Researchers delight in pursuing a trail of historical evidence, doggedly advancing towards a clearer view of the past. I recently found myself in the Archives on a different sort of trail, this time following two early 20th-century artists on their vacation in the American West. A collection of stunning black and white photographs documents sculptor Evelyn Longman and architect Henry Bacon as they made their way through Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon. The year was 1914, two years before the federal government established the National Park Service. The Grand Canyon’s famed Hermit Trail beckoned the pair and made for one of the most memorable experiences of their western sojourn.

Longman and Bacon left New York on April 26, 1914, traveling by train to San Francisco, the site of the future Panama Pacific International Exposition. Bacon’s design for the Lincoln Memorial, his last major work, had been selected the previous year, and Longman’s commissions included celebrated work at the U.S. Naval Academy. Six years later, she would move her studio to the Loomis campus after marrying Nathaniel Batchelder, the school’s first headmaster. For the exposition, Longman and Bacon collaborated on the Court of Four Seasons. Bacon designed architectural features, and Longman sculpted the court’s center fountain, an homage to Ceres set upon a large pedestal circled by female figures identical to those later cast as the “Dancing Muses” now flanking the exterior north door of Loomis Chaffee’s Longman Hall. Once at the exposition’s location—still a muddy construction site bustling with laborers and horse drawn equipment—Bacon and Longman oversaw production of their designs made in staff, a temporary material composed of burlap fiber and plaster. After a week’s work, the duo hopped on a Santa Fe Rail car bound for Yosemite Valley.

A photo captioned “Ready for the First Trail” shows Longman on the front porch of Yosemite’s Oak Cottage, lifting her long full skirt’s hem to reveal pants underneath, a sartorial choice allowing her to conform to the era’s gender roles and to ride horseback on the trail to Yosemite Falls. Later, Bacon and Longman joined a horse-drawn carriage of tourists in fancy dress for a trip to Mariposa Grove, a forest of giant sequoias. Another image shows the carriage load emerging from one of the “tunnel trees,” ancient sequoias into which pass throughs had been cut by pioneering entrepreneurs. For a fee, one could be driven through the tree and pose for a professional photograph, printed as a picture postcard ready for mailing.

After another eastern-bound leg on the Santa Fe Railroad, Longman and Bacon arrived at the Grand Canyon. Their first days included typical touristy activities: visiting the Hopi House, a Santa Fe Rail-sponsored showplace for native people’s craft production and photographing each other perched on rocky outcrops at the canyon’s rim. On May 17, a seemingly more genuine adventure began. Riding a pair of mules named Rasmus and Kickapoo and accompanied by a guide and a cook named Slim, Longman and Bacon descended into the canyon on the Hermit Trail, a challenging seven-mile winding and sometimes steep path rumored to have been constructed by nineteenth-century horse thieves and improved by the Santa Fe Railroad just a few years before this visit. The trip to the canyon’s floor offered breathtaking scenery and a night’s stopover at the Hermit Camp; Bacon’s hand drawn map of the camp buildings survives along with photos of the tarp-covered tent platforms. The next morning at sunrise, their guide led a mile and a half hike down to the Colorado River. There they lingered, taking more photos at the river’s edge before breaking camp and beginning their ascent around noon.

Following Longman and Bacon through the western wilderness in over 140 photographs, one can see that taking the Hermit Trail transformed their experience. In these images, they appear less posed, less awed by the majestic landscape. I imagine they felt subsumed by the centuries-old geological tableau surrounding them. Their cast mates in this scene set—the flowing river waters, the cactus, Slim, Rasmus, and Kickapoo—they, too, were less visitors than characters in a story that has little feel of beginning or end. One image in particular, captioned, “The Walk Down the Trail,” offers a clear view of Longman in this landscape.