Laton A. Huffman (1854-1931) frontier photographer PHOTOGRAPHIC MURALS VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY On a bitterly cold December morning in 1878, 24-year-old Laton Alton Huffman arrived by open buckboard at Fort Keogh in the Montana Territory to become post photographer. Although his predecessor had gone broke, Huffman took over his abandoned studio with great enthusiasm. Using a 50-pound camera, cumbersome chemistry and photographic skills learned from his father back in Iowa, Huffman spent the next 35 years photographing in extraordinary detail, the last frontier of the American West. Although he never achieved much financial success during his lifetime, Huffman's body of work today offers us an intimate glimpse into what the photographer himself called "a chapter forever closed." "Kind fate had it that I should be post photographer with the army during the Indian campaigns close following the annihilation of Custer's command. This Yellowstone-Big Horn country was then unpenned of wire and unspoiled by railway, dam or ditch. Eastman had not yet made the Kodak, but thanks be, there was the old wet plate, and collodion bottle and bath. I made photographs. With crude, homemade camera, from saddle and in log shack, I saved something. Yes, it was worthwhile, despite the attendant and ungodly smells of the old process. Round about us the army of buffalo hunters - red men and white - were waging the final war of extermination upon the last great herds of American Bison seen upon this continent. Then came the army of railroad builders. That - the railway - was the fatal coming. One looked about an said, 'This is the last West.' It was not so. There was no more west after that. It was a dream and a forgetting, a chapter forever closed." Huffman eventually opened a studio in nearby Miles City, where he remained for the majority of his life. After the passing of the Indian and the buffalo, Huffman's interest was captured by the huge herds of cattle brought to Montana Territory from Oregon and Texas to feast on the native grasses, and the cowboys who came with them. Huffman frequently joined roundups, traveling with is camera mounted on his "four-footed tripod" (his horse). He went on his last great roundup just after the turn of the century, right before the flood of new settlers, who with their barbed wire and plows, turned the buffalo grass "wrong side up." By 1905, Huffman closed his photographic studio to customers and spent his remaining days reprinting and selling earlier images of the west. As he lamented to a close friend: "Everywhere I go in Yellowstone country tells me this, that soon, if I am to gallop the little gray mare, it must be in a lane...and that makes me sad: I would there were yet a few waste places left untouched by the settler and his cursed wire fence, good in its way, but not for me." PHOTOGRAPHIC MURALS VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY

19th Century American Artists Contemporary Western Artists L.A. Huffman Antique Horn Furniture Early Show and Movie Posters Photography

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