Photo of the Day

To fail at everything.

If someone were to have written the life story of Solomon D. Butcher on the day he died in 1927, that would have been a fair statement.

Nothing he tried had worked out for him.

Solomon’s failures began early.

He dropped out of school.

First military school and then medical school.

Solomon moved a lot, living here and there in the American Plains — almost a dozen places — and found problems with each one of them.

He was full of ideas.

So, there were many failed careers.

There was his plan to stake a homesteader’s claim on a tract of farmland in Nebraska.

But then he got a new idea, moved off the land too early to earn clear title and lost it.

Solomon tried to market a divining rod to locate underground oil reserves, but it didn’t work.

He concocted a patent medicine made mostly of alcohol which he called “Butcher’s Wonder of the Age,” but no one bought it.

So, Solomon was constantly in debt and often beholden to his dad, living with him off and on and earning money by working as his dad’s hired farm hand.

There was a period of good times, when Solomon got his own house.

But it burned down.

Then his wife died.

Only one thing in life worked out for Solomon: he liked taking pictures.

Early on, he began taking pictures of the Nebraska homesteaders who lived near his dad’s place in Custer County.

And he kept at it.

By the time he died, Solomon had taken three thousand photographs of Nebraska homesteaders.

And these pictures are now considered one of the best primary sources of information on an important chapter in American history.

So, surprise!

Solomon had amounted to something after all.

I wonder what his dad would say.

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda