HAPPY JACK THE HORIZON CHASER

The chance you’ve heard of Milton “Jack” Snow is about as good as the chance you’ve heard of the Soil Conservation Service. But starting in the mid-1930s, these two relative unknowns combined to produce poignant photos of tribal life, including that of the Hopi people, which you’ll see in this portfolio.

Snow was born in Ensley, Alabama, in 1905, but he moved with his family to Southern California at age 2. He had a form of cerebral palsy that caused a speech impediment and impaired his left hand, but longtime friend Julian Hayden recalled that Snow’s self-discipline, which included a routine of shaving with a straight razor in the dark to develop control of his hand, helped him overcome the disability. “[He] took up photography before I knew him and was a perfectionist,” Hayden said.

Snow studied photography and other subjects at Riverside Junior College, then left school in 1929 to become a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Museum. Using bulky 4x5 and 5x7 view cameras, he proved a solid field photographer during museum expeditions in California, Arizona and Utah. William R. Wilson, in a 2002 dissertation on Snow’s work with the Navajo people, hypothesized that these expeditions, which included excavation and photography of human remains, engendered a lifelong respect for tribal beliefs regarding photography of the dead.

Later, Snow was hired to photograph the excavation and reconstruction of Wupatki National Monument, near Flagstaff. After that project, he joined the staff of the Museum of Northern Arizona. His next stop, in 1935, was a Works Progress Administration-sponsored position with the Soil Conservation Service, a federal department (now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service) that originally was founded to help farmers and ranchers deal with the effects of soil erosion.

Snow’s role with the SCS was to record conditions before and after conservation measures were implemented, but he also documented social and economic conditions among Arizona’s Navajo and Hopi people. In doing so, Wilson wrote, “Snow came to represent Indian subjects in a manner that distinguished his work from that of art, newspaper or tourist photographs,” because the work was created in an official government capacity. And Hayden suggested that his friend’s personality helped put his subjects at ease: “His joy in jokes and in fun was all-inclusive and endearing and contagious, so that he was often the belle of the ball, wherever he was, and he didn’t mind at all making an ass of himself.” Snow’s more than two decades of work with American Indians led his Navajo acquaintances to dub him “Happy Jack the Horizon Chaser.” He retired from the SCS in 1957 and died in New Mexico in 1986. The Hopi photos in this portfolio are among nearly 1,000 Snow photographs that the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office has entrusted to Cline Library at Northern Arizona University.