A delightfully accessible trail-guide approach to the traditional uses of wild plants in the Pueblo world.

The Pioneer Photographer is the story of William Henry Jackson¿s love for the outdoors and of his adventurous life photographing the Rocky Mountain West during the late 1860s and 1870s. His meticulous descriptions of the rugged and treacherous landscapes, and the efforts required for capturing the images on glass plates, edify the reader about the enormous challenges presented by early photographic technology.

Describes the life of the artist and photographer whose pictures of the West helped establish national parks in Mesa Verde and the Rocky Mountains. Also discusses his time during the Civil War and his trips through Asia.

William Henry Jackson was an explorer, photographer, and artist. He is also one of those most often overlooked figures of the American West. His larger claim to fame involves his repeated forays into the western lands of nineteenth-century America as a photographer. Jackson’s life spanned multiple incarnations of the American West. In a sense, he played a singular role in revealing the West to eastern Americans. While others opened the frontier with the axe and the rifle, Jackson did so with his collection of cameras. He dispelled the geological myths through a lens no one could deny or match. His wet plate collodion prints not only helped to reframe the nation’s image of the West, but they also enticed businessmen, investors, scientists, and even tourists to venture into the western regions of the United States. Prior to Jackson’s widely circulated photographs, the American West was little understood and unmapped—mysterious lands that required a camera and a cameraman to reveal their secrets and, ultimately, provide the first photographic record of such exotic destinations as Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, and the Rocky Mountains. Jackson’s story was long and his life full, as he lived to the enviable age of 99. This biography presents the good, bad, and ugly of Jackson’s life, both personal and professional, through the use primary source materials, including Jackson’s autobiographies, letters, and government reports on the Hayden Surveys.

"William Henry Jackson: An Intimate Portrait" is an engaging personal look at a man whose life and work spanned the development and transformation of the West, from the 1860s to World War II. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Lloyd W. Gundy, this first-hand biographical portrait includes full-color images of Jackson's paintings of majo