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

Preface

{ix} level South Plains, and plunge deep into the Trans-Pecos country. We turn east to explore the vast Rolling Plains, follow the settlers of the Cross Timbers, and roll along the well-traveled roads of the Comanche Plateau. The western half of the state is big; the time period is tumultuous; our grail is insight itself. Like Walter Prescott Webb and J. Frank Dobie, I have found that good local histories make suitable building blocks for Big History. Theprobleminattemptingtobringlong-lostknowledgetolightis that old mediums require interpretation or translation. A book about a historic communication medium should also reflect this medium and its best practitioners. The Chinese sage observes that a picture is worth a thousand words, but we know this verity because it is in print, a part of our reading. The challenge has been to create a verbal interpretation to accompany the visual artifact. I hope the written commentary promotes deeper insight into the visual story. With this in mind, each region is introduced by an essay, and a description of places, people, or events accompanies each photograph. Each volume in the Plains of Light series is based on bioregional, geographical, and cultural considerations. Physical and cultural geography are woven together wherever possible. Oddly enough, most of the photographers presented herein rarely ventured from their chosen region, as if they were bound to the land by affections and sentiments too great to ignore. Identifying local place photographers can be extraordinarily difficult. The vast majority did not sign or otherwise identify their photographs. Most took portraits of everyone but themselves. Amplifying the problem, virtually all illustrated county history books reproduce old photographs only after cropping to remove all traces of captions and names—a “photophobic” act if ever there was one. The problem is compounded by scores of traveling photographers, good and bad itinerants, who plied their trade for short or long spells. Asserting that this photographer took that photo is an art as much A kibbutznik once showed me the caves in Israel where Bedouin boys had found the Dead Sea scrolls. The caves were nondescript, high above the Dead Sea, and more like small caches than caves. But the parchments therein, packed carefully in clay jars, carried priceless wisdom and authentic voices of the past. I too have found long-lost knowledge. I have had to look in a thousand caves, as this knowledge had been fragmented and dispersed over an entire nation. The wisdom I discovered is not lacking in voices from the past. But its real treasure is visual—the photographic record of our ancestors and their villages. Plains of Light is the multi-part picture story of small places in Texas. It is also the story of the men and women who recognized the beauty of both the extraordinary and the mundane and recorded their visions on film. The period is the bright unfurling of a new century. The protagonist is an economic and technological transformation so powerful that only the name “the big change” will do. The story is told through photographic crafts and arts of the state from 1900 to the 1920s. The medium is the gelatin silver postcard print—the socalled real photo postcard (RPPC)—a phenomenal communication medium that swept the state from 1904 to 1920. Perhaps a thousand Texas photographers were busy in this period, many quietly producing magnificent visual documents of their communities for the postcard trade. The Plains of Light series is concerned with the small town and county photographers—the “lost photographers.” Though the population was increasingly drawn to the big cities, a majority of Texans still lived on farms or in small towns and quiet communities. Many of these settlements are now remembered only in anthologies on ghost towns, by a forlorn state highway marker, or in real photo postcards. Starting at the northwest tip of Texas’ 801 north-south miles, this serial work proceeds as a Grand Tour of local place photography. We journey across the booming Texas Panhandle, down through the Preface Preface {x} as a science. Wherever possible I have used documented presences, distinctive captioning, known periods of activity, and idiosyncratic papers or styles in establishing the identity of a photographer. Most local photographers have not been well documented. It is lamentable that such a pleasurable, lasting, and honorable profession as photographer receives almost no attention from historians, while tales about sociopaths, punks, and lowly cow thieves continue to fill shelves in bookstores and libraries. Spatial limitations preclude presenting the work of some...