Arthur Clarence Pillsbury (1870 - 1946)
Arthur Clarence Pillsbury was living in Palo Alto, California in 1897. He ran a business, the Rambler Cyclery, that sold sporting goods and photographic supplies. He was educated in mechanical engineering at Leland Stanford University and had devised a panoramic camera with a moving lens. Pillsbury sold the business and in January 1898, he and his father left for the Klondike. They packed cameras and equipment into a motor launch and sailed to Dixon Entrance where a storm swamped the boat. They salvaged the photographic equipment and arrived in Wrangle on 11 June 1898.1)
Pillsbury Sr. returned to San Francisco, but his son continued on, taking photos of communities along the Lynn Canol and selling them in Wrangell, Sitka, Juneau, and Skagway. He walked over the Chilkoot Pass and then returned, possibly over the White Pass, took the aerial tram up the Chilkoot, and again returned to Dyea. He took photographs of the area, and then returned south for the winter.2) Pillsbury travelled north again in 1899 and arrived in Skagway in March. He travelled to Atlin by bicycle, pulling a 90lb. sled, and taking photographs as he went.3) V. Cleveland worked in his photo studio in Discovery, near Atlin, in 1899.4)
When Pillsbury left Skagway for good, he moved all his supplies and camera equipment over the Chilkoot on a sled. He bought a boat at Lake Lindeman and travelled down the river to Dawson. His assistant in Dawson took ill and he used his money to send him outside. Some of his Yukon 1899 – 1900 photos are inscribed with the names Pillsbury & Cleveland. Pillsbury sold a three-foot panorama of Dawson, printed on blue paper, for enough money to buy a canoe and arrived in Nome in September 1899. One of his Nome photographs, dated October 1899, was used by Tappan Adney in his book Klondike Stampede.5)
Pillsbury sailed on the seamer Roanoke for Seattle and established the Pillsbury Panoramic View Company to sell photographs of the north. When the business slowed, he returned to California as staff photographer for the San Francisco Examiner. The negatives from the Alaska trip were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Pillsbury operated a photographic studio in Yosemite Valley from 1907 to 1927.6)
Vintage and contact prints by Pillsbury are held by the University of Washington. There is an unpublished autobiography of Arthur C. Pillsbury at the University Art Museum's Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley.