The photographs of F.M. Steele
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
I suppose it must have been 20 or 30 years ago when I first saw some of Francis Marion Steele's photographs of cowboys at work in the Southwestern Plains. Since then I often have seen some of his more striking photos — a nighttime shot of trail-driving cowboys around a chuck wagon preparing to go on night guard, a branding scene out in the open plains, a group of cowboys and a horse taking a bath in a stream — serving as illustrations in many books and articles, usually without attribution.
These photos, and 55 more, are in the Berryman Collection in the Krier Pioneer Museum in Ashland, and also in the Kansas State Historical Society library.
Looking through the Berryman Collection, which in addition to cattle ranching also contains scenes of early-day farming, it was obvious to me that Steele's work provided an excellent source of documentation of life on the Plains at the turn of the 20th century. And when I learned that Steele operated out of studios in southwest Kansas, my native pride kicked in and I determined to learn more about Steele and try to get him the credit he deserved.
His photographs of cowboys and ranch work, for instance, are comparable in quality and importance to the much better known photographs of Erwin E. Smith in Texas, and L.A. Huffman in Montana. Unlike Smith, however, Steele was not a cowboy determined to document his profession, and unlike Huffman in his Miles City studio, Steele did not work out of a single locale. Rather, Steele began his work as an itinerant photographer, traveling the plains in the years around the turn of the 20th century in a wagon that served as a portable studio and darkroom.
Starting in 1891, Steele traveled the roundup circuit in southwest Kansas, southeast Colorado, northeast New Mexico, and the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, taking pictures, developing them on site, and then selling them to ranchers and cowboys working the roundups. One early-day cowboy, Charles McKinney of Englewood remembered Steele as a photographer who followed area roundup wagons in a buggy. By the late '90s he had a studio in Ashland where he would develop the photographs he had taken in the field of farmers, farmsteads, and small towns.
A couple of years ago I decided there were probably other Steeles besides those in the Berryman Collection, so working through the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia State University, I enlisted the cooperation of the Kansas State Historical Society Library, Kansas Heritage Center in Dodge City, and various local historical societies, and we obtained a grant from the Kansas State Library's Western Trails digitization initiative, which had been originated by the Colorado State Library.
A canvass of county and state historical societies in Steele's area of activity has thus far added more than 150 Steele images to his previously known body of work. More important than the numbers is the variety, which extends far beyond ranching and cowboys and includes many scenes of farming (from kaffir corn to sugar beets to wheat), irrigation projects, railroad construction, community celebrations, civic booster trips, buildings (including farmsteads, town houses, and factories), portraits, floods, wild animals, and other scenes from nature.
To view some of Steele's photographs, go to the Western Trails link on the Kansas State Library website (http://trails.lib.ku.edu) and type in Steele. Information about Steele's life in my next column.
