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Photographer on an Army Mule
Contributions by Casey E Barthelmess
Foreword by Robert M. Utley
Published by: University of Oklahoma Press
Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press
300 Pages | 6 x 9 | 127 b&w illus.
$21.95
Rebelling against the nineteenth-century compulsory peacetime military service of his fatherland, Bavarian-born Christian Barthelmess demonstrated his independent spirit by migrating to America and spending the greater part of his life in the United States Regular Army. Beginning as an army musician, he soon developed his avocation of photography to such an extent that it gradually supplanted his regular assignments.
Never a man to limit his interest to mundane daily affairs, Barthelmess was keenly aware of the significance of the place and time in which he lived. While serving on the western frontier of the United States during post–Civil War days, he was “catching shadows” in his little black box, as the Indians described photography. His photographs preserved many details of military life on the western plains. Barthelmess captured what the men there looked like, details of their equipment and activities, their actions at ease and under stress, and the historic events of that time and place.
Including more than one hundred of Barthelmess’s fine photographs, Photographer on an Army Mule is an important contribution to the history of the nineteenth-century American West.
Never a man to limit his interest to mundane daily affairs, Barthelmess was keenly aware of the significance of the place and time in which he lived. While serving on the western frontier of the United States during post–Civil War days, he was “catching shadows” in his little black box, as the Indians described photography. His photographs preserved many details of military life on the western plains. Barthelmess captured what the men there looked like, details of their equipment and activities, their actions at ease and under stress, and the historic events of that time and place.
Including more than one hundred of Barthelmess’s fine photographs, Photographer on an Army Mule is an important contribution to the history of the nineteenth-century American West.
Maurice Frink spent thirty years as a newspaperman and was the author of several books on the West, including Fort Defiance & the Navajos.
Casey E. Barthelmess was the son of Christian Barthelmess and a prominent rancher in Montana.
Robert M. Utley (1929–2022) served in the National Park Service for 25 years in various capacities, including Chief Historian from 1964 to 1972. Since his retirement from the federal government in 1980, he has devoted himself full-time to historical research and writing with a specialty in the American West. He is author, among many articles and books he has published, of Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier, Revised Edition; Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life; Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers; and The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West. A founder of the Western History Association, Utley has served on its governing council and as its president.
“A detailed and fascinating picture of Army life.”—Western Books Roundup