s, when he would have been over 80.