[Annotated Vernacular Photograph Album Documenting the Travels of the Royse Family Across the American West, With Much Content on Early Automobile Culture and Industry in the Far West]

[Various locations, including Montana, Wyoming, Missouri, California, 1931. Very good.. [45] leaves, illustrated with 185 original photographs, from 2.75 x 2 inches to 6.5 x 4 inches, the great majority measuring 5.75 x 3.5 inches, and a few postcards, most with manuscript annotations on the borders of the images or on the album pages. Oblong folio. Contemporary textured black cloth, gilt title on front cover, string tied. Moderate rubbing to covers, bottom edge worn, corners creased. Internally clean, photographs in very nice shape. A well-annotated vernacular photograph album chronicling about two decades of the travels and experiences of Ray Royse and his family as they trekked from Illinois to California through the Upper West in the first quarter of the 20th century. The Royse family started in Aledo, Illinois, and numerous photographs feature various family members here. They then traveled through Casper, Wyoming, Great Falls and Butte, Montana, and other locations before settling in Long Beach, where Ray and his brother-in-law worked at the shipyards. The images here document Ray's training at the Sweeney Automobile & Tractor School in Kansas City, driving Harley-Davidson motorcycles, attempting to repair a nearly destroyed family sedan, visiting the Custer Battlefield and the monument to Buffalo Bill Cody among other western sites, scenes in Yellowstone Park, and a family drive up Pike's Peak, among many others. Ray's efforts to move West reflect the expansion and increasingly wide availability of automobiles, and the growing industry in the West following the First World War.

The photographs here record numerous locations in the American West to which Ray Royse, along with his family and friends, traveled or worked in in a 1922 Nash, and later a Ford Model T. They traveled across the Continental Divide, Ray worked for a time at the Anaconda Mines near Great Falls and Butte, Montana, and later the Standard Oil Refinery at Shelby, Montana. Many images show a wrecked Ford Model T, with Roy diligently at work trying to repair it, before finally resigning his efforts by attaching a sign reading, "Rest in Pieces" on the radiator. Another picture shows another Ford weighed down with a huge sack of wool in Bear Creek, Wyoming. There are also images emanating from Dublin Gulch near Butte; Livingston, Montana; Wind River Canyon in Thermopolis, Wyoming; Salt Creek, Wyoming; ; and several park scenes in Kansas City. A handful of images feature the Warren family in Butte. Several photographs memorialize the Royse family trip to Yellowstone Park in 1923, with many of the geysers and surrounding landscapes, the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone, and more. There are also interesting photos from a Royse family drive to the top of Pike's Peak with views from the peak, with additional shots from the Garden of the Gods, cliff dwellings near Colorado Springs, scenes in New Mexico and Arizona in 1929, dams near Great Falls, the Beaver Dam in Wyoming, a picture of the "Million Dollar Fire" in Casper in 1921, and a beached fifty-five-foot whale in Long Beach, dated December 28, 1929. Altogether, the images clearly illustrate the wandering nature of the Royse family across several states in the American West.

Ray Royse (1903-1942) was an automobile mechanic, metal worker, and sheet metal specialist who worked in the Long Beach shipyards from 1929 until 1942, when he was killed in a shipyard accident. He also worked as a coal miner in Wyoming and on the Douglas Sheep Ranch in Wyoming, both of which are chronicled in photographs in the present album. He met and married Sylvia Lambert in 1934 in South Dakota, before returning to California.

A wide-ranging and eclectic mixture of original and unique photographs of the West documenting an interesting family who began in Illinois and eventually settled in California.