Solomon D. Butcher.

Solomon Devore Butcher arrived in Custer County, Nebraska in 1880, filed on a homestead, and almost immediately decided he did not want to farm it. What he wanted, by his own account, was to make a photographic record of the people who did — the families breaking sod across the central plains in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

From roughly 1886 through 1892 he travelled the county with a wagon-mounted view camera, posing homesteaders in front of their sod houses with everything they owned arranged on the prairie: organs, sewing machines, wedding-china, mule-deer antlers, the milk cow, the horse, the dog, the rifle. The resulting plates — perhaps three thousand of them — are the most complete visual record of frontier sod-house life that survives anywhere in America.

The work was nearly lost. A 1899 fire destroyed his studio and negatives of his manuscript history; the glass plates survived only because they were stored in a separate building. The Nebraska State Historical Society acquired the surviving negatives in 1911 and they remain the cornerstone of any serious study of the homesteading era.

Butcher kept working into the new century. By the late 1900s he had moved into the real-photo postcard trade and was operating in and around the Pine Ridge Reservation, photographing Lakota encampments, dances, and the everyday cultural collisions of Rushville and White Clay. He died in Greeley, Colorado in 1927, largely poor, his reputation made entirely by other people's later reading of his pictures.