Historians May Have Found Colorado’s Oldest Known Photo

Local historians believe they may have identified the oldest known photograph of Colorado — a fascinating daguerreotype from 1853, taken during a doomed expedition across the American West.

Sam Bock, director of Interpretations and Publications at History Colorado, led the search for the earliest known photo of Colorado to mark the state’s 150th birthday next year, according to a report by KUNC.

Experts at History Colorado believe the oldest photograph was taken by American photographer Solomon Nunes Carvalho — more than 20 years before Colorado became a state in 1876. The image shows a Cheyenne village at Big Timbers, near present-day Lamar, Colorado, with two people facing the camera and four large tipis at the edge of a wooded area.

The 172-year-old daguerreotype is the only surviving image from Carvalho’s ill-fated expedition across the West. Carvalho was one of the first photographers to capture the landscapes and harsh terrain of the American West. He was best known for traveling through Kansas, Colorado, and Utah with explorer Colonel John C. Frémont.

Born to a Portuguese-Jewish family in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1815, Carvalho studied to be a portrait painter. But by the 1850s, he had become known as a technical innovator and expert in daguerreotypes. Carvalho operated galleries displaying both his daguerreotypes and oil paintings in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.

In 1853, Frémont invited Carvalho to join his fifth expedition across the continent to take photographs and help show that the “central route” near the 38th parallel could work for a transcontinental railroad. Frémont had previously struggled to produce daguerreotypes and likely sought Carvalho’s expertise in developing images in freezing conditions.

Carvalho accepted Frémont’s invitation, traveled from New York to St. Louis, then by steamer up the Missouri River to Westport, Kansas Territory. During the expedition, Carvalho created daguerreotypes almost every day, documenting the landscapes, the expedition members, and the Native American communities they encountered. The work was challenging, as the cold weather made handling the photographic chemicals difficult, but Carvalho continued to record the journey in detail.

However, the expedition itself was harsh, and Carvalho came close to dying during the expedition from scurvy, starvation, and frostbite. He was cared for by Mormons in Parowan and Salt Lake City, while Frémont and other members continued on to California. Carvalho eventually recovered and reached Los Angeles, but nearly all of the roughly 300 daguerreotypes he produced during the trip were later lost in a fire.

The Only Surviving Image From The Expedition

The surviving images were later given by Frémont to Mathew Brady to copy on wet plate negatives, becoming mixed with Brady’s own work. While some of Carvalho’s images were reproduced as wood engravings in magazines, only one known photograph from the expedition exists today: the 1853 daguerreotype of the Cheyenne village. The image is likely a Brady studio copy of Carvalho’s daguerreotype, and it is now held by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

“This is a photograph of a Cheyenne village or Cheyenne camp at Big Timbers, near Lamar, which was a really important gathering place for Cheyenne people and a place of trade and refuge for them,” Bock tells KUNC. “The photograph itself shows some tipis and some families along with what appears to be either food or other kinds of hides that were hanging up to dry on a rack the villagers had constructed.”

The image provides a fascinating glimpse into life in a Cheyenne village and upheaval in Colorado in the 1850s, according to

“This image is really an image of a moment in transition. It shows us the Indigenous people of the lands living in the ways that had been handed down to them that they had developed over time in Colorado, and the landscape, and the resources available to them,” Bock tells KUNC. “But it also shows the massive upheaval that these people were about to encounter, as the U.S. military, as the U.S. government starts becoming a bigger and bigger part of everyday life for everybody in southeastern Colorado.”

Image credits: All photos via Library of Congress.