Frank Jay Haynes

Frank Jay Haynes, known as F. Jay (American, 1853-1921), was a photographer known for his landscape images of the American West. He became the official photographer of the Northern Pacific Railway and of Yellowstone National Park. He became interested in photography as a boy after his family moved to Detroit and he visited the photo studio of a Mrs. Gillette. As a young man, he tried working as a traveling salesman and ended up in Ripon, Wisconsin, where he began an apprenticeship at William H. Lockwood’s Temple of Photography. In 1876, he left to open his own photo business in Moorhead, Minn., and began photographing for Northern Pacific Railway as it expanded westward. He had a free pass to travel and access to the railway’s full territory and could photograph anything he wished. In 1885, he purchased a railroad car and furnished it as a photo studio that rode with the Northern Pacific for a small fee, operating until 1905. In the fall of 1879, Haynes and his family moved to Fargo, North Dakota, where he remained until moving to St. Paul, Minn., in 1889 and establishing his final studio. When the railroad’s tracks extended to Glendive, Montana in 1881, Haynes applied to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to be the official photographer of Yellowstone Park. His bid was unsuccessful but he made his first trip that year and took more than 200 photographs over a period of two months. He was granted a lease for a small photographic studio in the park in 1884 and returned to the park annually until his death. In addition to capturing the park’s attractions, he was the exclusive photographer for President Chester Arthur’s visit there in 1883 and Arctic explorer Frederick Schwatka’s winter tour of the park; Schwatka did not complete the trip but Haynes and several guides continued on, nearly perishing but returning with an extensive and exclusive set of negatives of Yellowstone in winter.