Identity, Power, and History in the Solomon D. Butcher Photographic Archive (1886-1892)

Among the most important visual archives of the late 19th-century American West is the photographic archive created by Solomon Devoe Butcher (1856-1927), who began photographing settlers in Custer County, Nebraska, in 1886. Due to the depth of material-nearly 900 portraits from a single county over just six years-and to Butcher's process of working on-site, the archive can reliably be approached as a very close and thick history, a "micro-history," of the experience of Plains settlement. This dissertation suggests that Butcher's archive offers a mode to understand the ways in which power fills space, quite literally, on a specific western landscape by approaching it as a visual nexus, as a point within which various competing beliefs and activities converge. I conceptualize the relationship of the cultural agents that vie for voice, for power, in these portraits as that of a network, a web of paths through which each agent juggles for a dominant voice in the definition of the settlers' lives. The paths of this network are fluid, multi-leveled, multi-directional, and frequently unstable, and thus their agents cannot all be defined or categorized by the same approach. Through a series of contextual essays I work to analyze each of the agents-such as agrarian and progressive ideologies, the identity of the pioneer and the westerner, the power of the Plains landscape, the presence of failure, and the awareness of history-and the nature of their visual presence in the archive. The archive and this approach reveals the specific experience of the Plains in the 1880s as a moment and location of profound transition when the colonializing agendas and structures of industrialism, the long-term nature of the Plains, and a fledgling regional identity all increasingly put pressure on the received beliefs and identities of the county's settlers. This transition was experienced self-conscious of an audience. Created to record the county's participation in national history, the archive itself acted as a venue for settlers to both conceal the agendas of their received identities to their perceived audience, and yet also to reveal the nature of the systematic failings operative in their experience.