Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains

A Note on Sources

{207} There are exceedingly few published primary or secondary sources for the 1900–1920s photographers of the Texas Panhandle. This work has drawn heavily, therefore, on a decade of original research by the author. This research ranges from Internet searches to regional museum archives to a personal collection of a thousand Texas Panhandle real photo postcards. In most cases, a wide variety of search functions and tasks—plus some considerable luck—were required to find, identify, and trace a “lost” town and country photographer. Once a photographer was identified, the name was added to a “Panhandle directory,” a listing of all known professionals of the period organized by geographic location. This directory evolved over time, and there were mistakes in the early versions. I also established an organizational file on the named photographer. Information from various sources and in various mediums (photocopies, subscriber service printouts, and web sites) was then added to the photographer’s file. The following general search tools and methodologies proved useful in this primary research process. Local county history books/brochures: Most Panhandle counties have one or more county history books with illustrations. I examined about thirty such works. Sadly, many photographic captions have been cropped out by editors or historical survey committees, but there are exceptions. Sometimes local or business reminiscences include a reference to an early town photographer . These local histories provide excellent context for the post-1900 period. State photohistory reference works: Among the best are David Haynes, Catching Shadows: A Directory of Nineteenth-Century Texas Photographers (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1993). Haynes’s work is an indispensable directory of the known nineteenth-century photographers of Texas up to the census year of 1900. Some significant post-1900 photographers also appear in this directory, which captures them at an earlier point in their career. However, most photographers had moved to new towns and studios in the post-1900 booms. Ava Crofford, The Diamond Years of Texas Photography (Austin: W. Frank Evans, 1975). Crofford chronicles the early Texas Photographers Association, including various state meetings and pioneer names. Some biographical “memory cups” are also included for turn-of-the-century photographers . This work includes some material on the 1920 to 1930s photographers of the Panhandle. Richard Pearce-Moses, Photographic Collections in Texas: A Union Guide (College Station: Published for the Texas Historical Foundation by Texas A&M University Press, 1987). Pearce-Moses provides useful indices and archival holdings of the major photographic collections in the state of Texas. Archival resources: Amarillo Public Library, Reference Collection and Photoarchives, Amarillo, Texas. Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Clarendon County Museum, Clarendon, Texas. Deaf Smith County Museum and Library, Special Collections, Hereford, Texas. Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and Library, Canyon, Texas. Red River Valley Pioneer Museum, Canadian, Texas. Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Texhoma Historical Society, Texhoma, Oklahoma. Internet resources: The Internet has been indispensable in the writing of this work. In some respects Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains is a disciplinary effort at digital historical geography research. The Internet was crucial in identifying the lost photographers and obtaining biographical information about them. Public and private genealogy services and associated web sites have created a vast infrastructure for finding obscure dead people—photographers as well as ancestors. The present work is very much a hybrid research work, combining oldschool archival digging and new-school blazing-fast Internet searches. Both A Note on Sources Note on Sources {208} approaches are indispensable and are woven together. A clue gleaned from one arena of knowledge can be pursued in the other. In some cases, I simply pulled up on the screen the 1910 census enumeration sheets and scrolled past all town residents and occupations—as laborious a task as it sounds— looking for the magic words “photographer” or “owns gallery.” A hit could then be researched in county archives or books. In other cases a known surname from history or a photo caption could be tracked down in digital databases, and the family even followed over time and place. The following digital tools, services, and search engines have been employed in the research and writing of this book: Ancestry.com—a major subscriber service that has a most useful search function by specific place, for example, state, county, town. I used the U.S. census collections at this site extensively, but an important caveat to this and other paid services should be noted: transcription errors are common. Consider one example...