visited North Africa, the Middle East, India and Australia, then moved on to East Asia, Russia, Europe, East Africa, then finally South and Central America before returning home to the US. Jackson produced more than 900 photographs for the commission, which are now part of a collection on display at the Library of Congress. Career as a painter Jackson was a prodigy as a painter in his youth, and during his lifetime produced many paintings of the American west. Jackson's mother was also an accomplished painter of water colors, and he credited her for her encouragement with his success as a painter. His first job as an artist was in 1858. He was hired as a retoucher for a photography studio in Troy, New York, where he worked for two years. Scotts Bluff National Monument in Nebraska, houses the largest collection of William Henry Jackson paintings in the world. During the last decade of his life Jackson returned to illustrating. Career as publisher Thrust into financial exigencies by the Panic of 1893, Jackson accepted a commission by Marshall Field to travel the world photographing and gathering specimens for a vast new museum in Chicago; his pictures and reports were published by Harper's Weekly magazine. He returned to Denver and shifted into publishing; in 1897 he sold his entire stock of negatives and his own services to the Detroit Publishing Company (formerly called the Detroit Photographic Company, owned by William A. Livingstone), after the company had acquired the exclusive ownership and rights to the photochrom process in America. Jackson joined the company in 1898 as president – just when the Spanish–American War gained the nation's fervent interest – bringing with him an estimated 10,000 negatives which provided the core of the company's photographic archives, from which they produced pictures ranging from postcards to mammoth-plate panoramas. In 1903, Jackson became the plant manager, thus leaving him with less time to travel and take photographs. In 1905 or 1906, the company changed its name from the Detroit Photographic Co. to the Detroit Publishing Co. In the 1910s, the publishing firm expanded its inventory to include photographic copies of works of art, which were popular educational tools as well as inexpensive home decor. During its height, the Detroit Publishing Company drew upon 40,000 negatives for its publishing effort, and had sales of seven million prints annually. Traveling salesmen, mail order catalogues, and a few