The Thinker King of Wild Horse Island

Herman Schnitzmeyer was fortunate, at the very least in his early years.

Born in 1879 in Illinois, Schnitzmeyer, the son of German immigrant dad and mom, labored as a home painter earlier than getting coaching in images in St. Louis. He was one in every of greater than 81,000 individuals who entered a lottery in hope of successful the appropriate to pick out a homestead on the Flathead Indian Reservation. One of 1,600 lottery winners, Schnitzmeyer filed a declare to 160 acres on the southeast portion of Wild Horse Island, with concepts of an idyllic life filling his head. He developed plans, together with bylaws and a structure for a self-sustaining society on the island that he known as Apollo Heights. 

While Schnitzmeyer planted crops and constructed a dwelling on Wild Horse Island, the truth of an remoted, agrarian life didn’t appear to go well with him. “He wasn’t much of a farmer or rancher, more of a philosopher,” famous Denny Kellogg, a Bigfork-area historian and historic collector. While on the island he saved journals crammed together with his ideas. Samples of his musings: “Submit as little as possible to insignificant things,” and “The mind receives the most healthful exercise in creative activity.”

Although Schnitzmeyer typically captured his ideas and concepts in written kind, it discovered little viewers and ended being “mostly for his own consumption,” Kellogg says. As for Apollo Heights, there isn’t a proof that the society had a member apart from its founder.

  Schnitzmeyer met the necessities to “prove up” on his Wild Horse homestead declare, presumably the primary particular person to take action, however island life wore skinny. He spent the winter of 1913-14 dwelling on the roughly 2,100-acre island, possible as its solely human occupant. He battled isolation and, by his personal account, hunger. A self-portrait made shortly after that winter reveals a gaunt, wild-haired Schnitzmeyer, a doable reflection of his harrowing expertise.

“His Wild Horse Island days were hard on him – physically as well as mentally,” the late Paul Fugleberg, longtime editor of the Flathead Courier in Polson, wrote practically a century after the lengthy winter. While dwelling at the very least sporadically on the island, Schnitzmeyer labored as a lodge clerk in Kalispell for a short while and developed a photograph postcard enterprise primarily based in Dayton with Louis Desch, one other space homesteader. He additionally hatched a plan for a photograph studio in Polson. A 1914 journal entry outlined this imaginative and prescient: “My ambition now is to make a nationwide reputation for depicting the sentimental beauty of natural scenery, and while doing this, accumulate a nice competency.”

Schnitzmeyer was a talented photographer, particularly in an period of cumbersome cameras and glass-plate and enormous movie negatives. He doggedly pursued photographs of Flathead Lake, the encompassing mountains, steamboats and native inhabitants, together with one in every of his favourite human topics, Koostahtah, the Kootenai chief. He captured a number of historic moments, together with the primary flight of a “hydro-aeroplane” in Montana by aviator Terah. T. Maroney in 1913 and the 1930 groundbreaking for what would turn into Kerr Dam.

He additionally documented on a regular basis life in and round Polson, Fugleberg wrote, noting “his camera clicked on sweaty threshing crews, lumberjacks, ice-cutting operations on the lake, school activities, community plays, tribal events and chiefs, Boy Scouts, World War I doughboys, landmarks, buildings, people, hotel card games, and parties. He even took pictures of corpses in caskets.” All advised, the photographer’s work captures “a dynamic turning point in western Montana’s culture and economy,” Kellogg says.

Schnitzmeyer opened his Polson studio in 1912. A jovial kind, he additionally developed a fame for unreliability, typically lacking picture appointments and different commitments. Fugleberg, the newspaper editor, noticed that the photographer appeared to lack “even the slightest semblance of business knowledge or procedure.” Desch, his associate, had extra enterprise and advertising and marketing sense and helped produce hand-tinted photographs of Schnitzmeyer’s work. The two produced a sequence of picture playing cards depicting scenes of Polson and the encompassing space that proved standard with homesteaders who despatched them to household elsewhere.

Schnitzmeyer additionally developed an urge for food. Acquaintances famous his fondness for breakfast, roaming from one Polson café to a different, typically consuming a number of occasions in a morning. As a younger man, Bill Gregg drove Schnitzmeyer across the space in a Ford Model T and recalled that on quite a few events, the photographer would ask to cease at farmhouses and supply to commerce a photograph of the house for a meal. Odd conduct apart, “that man was a genius with a camera,” Gregg advised an interviewer.

Schnitzmeyer offered his picture studio in 1922 to Julius Meiers, an apprentice, who subsequently operated Lake City Studio in Polson for a few years. Between 1922 and 1930 Schnitzmeyer did freelance images work for the Northern Pacific Railway throughout Montana, in Yellowstone and Grand Teton nationwide parks and within the Cascades in Washington state. His photographs that had been used to advertise settlement alongside the railroad’s route, passenger journey and the freight enterprise.

Schnitzmeyer’s railroad work has parallels with that of Tomer J. Hileman, who moved to Kalispell in 1911 to start out a photograph studio and, shortly thereafter, began capturing promotional photographs for the Great Northern Railway. While Schnitzmeyer made many photographs of rural landscapes, Flathead Lake and the Mission Mountains, Hileman obtained popularity of his photographs of Blackfeet individuals and Glacier National Park, which had been standard with vacationers and locals alike. Hileman was additionally expert at advertising and marketing his work, establishing early-day picture labs in a number of of the park’s accommodations that additionally offered better publicity of his private work.

While his work was extra obscure, Fugleberg, in 1961, wrote that Schnitzmeyer, at the very least within the eyes of some, “was probably the outstanding depicter of natural scenery of his time in Montana – even surpassing the famous Glacier National Park photographer Hileman.”