A Missoula man’s unique collection of three-dimensional images, viewed through a hand-held stereoscope, recalls Missoula’s greatest natural disaster with such vividness that you can all but feel the mist and smell the must as the Clark Fork River and its tributaries roar to the ocean before your eyes.
“It was very likely about a 500-year flood, because the water rose 12 feet here in Missoula,” John MacDonald said.
The Northern Pacific railroad, the city’s transportation lifeblood, lost track of its tracks. Power and telephone lines went down, leaving the NP’s overworked telegraph as the only means of outside communication.
Missoula was far from the only town affected by the flood n almost nonstop rains that started in April doused much of Montana. The water wreaked havoc at the Butte Reduction Works, the East Helena smelter, the Missouri River Bridge at Fort Benton.
But Norman Forsyth was in Missoula.
One of only a handful of stereographic photographers in the nation at the time, he was on hand to record the devastation with his two-lens camera.
Some 30 viewcards, each consisting of two nearly identical photos side by side, somehow ended up in a box in a house on South Fifth Street West.
The house, built probably in the 1890s, belonged to George Freisheimer, a druggist, and his wife Alice.
“He died in the ’20s, and they had no heirs. So when she died in ’44 or so, the house just sat there,” MacDonald said.
His parents, Kenneth and Margaret Wicks MacDonald, retired to Margaret’s hometown of Missoula in 1952 from the Philippines, where John had been born and raised and the MacDonalds served as Presbyterian missionaries. They bought the house on Fifth Street.
“Everything (Alice Freisheimer) had been using, her clothes (and) everything else was right there in the house. These were among them,” John said, indicating the stereoscope and three boxes of viewcards spread out on the table of his South Hills home.
MacDonald, now 78, was three years into a 20-year career as an Air Force pilot when Kenneth and Margaret moved to Missoula. He flew night missions over North Korea and years later piloted C-130 transports in Vietnam.
When he retired, MacDonald and his wife Cloie moved to Missoula, where John had spent his senior year of high school and a couple of years in college.
The stereograph and photo collection at his parents’ home were far from an obsession as the MacDonalds got busy raising a family in Missoula and, later, Stevensville.
“We knew they were there while our folks were living there. Occasionally I’d get them out and look at them, but I didn’t pay too much attention,” he said.
When his parents died, John “latched onto” the photos, “just because they were old and curious,” he said.
His interest was piqued again in recent months.
“Christmastime, when the kids were here, I got them out to show them and I thought n hey, now, the Seniors Forum would be happy to see some of these,” MacDonald said.
The Forum, an offshoot of Kiwanis Club, is a weekly gathering of retirees in Missoula. It routinely draws 20 to 30 people, MacDonald said. Each member is called upon to arrange at least one program a year. Programs range from poetry recitations to health insurance presentations, oil industry talks and the pros and cons of the Bitterroot Resort.
MacDonald’s flood stereographs on Jan. 31 were well-received.
“They were very interested in them,” he said. “One of the fellows talked to his son about it and the son is an engineer. He called me and wanted copies of the pictures because he’s working on a flood study for Missoula, something of that nature. So it could be quite valuable.”
MacDonald has no immediate plans for another public presentation, but said he isn’t averse to showing his collection.
Stereoscophics have been around for years n 174, to be precise. A British inventor, Sir Charles Wheatstone, created them in 1833 using drawings, since photography was unknown. When that medium came into wide use, the stereograph enjoyed a huge surge in popularity.
By the late 1800s, stereoscopes could be found in virtually every home in America. Forsyth, working out of his Butte studio, produced some of the best.
“He was one of the big ones,” said MacDonald, who has researched both the photographer and the Flood of 1908.
MacDonald’s collection includes a second box of Forsyth shots from around Montana n hikers in Glacier Park, the Lewis and Clark Caverns (then called the Morrison Cave), and some remarkably clear photos taken deep in the mines of Butte.
“He probably used the flash powder, which I imagine scared the hell out of the miners if they didn’t know it was going off,” MacDonald said.
One dual-photo card elicited a chuckle. A rail fence dominates, but to one side a handful of bison, obviously escaped from their pen, are bearing down on the viewer.
The photographer called it, “When Forsyth Lost His Camera And Nearly His Life.”
A third box contains what MacDonald calls commercial stereographs. Taken by photographers other than Forsyth, they are colorized prints of a Yellowstone Park hot pool, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Holy Land and Japan.
“The early travelogues,” he said. “They would sit around and pass the pictures around that way.”
In stereoscopy, an illusion of depth in a two-dimensional image is created by presenting a slightly different image to each eye.
MacDonald pointed to the two lenses on his stereoscope, which are surrounded by an aluminum hood.
“They’re taking one on the left and one on the right, imitating the separation of your eyes,” he said. “When you look through there, if you get it in focus n move the picture back and forth n the lenses let you focus on them in close and you get a three-dimensional appearance out of it.
“The normal reaction is: Cool.”
His experience with stereo pairs in the Air Force makes it possible for MacDonald to see stereographics without the stereoscope.
“I got my eyes trained where I could keep them parallel and focus in at a certain distance, so I can study some of the pictures without using the viewing thing,” he said.
He’s seen a stereoscope on eBay that sold for $15.
“I think they’re relatively common,” MacDonald said.
Moving pictures, first the silent kind and later talkies, supplanted stereoscopy in the public’s appetite. The medium made a resurgence during World War II as a party fad.
“Go to a Hollywood party today and the chances are that you’ll never see faces for hours n at least where the stereoscope has climbed back into favor,” reported the Milwaukee Journal in a feature article from the era that MacDonald keeps in his collection.
“The guests have made a beeline for the piles of pictures and the newfangled machine viewers, immersing themselves in photographic images which range from musty sepias of the gay nineties to exciting tints of blitzed-out London.”
A 1952 movie called “Bwana Devil” used polarized glasses and started a 3-D craze in the theater. The adult film industry adopted 3-D films in the early 1970s, and such thrillers as “Jaws,” “Amityville” and “Friday the 13th” were released in 3-D form in the 1980s.
These days, thousands of 3-D animations and clipart images are available in cyberspace, and you can even create your own flicks with software programs such as Microsoft’s 3-D Movie Maker.
But you can’t recreate the Flood of 1908.
His collection has more than nostalgic value, MacDonald said.
“You’re seeing what’s going to happen one of these years to all the houses that are on the low-lying areas now,” he said. “I would be interested in how it would do now with the channel restricted. It doesn’t have a quarter of a mile more to spread out on, so it’ll either go much higher or much faster.”
The Clark Fork would probably flood Caras Park and parts of Front Street, MacDonald speculated, as well as the secondary highway east of town toward Bonner.
“It’s happened before,” he said. “It’s going to happen again.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com
Photographer Tom Bauer can be reached at 523-5270 or at tbauer@missoulian.com.
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