Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
1853. Big Timbers. There is a wooded stretch of the Arkansas River near what we now call Lamar, and on this particular day a man from South Carolina is standing there with a box, coating a copper plate with chemicals and pointing it at four tipis.
That plate is now the oldest known photograph ever taken on Colorado soil. And here is the part that reframes everything. It was made in 1853. Colorado did not become a state until 1876. So the single oldest picture we have of this place is not gold miners, not a Denver street, not a cattle baron. It is a Cheyenne village, 23 years before there was a Colorado to photograph.
Curators at History Colorado made it official, and they timed the announcement to something big. This Saturday, August 1, 2026, Colorado turns 150.
His name was Solomon Nunes Carvalho. Born in Charleston to a Portuguese-Jewish family. He trained as a portrait painter first, which matters, because you can feel the painter's eye in the composition. Then he got obsessed with the daguerreotype, the earliest form of photography, and became genuinely good at it. Good enough that in 1853 Colonel John C. Frémont wanted him for a job most people would have said no to.
Frémont was mounting his fifth expedition across the West. The pitch was political as much as geographic. He wanted to prove that a "central route" near the 38th parallel could carry a transcontinental railroad, and he needed pictures to make the argument stick. So he brought Carvalho along to photograph the terrain.
Think about what that actually meant in 1853. Carvalho went from New York to St. Louis, then boarded a steamer up the Missouri River to Westport in Kansas Territory. And the whole way he was making daguerreotypes almost every single day. No autofocus. No do-overs. Every image was a chemical wrestling match with a copper plate, in the cold, on the move.
The expedition itself went badly. Ill-fated is the word the historians keep using. And out of that entire journey, this one daguerreotype of the Cheyenne village at Big Timbers is the only known image that survived. The only one. A roughly 172-year-old plate, and by every account it is striking.
Four large tipis at the edge of the woods. Two figures facing the camera, holding still the way you had to back then because exposures took forever. And off to the right, a frame of what curators think is pemmican or hides drying.
That is it. That is the picture. But sit with it for a second. Two people looked into a lens in 1853 and held their pose, and we can still see them. Most people do not realize how rare that is. This is the oldest surviving evidence, in a photograph, of who was living here. And it was not us.
The detective work was led by Sam Bock, History Colorado's director of Interpretations and Publications. He was working with a research volunteer named Jim England, and honestly England did the thing every researcher dreams of. He looked at the Carvalho image and flagged it fast as the strongest candidate. Sometimes the answer is not buried for years. Sometimes the right person sees it and knows.
They shared the find with readers of The Colorado Magazine, and the whole effort started as a way to mark the state's 150th birthday. KUNC's In The NoCo re-aired the story on July 29 as the first of several Colorado-history conversations rolling into the big weekend.
Quick history. Colorado entered the Union in 1876, exactly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence. That is where the "Centennial State" nickname comes from. So 150 years lands on Saturday, August 1, 2026.
And the state moved almost immediately to start collecting its own story. History Colorado was founded in 1879 by the state legislature, just three years after statehood.
Here is the part that gives this whole thing weight, if you ask me. A 2020 audit found that only 3.6 percent of properties on the Colorado State Register reflected the histories of women and communities of color. Three point six. So History Colorado launched an initiative called Heritage for All, aiming to add 150 more representative sites during this sesquicentennial year. A Cheyenne village being the oldest photo we own is not a footnote to that effort. It is the whole point.
The History Colorado Center at 1200 Broadway is free from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with gold panning, lab activities, and the launch of a new exhibit, "Setting Colorado's Table: 150 Years of Agricultural Legacy."
Right down the street, the Center for Colorado Women's History at 1310 Bannock Street is doing a free pancake breakfast at 9 a.m. and free tours from 10 to 5, including the grand opening of the "Shared History" mural. Hayley and I are partial to a free pancake, so.
Go look at the state's oldest face on Saturday. Then remember it was here first, more than two decades before the state had a name.