Head of the Stairs, Big Cottonwood

Salt Lake City, 1890. Boudoir cabinet card. Albumen photograph [20.5 cm x 12.5 cm] on a cream colored mount [21.5 cm x 13.5 cm] Title in the negative. Quarter size bump to center of the image with splitting. View of a rushing Big Cottonwood Creek through the 'Stairs' section of the canyon, near this location is the Big Cottonwood Power building. Not an image that we've handled or seen previously. Charles Roscoe Savage (1832-1909) was an accomplished and prolific photographer who lived successfully within his Salt Lake City community and traveled widely throughout the West taking photographs and befriending other important photographers of his day such as Carleton Watkins, Edward Wilson, Timothy O'Sullivan, Alfred Hart and A.J. Russell. Savage took several of the West's most famous images at the celebration of the joining of the transcontinental railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. Savage also took the first photographs of what became Zion National Park.