Collecting the American West: The Rise and Fall of William Blackmore

William Henry Blackmore (1827-1878) was a successful lawyer based in Liverpool and an international financier involved in numerous American land grants in New Mexico and Colorado; he was principal financier of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad; his reputation by the mid 1870s within London financial circles was that "everyone knows him and he knows every one" and he "has means of obtaining information in the City such as very few men possess"; he met Brigham Young (1801-1877), president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and wrote a confidential report for the Cabinet of the British government on the "Mormon Empire" and he dined at the White House with President Ulysses S.Grant (1822-1885);  he created, funded and populated with artefacts perhaps the leading ethnographic museum in 19th century Great Britain, located in his home town of Salisbury; he was an early patron of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and the commissioner of an influential set of watercolours of the Yellowstone region by Thomas Moran (1837-1926); and he so effectively exploited photography to document the North American 'Indians' that his photographic collection was copied to form the basis of the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C.


Yet Blackmore's legacy was to be comparatively limited. He went bankrupt and committed suicide in 1878. Shortly after his untimely death, his papers and other materials were consigned to storage and lay apparently unused for almost half a century. The Blackmore Museum was incorporated with that of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum after Blackmore's death, and was amalgamated in 1902. While it remained something of a place of pilgrimage to American archaeologists until the early 20th century William's museum was already in terminal decline and its collections were to be broken up and dispersed over a period of over four decades.

Anthony Hamber has written the first biography of William Blackmore to cover the wide gamut of his professional and private interests and the significance and impact of his wide ranging achievements. With reproductions of many Victorian photographs, and a diligently researched text, fully referenced with bibliography and index, Hamber's work is a major contribution to understanding an important but neglected figure and his world.