 Magazine features forgotten photographers of Yellowstone Park By MARY PICKETT Of The Gazette Staff Photographers began capturing Yellowstone's natural marvels a year before it became a national park.
 Albert Bierstadt's "Lower Falls of the Yellowstone" was one of many early images that shaped the country's impression of the park. Most of the new issue of Montana The Magazine of Western History is devoted to photographers and painters who toured the park in its first years. Photo courtesy Montana Historical Society Museum Much of the Summer 1999 issue of Montana The Magazine of Western History, "Yellowstone and Western Images," is devoted to how 19th and early 20th century photographers and painters brought the national park to public attention.
"Photography held great power in explaining and therefore transforming perceptions of the West from a mythical realm to a place that could actually be visited and settled," Whittlesey writes. Images taken by the most well known of the early photographers, William Henry Jackson, also helped persuade Congress to designate Yellowstone as the country's first national park in 1872. Those photos have kept Jackson's name alive 127 years later. Although Jackson remains famous, several other early Yellowstone photographers are not. Two nearly forgotten photographers, Thomas J. Hine and Joshua Crissman, each are recognized with their own articles in the magazine. Hine, who worked in Chicago, accompanied a military expedition through Yellowstone in the summer of 1871. Among the 200 glass plates that he produced that summer were the first photographic images of Old Faithful and Fairy Falls. Less than a month after he returned home, the great Chicago fire destroyed his original plates. Sixteen prints of Hine's photos had been made before the fire, but their whereabouts were not known until recently. James Burst, who co-authored the Hine article with Whittlesey, found seven of the 16 prints last year at the New York Historical Society. Joshua Crissman photographed Yellowstone at the same time as William Henry Jackson but never achieved Jackson's fame. Crissman was working as a photographer in Bozeman in the summer of 1871 when he was invited by Jackson to join the Hayden expedition. Historians speculate that some images in the expedition's collection may be Crissman's, according to Steven B. Jackson, who wrote the Montana article. And it is probable that Crissman and Jackson may have collaborated on several photos. Back in Bozeman, Crissman began printing stereo-view negatives (used to produce double-image photocards for stereoscopes), the first printed and publicly viewed photographs of Yellowstone, Steven Jackson writes. Because Crissman sold many negatives to other photographers, many of his photos of the park were sold with another person's name. The magazine also includes articles on Helena landscape painter, R.E. DeCamp, and the 1859 Lander Expedition. DeCamp came West in 1885 to sketch Yellowstone and eventually settled in Helena. He would live and paint there until two years before his death in 1936. An expedition led by Col. Frederick W. Lander into what would become Wyoming was accompanied by several artists, including German-born Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt would return to the West several times, including an 1881 trip to Yellowstone.
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