L.A. Huffman: Photographer of the American West, by Larry Len Peterson

By Allen M. Jones, 9-30-05

“...One looked about and said, ‘This is the last West.’...There was no more West after that. It was a dream and a forgetting, a chapter forever closed."
– L.A. Huffman

The history of the American West is a history of documentarians. Right out of the gate, every easterner turned westerner seemed aware that his or her name was going to be written in textbooks. There was the vanguard of state sponsored explorers, tramping up and down unnamed peaks, jotting journal notes on flora and fauna, unruly natives and their own sore dogs. Then the newspapermen turned dime novelists, romanticizing every penny-ante quickdraw sheriff from Deadwood to Abilene. Then there was the tidal wash of honyockers chugging along the Oregon trail in prairie schooners, each (apparently) with a prayerful wife in the back, writing letters to the folks back home. “Skeeters shure are feersume agin tuhday." This isn’t even to mention the painters, the Catlins and Bodmers, the Russells and Remingtons, (mostly) provincial sophisticates each carving out, in their own way, a colorful piece of parochial history. Each consecutive wave was aware that their experiences were remarkable, that they should be recorded for posterity. Nowhere is this more true than with the photographers, D.F. Barry and William H. Jackson, Edward S. Curtis and L.A. Huffman.

For my money, photography would have been the profession of choice. Not only were these guys on the outside edge of perhaps the most significant cultural dispersion the world has ever seen, they were also participating in a technological revolution that, fifty years before, would have seemed unimaginable. With their tripods and stacks of glass negatives, mysterious chemicals and neck braces, they would have surely seemed the David Copperfields of this new remarkable age. In a culture that valued, above all other things, commerce and technological innovation... Imagine! Here’s a machine that could steal a slice of time, then translate it into a commodity, selling it in the form of prints, postcards, cabinet cards, stereo views and collotypes. Few people did it so well (and, arguably, no single photographer has been so important to the history of Montana) as Laton Alton Huffman (1854-1931).

A protégé of Frank Jay Haynes (who would later become the official photographer for Yellowstone National Park), and an emigre from Iowa to Montana Territory’s Fort Keogh (later, Miles City) Huffman came west at the tail end of the Indian wars, just before the final extermination of the buffalo, and on the cusp of the Texas cowherds and the million-acre-ranches of yore. He made it a point to be buddies with the likes of Teddy “Blue" Abbott, Charlie Russell, William Hornaday, and George Bird Grinnell. And by god, through it all, he remembered his camera.

A couple of years ago, The Settlers West Galleries of Tucson, Arizona published, in expensive, limited edition hardcover, a remarkable collection of over 500 images: L.A. Huffman: Photographer of the American West. With accompanying text admirably written and researched by historian Larry Len Peterson (author of Charles M. Russell: Legacy, and Philip R. Goodwin: America’s Sporting and Wildlife Artist), Missoula’s small publishing company Mountain Press has recently released an accessibly-priced ($45) paperback edition. Prior to these books, the only available portfolios of Huffman’s work came in the form of the classic (but long out of print) The Frontier Years: L.A. Huffman, Photographer of the Plains, and its companion Before Barbed Wire. Together, these two books reproduced (with poor quality) roughly 250 of Huffman’s images. This newest collection – coffee table sized and printed in four colors on high quality paper – corrals together more than 500 images, including book covers, novel illustrations, postcards, and a handful of exquisite, hand colored prints. As Peterson points out in his introduction, “The famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams once said, ‘the negative is the score, and the print is the performance.’ Until this publication, Huffman’s performance has gone unrecognized. For the first time, the visual and emotional tones of his photographs are presented since all of the images in this publication are reproduced from originals."

The photos are clumped in chapters, according to subject matter, each with an explanatory introduction from Peterson. A sampling of chapter titles demonstrates the diversity of Huffman’s interests: Yellowstone National Park; Hunting; Custer Battlefield; [Indian] Portraits; Bronc Busting; Branding, Roping, and Cutting. Peterson’s text leads us through these subjects, taking the time to explain the technical processes behind the images – “Collotypes were mechanically reproduced prints produced on special paper that, under magnification, has a reticulated or grainy pattern." – as well as the cultural contexts in which the images were being produced. We learn, for instance, the variety of names given to different kinds of ear notching on cattle (under bits, over hack, sharp, steeple fork) as well as the price paid for a chuck wagon manufactured by Studebaker ($100). Consider them tiny little history lessons. About Huffman’s hunting images, for instance, Peterson writes, “In May 1884, Grinnell wrote in Forest and Stream about the need for an ‘association of men bound together by their interest in game and fish, to take active charge of all matters pertaining to the enactment of carrying out of laws on the subject.’ Limited to one hundred members, the Boone and Crockett Club was established in 1887. At the founding dinner held at Theodore Roosevelt’s home, distinguished guests included Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Francis Parkman, Owen Wister, Albert Bierstadt, and Huffman’s good friends Grinnell and Hornaday."

These petite essays are appropriately accoutered with excerpts from a variety of sources, including Huffman’s own writings. In describing an interview with Cheyenne Chief Two Moon, a participant in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Huffman wrote, “When one realizes as I did at that moment, knowing that man as I did, that event was the most momentous of his life...– if one can imagine the condition of mind of those young boys and girls, and those aged and withered, travel-stained mothers of those Indian children out driving the horses toward camp – can one imagine a more thrilling thing to them than their running for a mile or more in a cloud of dust with the horses and crying so that warriors could hear, ‘Nutskawehooo, the white soldiers – they are here!’" Unfortunately, in one of the book’s few weaknesses, Peterson’s text is physically displaced from the images themselves, so that, as a reader, you’re often forced to flip back and forth to reference a particular photo. And if Peterson relies for his excerpts somewhat too heavily on Teddy Abbott’s memoir, We Pointed Them North, and Charlie Russell’s Trails Plowed Under, it’s easy to forgive him, given how essential and indeed canonical these two titles have become to the literature of Montana.

It’s tough to make a book of photography feel important. Nine times out of ten, they’re produced as mindless accessories, the coffee table equivalent of magazines in a waiting room. And yet, with the long overdue L.A. Huffman: Photographer of the American West, presented nearly seventy-five years after the artist’s death, Larry Len Peterson and the intrepid folks at Mountain Press have given us a title that, in its accessible and artful documentation of an iconic era, belongs on the shelf of every well read westerner.

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