Before the Fire:

The Search for Montana's Oldest Photograph

A Question That Haunts the Archives

In the collections of the Montana Historical Society in Helena, more than 1.25 million photographs document the human and natural history of the state. The images span from the mid-nineteenth century into the digital age. Among all of them, one question has occupied MHS archivists for decades and remains, as of this writing, definitively unanswered: which photograph, taken within the boundaries of present-day Montana, is the oldest known to survive?

The question seems as though it should have a clean answer. It does not. What it has instead is a layered story of lost images, flawed attributions, false leads, and the inherent difficulty of establishing "firsts" in a historical record built from fragmentary evidence. The search for Montana's oldest photograph turns out to be as much a story about the limits of archives as it is about the early history of the camera.

The Technology Arrives in the West

To understand when photography could have reached what is now Montana, it helps to situate the technology in time. The daguerreotype process, the first publicly practical form of photography, was announced to the world in Paris on August 19, 1839 (History of Photography, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). Within a year, American practitioners had taken up the medium, and by the mid-1840s, itinerant daguerreotypists were working their way through eastern cities and small towns. The wet-plate collodion process, which allowed for multiple paper prints from a glass negative, came into wide use in the 1850s and gradually displaced the daguerreotype. Ambrotypes, which created a positive image on glass using the wet-plate process, also appeared in that decade. All of these technologies were in active use by the time federal exploring expeditions began pushing into the northern Rocky Mountain region.

Carrying a camera into the field in this era was not a casual undertaking. A daguerreotype kit required polished silver-coated copper plates, iodine and mercury vapors for sensitizing and developing, and rigid, heavy equipment that was prone to failure in extreme conditions. Wet-plate photography demanded that glass plates be coated with collodion, sensitized with silver nitrate, exposed while still wet, and developed immediately before the emulsion dried. To bring any of this apparatus into mountain terrain in the 1850s required both technical skill and institutional commitment. Federal survey expeditions, which had both the funding and the logistical resources to carry such equipment, represent the most likely vehicles for photography's earliest entry into present-day Montana.

John Mix Stanley and the Stevens Expedition, 1853

The first documented use of a camera within Montana's present boundaries occurred in the summer and fall of 1853, during the northern Pacific Railroad Survey led by Isaac I. Stevens. Congress had authorized six surveys that year to determine the best route for a transcontinental railroad, and Stevens, newly appointed Governor of Washington Territory, led the northernmost of these, following roughly the 47th parallel from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Puget Sound (Pacific Railroad Survey Prints, Eastern Washington University Digital Collections, https://dc.ewu.edu/rrsurvey/, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

Stevens hired two artists for the expedition. One was John Mix Stanley (1814-1872), an experienced painter of Native American life who had already traveled extensively in the West and who was, crucially, also an accomplished daguerreotypist. Stanley had been working with daguerreotype equipment since the 1840s and was described by later scholars as "one of the earliest photographers of the Indian" (Smithsonian American Art Museum, "John Mix Stanley," https://americanart.si.edu/artist/john-mix-stanley-4600, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The expedition passed through the region that is now Montana in the summer and fall of 1853. At Fort Union, near the present Montana-North Dakota border, Stevens recorded in his official narrative report that Stanley "was busily occupied during our stay at Fort Union with his daguerreotype apparatus, and the Indians were greatly pleased with their daguerreotypes" (Stevens, Isaac. "Part I, General Report, Narrative of 1853," quoted in "Natawista Iksina," The James Madison Museum, https://www.thejamesmadisonmuseum.net/single-post/13-natawista-iksina-medicine-snake-woman, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). The expedition continued westward through present-day Montana, visiting Fort Benton and encamping near Blackfoot and Piegan communities. Local historian Ken Robison, writing for the Joel F. Overholser Historical Research Center in Fort Benton, concluded that Stanley's daguerreotypes at Fort Benton in 1853 almost certainly represent the first photographs taken within the boundaries of what is now Montana, and that Stanley also produced the first photographs of the Rocky Mountains during this journey (Robison, Ken. "Shooting Fort Benton: The Early Photographers." Fort Benton River Press, 31 May 2006, rev. Apr. 2008, http://fortbenton.blogspot.com/2008_01_18_archive.html, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The critical problem is that none of Stanley's daguerreotypes from the 1853 expedition are known to survive. Stanley's career was beset by fires. His famous Indian portrait gallery, donated to the Smithsonian Institution, was largely destroyed in an 1865 fire that consumed most of the building's contents. The daguerreotypes he made in the field were not physical originals preserved for posterity; they served primarily as reference material for his paintings. "Though Stanley created hundreds of paintings, drawings and daguerreotypes in his career, little of his original work survives due to disastrous fires" (Pacific Railroad Survey Prints, Eastern Washington University Digital Collections, https://dc.ewu.edu/rrsurvey/, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). So while the historical record confirms that a camera operated in Montana in 1853 and produced images there, no image from that event is presently known to exist.

James Dempsey Hutton and the Raynolds Expedition, 1859-1860

The next significant photographic presence in Montana's territory came six years later. In 1859, the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers dispatched an expedition under Captain William F. Raynolds to explore and map the Yellowstone River headwaters region. Among Raynolds's technicians was James Dempsey Hutton (c. 1828-1868), who served as topographer, assistant artist, and photographer. Hutton's charter explicitly included photography, and he "doubled as an assistant artist and photographer with the expedition, making pen-and-ink sketches and taking photographs of Wyoming's Big Horn and Wind River Mountains and Montana's Yellowstone and Missouri River valleys" (James D. Hutton, Military Wiki, citing Palmquist, Peter E., and Thomas R. Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865, Stanford University Press, 2000).

Hutton photographed members of the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Nations during the expedition. By September 1859, Raynolds's detachment had traveled along the Yellowstone River to its confluence with the Bighorn River in south-central Montana. In 1860, the reunited expedition traveled to Three Forks, Montana, and then departed down the Missouri via steamboat from Fort Benton. Seven engravings derived from Hutton's photographs of Native Americans were published in 1862 in Ferdinand V. Hayden's "Contributions to the Ethnology and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley," in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 12 (James D. Hutton, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Hutton, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The surviving evidence for Hutton's Montana photographs is indirect. His expedition's records, including William Franklin Raynolds's papers from 1859-1860, are held in the Yale Collection of Western Americana at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. That collection includes both photoprints and pictorial works attributed to the expedition, though it is not clear from available finding aids which specific images document locations within present-day Montana (William Franklin Raynolds Papers, 1859-1860, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, described in ArchiveGrid, https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/archiveComponent/702127481, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). The Smithsonian ethnologist John C. Ewers, writing in the Montana Historical Society newsletter Montana Post in 1969, stated that he believed prints from Crow portraits taken by the Raynolds expedition's photographer had been located, though he did not specify where (Malcomson, Jeff. "In Search of the Oldest Montana Photograph, Part 1." Montana History Revealed: The Montana Historical Society Blog, 14 June 2018, http://mthistoryrevealed.blogspot.com/2018/06/in-search-of-oldest-montana-photograph.html, accessed 18 Apr. 2025). As with Stanley's work, confirmation of specific surviving images from Montana terrain has not been established in the published scholarly record.

The French Gulch Ambrotype: A False Positive

For nearly fifty years, the leading candidate for Montana's oldest surviving photograph was a cased ambrotype held by the Montana Historical Society, catalogued as C969-001. On the back of the case, in handwriting, is the inscription "French Gulch, Aug. 23, 1862." The image shows a small mining camp situated in a mountain valley. The photograph was donated to the MHS Library in early June 1969 by the grandson of a man identified as a gold prospector in the Rocky Mountains during the 1860s (Malcomson, "In Search of the Oldest Montana Photograph").

When MHS staff reported the acquisition in the September 1969 issue of Montana Post, they floated the possibility that the image could be "Montana's oldest picture." Montana had seen its first major gold discovery at Bannack in the summer of 1862, and a mining camp photograph from August of that year would have represented a remarkable early document. The timing and subject matter seemed to fit.

Doubts emerged almost immediately. Smithsonian ethnologist John C. Ewers responded in the following issue of Montana Post, pointing out that photographers had been active in the Montana region well before 1862, citing both Stanley's 1853 work and the Raynolds expedition photographer. But the ambrotype was not discredited on those grounds. It retained its informal status as one of the earliest known surviving photographs from the region, even as Ewers's comments reminded researchers that even earlier images likely existed in some form.

The definitive correction came in January 2018, when Jeff Malcomson, the MHS Photo Archives Manager, undertook a systematic effort to identify the ambrotype's location. His method was geographic. The image shows a distinctive mountain ridgeline above tree line in the background. Malcomson compared this ridgeline against both of the "French Gulch" locations in Montana, neither of which matched. He then checked a French Gulch location in northern Idaho, again without success. Turning to Colorado, he found French Gulch Road near Breckenridge and examined the terrain using Google Maps in three-dimensional view. The peaks above the ski slopes, now known as Peaks 8, 9, and 10, matched the ridgeline in the ambrotype with what Malcomson described as astonishing precision. The Colorado identification was also consistent with the regional mining chronology: Colorado's French Gulch near Breckenridge saw peak mining activity in the post-1859 period, exactly matching an 1862 date (Malcomson, "In Search of the Oldest Montana Photograph"). The photograph that MHS had held for nearly fifty years as a possible early Montana image turned out to document an early Colorado mining settlement instead. The search, as Malcomson concluded, continued.

Where the Record Stands

As of the available scholarship, no single surviving photograph has been identified and verified as the oldest taken within the present boundaries of Montana. What the record does establish is a sequence of documented photographic activity: John Mix Stanley produced daguerreotypes of Blackfoot people and landscapes at Fort Benton and nearby locations in the fall of 1853, but no image from that session is known to survive. James Dempsey Hutton photographed the Yellowstone and Missouri River valleys of Montana during the Raynolds expedition of 1859-1860, and engravings derived from his photographs were published in 1862, but specific surviving prints from Montana locations have not been publicly confirmed. Images from the early Montana gold rush era of the 1860s may survive in archival collections that have not yet been systematically examined against geographic criteria. The earliest verified surviving photograph actually taken in Montana is often attributed to William Henry Jackson or photographers from the 1870s (like those on the 1871 Hayden Survey), simply because their work was systematically archived and printed. The "gap" between 1853 and 1870 remains the "Holy Grail" for Montana archivists.

The Montana Historical Society's Photograph Archives, which holds approximately 1.25 million images, includes photographic materials in historical formats going back to the mid-nineteenth century. The archives continue to accept donations and conduct attribution research, and it is plausible that the question could be resolved through future discoveries in collections that have not yet been fully catalogued (Montana Historical Society, Photograph Collections, https://mhs.mt.gov/Research/collections/photos, accessed 18 Apr. 2025).

The question of Montana's oldest photograph is not merely an archival curiosity. Photography arrived in the region during a period of rapid and consequential change: federal surveys were mapping the terrain that would open the way for settlement, railroad construction, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples from lands they had occupied for generations. The earliest cameras in Montana were carried by agents of that process. Stanley's daguerreotype apparatus came west in the company of a survey explicitly designed to facilitate a transcontinental railroad. Hutton's photographs accompanied an expedition charged with assessing the region's agricultural and mineralogical resources and the disposition of its Native inhabitants. That those earliest images are lost, or unlocated, is itself a fact worth noting. What the camera recorded in Montana before the gold rush has not been preserved in any archive that researchers have yet found.

Works Cited

Malcomson, Jeff. "In Search of the Oldest Montana Photograph, Part 1." Montana History Revealed: The Montana Historical Society Blog, 14 June 2018, http://mthistoryrevealed.blogspot.com/2018/06/in-search-of-oldest-montana-photograph.html. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Montana Historical Society. Photograph Collections. Montana Historical Society Library and Archives, https://mhs.mt.gov/Research/collections/photos. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Robison, Ken. "Shooting Fort Benton: The Early Photographers." Fort Benton River Press, 31 May 2006, revised April 2008. Joel F. Overholser Historical Research Center, http://fortbenton.blogspot.com/2008_01_18_archive.html. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Smithsonian American Art Museum. "John Mix Stanley." Smithsonian Institution, https://americanart.si.edu/artist/john-mix-stanley-4600. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Eastern Washington University Digital Collections. "Pacific Railroad Survey Prints." Regional History, https://dc.ewu.edu/rrsurvey/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Hutton, James D. Photographs and field records, 1859-1860. Published as engravings in Hayden, Ferdinand V. "Contributions to the Ethnology and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 12, 1862.

Stevens, Isaac I. "Part I, General Report, Narrative of 1853." Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Vol. 12, U.S. War Department, 1860.

William Franklin Raynolds Papers, 1859-1860. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Described in ArchiveGrid, https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/archiveComponent/702127481. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.