Frozen In Silver

by Ronald T. Bailey

In 1898 men and women from all over the world converged on Alaska. Gold had been discovered in the Yukon Territory of Canada. All winter long eager gold seekers struggled over the mountain passes between Canada and the United States. A small group of photographers chronicled this epic, creating images of men and women laboring through blinding snowstorms over the windswept, ice-covered mountains. One of these photographers was a young Swedish immigrant, P. E. Larss. Frozen in Silver tells the story of Larss, who changed his name to Larson in 1904, and how he became a frontier photographer. It documents how photography evolved in the nineteenth century and how Larson used the medium to earn a living as a merchant and tradesman. Photographers were ubiquitous on the frontier. Every community of any size had a town photographer who made portraits and baby and wedding prints - in fact, many towns had several, all working in relative obscurity.