This object is a print of a photograph produced by Evelyn Cameron in 1889, entitled by her brother, Evie in Montana, 1889. This image is a self portrait Cameron arranged. She appears in the photograph, mounted on a horse and holding a bear cub. It was taken in Miles City, Montana, where Cameron and her husband, Ewen Cameron, lived on their ranch. This particular photograph, part of a massive body of work produced by Cameron between mid-1880 and 1928, is taken from her brother’s own albums. Like most of her images and self portraits, this was a photograph meant for personal documentation to be sent to her family back in England, displaying her way of life on the frontier.
Because her photographs were taken for personal use and not necessarily created as art for public distribution, Cameron’s photographs are mostly untitled. Cameron was working with photography at the turn of the century, when equipment was fairly new. Her work, in its original form, exists as glass plate negatives. Original prints like this one, developed by Cameron herself in the kitchen of her own cabin, are mounted on cardboard. Most of Cameron’s photographs took this form and were either sent to her family in England or kept for personal use. As a way to make money, Cameron also took photographs for other people living on the ranches in Montana. While she was still alive, the Terry Post Office sold her photographs for a rate of 10% commission (Lucey 11).
Evelyn Cameron’s photographs date back to the 1880s and 1890s in Montana. Her photographs are often considered, in a scholarly context, in their existence as a singular archive, instead of as individual photos. Literature on Cameron’s work focuses on its entire body, instead of analysis of single photos, since they all contribute to her collection of documenting Montana. Cameron’s production of photographs documenting frontier life in Montana are unique for various reasons. The first is simply that they not only captured life on the frontier at the turn of the century, but they particularly captured the life of a woman. Cameron took many self portraits during her daily life and chores on the ranch, tending to the kitchen, riding horses, hunting wild animals, etc but she also documented other women ranchers in her area. Women on the ranches were few and outnumbered by large numbers of men living on the frontier. Because of this, history of these women is not widespread, and Cameron’s photographs are some of the only physical documentation of women in Montana during the late 1800s.
More broadly, Evelyn Cameron’s photographs are so unique because they are some of the first and only images produced of frontier life in Montana. At the time, the United States was just beginning to expand so far West. This new life of frontierism in Montana mainly attracted immigrants and people of low classes who sought new opportunities for making money. This meant that most of Montana’s residents were poor and/or uneducated. Work and money was the primary concern, and there was not art and literature being produced to document life on the frontier. And photography was not much of a broad possibility, considering the equipment was heavy and expensive, and the materials required were just as pricey and difficult to come by.
Evelyn Cameron, however, was of unusual circumstances to be living on the Montana frontier. Cameron grew up in England and hailed from an incredibly wealthy family. As a family of two parents and five children, the Flowers (Cameron’s maiden name) were still rich enough to live extravagantly and even had servants to tend to the chores in their mansion. This meant that for Cameron, unlike most other residents of Montana, living the frontier lifestyle was not a necessity but a choice. While her husband was not nearly as rich and was not known to be great with finances, and her family did not entirely approve of the marriage, Cameron still received a monthly portion of allowance from her inheritance. It was not quite enough to keep the ranch operational, but it certainly entitled the Camerons to a life far less stressful and centered around money, allowing time for activities like documentation of daily activities.
A few years after they’d moved to Montana and in need of extra income, the Camerons took on another border (in addition to Evelyn Cameron’s older brother, Alec). The man, referred to as Adams (Lucey 6), was wealthy and they had hoped he would consider investing in their ranch. He did not do this, but he did introduce Evelyn Cameron to the art of photography. He himself was a photographer and he taught Cameron how to properly use the equipment. He even traveled to a shop where Cameron was able to purchase her camera (unfortunately, the model of the camera is unknown). Due to her prominent connections, Cameron was able to be introduced to photography, and because of her higher class lifestyle, she was able to afford camera equipment and production materials. This was true for very few of the residents of Montana’s frontier.
While Evelyn Cameron’s hobby of photography did eventually turn toward a way to make extra money, it was mostly a form of personal record keeping for Cameron and a way of sharing the details of her lifestyle with her siblings, nieces, and nephews back home in England. However, in addition to her photographs, Cameron kept extensive diaries with exceptionally detailed entries keeping record of her daily life and activities. These diaries are an exceptional resource in and of themselves, but also act as incredible supplementary documents for contextualizing Cameron’s many photographs taken over her decades on the frontier. The two records, when paired together, inform each other and make Cameron’s documentations some of the strongest in existence from the time.
Currently the entirety of Evelyn Cameron’s photographic catalogue, including all glass negatives and original prints, as well as her collection of diaries, belongs to the Montana Historical Society. The objects live at their storage headquarters, but are scanned and transcribed into a digital database on the Montana Memory Project website. The MHS acquired these documents fairly recently, as late as the 1980s. While Cameron’s photographic negatives and prints were known to be extant, and secondhand prints were floating around, the bulk of her collection was privately owned for a long period of time.
When Evelyn Cameron died in 1928, all of her equipment, negatives, and records were bequeathed to her close friend, Janet Williams, a fellow Montana resident. Williams kept the items in her basement and, despite being approached by many foundations, would not allow access to them. However in 1978, Donna Lucey, while writing a book about Evelyn Cameron’s life, convinced Williams to let her use some of the negatives for prints. This was the first time any of the negatives were available to the public. Not much later, in the 1980s, Janet Williams died and her family donated the entire collection of Evelyn Cameron’s belongings to the Montana Historical Society.
More recently, the MHS began the project to digitize their records, especially those of Evelyn Cameron, to be available to the public in an online format. Wynonna Breen, head of the Prairie County Museum board, acted as the head of the project. With a group of volunteers, they scanned and transcribed the massive amount of written and photographic records kept by Evelyn Cameron. The entire project took five years to fully complete the digitization of all the documents. These digitizations are now available on the Montana Memory Project website.
While the Montana Historical Society and the Montana Memory Project have many other documents of writing and photographs, the Evelyn Cameron collection in particular is the most expansive. Cameron’s diaries and photographs appear as the original scanned image, as well as a complete transcription of the entries and a year (if not a full date), as well as relevant tagged words. They are extensively detailed and categorized in an exact fashion.
The photographs of Evelyn Cameron are not widely known or distributed across the United States or the world, but they seem to be fairly popular in Montana. Scholar Donna Lucey wrote a book about these times to document Evelyn Cameron’s life. Other scholarly articles have been published, mainly in the Montana Magazine of Western History. The majority of these articles provide the history of Evelyn Cameron’s life or the historical context of her work. However, I located one article which speculates on secondary findings in relation to Cameron’s work. In this Article, “Divas, Divorce, and Disclosure: Hidden Narratives in the Diaries of Evelyn Cameron,” the scholars, Ann Roberts and Christine Wordsworth, explore alternative theories for the conditions of Cameron’s move to Montana and her life there. In particular, they focus on the possibility that her husband, Ewen Cameron, had been married before and his marriage to Evelyn Cameron was not officially legal. It explores the possibility that the move to Montana was not such an adventurous choice as it was an escape.
Scholarly conversation, as far as criticism goes, is few and far between when it comes to the work of Evelyn Cameron. These are objectively important documents which give us an idea of life in Montana, at least for white settlers, at the turn of the century. I would like to see more discussion of the context of Cameron’s work in conversation with the fates of Native American tribes and peoples at the time. In all the articles I read, there was no mention of Native people or of settler tensions. In fact, there was no mention of people of color at all, and the majority of Cameron’s images are of white people. Knowing that settlers pushed Native Americans off their land, and also that many cowboys at the time were Black, I would like to see more discussion of how Cameron’s work can be related to these tensions and political and social context of the time. Right now, her work seems to exist in a vacuum of the white experience and frontier “adventuring”. I am interested in the deeper stakes at hand with close analysis of her work in its wider historical context.
Works Cited
Cameron, Ewen, and Evelyn Cameron. “Under the Big Sky.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 64, no. 2, 2014, pp. 63–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24419897. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.
“Evelyn Cameron Heritage, Inc.” Evelyn Cameron Heritage Inc, www.evelyncameron.com/.
“Evelyn Cameron: Pictures From A Worthy Life.” KUSM / MontanaPBS, www.montanapbs.org/programs/EvelynCameronPicturesfromaWorthyLife/.
Lucey, Donna M. “Evelyn Cameron: Pioneer Photographer and Diarist.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 41, no. 3, 1991, pp. 42–55. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4519403. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.
Roberts, Ann, and Wordsworth, Christine. “Divas, Divorce, and Disclosure: Hidden Narratives in the Diaries of Evelyn Cameron.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 64, no. 2, 2014, pp. 46–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24419896. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.