Cameras

This is one of the Revillon Freres boats used on the Athabasca River in the early 1900s. This image, na-1338-20 is used with the permission of Glenbow Archives.

I am going to talk about cameras, and for a very good reason. However, I am not quite talking about cameras, but about what kinds of cameras existed, and when. Understanding what kind of cameras existed in the time period for which you are researching images, either for your book, or for your family history, will help you to understand, and either confirm or reject, the image you might be considering as representative of whatever it is you are researching.   

Confusing? No, essential information. I ran across this first of all when a New Zealander member of the Anderson family came to visit me and showed me a picture of a woman that she thought was Charlot Birnie, who was born in 1805 or thereabouts. The first problem was that it was a picture of a well-dressed white woman, in a dress that had a bustle. Not only was the woman dressed in a fashion that would never have been worn by a woman who grew up in the fur trade, Charlot was not a white woman. Anything but, in fact. Neighbours described her as a Red River Indian. If I am correct about what I think she was, her father was Métis (French and First Nations), and her mother was Cree. With approximately three quarters of her DNA coming from the Indigenous people, there is no way she looked like a white woman.

But even without that argument: the woman in the photograph appeared to be twenty or twenty-five years old. That would mean that if it was a photograph of Charlot when she was the age of that woman, the photograph would have been taken in, say, 1825 or 1830. Did cameras exist then? No. A definite no.

So let’s talk about cameras. To be clear, I am no expert on cameras. I own a modern camera or two, but I am certainly not a good photographer. No one would ever illustrate my books with the photographs I take. 

The earliest camera was the Camera Obscura: the words mean “Dark Chamber.” The Camera Obscura was basically a box, with a hole (with or without a lens) in one end, and a piece of paper on the opposite wall, onto which the image was projected through the hole at the front end of the box. The Camera Obscura could be the size of a small room: it could be a box with an open bottom that the so-called photographer clambered into; it could be a fancier box, with a lid that lifted up giving the photographer access from the top. But basically, it was a box, with a hole in one end, and a piece of paper inside the box on the other end.

So we have an image inside the box, shining onto a piece of paper. The paper was not film and did not record the image. The so-called photographer accessed the inside of the box, and used a pencil to trace the outline of whatever was projected onto the paper inside the box. Obviously, the Camera Obscura was not small, and not portable. It had to be large enough to hold one or two persons who were responsible for transferring the image onto the paper, by tracing it.

And, as you can guess, fabulous as these cameras may have been, none of them were wandering around in the interior of this country, capturing what was happening on our Canadian rivers or inside the fur trade forts.

So, what came next? In the early 1800s, scientists began to play around with the knowledge that silver salts darkened when exposed to sunlight, and it resulted in something that resembled a modern-day photograph. The earliest surviving photograph was taken in 1826, in France, I think. To take this photograph, the photographer probably added water-soluble salts, such as silver nitrate or silver fluoride, to water, and painted the solution onto the paper he wanted to preserve the picture on. Then he exposed the paper to the image that was outside the box, or the room. And set it, and dried it, and did whatever it was that he or she had to do to process and preserve the image.

Then comes the daguerreotype (and the ambrotype, and the tintype, and whatever else type of camera that falls under this description.)

1839 is regarded as the official birth year of the camera we know today. Louis Daguerre developed a high contrast, sharp image with a camera that captured photographic images on a plate. In the early days, this type of camera used long exposure times, anywhere from five to 30 minutes. In 1841, a newly invented camera that used silvered copper plates brought exposure time down to 3 minutes. In the 1850s, the process replaced the copper plates with thin glass plates coated with silver salts, which were exposed while still wet. In Victoria, BC, one of the earliest photographers that used this process was George Fardon, who arrived here in 1858. (I don’t, however, think this image belongs to him.)

The daguerreotype I used in The Pathfinder, many years ago, is of Victoria Birnie, the very much younger sister of Betsy Birnie (Anderson’s wife.) I used her image to indicate what Betsy Birnie might have looked like as a young woman, in about 1845. 

In the 1860s, cameras finally began to produce images that looked like modern-day black and white photographs. 

The first cameras arrived in the New Caledonia district (now called the Cariboo) in about 1866, with two photographers: Frederick Dally, and Charles Gentile. They were only there for a short time, a matter of a few years. Their cameras produced photographs that looked like the photographs we have today. However, their cameras were certainly not portable, as you will see!

Frederick Dally took the photograph of the Nicoamen River, that appears on page 246 of The HBC Brigades. (The Nicoamen River is where the Fraser River gold rush supposedly began: at least that is according to the caption on the photograph.) The cameras these two photographers used at that time (1866) were handsome, light-tight wooden boxes with a simple lens at one end. Early emulsions were not fast enough to require a shutter, so the photographer simply removed the lens cover, and replaced it when enough time had passed. Boxes of glass plates, bottles of fresh water, and chests of chemicals were carried everywhere, unpacked and repacked many times over in their journey north. The glass plates were prepared with the solution just before use, and the films were developed immediately after exposure, so a portable developing room was part of the equipment the photographers carried around with them. And the photographer needed to work when it was hot, cold, rainy, dusty, and windy. In other words, any photographer who took up producing images in the Cariboo was crazy — but they were also there!

Things changed for the better in the 1880s, when George Eastman made photographic film, first out of paper and then out of celluloid. Eastman’s first camera, called a Kodak, was offered for sale in 1888. It came preloaded with a roll of film, enough for 100 exposures, but it had to be sent back to the factory for processing of the images on the exposed film, and the reloading of another roll of film. It was not fast, and not particularly convenient, and there were also periods of time when the camera was at the factory.

Cameras improved over time. By 1905 or so, a French luxury goods company sent a photographer out to take images of fur trade life on Canadian rivers. The company was called the Revillon Freres, and it competed directly with the Hudson’s Bay Company for furs, which they made into fur coats they sold in their stores in Paris and New York. Many of the images I used in The York Factory Express came from this French fur trading Company.

So you can see there has been a slow progression as cameras improved and became more user friendly. The images I have of A.C. Anderson were taken in the 1870s, I believe, and so captured by studio cameras that were a little cumbersome and not very portable at all.

Interestingly, something else happened in this time period, too: and that is, the first moving Moving pictures. I think we all know the short “Horse in Motion” film, don’t we? If you have forgotten, this “movie” is actually made up of a series of images that show a horse galloping past a single camera. Or so it appears: but it was done with multiple cameras, all shooting a single image at almost the same time but mini-seconds apart, so that the images, when put together on a piece of film, made it appear as if it was a film of the horse galloping past a single camera.

The world’s first moving picture that showed actual consecutive action was shot in 1888, and is titled “Roundhay Garden Scene.” It’s a very short film: only 2.11 second longs, but it’s technically a movie! And then there is the 60 second film that shows the train, pulled by a steam engine, running into the railway station. Apparently, when it was first shown it was so realistic that the audience in the theatre ran away from the train that was supposedly barreling toward them. This film is called “Arrival of a Train,” and it was filmed in 1895. And you can find it on the internet. 

But this is where it gets really interesting.

There is one more early film you might want to look at. It is a Hudson Bay Company film called The Romance of the Far Fur Country. It’s a silent film, a historical documentary that portrays HBC traders, Arctic fur trappers, and others who worked in the fur trade in the north. It was filmed in 1919 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1920. The HBC hired two camera-men from New York City, and out they went into the wilderness with their heavy cameras and thousands of pounds of equipment, and filmed what they saw. Here, from Wikipedia [accessed: March 4, 2025], The Romance of the Far Fur Country:

The film crew sailed from Montreal to Arctic circle. As reported in a BBC article, in the next course of nine months, they captured extraordinary footage never done before. They captured more than 75,000 feet of film, equivalent to 8 hours of viewing time. It is reported that the crew filmed the documentary by walking laboriously on land, across the ice, and travelling by dogsled over a frozen river. The crew filmed from canoes on the Abitibi River and had to portage canoes over their shoulders. The film was premiered in Allen Theatre at Winnipeg, on May 23, 1920. It was later released across Western Canada and in London.

I have seen part of this amazing film, some time after it had been re-discovered in an archives somewhere, and edited, but not yet finished. It showed at a local art-movie theatre at University of Victoria some years ago, and I remember I watched as an older Indigenous man, who had in his youth handled the poles in the York Boats, described how poling the boats worked. It was amazing! What I learned from listening to what he described made its way into The York Factory Express.

I never did see the finished film. Where it is now, I do not know. It might be part of the National Film Board Collection, or maybe it’s in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. You can google it and watch bits of the film online, although sometimes what is shown is a separate film that shows the photographers at their work, rather then what they actually filmed. But it’s worth pursuing. All of us who are interested in the fur trade should perhaps encourage whoever has it to share it with us.

I really just wrote this post to let people know why photographs did not exist when their ancestor were working or living (and this is not only in the fur trade, but everywhere.) It morphed into the conversation about silent movies, and then this film, The Romance of the Far Fur Country. This may or may not continue into another blogpost, and if it does, it will appear here: https://nancymargueriteanderson.com/whatever-i-call-it/

Copyright, Nancy Marguerite Anderson, 2025. All rights reserved.

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