Camera in the Cow Camps
Cowboy Erwin E. Smith captured the disappearing West on film.
Categories: History , Photo Gallery
By: Bonnie Crutcher 05/01/2008
At the turn of the 20th century, a young cowboy obsessed over how he could best preserve true cowboy culture.
Erwin Evans Smith, born in 1886, roped, branded, herded cattle, rode horseback and cooked chuckwagon food while staying at his uncle John Sanders’s JCS Ranch in Foard County, Texas. Some of the old cowhands shared their stories with him, as well as their concerns about how life on the open range was gradually disappearing, due to the invention of barbed wire and railroad lines that were making long cattle drives a thing of the past. (The 1885 Kansas Quarantine law to keep out Texas cattle fever also helped put the nail in the coffin.)
A grown-up Erwin took his love for the open range with him when he studied painting and sculpting at the Art Institute
of Chicago (his school mate was artist Georgia O’Keeffe who would make her
mark in Santa Fe) and the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts. But after receiving his first camera as a teenager, he soon realized the only way to truly capture the beauty of the open plains was through photography. He wrote: “From the first time I laid eyes on the sun burnt plains of the West, with its grand scenery, I have been in love with its still, enchanted solitude. Its change of colors no artist can portray.”
Erwin felt he had an edge over some
of the artists of the times, like Remington and Russell, who drew the frontier life
he was preserving on film. He even said
of the New York-born artist Remington,
in 1908, “Some of Frederic Remington’s illustrations are magnificent, but in certain of his pictures, in not a few of them, in
fact, Mr. Remington has not been accurate. This is probably due to the fact that he doesn’t know the men and the life with
that thorough knowledge an artist who paints it should have. One must live among them to acquire it.”
The camera allowed Erwin to capture the hard-working cowboy life he knew firsthand. He swore to portray the relationships cowboys had with their horses, cattle and the open plains. In doing so, he helped preserve important details of that culture and dispelled some of its most romanticized myths.
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