The Big Picture. Nashville Terminal, 1905.

Nashville terminal, 1905

Cowgirls at the Pendleton Round Up, 1911

July 3, 1920. Gorgas and Georgism

Portland, Maine.  Fire Department No. 1.  July 3, 1920.

Portland, Maine, Fire Department, #2, July 3, 1920

The Surgeon General of the U.S. Army during World War One died on this day in 1920.  He was 65 years old.

William C. Gorgas.

Gorgas was an interesting character.  The son of a northern born Confederate Civil War officer, he had joined the Army as a physician in 1880.  In the Army, he'd become a specialist in tropical diseases, surviving a bout with yellow fever himself.  

His experiences in tropical areas lead him to become a Georgist, a fairly difficult to grasp economic theory which holds that a "Land Value Tax" is somehow the cure for all of society's ills.  The theory had some well known adherents, including Winston Churchill and William F. Buckley.

Connecticut College, July 3, 1920

Gorgas was 65 when he died.  He fits into a certain pattern for men who have endured the stress of command in war. They die soon after the conflicts have concluded.  An examination of the lives of officers from the Civil War, World War One, and World War Two, pretty clearly demonstrate that trend.

The Big Picture. American Indians, California. 1916.

June 9, 1920. In Memorium.

Fort Worth, Texas.  June 9, 1920.

Fort Worth was the subject of wide lenses on this day in 1920.

I've been to Fort Wort and this looks sort of familiar today, but I'm not familiar enough to really comment on it.  Is anyone who stops in here familiar with the town?

War memorials Council appointed by the Secty. of War as an advisory group for consultation with the War Dept. in matters respecting the deposition of overseas dead.

In the US the council appointed by the Secretary of War dealing with overseas war dead had their photograph taken.  In the UK, on the same day, the Imperial War Museum opened.  It is one of the greatest military museums in the world.

May 29, 1920. Good Roads Week.

First East Bay Ship by Truck Tour, May 17-22, 1920, Robert W. Martland, Train Commander.  Copyright deposit, May 29, 1920.  Not juxtaposition next to railroad. . . a sign of things to come.  The five day tour, which included military and civilian trucks, was part of Good Roads Week.

Panoramic Photograph Equipment?

We have a category here called "The Big Picture" that features panoramic photographs and, for that matter, panoramic photos are also a separate category item here.  We like them.

Camp Kearney Remount Station, California.  December 1917.

Indeed, we like them so much we've used in them for our various blogs for header or footer photographs.

Big Horn Springs, Thermopolis Wyoming.  April 8, 1918. This is our header photograph for our Railhead blog.

But in spite of that, there's some things we don't know about them.

Laramie, Wyoming.  October 1908.  This is the header for our Painted Bricks blog.

And one of the principal things we don't know is what the photographic equipment used to make these photographs was.

Panoramics were enormously popular from the late 19th Century up through World War Two.  After that, for some reason, they really faded from the scene, and even though you'll occasionally see them today, and you can in fact make them with your Iphone, they aren't what they once were.

How were they done? The camera equipment was obviously special for them, but I can't really find out anything about it.  A search on the topic reveals very little in the way of information.

Advertisement for early panoramic camera.  I have no idea in general what panoramic cameras were like.

If you know, comment below.  We'd like to know how these were done.

April 24, 1920 The return.

Law enforcement legend William E. Johnson returned to Westerville, Ohio.  I don't know what his connection with Westerville was, but Johnson was a legendary prohibitionist and undercover policeman.

April 18, 1920. Dallas skyline.

Dallas Texas, April 18, 1920.

Scenes from November 24, 1919

International Men's Day, 2019

Photograph of a Soviet soldier prior to the Battle of Kursk, 1943. This photograph is really remarkable in that it shows a soldier in the Red Army making a visible religious devotion in a state that didn't approve of that.  Given the style of the cross, he was likely Catholic and probably Polish or Ukrainian.

I'm sure that this day will go largely unnoticed and unobserved.  I'm only aware of it due to Kursk.  Perhaps its a day that can serve for meaning more than its intended to mean.

The Big Picture: Scenes from September 9, 1919.

Pike's Peak, Colorado. September 9, 1919.

Gateway, Garden of the Gods, September 9, 1919.

Fourth biennial and twenty-seventh consecutive convention, United Mine Workers of America held at Cleveland, Ohio, Sept. 9, 1919

Mid Week At Work. Names that shouldn't be forgotten.

Marguerite Higgins.

Dickey Chappelle

Catherine Leroy

Scenes from the past. . .Ford Tri Motor Flying over town.

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: One of the Great Wars Most Iconic ...

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: One of the Great Wars Most Iconic ...: The bridge in the photo above still stands across the St. Quentin Canal, just south of the village of Riqueval where the canal emerges...

Those top two shelves of the secretary.

"Sincerely yours, Woodrow Wilson 21,000 officers and men, Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio, Brig. Gen. Mathew C. Smith, commanding". September 5, 1918.

The U.S. was big on these odd staged photographs during World War One.  This is one of the odder ones.

Mid Week At Work: Today In Wyoming's History: August 29, 1870. Mt. Washburn ascended.

From Our Companion Blog, Today In Wyoming's History:

Today In Wyoming's History: August 29:  1870  Mount Washburn in Yellowstone National Park ascended for the first time by members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition.   The scientific/topographic expedition was under a military escort lead by U.S. Army Cavalry officer, Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, who made this report:

The view from the summit is beyond all adequate description.  Looking northward from the base of the mountain the great plateau  stretches away to the front and left with its innumerable groves and  sparkling waters, a variegated landscape of surpassing beauty, bounded  on its extreme verge by the cañons of the Yellowstone. The pure  atmosphere of this lofty region causes every outline of tree, rock or lakelet to be visible with wonderful distinctness, and objects twenty  miles away appear as if very near at hand. Still further to the left the snowy ranges on the headwaters of Gardiner's river stretch away to the  westward, joining those on the head of the Gallatin, and forming, with  the Elephant's Back, a continuous chain, bending constantly to the  south, the rim of the Yellowstone Basin. On the verge of the horizon  appear, like mole hills in the distance, and far below, the white  summits above the Gallatin Valley. These never thaw during the summer  months, though several thousand feet lower than where we now stand upon  the bare granite and no snow visible near, save n the depths of shaded  ravines. Beyond the plateau to the right front is the deep valley of the East Fork bearing away eastward, and still beyond, ragged volcanic  peaks, heaped in inextricable confusion, as far as the limit of vision  extends. On the east, close beneath our feet, yawns the immense gulf of  the Grand Cañon, cutting away the bases of two mountains in forcing a  passage through the range. Its yellow walls divide the landscape nearly  in a straight line to the junction of Warm Spring Creek below. The  ragged edges of the chasm are from two hundred to five hundred yards  apart, its depth so profound that the river bed is no where visible. No  sound reaches the ear from the bottom of the abyss; the sun's rays are  reflected on the further wall and then lost in the darkness below. The  mind struggles and then falls back upon itself despairing in the effort  to grasp by a single thought the idea of its immensity. Beyond, a gentle declivity, sloping from the summit of the broken range, extends to the  limit of vision, a wilderness of unbroken pine forest.

William Henry Jackson on Mount Washburn a few years later.

If reading this description, and looking at this photo, makes you think that this work was considerably more exciting, interesting and valuable than your own today. . . well it probably indeed really was.

Night attack with phosphorous bombs, Gondrecourt, Aug. 15, 1918 / Signal Corps photo by Sgt. J.J. Marshall.

Some days

Harry Yount, sometimes regarded as Wyoming's first Game Warden, at Berthould Pass, Colorado in 1873.

Note that Yount retains a muzzle loading plains rifle, even though this was now in the cartridge arm era.