NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/831879
54 NEBRASKAland • JUNE 2017 PHOTO BY ERIC FOWLER East Ranch at its peak: the cabin where McCanles would be murdered, the barn and bunkhouse, and the toll bridge cabin on the right. The West Ranch sits in the distance, surrounded by the Oregon-California Trail path. Nearly-indiscernible figures dot the scene: three people gathered by the bunkhouse, a man sitting on the stoop of the toll bridge cabin, the stagecoach driver, and the mysterious figure, believed to be McCanles, in the foreground. Little did they know that their likenesses – and the buildings surrounding them – would be pored over more than a century later by researchers, history buffs, living history interpreters and a modern-day wet plate photographer from Texas. O "We wanted to give the park a tangible artifact," said Mitch Critel, explaining why he and his friends wanted to re-create the historic 1860 Rock Creek Station photograph. "The original belongs to someone else. The thinking was that the park could use it for publicity or whatever else they might need it for." Critel is part of a band of volunteers who regularly put on living history events at Rock Creek Station State Historical Park. The photo re-creation took place during a living history event that required a year and a half to plan, and involved living historians from around the country who drove in to help out. One of them was Critel's old friend, 33-year-old Cody Mobley. "I knew Cody was really getting into the experimentation of wet plate photography," Critel said. "Since I was able to talk him into making the long haul up here, I knew we could give it a shot." Wet plate photography is one of the earliest forms of photography and was the dominant process used from the 1850s to the 1880s. It is called "wet plate" because the image is exposed onto a plate of glass that has been submerged in a bath of silver nitrate, and the picture must be developed before the solution dries. From start to finish, the entire process typically takes Mobley less than seven minutes. Mobley has shot historic photo re-creations before; it's not uncommon for wet plate photographers. But Rock Creek Station holds a special allure as a subject. It has almost no modern intrusions and provides a photographer with an entire scene of historically accurate buildings to play with. Because of the type of photograph they were shooting, both Mobley and his 1860s photographer counterpart had to be especially sensitive to the conditions and weather around them. "Any dust that's blowing can affect the plate, any moisture in the air, even a cloud rolling in," Mobley said. "There are so many variants that go on while you're shooting, so you have to adjust on your feet; that's the art of it." Because of this, wet plate photography is one of the hardest forms of photography to master. It took Mobley a month or two to feel confident with the wet plate process, and he remembers his elation when he made his first successful image. The original Rock Creek photograph is a daguerreotype, the form of photography directly preceding wet plate. Mobley thinks that the photographer used the daguerreotype process because it was going out of style and, thus, was cheaper. (Mobley uses wet plate himself, rather than the daguerreotype process, because today, it's less expensive, easier, and more historically accurate for the The East Ranch buildings pictured are the cabin where McCanles was murdered, left, the bunkhouse, the Pony Express barn, and the toll bridge cabin across from it. Mobley and the original photographer stood approximately where the red dot is.