“No. I am a student.” Johnson looked at the crates of fossils. He rested his hand on one, touched it. He could leave the fossils here. He could take the stage from Deadwood to Fort Laramie, and from there cable home for money. He could tell Cope—assuming Cope was still alive—that the fossils had been lost. A story formed in his mind: they had been ambushed, the wagon had overturned, fallen over a cliff, all the fossils were lost or smashed. It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped.
Anyway, he thought, these fossils weren’t so important, for the entire American West was full of fossils. Wherever you dug into a cliff, you found old bones of one sort or another. There were certainly far more fossils than gold in this wilderness. These few wouldn’t be missed. At the rate Cope and Marsh were collecting bones, in a year or two these would hardly even be remembered.
Another idea came to him: leave the fossils here in Deadwood, go to Laramie, wire for money, and with proper funds return to Deadwood, collect the fossils, and leave again.
But he knew that if he ever got out of Deadwood alive, he’d never come back. Not for anything. He must either take them now, or turn tail and run without them.
“Dragon teeth,” he said softly, touching the crate, remembering the moment of their discovery.
“What’s that?” said Perkins.
“Nothing,” Johnson said. Try as he might, he could not diminish the importance of the fossils in his mind. It was not merely that he had dug them with his own hands, his own sweat. It was not merely that men had died, that his friends and companions had died, in the course of finding them. It was because of what Cope had said.
These fossils were the remains of the largest creatures that ever walked on the face of the earth—creatures unsuspected by science, unknown to mankind, until their little party had dug them up in the middle of the Montana badlands.
“With all my heart,” he wrote in his journal,
I wish to leave these accursed rocks right here in this accursed town right here in this accursed wilderness. With all my heart, I wish to leave them and go home to Philadelphia and never think again in my life of Cope or Marsh or rock strata or dinosaur genera or any other of this exhausting and tedious business. And to my horror, I find I cannot. I must take them back with me, or stay with them as a mother hen stays with her eggs. Damn all principles.
While Johnson was examining the fossils, Perkins pointed to a jumble of material under a tarp. “This yours, too? What’s all this?”
“That’s photographic equipment,” Johnson said absently.
“Know how to use it?”
“Sure.”
“Well then, your troubles are over!”
“How’s that?”
“We had a man who made photographic pictures. He took his camera out on the road south out of town last spring. Just him and a horse, to take photos of the land. Why, I do not know. Ain’t nothing there. The next stagecoach found him on his back, with the turkey vultures on him. That camera was in a thousand pieces.”
“What happened to all his plates and chemicals?”
“We still got them, but nobody knows what to do with them.”
The Black Hills Art Gallery
“How quickly can one’s disadvantages be turned to profit!” Johnson wrote in his journal.
With the opening of my studio, the Black Hills Art Gallery, my every character flaw is perceived in a new light. Before, my Eastern habits were seen as lacking masculinity; now they are proof of artistry. Before, my disinterest in mining was viewed with suspicion; now, with relief. Before, I had nothing that anyone wanted; now, I can provide what everyone will pay dearly to possess—a portrait.
Johnson rented a location in the south bend of Deadwood, because the light was stronger there for more of the day; the Black Hills Art Gallery was located behind Kim Sing’s laundry, and business was brisk.
Johnson charged two dollars for a portrait and later, as demand increased, raised his prices to three. He could never get used to the demand: “In this rude and bleak setting, hard men want nothing more than to sit as like death, and walk away with their likeness.”
The life of a miner was backbreaking and exhausting; all these men had come a long and dangerous way to seek their fortune in the rugged wilderness, and it was clear that few would succeed. Photographs provided a tangible reality to men who were far from home, fearful and tired; they were posed proofs of success, souvenirs to send to sweethearts and loved ones, or simply ways of remembering, of grasping a moment in a swiftly changing and uncertain world.
His business was not limited to portraits. When the weather was bright, he made excursions to placer mines outside town, to photograph men working at their claims; for this he charged ten dollars.
Meanwhile, most of the businesses in town hired him to portray their establishments. There were moments of minor triumph: on September 4, he tersely records:
Photograph of Colonel Ramsay Stablery. Charged $25 because of “large plate required.” He hated to pay! F11, at 22 sec., dull day.
And he was apparently pleased to become a full citizen of the town. As the days passed, “Foggy” Johnson (a contraction of “photographer”?) became a familiar figure in Deadwood, known to everyone.
He also acquired the frustrations of commercial photographers everywhere. On September 9:
Broken Nose Jack McCall, a notorious gunman, returned to complain of his portrait made yesterday. He showed it to his inamorata, Sarah, who said it did not flatter him, so he was back to demand a more sympathetic version. Mr. McCall has a face like a hatchet, a sneer that would kill a cow from fright, a pox-scarred complexion, and a wall-eye. I told him politely that I had done the best I could, considering.
He discharged his pistols in the Art Gallery, until I offered to try again at no charge.
He sat once more, and he wanted a different pose, with his chin resting on his hand. But the effect of his pose was to portray him as a pensive, effeminate scholar. It was wholly unsuited to his station in life, but he would hear no disagreement about the pose. Upon my retiring to the darkroom, Broken Nose waited outside, allowing me to hear the clicking of his pistol chambers as he reloaded his revolver, in anticipation of my latest effort. Such is the nature of art critics in Deadwood, and under such circumstances, my work surpassed my own expectations, although I lost a deal of sweat before Broken Nose and Sarah pronounced themselves satisfied.
Apparently Johnson knew the rudiments of retouching photographs; by the judicious use of pencils, it was possible to soften signs of scarring and to make other adjustments.
Not everyone wanted his picture taken.
On September 12, Johnson was hired to photograph the interior of the Deadwood Melodeon Saloon, a drinking and gambling establishment at the south end of the main street. Interiors were dark, and he often had to wait several days for strong light to carry out a commission. But a few days later the weather was sunny, and he arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon with his equipment and set up to make an exposure.