Iowa Heritage Illustrated

Swaim, Ginalie

English

Water plenty timber scarce grass is poor'

Here’s  your 
sneak preview o f "the 
W estern Historic 
Trails Center, 
opening October 5  
in Council Bluffs
Aerial perspective of the 480-acre Western Historic Trails Center.
T
he following photo essay is part of an exhibit now being installed in the 
new Western Historic Trails Center in Council Bluffs. Opening in early 
October, the center will tell the story of western expansion in the United 
States. Through exhibits, sculptures, and film, visitors will experience westward 
migration on the four overland trails—the Lewis and ClarkTrail.the Oregon Trail, 
the California Trail, and the Mormon Pioneer Trail, which crossed southern Iowa 
and is the focus of the images on the following pages.
Western Historic Trails Center is owned and operated by the State Histori­
cal Society of Iowa, and was built by the National Park Service and local partners. 
The center opens October 5. Take exit I B off Interstate 80 and south onto 24th 
Street. For more information, call 712-325-4900.
The Editor


Your Sneak Preview of the Western Historic Trails Center

Bennett, Mary

How to Store and Preserve Your Color Images

Iowa Heritage Illustrated, vol.78 no.1, Spring 1997

Wagasky, Rashelle

One in a Million

Hockett, Philip G

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CORA BUSSEY HILLIS COLLECTION. SHSI (IOWA CITY)
Photographers and consumers have searched for ways to add color to monochrome photographs 
since the beginning of photography. Daguerreotypes 
were hand-tinted with gold to highlight a necklace, 
ring, or pocketwatch chain and with light shades of 
color to accentuate clothing. One method involved 
mixing dry color tints with wine and applying them 
carefully with a camel's hair brush.
With the widespread use of albumen prints after 
the 1850s, commercial photographers offered a variety 
of monochrome images—portraits, stereographs, or 
landscapes—that could be colored with oils, watercol- 
ors, or crayons. The 1880s cabinet card above shows 
an amateur's efforts to regain the color of what must 
have been a fun-filled event.
In the hands of a professional, far more sophisti­
cated results could be obtained—consider the 1940 
graduation portrait on the right. A product like Mar­
shall's Oil Photo Colors (see sample tubes) offered 
hues ranging from "cheek," "lip," and "flesh," to "tree
green, Chinese blue," and "raw Sienna," and 
could be applied with cotton tufts to "hair, grass, 
rocks, roads, tree trunks, brick walls, etc." The 
Marshall brochure also explains that everyone 
from "children who want to apply a few simple 
washes of color to a print to amateur and profes­
sional colorists making colors for studios or . . . 
magazine covers" could use the transparent oils to 
transform their "black-and-white prints into gor­
geous color photographs," and that the advantage 
"over direct color photography is that the colorist 
is not limited by the
original color of the 
subject."
The persistence of 
hand-tinting long after 
direct color images be­
came readily available is 
hard to explain. Perhaps 
some photographers be­
lieved that so intimate a 
thing as color had to be ap­
plied by hand, and that the 
artificial look that resulted 
bridged the arts 
of painting and 
p h o t o g r a p h y ,  
thus providing 
the best of both 
worlds.
Hand-coloring 
became a skilled 
craft, that lasted 
well into the 
1960s as a main­
stay of portraiture 
and wedding pho­
tography. ♦>
COURTESY WINNIE BENNETT
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¿*ESE BLUE 
jtuI China
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NOTES ON SOURCES FOR "EXPOSING IOWA'S TRUE COLORS" AND "THE HAND-COLORED PHOTO"
For an extended discussion of the cultural context of the autochrome process, see John Wood, The A r t  o f  the A u tochrom e: The B irth  o f  Color 
P hotography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993). Other sources include: Robert Mason, Paul Trachtman et al., Color (Time-Life Books, 
1975?); Walter W. Sipley, A  H a lf  C e n tu ry  o f  Color (New York: Macmillan, 1951); Sylvain Roumette, Michel Frizot et al., E arly  Color Photography  
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Brian Coe, C olour Photography: The F irst H u n d red  Years, 1840-1940  (London: Ash & Grant, 1978); Clifford A. 
Nelson, N a tu ra l Color Film: W hat It Is and  H ow  to Use I t (New York, Galleon, 1939; 2nd ed.); Mary Bennett, "The Man Behind the Camera: Fred W. 
Kent," The P alim psest (Fall 1994); and Leo A. Borah "Iowa, Abiding Place of Plenty," N ationa l G eographic (Aug. 1939). Also consult Henry 
Wilhelm, The Perm anence and  Care o f  Color Photographs (Grinnell, Iowa: Preservation Publishing Co., 1993). Thanks to the University of Iowa 
Press for allowing Tom Jorgensen and SHSI staff to use their 19th-century window as the backdrop for the page 2 photo. Thanks also to Barbara 
Kent Buckley and Paul Zimmer for their assistance. Mary Bennett, photo archivist at the State Historical Society of Iowa (Iowa City), was 
instrumental in the preparation and shaping of this presentation. Annotations are kept in the Iowa H eritage Illu stra ted  production files.
24 Iowa Heritage Illustrated


The Hand-Colored Photo

Tschofen, Carmen

The Finest Warehouse West of Chicago': Bishop's Block in Dubuque

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SHSI (IOWA CITY): DAVID F BARRY COLLECTION
A s  emigration expanded during the century, the American Indian nations that  witnessed covered wagons crossing their 
hunting territories found their shrinking numbers restricted to reservations and their people dependent on government 
annuities. David Barry photographed this census-taking late in the century at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota.
In the Wake of the Western Trails
T
he story of the western
trails did not end in 
the 1870s—nor did the 
impact of the trails on 
western lands and 
peoples. U.S. government treaties 
shifted American Indian nations 
from their wide-ranging hunting 
grounds to reservations. Home­
steaders developed local transpor­
tation routes to connect their new 
communities. Railroads, eager to 
recapture investments, brought 
first emigrants and then tourists to 
the West.
By the 20th century and the 
Age of the Automobile, traveling 
across the West became a matter of 
finding service stations, photo­
graphing majestic scenery, writing 
postcards, and visiting those dis­
tant cousins whose parents had 
emigrated west 50 years earlier. 
And what of the five diarists
with whom we journeyed west in 
this issue? Kitturah Belknap, who 
had spent so many winter nights 
in Van Buren County sewing for 
the trip, ended her diary with the 
good news that the party was only 
a half-day from Fort Hall, Idaho.
Nevertheless, pregnant with 
another child and worried about 
her son Jessie, who was sick with 
mountain fever, she wrote: "It's 
morning. I have been awake all 
night watching with the little boy. 
He seems a little better; has 
dropped off to sleep. The sun is 
just rising and it shows a lot of the 
dirtiest humanity ever was seen 
since the creation. We just stop for 
an hour and eat a bite and let the 
teams breathe again. We divide the 
water with the oxen. George has 
sat on his seat on the front of the 
wagon all night and I have held 
the little boy on my lap on a pillow
and tended him as best I could. I 
thot in the night we would have to 
leave him here and I thot if we did 
I would likely to stay with him but 
as the daylight [came], we seemed 
to get fresh courage."
Eventually, Kitturah Belknap 
and her husband, George, ranched 
and farmed in Oregon. Five more 
children were born to them; two 
died of typhoid. Kitturah died in 
1913, at age 93.
I
oŵ an James Cowden, who 
had been so "anxious to get 
to the land of gold," finally 
reached California on Octo­
ber 12, 1853—six months 
and five days after he had left 
Keosauqua. On January 1,1854, he 
reflected in his diary again: "After 
spending a few months here 1 will 
add a few words to my daily
190 Iowa Heritage Illustrated
A
record. . . . An overland trip to 
California or Oregon is not diffi­
cult or dangerous. I really enjoyed 
it and could spend several years 
very pleasantly traveling through 
the hills and mountains of this 
western country. Its wild scenery 
is very interesting to me, and I do 
not see how any person can help 
enjoying it. But a person that has a 
team of 4 or 5 pairs of oxen to drive 
every day will have but little time 
or inclination for romancing. .. .
"From Fort Laramie to the Ne­
vada Mountains, a distance of 
twelve or fourteen hundred miles, 
wild sage constitutes three fourths 
of the vegetation to be seen/' he 
wrote. "I would give more for one 
county in Iowa than for all of it, ex­
cept perhaps the Salt Lake Valley. 
Can't see any use for so much 
desert country, for certainly it is 
good for nothing only to hold the 
rest of Creation together.. ..
"While on the road to Califor­
nia, the men would sometimes get 
to talking about a railroad across 
the plains to San Francisco, and all 
thought it would be a good thing,
though few think it will be built 
during our day. One man ex­
pressed the opinion that one 
would be built within twenty-five 
years or thirty years if California 
continued to turn out gold as 
freely as at present, but most 
thought it more likely to be fifty or 
one hundred years before any road 
would be built....
"But take the whole country, it 
seems to me to be of little account 
except for the gold it contains. No 
doubt there is untold millions of 
gold hid away in the mountains 
and creeks, but it takes hard work 
to get it out, and mining is a Lot­
tery business at best, with many 
blanks for one prize. I have seen 
men here that came in 49 and are 
not worth anything now, while 
others come and only stay a few 
months and are lucky enough to 
make a few thousand and return to 
their old home, well satisfied.
". . . My first claim is on Long 
Gulch," Cowden continued, "and 
cost me two hundred dollars, but 
as yet have not made anything out 
of it, but hope I will when we get
water enough to work to good ad­
vantage. I do not regret coming to 
California, although I have not 
made anything yet. It is a very 
healthy country, and to me is a 
very pleasant place to live, and if a 
few others were here would spend 
the rest of my life here or some 
other part of the Pacific Coast."
We have no record of where 
James Cowden spent the rest of his 
life.
E
liza Ann McAuley, the
17-year-old who had 
tamed a young ante­
lope and learned Indian 
words on the trail, 
settled in California. Two years 
later in Sacramento she married 
Robert Seely Egbert, a 49er from 
Indiana. Later they owned a large 
ranch in Solano County.
Albert Paschal, who had been 
so impressed with immense herds 
of buffalo, mined for gold until late 
1853, when he returned to Colum­
bus City, Iowa. There he married 
Mary G. Getts in 1854. They lived 
in various spots in Iowa; he died in 
1900.
Richard Keen, who had scaled 
trail landmarks to leave his name 
"above all others," wandered in 
California for some time. After 
stints ranching, mining, and mill­
ing, and wishing he "had never 
heard of California," he took a ship 
from San Francisco, to Panama, to 
New York—and then home to 
Iowa.
—The Editor
Io w a  to u r is ts  pose  by a c o g ra il e x c u rs io n  c a r  a s c e n d in g  P ik e ’s Peak in  C o lo ra d o , 
1 893. L u re d  by p o w e r fu l w e s te rn  la n d sca p e  p h o to g ra p h y  and  ra i lro a d  p ro m o t io n s ,  
A m e r ic a n s  t re k k e d  to  w e s te rn  la n d m a rk s  o n c e  c o n s id e re d  fo rm id a b le  o b s ta c le s .
Winter 1997 191


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