Old West Postcards Being Reprinted Charles Morris Photographed Montana’s Range

Bill Morris was a small child when the last of his father’s postcards were being sold.

“It’s been 75 years they’ve been off the market,” Morris says.

Now, Morris is reprinting the cards, which gave people across the world a glimpse of Montana life around the turn of the century.

The gruff, lanky Morris - whose wavy gray hair belies his 82 years - wants people to know how talented his father was.

“Oh, he had an eye for a picture,” the younger Morris says.

His dad was pioneering photographer Charles E. Morris, whose images of cowboys, Indians and animals on the plains offer a nostalgic, sometimes haunting picture of Montana life.

A number of Morris’ photographs have been reproduced in books over the years, but rarely was Morris given credit.

“Very few people ever heard of Charles E. Morris that should have,” his son said.

The elder Morris’ story had some similarities to that of famed artist Charlie Russell. Both wrangled horses and herded cattle in the wild West, then used art to show the end of Montana’s open range.

Unlike Russell, who painted and sculpted, Morris used a camera, first in Big Sandy and later Chinook.

In 1904, Charles Morris won a prize at the Centennial Lewis and Clark Exposition in St. Louis, where he entered a photograph of a cowboy named Roy Mathieson, high in the air, taming a bucking bronco.

Morris moved his studio to Great Falls in 1910, adding confections, novelties and later on sporting goods. Some of Morris’ best photographs were placed on postcards, which he had colorized through lithography in Germany.

“Morris’ postcards were the biggest selling postcards in Montana at that time,” his son said.

The quality of the elder Morris’ photographs was not lost on Lloyd Schermer, former chief executive of the Iowa-based Lee Enterprises newspaper chain.

Schermer bought the entire photographic collection from Bill Morris for $25,000 in 1984. Schermer and wife Betty later donated the photographs to the University of Montana.

Dennis Kern, gallery director and curator for the university’s School of Fine Arts, says the elder Morris took some “really striking photographs” and showed “a mastery” of photographic techniques.

Kern has placed six Morris photographs on the fine art museum’s World Wide Web site, which can be reached at this computer address: http://www.umt.edu/partv/famus/ photo/.

The younger Morris hopes to some day publish a book, using 100 or 200 of his father’s photographs. In the meantime, Bill Morris hopes the new postcards, being reprinted by Advanced Litho in Great Falls, will help shine the limelight once again on the work of his father, who died in 1938.

“Charles Morris was one of the finest photographers of his time,” his son says, eyes glistening.

—-

New postcards featuring photographs taken by pioneer photographer Charles E. Morris are available at the following locations:

Stagecoach Gallery, C.M. Russell Museum gift shop, and the KOA Kampground in Great Falls; the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning; the Montana State Historical Society Museum in Helena; and the Blaine County Museum in Chinook.

The postcards sell for 35 cents each. A set of 18 postcards sells for $4.95.