- In the 1890s, Thomas Jaggar was a young geologist from Harvard University who came west to Wyoming and made dozens of photographs of remote Wyoming landscapes in the Absaroka region for a geological survey.

Now, an archivist from Cody, Brian Beauvais, is setting out to recreate those photographs.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

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- Brian Beauvais, welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

You're hosting us today at the very nice Park County Library Building in Cody, which is where you have an office as well.

What's your job exactly?

- So I'm the curator of the Park County Archives, which mean I collect historical information, I organize it, I help folks do research on local history.

And then we also just work on our own research projects, whatever that might be.

We talk on local history, we write, and sometimes we engage in these fun photo projects.

- Yeah, not every county has a county archives.

- We are the only county archives in the state.

- [Steve] Is that so?

- Other counties have archive sections in their libraries or in local museums.

But Park County's the only county that has a specific county archives that's dedicated to local history.

- Well, one of the things that in local history that you've discovered recently, we're talking about today is this series of photographs taken by a man named Thomas Jaggar more than 100 years ago in Wyoming.

What do we know about why he was taking these pictures and what kind of pictures did he shoot?

- Well, he took landscape photographs and he was interested in geology.

So he was out here for a geology survey with the main surveyor for Yellowstone National Park, Arnold Hague, and Jaggar came out right after he had graduated from Harvard University with a degree in geology.

He came out in 1893, came out to Bozeman, Montana, and that's where the party assembled.

And it was their plan to go through the Absarokas for three months, survey everything, look at all the geology.

Their plan was to create this Absaroka folio.

And Jaggar's job was to take photographs.

He took 140 photographs in 1893 and then 200 photographs in 1897.

And of those, 90 exist.

A lot of them were not usable or they didn't develop correctly 'cause he had to develop them in the field.

- Sure.

I wanna talk about more about what his technique was, but when you talked about the folio, we see a copy of it here and we'll get it on a different shot.

The geologic Atlas of the United States, specific to this region.

This is, for viewers to keep in mind, Wyoming statehood dates to 1890.

The Yellowstone Park, more or less, as we know, it was established a couple of decades before that.

As you understand it, what's the purpose of doing a geological survey and having maps and photos like this?

Why does that matter?

- Well, I think the USGS wanted to know about the land that is in the United States.

They wanted to map it all.

They wanted to explore the resources.

So in this case, they were really interested in the mineral resources of what the Absarokas had because they hadn't been, they had been explored, but they hadn't really been officially documented.

So miners had gone through the Absarokas, every single nook and cranny of it back in the 1860s and '70s.

But they don't always write down what they find.

And the US government wanted to have a record of what was actually there.

- [Steve] Yeah, that's awfully important.

They'd always write down what they find or where they've found it exactly.

- [Brian] Well, yeah, 'cause they wanna keep it secret from other miners.

- Your project was and is ongoing to look at these photos that he shot and then try to relocate for yourself where he shot them and photograph them again today to see how they've changed, how they haven't.

And just to add the knowledge of, to add to the body of knowledge, including pinpointing them a little more exactly and cataloging it a little more exactly than he did.

How did you first hear about Thomas Jaggar?

- Well, I fell in love with this book that was published by Bruce Blevins.

And he went to the work of editing Jaggar's diaries.

He kept diaries in 1893 and 1897.

And he edited them with some commentary.

And then he published the photos, Jaggar's photos in this book.

And then also sort of mapped out their route through the Absarokas.

And I loved this book because I just loved local geography of Park County.

And I was fascinated by the routes that they took in 1893 and 1897 and how they were different or similar to the main travel routes that we still use today.

- Sure.

- Whether that be trails or highways.

I was also interested in what he was finding there, the people that he encountered in the Absarokas in 1893 and what they were doing.

Miners, ranchers, market hunters, meat hunters.

That's fascinating in and of itself.

And I was really interested in that.

So I really love these photos.

And one day, it just occurred to me that, oh, I could go to these spots that Jaggar took these photos and sort of see how the landscape is changed or hasn't changed.

- Yeah, this is an interesting concept that I think people are familiar with in sort of a more urban kind of cityscapes and townscapes.

There was never a building there, now there is.

There used to be a false front log building there.

Now there's a six-story brick building there and on and on it goes.

Less so I think with natural landscape kind of picture.

So this was an opportunity that you recognized.

- Yeah, I think historic rephotography is not all that popular in documenting wilderness settings because there just aren't very many photos of those places, and not very many good photos, quality photos.

Old photos from cities are a dime a dozen.

But it's hard to get great photos, find great archival photos of places out in the boonies, out in the back country, up in the mountains.

- Well just think about what, yeah, had to be done.

I mean, we'll continue to talk about this and you undertook it yourself and with modern technology and more modern transportation and so forth.

I'm just imagining what Jaggar had to go through to get a lot of these.

He must be lugging- - [Brian] Yes.

- [Steve] Some heavy equipment around with a big tripod and on horseback or mule or something.

- For three months he had to bring a large glass plate negative camera and a bunch of glass plates.

And of course a lot of those got broken because they were on horses bouncing around.

- [Steve] And they're heavy.

- And they're heavy, and he had to develop these photos in the field using just creek water.

So he would develop the photos in the tent, a dark room tent as best as he could.

And a lot of them didn't work out, but a few did.

- So we're talking not just about creek water, but I remember the old days of dark room photography, bottles of chemicals as well.

Just what an undertaking.

- And he wasn't a professional photographer, so he was kind of just doing the best that he could.

- I think I heard a quote from you somewhere where you said, "This wasn't Ansel Adams out there trying to get an art shot of the full moon over the something."

- Well, that's something that I tell myself because I'm not a professional photographer either.

And it alleviated my anxieties when I remembered that Jaggar was not a professional photographer.

He was a geologist and he was taking documentary photos, he was taking photos of the landscape that would just document what was there.

And I can do that too.

- What goes into preparing for a project like that?

How did you swing it?

And did you pay for it?

- In order to rephotograph these images, I needed to get the actual photos notch from a book.

Because this book doesn't contain all the photos.

It only contains like 20 or 30.

So in March of 2020, I went down to the USGS library in Denver and talked to the archivist down there.

And I got copies of Jaggar's notebooks, his journals, and then digital images of all of the photos that he took in the Absarokas in 1893 and 1897.

They digitized them for me.

I think a few had been digitized.

So after I got done with talking to the archivists, the USGS library in Denver closed two days later for probably a couple years because of COVID.

So this was very lucky.

It was also lucky because during COVID, it was a great time to get outside and explore.

So this started with just myself, some friends, my wife, my dogs going out on day hikes trying to locate these photo locations.

- How accurate was the mapping and plotting and recording of the locations when you got started?

Were they pretty easy to find or not so much?

- Some were very easy.

Some I still haven't found where they're located.

I don't know how some would do a project like this without a technology like Google Earth that makes it so easy to view the landscape and put yourself in a certain perspective and see how mountains align.

Just to get a general idea of where perspective might be located.

So I would have a photo.

The first step would be to, at that perspective, just sitting in my office with Google Earth and try to locate a general idea of where it might have been taken and then figure out how to get to that place 'cause they're not always along a trail.

They're often not on a trail.

Involves some bush whacking.

trying to figure out the best approach or, you know, the best place to start.

And then I would often go out on day hikes, try to reach these points.

Sometimes it would take me two or three times to figure out the exact point to get there.

Or I would go on a hike and the weather would turn nasty and it wouldn't really be good photo weather.

So we have to start all over again and leave it for another day.

- Sometimes through the diaries, they pinpointed it fairly well.

- Jaggar gives some description of where he's taking photos, but they tend to be pretty general.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- He'll say at the head of Rattlesnake Creek or a long such divide.

But that's can still be a large area.

- It's a big country out there.

- It's a big country, and as some of these areas have kind of changed with vegetation changes.

- Been renamed in some cases or?

- In some cases.

It can be hard to pinpoint exactly where he took photos.

- So it was a lot of work to find.

- It was a lot of work, it was also a lot of fun.

And it's a good excuse to get outside and see the world and see the landscape while also exploring history.

- [Steve] There are photographers who love to duplicate old style photography too.

You weren't trying to do that.

You didn't lug a- - [Brian] I'm not a professional photographer and- - [Steve] Glass plates out there with you or- - I'm totally unqualified to do that.

- Yeah.

So you had a digital camera with you?

- I had a digital camera, did my best.

Again, we're just trying to get documentary photographs here.

- And you can see right what you got the moment you shot it.

Do you remember the first one you got that came out and it accomplished what you were trying to do?

- The first one that I got was in the spring of 2020.

My wife and I hiked up on, above the Clarks Fork Canyon.

And we reached a point overlooking Sunlight Falls here.

And I got this photo and I realized this would be a cool project because I was able to find, see this stick sticking up right there?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Brian] I was able to find the exact same stick, so we got the exact point where he was taking that photo.

- [Steve] 125 years later.

- Yes.

- The same piece of deadwood is there.

- So it was dead in 19, it was dead in 1893.

It's still standing there dead.

And we have multiple examples of this in this rephotography project of trees, stones that are still there.

And it always helps when Jaggar photographed something in the foreground to allow me to line up perspectives.

- Exactly.

- Makes it a lot easier.

- What were you expecting you would find?

Did you have any expectations about it?

Obviously you weren't assuming that a big tabletop mountain would not be there anymore.

- I expected to pick up how the landscape is developing with subdivisions and roads.

- And there were some of those places.

- And there are a few of those in developed areas.

You do see in some of these, erosion events, like in the floods in the spring of 2022, you can see where it eroded some of the sides of the Clarks Fork Canyon.

And those are gone now.

- Really?

- Obviously rivers change courses- - All the time.

- As they should.

And it's good to have, it's interesting to have that documented in a way that's beyond just scientific.

- So you probably found evidence, you've said you found evidence of floods.

You found evidence of erosion.

Fires?

- Evidence of fires.

Some of the places that Jaggar photographed had just been burned when he came through in 1893, 1897.

And now they are very dense forests, which makes rephotographing them difficult because where he was photographing a open meadow or a sort of burned out area where we had a good view.

Now it's just dense forest and you're just getting pictures of pine trees.

- [Steve] Of trees, yeah.

- And I go to some of those spots and I get frustrated and I say, "Well I can't rephotograph this."

And my wife says, "Well you are rephotographing it, it's just not a very good photo."

- Yeah.

- And I just have to accept that.

- Well that's what you're bound to find.

That's what you're looking for.

How has this changed, how it hasn't.

One thing that I noticed, and maybe you find it here, there's a photo at least one and probably more than that of an area that had the glaciers on it.

- [Brian] Yes.

- And you can really see the deterioration over a century of where there's just not nearly as much ice there if there is at all.

- [Brian] Yeah, so- - It's very dramatic in some places.

- That was in Sunlight Basin, the head of Sunlight Basin up Sulphur Creek, at the Sulphur Creek glacier.

And you can still go up there today, but you won't find a glacier.

You will find a rock glacier.

- And this is the glacier here.

- That's the glacier right there.

So when he was there in 1893, he was standing on probably 30 or 40 feet of ice and snow.

When I've gone there today, there is no ice and snow when I go there at the same time of year when he was there.

So you obviously can't get the same perspective exactly.

But it documents how this glacier has basically been erased.

So that's a pretty fast change in the landscape in just 100+ years.

- Yeah.

There's another picture that I've seen showing what I think to the modern eye might look like a big sort of pile of tailings or something, like a construction project.

But it's in his photo and in yours.

You know the one I'm talking about?

- The talus cones?

- [Steve] Maybe so.

- On the South Fork?

- A big, yeah, it's just like a big spray of shale almost that's come down.

- He loved those talus cones and so do I.

So he called these the great talus cone.

- T-A-L-U-S. - Yes.

- Talus cone.

- In the canyon of the South Fork of the Stinking Water, which is now called the South Fork of the Shoshone River.

There are these massive talus cones that come off the, that would be the north side of the canyon there.

- And that's not because after he shot, a miner came in and shoveled out a bunch of gravel, it's- - No, it's natural erosion.

- [Steve] Mother nature.

- Yeah.

Yep.

But the trail that he took and the trail that we took is the exact same trail.

It hasn't really changed much because you're on you top of a sort of catwalk of stone above the South Fork Canyon.

So it was pretty easy to get these photos because it's a very narrow area where he could have captured them.

- Yeah.

- And that made my job much easier.

- Tell me about one or two that you hope to find but couldn't or haven't yet.

- There's this photo.

Image number 68.

It says it is in Sunlight Basin looking east northeast from the ridge at the Forks of Great and Little Sunlight.

- [Steve] Seems like he's got some- - It seems- - Specificity there.

- Like a great description.

I have no idea where this photo is.

And I've been all over Sunlight Basin.

I've gave this photo to friends who live up in Sunlight Basin and we can't figure it out.

It's really hard to say.

He mislabeled other photos and it's pretty clear where they were actually taken.

But I have no idea where this photo is.

It's hard to line up the ridge lines.

- [Steve] The ridge lines.

- I mean, it has to be somewhere, right?

- Well maybe that'll be a, it's a discovery to come perhaps.

So did you do this as part of your job as the Park County archivist or is this a extracurricular project for you?

- I just did this on weekends just as an excuse to get outside.

But some of the photos are more than a day hikes deep into the back country.

And in that case, I had to figure out how to get to these locations.

So this past summer, I applied for a research grant from the Wyoming Historical Society.

And they very generously gave me this grant in which I was able to hire the services of an outfitter here in Cody to get me to some of these remote locations, up the thoroughfare, up the South Fork, places where I wouldn't be able to just hike in a day.

And I didn't feel like I really wanted to backpack through that country by myself.

There's just a lot more forest and denser forests on our topography today than there were back in the 1890s.

And this is a great example right here.

This is looking at the Clarks Fork Canyon and you can see these large open meadows around Russell Creek over here towards Sunlight.

Now when you look at the rephotograph, you can see those forests have moved probably three or 400 yards down the mountain.

So whether that's from the absence of forest fires or other factors, the landscape is changing in ways that is affecting wildlife, habitat.

And it's just, it's nice to have documentation of that 'cause scientists can, we know the landscape's changing.

Scientists tell us that.

But it's great to have visual, very easy visual documentation of the ways that the landscape's changing.

And of course this affects elk habitat.

It affects when my archeologist friends find sheep traps 300 yards into the forest.

And we obviously have to ask, why would the sheep eaters build a sheep trap 300 yards in the forest?

- In the forest when the forest wasn't there.

- Well, clearly they weren't there when they were building those traps.

it was an open meadow or the edge of the forest, which is now deep inside of the forest.

- Is this the kind of a thing that the historical society typically would give a grant for you to do?

- They usually fund more straightforward research expenses, but- - A PAC trip is- - A PAC trip might be usually a little out of the bounds for what they fund.

But I'll write a couple of journal articles about this project.

I'd like to publish a book, republish a book of his journals, the original photographs and the rephotographs with historical and geological commentary on everything that Jaggar was seeing.

And then I'll give a talk at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West this winter about the trip, about Jaggar, about the rephotography project.

- Jaggar was in his 20s, I think, when he was here.

What became of him?

Did he stay in Wyoming his career or what happened?

- Well, after the 1893 trip, he went back to Harvard University where he got his PhD in geology.

Then he came out in 1897 again under Arnold Hague to do another survey of the Absarokas.

And then his career took him around the world as mainly a volcanologist.

He went and studied all the volcanoes in the Aleutians.

And then he ended up in Hawaii studying the volcano activity out there.

And that's where he spent most of his career.

- So you're all done with this or is there more to come?

- No, there's plenty more.

Out of the 90 photos that Jaggar has, I have rephotographed a little over 50, and I'll do a few more this fall before winter moves in.

But then I'll continue rephotographing these.

I'll go to these spots again next summer, maybe the summer after that.

Maybe after this project is totally done, I'll continue to go to these spots just to see how they're changing, how they're not changing.

And just because I love being outside and going to these spots.

These spots have kind of become really special to me.

'Cause some of them I've already been to 10, 20 times.

- Before you ever thought of this.

- Before I ever thought of this.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Or just the process of locating these spots has really made them special.

- Well, it would be particularly useful I guess if you become aware of something that happened, like another flood or a big fire or maybe heard of a landslide or something.

You might to see not quite as it's happening, but more recent changes than 100 years on.

- I think it'll also be helpful for researchers in the future 100 years from now.

'Cause we'll have a timeline of rephotographs.

We'll have Jaggar's original photographs, my photographs 130+ years later, and then folks who are taking photographs, rephotographs of these same locations, however long from now to really see how the landscape has changed over a long period of time.

- What got you interested in Park County geography?

Are you a local person?

- I moved here from Iowa after graduate school 12 years ago.

And I just love being outside, skiing, fishing, hiking, hunting.

So I just love the local geography.

And while I am healthy enough to explore it, I wanted to get outside and explore these places while I can.

- Yeah, and a great way to do it with a particular purpose beyond the general one that you described.

- Yeah, again, it's a good excuse to get outside and not just lollygag around, but have a work component to your play.

- Brian, I am envious of your project and your work and I'm really glad to hear that you've been able to do it.

Particularly glad to hear that you're gonna keep on doing it.

I get that's important.

I bet viewers feel the same way or imagine them out there on in the field with you and your camera and your horse and looking for the perfect spot.

- Well, I would say look for other good landscape photos from around the state and see what we can do with taking historic rephotography in other places around the state.

- Or possibly, I suppose, begin a landscape photography project, hoping that in the generations to come, someone might do what you've done.

- [Brian] Mm-hmm.

- I appreciate your time and thanks for hosting us and thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Thank you very much.

- Very enjoyable.

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