Along the River

This post card is a picture of a train travelling along the edge of the Kicking Horse River. In the bottom right hand corner, Byron Harmon has written, “217. Kicking Horse Canyon”. I have a magnifying glass with a small light on it; when I look very carefully, and at the right angle, I can read these words on top of the river. If you compare this to the picture on the front of post card in the blog post of two days ago, you could see the curves in the river that look very similar to those in the previous post card.

I can understand Byron finding his way down to the river to be able to get a great shot like this one. One can see the entire train: two engines and tenders at the front, eleven enclosed passenger and baggage cars and one open car at the back. The rapids in the water show that the engines are working their way up the canyon from Field toward the Spiral Tunnels. If one looks carefully, especially with the assistance of a lighted magnifying glass, one can see in the upper right hand corner of the post card, a gash in the side of the mountain. Perhaps that is where the picture of the previous post card was taken and where the upper Spiral Tunnel is – who knows?

The back of the post card is just like the one of the previous blog post. It has AZO where the stamp goes with squares in the corners. So, this card is about the same age as the one in the last posting. AZO is a type of paper used to print photographs for over a century. It was first offered to the world by Kodak in 1898. Its best use was for developing contact prints. Many photographers have used AZO paper because of its qualities to produce a sharp image on strong paper. It seems Byron Harmon liked it, too.

This introduction to the biography of Byron Harmon comes from: http://www.harmonphotography.com/artists/byron.html

Again the photographer is Byron Harmon. He was born on the family homestead at Olympia, Washington, and endowed with a knack for using his hands, an adventurer’s spirit, and a bad case of asthma that vexed him his entire life. As a teenager, photography grabbed his interest and he waded into the new medium with a pinhole camera he constructed himself. An enterprising young man, he opened up a portrait studio in Tacoma, WA. Without enough money to buy film he accepted his first client and proceeded to take her picture with an empty camera. Requesting a down payment, he used the money to buy film and then asked the lady back for retakes. From that moment on he never looked back. Harmon soon realised that there was little to hold his interest in portrait photography alone. Packing his studio into three valises, he set out to wrestle with the North American landscape, heading across the southern United States, up through New York, and back west across Canada, garbed in a travelling hobos fashion wearing overalls, a white shirt and a wide brimmed straw hat, his feet naked in his boots. Wandering amidst these landscapes, his eye for geography and his talent with a lens developed quickly.

In 1903, at age 27, Harmon made a short visit to a bustling little community in the Canadian Rockies called Banff. Already with a handful of hotels, a chemist, a sanitarium, and international stardom, Harmon was shocked to find that the town was without a photographic studio. As an added bonus, the dry mountain air helped relieve his asthma. The visit was short but his impression of the place was a lasting one and he soon returned to make a living photographing mountains. Without roads or trail systems, the mountains required him to negotiate their steep slopes and treacherous passes to discover his sought after images, a deed equally as challenging as framing up the jagged peaks. His forays into mountaineering bore fruit and in 1906 he opened up shop on Banff Avenue advertising the largest collection of Canadian Rockies images in existence.