With help from his fellow researchers, photographer Paul Horsted has located and re-photographed more than 45 photo sites from the 1874 Black Hills Expedition. Some of these locations look remarkably similar to 1874, but many have changed due to mining, road building, agriculture, railroads, and other of man’s activities. The most obvious change is the growth of Ponderosa pine trees; there are more of them visible now in almost all the views, and they have spread into valleys that were wide open in 1874. In some places, trees completely block the present view from a 1874 photo location. This is due to the suppression of natural and man-made fires since the late 1800’s.

The 1874 photos shown on this web site were scanned from stereocard originals in the collection of the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum at The Journey in Rapid City, SD. We are very grateful to the Minnilusa Pioneer Museum for their cooperation. These stereocards are first-generation prints from glass-plate negatives, made by the photographer W. H. Illingworth in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Stereocards contain two images taken at the same time from slightly different angles by a twin-lens camera,which gives a stereo effect when the resulting prints are viewed in a stereoscope, a popular pastime of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. For our project, one of the two views on each stereocard was selected for sharpness and contrast, and matched with the modern color photograph.

For the modern photos, Paul Horsted used a 6x7cm Pentax camera and Fujichrome Provia transparency film; the transparencies were scanned, cropped as needed, and sized to match the stereocard views. All images were scanned into Photoshop.

Taking the modern photo was the comparatively easy part of this project. First, hours, days and even weeks of research and hiking the Black Hills areas where the Expedition is known to have traveled was required to find the photo locations. Some of the photo locations are next to modern roads (one has a highway going right through it) while others are on remote mountain tops. All photo sites are near the 1874 Expedition route, or around its camp sites. When the Expedition camped for 6 days near the present town of Custer, SD, Illingworth was assigned a protective detachment of soldiers (Indian attack was a constant possible threat) and had time and opportunity to take photographs up to 5 miles from camp.

During our research, when a foreground rock or other landmark was recognized for the first time as something seen in the 1874 photograph, to say there was much rejoicing would be an understatement. The precise latitude and longitude of these locations were carefully recorded with GPS receivers so that they may be re-located in the future.

Paul Horsted attempted to match the angle of view and content of Illingworth’s 1874 photos as closely as possible. The alignment of foreground, middle ground, and distant landmarks was studied carefully; some locations required more than an hour of adjusting camera height, left and right, forward and back, to finally get the shot. Unknowns when re-shooting the photos include how much the foreground rocks may have shifted, or whether erosion has raised or lowered the area where the tripod stood. Pine needles are several inches thick at some locations where there was formerly barren rock, and obstructing trees made lining up distant landmarks difficult at times. Within the context of these changes, a surprisingly close match can still be made at most photo locations.

All of the photo pairs from 1874 and the present are published in the new book on the1874 Expedition.