"... Early Days in the Rocky Mountains" - the photography of Lora Webb Nichols

 

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Lora Webb Nichols (28 October 1883 - 31 August 1962), American photographer and diarist. Born in Boulder, Colorado, she was three years old when her family moved to Encampment, Wyoming. She received her first camera in 1899 on her sixteenth birthday. A year later she married the boyfriend who have given it to her, a man almost twice her age; a decade and two children later, she divorced him. (With her second husband she had four more children.) Around 1906, Nichols built a darkroom and worked as a photographer and a photo finisher. In 1925, she founded three businesses in Encampment: the Rocky Mountain Studio which developed film and loaned cameras; The Encampment Echo newspaper; and The Sugar Bowl, selling soda and ice cream. In 1935, at the age of fifty-two, she left her husband and children and moved to Stockton, California where she created a new life for herself, working in a children's home, and eventually becoming its director. She returned to Encampment in 1956 to retire, and died there at the age of seventy-eight.

There are twenty-four thousand photographs in the Nichols archive, sixteen thousand of them her own. Held at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming, the archive also includes a manuscript of her unfinished memoir, I Remember: a Girl's Eye View of Early Days in the Rocky Mountains.

There is more information and more images to be found here and here and here.