William Henry Jackson - Early Life

Early Life

Jackson was born in Keeseville, New York, on April 4, 1843, as the first of seven children to George Hallock Jackson and Harriet Maria Allen. Harriet, a talented water-colorist, was a graduate of the Troy Female Academy, later the Emma Willard School. Painting was his passion from a very young age. By age 19 he had become a skillful, talented artist of American pre-Civil-War Visual Arts, of whom Orson Squire Fowler wrote as being "excellent as a painter".

After his boyhood in Troy, New York and Rutland, Vermont, in October 1862 Jackson at the age of 19 joined as a private in Company K of 12th Vermont Infantry of the Union Army Jackson spent much of his free time sketching drawings of his friends and various scenes of Army camp life that he sent home to his family as his way of letting them know he was safe. Later he fought in the American Civil War for nine months, including (only) one major battle, the battle of Gettysburg, but Jackson spent most of his tour on garrison duty and was guarding a supply train during the engagement. His regiment mustered out 14 July 1863. Jackson then returned to Rutland, VT, where he eventually got into creative crisis as a painter in post-Civil-War American society. Having broken his engagement to Miss Carolina Eastman he left Vermont forever, for the American West.

In 1866 Jackson boarded a Union Pacific railroad and traveled until it reached the end of the line at that time, about one hundred miles west of Omaha, Nebraska, where he then joined a wagon train heading west to Great Salt Lake as a Bullwhacker, on the Oregon Trail. In 1867 along with his brother Edward Jackson he settled down in Omaha, NE and got into the photography business. On ventures that often lasted for several days, Jackson acted as a "missionary to the Indians" around the Omaha region and it was there that Jackson made his now famous photographs of the American Indians: Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Winnebagoes and Omahas.