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National Geographic : 1989 Feb
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him to this mist-laved ridge where he "emerged above the timberline and the clouds, and suddenly, as I clambered over a vast mass of jagged rocks, I discovered the great shining cross dead before me, tilted against the [opposite] mountainside." But before his teammates could arrive with his photographic kit, the cloud curtain fell for the day, and the crew descended to a foodless, blanketless night around a campfire below timberline to wait out the weather. When the next dawn broke clear, Jackson reclimbed the ridge, setup, and made eight exposures during the ideal brief moments when illuminating sunlight interplayed with depth-defining shadow-another instance of Jackson's life long luck of timing. My timing was not that lucky. The envelop ing clouds delayed Mike's site quest and our rendezvous until midafternoon when the mists swirled apart long enough to give us a tantaliz ing partial view of the elusive cross. But the slanting light failed, and next day's forecast promised more wet gloom, and so with that glimpse we had to be content. But I had gotten another meaningful measure of Will Jackson's indefatigable photographic enterprise. JACKSON WORKED in an era when photography was still a primitive and uncertain science, but its images car ried conviction. Yellowstone, the Mount of the Holy Cross, and Ana sazi ghost cities were stellar entries in his vast catalog of photographic firsts - including van ishing Indian tribes and their ways, raw lumber mining towns with no more perma nence than a line squall, and everywhere the railroads that were changing everything. In Wyoming he recorded spike-driving crews lay ing America's first ocean-to-ocean railroad; in tsarist Russia he photographed convict labor ers laying the first rails across Siberia. His 99 years gave him a recall that spanned an uncle's homecoming from musket warfare with Mexico and Japan's aerial attack on Pearl Harbor, that knew oil-wick lamps and electri cal incandescence, jolting stagecoaches and airline in-flight dining. And his 1843-1942 life span approximated the first century of photography-that beach head science that visually records the world around us. His birth came only four years after people first marveled at fragile daguerreo types; he learned photography largely as a r40o° HE FIRST SAW the high plains and Ssky-held peaks as a 23-year-old Y-. bullwhacker on the Oregon Trail; he last saw that far country on a summer sortie in his 99th year. In between, the American West, stretching from the Mis souri to the Pacific, became the special province of Will Jackson. Initially his consolation prize for losing Caddie, the frontier lured him to a new life and called him back again and again. 228 r
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