Beschreibung:

imprint of F.G. Ludlow, Carson City, Nevada Territory on verso, and identified in pencil on recto T.H. O'Sullivan and cryptic A Dem - in blank margin of mount on recto. A rare image, taken between 1871-74 while O'Sullivan was the official photographer for the Wheeler Expedition. Timothy O'Sullivan (ca 1840-1882), Irish born, began his career with Mathew Brady, but joined the Union Army until 1863, when he returned to work for Brady and took some of the most important photographs of the Gettysburg battlefield. After the war he was the official photographer for the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel. O'Sullivan's pictures were among the first to record the prehistoric ruins, Navajo weavers, and pueblo villages of the Southwest. In 1870 he joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the isthmus. From 1871 to 1874 he returned to the southwestern United States to join Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the One Hundredth Meridian. He faced starvation on the Colorado River when some of the expedition's boats capsized; few of the 300 negatives he took survived the trip back East. He spent the last years of his short life in Washington, D.C., as official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department. He died in Staten Island of tuberculosis at age 42. Provenance: The Dave Delling Collection of Western Americana, Condition: Light soil and corner bumps, VG-.