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
In 1904, a few years after Edward Curtis began his lifelong project to photograph the West’s vanishing Indians, Erwin joined a group of young men and traveled the open range as a cowhand across Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. During these summer vacations from art school, between 1905 and 1912, Erwin photographed hundreds of people and places. He rode the range with cowhands from outfits including the JA, Frying Pan and Matador Ranches.
Erwin worked with a variety of cameras available in the early 1900s, but many of his most impressive action shots, taken at the peak of drama, came from Kodak’s simple box camera, which utilized glass plates. Erwin had a keen eye for capturing the drama at just the right moment. Some of his most popular images of cowboy life depict cowhands roping and busting broncs and branding and butchering cattle. He even managed to photograph some shots of himself riding a bucking bronco.
Starting in 1906, Erwin’s photographs began appearing in popular national magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, and they appeared regularly in Cattleman magazine through the 1940s.
By 1932, Erwin was running a few cattle and looking after his mother, in a small house his half-sister owned in Bonham, Texas. His mother died in February 1947, and death took him that September. Erwin’s half-sister Mary Alice Pettis graciously donated more than 1,800 of his images to the Library of Congress in 1949. Four years later, the University of Texas Press published a book of his photographs titled Life on the Texas Range.
Erwin’s photographs include some of the best-known images of Southwestern range life, and his life’s work has been recognized in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His work ranks as highly as that of other frontier photographers: L.A. Huffman, Charles J. Belden, Evelyn Cameron and F. Jay Haynes.
This photo essay reveals Erwin’s skill in capturing the daily drama of a cowboy’s job, from the cook to the range boss to the wranglers, during the early 1900s. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, holds the principal collection of his work.
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