Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album

This photographic album found within the Smithsonian website from their National Anthropological Archives contains photographs taken by James E. Taylor in the second half of the 19th century. The album contains 1,109 drawings, photographs, newspaper dipping and letters, but this website only displays 748 of those items. On the website there are four main pages that give information on the era and the importance of this album intermixed with some of Taylor’s photographs. Additionally, throughout these four pages there a couple of links to the rest of Taylor photographs. Within every picture the observer is able to enlarge it to not only view it in more detail, but see the notes written on the edges and see the blurb newspapers included along with the photo if the image was printed in a newspaper. Unfortunately, the written aspects are hard to read and it would have been better if on the website the observer could enlarge the photograph even more. A second fault of this website is that there is only one link to view the online catalog of all 748 displayed items and this link could easily be missed. Therefore, this website creator has pretty much decided for the observer which images are the most important of the 748 that can be accessed. Overall, even with these few faults this is a great site with a variety of photographs reflecting White - Native Americans relations in the Western Frontier post-civil war.