Robert Benecke captured 19th-century western Kansas landscapes before massive European migrations to the area transformed them. In the intervening years, the dust bowl, mass extinction of bison, and expansion of mechanized agriculture have all led to a profusion of trees, ponds and lakes across the Sunflower State.
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When railroad companies hired Robert Benecke to help advertise Kansas land for sale in the 1870s, the German-born photographer captured a unique window into life on the Great Plains at a very early time in the state’s history.
A century and a half later, University of Kansas professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Town Peterson sees Benecke’s images as a chance to investigate the impact of human settlement.
Peterson first became aware of a trove of Benecke’s images preserved in the digital collections of Southern Methodist University during the pandemic, and he set out to re-photograph the scenes and see what changed over the course of time.
It’s all part of the curiosity process in science, Peterson says.
“You go out there with a tingle in your right ear and you play around for a bit,” he explains. “You learn some lessons and that leads you to the next curiosity.”
Peterson’s years-long effort has led to his new book, “One Hundred and Fifty Years of Change on the Great Plains,” available for free as a PDF or in hard-copy format on demand. It pairs Benecke's historic landscapes with Peterson’s new photographs of the same views.
The juxtaposition, Peterson says, can show how the region has changed.
“I use these photo comparisons as a way of exploring and thinking about things,” the Ohio native says. “This particular set of photographs was really neat because it goes back to 1873, which is pretty much at the beginning of what I would call mobile photography.”
The 1873 Kansas Pacific Railway assignment took the St. Louis-based Benecke between Kansas City and Denver, taking photographs along the tracks all the way. Benecke would eventually travel all 600 miles of Kansas Pacific’s tracks, taking photographs at nearly every major stop and using a railcar darkroom to process his glass plate negatives.
Benecke captured a moment before the massive migrations into Western Kansas, when cities like Lawrence and Manhattan were just small European settlements. His images help chronicle the disappearance of the bison, the dust bowl, and the expansion of mechanized agriculture, ranching, irrigation, fire suppression and more.
Peterson’s modern images display what’s changed in the intervening years. They show a contemporary Kansas in color, sometimes from the ground and other times from a drone.
The project, which scientists call “repeat photography,” took Peterson across the state to find and photograph 50 different Benecke vantage points.
Each photograph presented its own challenges. While Benecke offered some detail about where each photo was taken, exact locations were often difficult to find.
“Locating the sites was months of work,” Peterson says, noting the hunt often left him spinning his wheels.
“Then it was two summers of driving back and forth between Denver and Kansas City getting into the fine details of where these sites were,” he says.
One of Peterson’s first observations was that many of the sites from 1873 are now covered by trees that have taken over the landscape. They often made the rephotographing process difficult and, when trees obscured the view, Peterson had to make compromises.
“If I can't see anything because I'm in trees, then what do I do about this site?” Peterson says. “How do I take a photograph that's meaningful in showing how this site is similar or different?”
Finding so many trees wasn’t exactly a surprise for the ecologist.
“I certainly have been aware of the afforestation process.” Peterson says. “If you look out my office window, it's a forested landscape, and if you look at the depictions of Lawrence in the 1800s, it wasn't, so I had some expectations.”
But he wasn’t entirely prepared for what he found either.
“West of Manhattan in the 1873 photos, you see essentially no trees,” Peterson says. “To me, the contrast is just astounding.”
Photography commissioned in the age of steam
Benecke’s 19th-century photographs were originally commissioned by railroad companies to lure white European settlers out west.
“The U.S. government incentivized building railroads that would connect, essentially, the east to the west of the country,” Peterson says.
Between 1850 and 1872 the federal government granted millions of acres of public lands to railroad companies in order to promote railroad construction, disregarding indigenous populations already living on the land in the process. Railroad companies commonly received 20 miles on either side of track that was built.
“It was very much in the Kansas Pacific railroad's interest to get people to move out there,” Peterson says. “If they could depict the Great Plains as this wonderland where you can have land very cheap and prosper with your family, they could make tons of money.”
And they did. According to the Library of Congress, most western railroads had established as early as 1868 profitable land departments and European bureaus of immigration to sell land and promote foreign settlement in states like Kansas.
Early steam locomotives ran on wood and water so there had to be a settlement every few miles, and refueling stations were built every 15 or 20 miles. On the often arid plains, a permanent source of water was also necessary, so the railroads built ponds and lakes along the lines to keep the engines running.
The new infrastructure encouraged development across the state but also affected the land, creating new wetlands.
"Kansas didn't have much in the way of wetlands in the 1800s," Peterson says.
Environmental transformations like that substantiate the scientific merit in returning to these sites to track the changing land, he says, and ecological studies are often revisited at five, 10 and 20-year intervals.
“This is all an effort to get a longer-term view of a landscape,” Peterson says. “And sure, some of it is just fun, and some of it is that kind of pre-science curiosity that turns into neat questions down the line.”
Peterson has included in his book the precise geographical coordinates of each image to help facilitate the next curious photographer.
“So much is going to change in the next 30 or 40 years,” Peterson says. “The idea is this is kind of our long-term anchor point for being able to understand how the landscape changes here.”
Peterson also has some advice for that future photographer who may someday retrace his and Benecke’s journey.
“Get everything possible done between March and early June, and then October and November,” Peterson says. “Because, as much as I love Kansas landscapes, the ticks, the chiggers, the poison ivy, the mosquitoes, stinging nettles — you have to use early spring and late fall.”