1909

WAITING, about 1909. The horse, in its winter coat, had some frost on its tail and body. Richard Throssel was best known for his photos taken while living on Montana’s Crow Reservation. Throssel, one-quarter Canadian Cree, was already a skilled photographer when Edward Curtis came to the Reservation during the winter of 1904-05. One Throssel photo, and perhaps more, appeared without credit in Curtis’s “The North American Indian.”

Was the lone tepee Throssel’s? He would have been traveling with his bulky camera, tripod, and delicate glass-plate negatives. Throssel started photography about 25 years after Miles City’s L.A. Huffman, my favorite frontier photographer. During 1911, Throssel established a studio in Billings. By that time, Huffman was primarily marketing prints of his earlier, historically important captures. -Gary Coffrin