1890s Vacation Photo Album of Oregon, Washington, and California, Including Shots of Early Euro-American Architecture and Indigenous People

Oregon, Washington, and California, 1890. One forty-two page photo album with 9 ½ x 7 inch pages; 109 total photographs with eighteen 4 x 7 inch and larger and ninety-one 3 ½ x 3 ½ inch. Larger photographs captioned on negative and likely purchased while smaller ones are original. Album pages with chipping at corners and some repair with tape; photographs with some wear and very good to excellent contrast; overall very good to excellent.. A photo album from two trips taken by an unknown tourist, one around the Pacific Northwest and the other in central and southern California, with written captions describing location and subject matter. The California (truncated) trip starts in San Francisco and includes shots of Monterey, “Mexicans at Los Angeles”, and many of the Santa Barbara Mission and San Diego.

The Pacific Northwest photos show scenery around Mts. Hood and Rainier including from the recently-built Cloud Cap Hotel; the Columbia River, Paradise Valley, American Lake, and others. There are also shots of the Hotel Groe (built in 1893) and Kernahan home in Pierce County, Washington – James Kernahan was one of the earliest Euro-Americans to homestead in the region, arriving in the area in the late 1880s. The Kernahan family is mentioned in an account told by John Muir’s photographer of summiting Mt. Rainier with John Muir in 1888.[1] Further towards Rainier, there are shots of the Longmire buildings, built in about 1884.

Four interesting shots from Puyallup, also in Pierce County, are worth mentioning. Two show hops fields, one a line of tents identified as belonging to the “Indians”, and one of an “Old Indian woman” standing barefoot on train tracks. Before 1892, growing hops drove the economy of Pullyup; Indigenous people would travel from the US and Canada to Pullyup to work the harvest.[2] These photographs likely postdate the hops crash.

Of interest to historians of the Pacific Northwest and California, and especially of Pierce County, Washington.

[1] “John Muir’s Ascent of Mt. Rainier (As Recorded by his Photographer, A. C. Warner),” The Mountaineer 50, no. 1 (1956): 38–45.
[2] Hans Zeiger, “Indigenous Hop Pickers in Western Washington,” HistoryLink, October 3, 2021, https://www.historylink.org/file/21295. (Inventory #: List2871)