• These old photos from the American West will make you yearn for a better time

Family portrait

Taken in New Mexico in 1895 is a family portrait with that textbook seriousness that posed photos from this era so often showcase.

Different means

You can see their homestead in the background, and it looks modest to say the least, although the presence of some horses holds some faint promise for them. 

Hard work

If you want to get a sense for how difficult work could be under the hot sun of Oklahoma, check out some the expressions these women are wearing.

Mucking in

Fruit picking was a common job and sadly could be done pretty effectively by the child labour that was still extremely common at the turn of the century.

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From a distance

In one frame you have people, horses, carriages and a train all working together to clear the land. 

Isolation

If you want a portrait of the isolation that the West could mean,  check out this house on the edge of nothing at all, complete with porch and chimney stack.

Nature’s bounty

Whoever lived in the ranch on the right of the frame, must have enjoyed the natural beauty all around them.

No shortcuts

This old view shows the backbreaking effort that must have gone into working the land.

Quite a herd

In the foreground, this cowboy readies his lasso for a day’s work.

Ways of life

Another rough view of a hard life well lived.

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Coastal

In this photo, you can see a small village, which you might think was from Scandinavia but is actually in the San Francisco Bay. 

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Working in the dark

Back then mining involved more human labour, and this picture shows just how torrid the working conditions were.  

Sign of the times

Ships were in heavy use back in those days and this photo from San Francisco shows just how much they were used.

Buyer’s market

Here’s a look at a fish market and the sheer masses of fresh fish on offer even back then.

On the horizon

Here we see another type of environmental impact, this time of deforestation rather than mining.

Panning for gold

Here you can see a lone prospector sifting for gold - a reminder of the hopes and dreams that drew so many people to the West in the first place. 

Landscaping

It’s odd to see this sort of change made stark even over a hundred years ago, as it’s the sort of image we’re more used to seeing in modern settings.

Of course, while that might be a compelling set of images of the huge impact humans were already having on the landscape in America, we return to the individual viewpoint to close out this gallery. Here you can see a lone prospector sifting for gold - a reminder of the hopes and dreams that drew so many people to the West in the first place. 

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Panoramic

You might imagine that panoramic photography is necessarily a recent invention, but this picture proves otherwise, taken in Arizona in either 1899 or 1898.

A changing world

Away from the coast, the world was changing rapidly as industrialisation loomed.