National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

This transition from a 'wild' western frontier into organized segments of a federal union is documented in photographs. Private citizens and Government officials took the recently developed camera on their western adventures to record nature's curious sights and the marks that they as men and women made on the landscape. It is indeed a wonder that so many photographs have survived the hardships of the western experience, for early negatives were made of large glass plates. Some of these photographs have found their way into the National Archives as record materials of several Federal bureaus and offices, such as the Bureaus of Land Management, Indian Affairs, Public Roads, Weather, Agricultural Economics, and Reclamation; the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Geological Survey, boundary and claims commissions and arbitrations, the Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service, and the Signal Corps. The photographs listed below were selected from the records of these agencies now on deposit in the National Archives.