1 of 1

In 1886 — more than 20 years after the Homestead Act was signed — an itinerate photographer in Custer County Nebraska set out to produce a photographic history of his county. Over the next 15 years, he produced 1,500 images, hundreds of stories and a remarkable record of a remarkable time in the history of Nebraska and the U.S.

Solomon Butcher dugout
Solomon D. Butcher in front of his dugout, no date. On the photo, Butcher wrote, "My first house in Neb. 1880. Built from ‘Neb. Brick’."
Butcher had homesteaded with his father and younger brother in central Nebraska in 1880, when Solomon was 24-years old. Like many early settlers, they built a dug-out, one-room house out of sod. But he discovered he wasn't cut out to be a farmer. Solomon went back to Minnesota and studied medicine, married a nurse from the hospital, but never became a doctor. Instead he and Lillie came back to Nebraska. He taught school for a time and then fell back on training in photography he got during his high school years. He opened a photographic gallery in northern Custer County. But the gallery was never really profitable.

Somehow, Butcher hit on an amazing idea — he would produce a photographic history of Custer County. He must have realized that he was living in a time and place that were important to the history of the country. There is also evidence that he thought this was an idea he could sell. For whatever reason, it was an idea that seized him.

"From the time I thought of the plan, for seven days and seven nights it drove the sleep from my eyes. I laid out plans and covered sheet after sheet of paper, only to tear them up and consign them to the waste basket. At last, Eureka! Eureka! I had fount it. I was so elated that I had lost all desire for rest..."

Beginning in 1886, Butcher began to travel all across the county by horse and wagon, taking photographs of his friends and neighbors. These are the photographs that now illustrate many of the history texts about the settlement period (and that illustrate this Web site). He also collected pioneer stories. As he traveled, he supported himself with subscriptions and donations that various citizens made to the project as well as by the sale of photographs. Over the next seven years, he made over 1,500 images in Custer County.

S. D. Butcher at Univ. of Nebraska
S. D. Butcher working at his collection, at the University of Nebraska, 1916.
But pulling together all of his work into a book was difficult. The drought and depression of the 1890s dried up his finances. A fire in 1899 burned many of the biographies and narratives he had collected, as well as many of his slim financial assets. But finally, in 1901 he got the backing of a wealthy Custer County rancher, and the book Pioneer History of Custer County and Short Sketches of Early Days in Nebraska.

Butcher continued to photograph, and by 1911, the sheer size and weight of all of those glass plate negatives — each 6-½ by 8-½ inches — was too great for him to continue to maintain and move them. So he offered to sell the collection to the Nebraska State Historical Society. It took three years to get the funds from the Legislature, but the collection is now one of the major sources of primary material of history — documents made and collected during the period of history itself.

Click here to find out more about
the 1850-1874 new settlement of Nebraska.