Actually I have the photo, it also contains my Great Grandfather in his confederate uniform. The rifle is most assuredly a Spencer and does have the handle in it. Obviously captured from some prisoner or dead Yankee soldier.
Because of this photo I always thought the coffee grinder must have been fairly common.
” ... Because of this photo I always thought the coffee grinder must have been fairly common.”
It’s been written that one picture is worth a thousand words, but it may take 10,000 words to validate such.
The existence of a single photo can mean a lot, or nothing much, as it’s but an eyeblink in time, and the camera’s field of view reveals but a few degrees out of the 360 that surround every photographer every second of every day; and no matter how sharp-eyed, no photographer can see beyond the horizon.
Documentation is necessary.
In summer 1874, George Armstrong Custer led a detachment of the 7th Cavalry Regiment on an expedition through the Black Hills, in what is now Wyoming and South Dakota. Photographer W.H. Illingworth went along and captured the very first photo images of what was then completely unknown territory. Illingworth went on to photograph other spots in what was then still the rather wild American West, and other locales.
Over 100 years later, photographer Paul Horsted and writer Ernest Grafe retraced Custer’s route through the Black Hills as closely as they could, working with intense determination to find the exact spots where Illingworth set up his camera; from each, they snapped their own photos. Eventually, they published a book, _Exploring With Custer_ (Golden Valley Press; 3rd edition edition (2005), ISBN-10: 0971805318; ISBN-13: 978-0971805316). Containing great maps and detailed directions, it’s a wonderfully colorful travel guide popular with history buffs and energetic tourists.
The collection of original pictures is surrounded by legends and tales of its very own. Each was accompanied by documents and other information used by co-authors Grafe and Horsted to nail down location and circumstances, and capture their latter-day counterparts. But for decades, an image of a waterfall deep in a forest rested alongside the others; it was all by itself without location data or description. The authors conceded their lack of information; pleas for help went out around the globe, but no one knew where the mysterious waterfall was in the Black Hills.
Some years after the first edition of the book came off the presses, someone discovered that the waterfall was not in the Black Hills at all but somewhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin (I no longer recall which). How - and when - it came to reside in Illingworth’s Black Hills collection, no one could say.
So the truism is inescapable: a picture can tell us much, but not everything. And its surrounding circumstances - its context - can illuminate, or mislead, or even convince onlookers to believe falsehoods.