Buffalo Bill's Wild West troupe toured the world, captiving audiences with a heavily-romanticized story about the American West. McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West An 1886 picture of William "Buffalo Bill" Cody with several of his Pawnee and Sioux performers, taken in Staten Island, New York. Meanwhile, landscape photographs show us how places like San Francisco looked before they became the sprawling metropolises of today and reveal the frontier towns that sprang up to support the influx of settlers from the East looking for their fortune - or to simply escape their pasts.
And some of these settlers - not to mention outlaws, sheriffs, miners, and judges - remain captivating and historic to this day.įrom frontier legends like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid to Native tribesman like Whirling Horse and Geronimo, the traditional practice of portraiture took on new realism and immediacy in the new age of the camera, during which these two sides struggled for the heart of the Wild West. Capturing Photos Of The Old WestĪs the United States expanded its western frontier throughout the 19th century, the last remaining stretches of the North America that had gone largely untouched by colonization eventually came under the control of white settlers. The cowboys, Native Americans, and stunning vistas west of the Mississippi were some of the earliest people and places to come in front of the lens for pictures that survive and remain important to this day. Now, artists' interpretations and people's faulty memories were quickly becoming largely obsolete.Īnd as the Old West photos above show, few historical periods benefitted as much from the invention of the camera as did the infamous Wild West. In this new age of photography, history itself was able to be preserved for posterity as it actually happened and in real time. The development of photography starting in the middle of the 19th century marked a momentous turning point for the study of history.
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