The Frontier Years: L. A. Huffman, Photographer of the Plains (review)

116CIVIL WAR HISTORY In a commendable effort to recapture some of the movement and confusion of war, the editors have added nearly a hundred reproductions of battlefield sketches by Alfred Waud, William Waud, Edwin Forbes, and others. These sketches were badly reproduced in contemporary magazines, their lightness and detail destroyed by the heavy hand of the engraver, but as presented here they provide a striking addition to the photographic record. They range from battlefield panoramas, showing the terrain and disposition of troops, to detailed renderings of small action scenes. Some of them are meticulously literal; others are brilliantly impressionistic. Invariably they have a vigor and an immediacy which the photographs often lack. The illustrations are arranged in fourteen chapters, which follow the progress of the fighting from Sumter to Appomattox. Continuity, and context and commentary for the pictures, are provided by Mr. Donald's accompanying text. The problems in preparing such a work are formidable. The illustrations are the main thing; yet the text must supply the information the reader needs in order to see everything that is in the picture. The text must provide continuity and perspective, with due emphasis to parts of the story for which the pictorial record is inadequate, and with adequate treatment of those parts for which it is especially rich. Mr. Donald has executed this difficult task most successfully. Through a lavish use of quotations from letters, diaries, memoirs, and other contemporary records, he faithfully reflects the immediacy and concreteness of the illustrations themselves. The perspective of the war is well maintained, and the illustrations, from first to last, are closely bound together. It was perhaps inevitable that the war in the West, especially before the Vicksburg campaign , and the war in general from the Confederate side, should be rather scantily represented. In this regard the pictorial record is defective, and Mr. Donald does his best to make up for it in his text. This book is a great credit to everyone who had a hand in its preparation, from Mathew Brady and his assistants to the present editors. It should be a part of even the most modest Civil War library. William R. Keast Ithaca, New York The Frontier Years: L. A. Huffman, Photographer of the Phins. By Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton. (New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1955. Pp. 272. $10.00.) this book is about plainsmen, hunters, soldiers, scouts and Sioux and Cheyenne warriors; it tells of hunting, fighting, freighting, wolfing, buffalo killing, road ranching, and track laying, of rough and lusty town life, and life in rugged, open country — in short, its subject is the Montana Territory during the years of exploration, settlement, and exploitation following the Civil War. The volume is illustrated by photographs originally owned bv L. A. Huffman, a frontier photographer, whose life is a part — though by no means the chief part — of the authors' story. Laton Alton Huffman, Montana's Mathew Brady, was born on a frontier Iowa farm in 1854. From his father, a photographer, he learned the techniques of that relatively new art; from stories told by pioneer relatives and from a Book Reviews117 chance meeting with a picturesquely attired plainsman, he developed a compelling urge to go west. In 1878, two years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, he arrived at Fort Keogh, situated on the Yellowstone above its junction with the Big Horn, to take the position of post photographer. Later, probably in 1880, he opened a studio in nearby Milestown (now Miles City), and made frequent camera and rifle hunts deep into the Yellowstone-Big Horn country, recording its scenery and its people, and becoming adept in the ways of frontier survival and the techniques of photography. However, with the arrival of the railroad in 1881, he began to regard the days of the true West as ended, and his economic status gradually declined until his death in 1931. In the half century he had spent in Montana, its population had increased from less than 40,000 to more than 500,000. From some 1200 of Huffman's negatives — most of which he took himself, many while wielding a home-made, fifty-pound camera from...