Byron Harmon left Tacoma, Washington in 1903 to photograph mountains and, realizing that there were no photography studios in the Canadian Rockies, settled in Banff, Alberta. The surviving collection of photos numbers over 6,000.
On this card, barely visible near the bottom center, is the legend “Lake Louise. 118.”, scratched into the negative by the photographer. An identical real photo postcard with a more visible legend can be seen in Toni McLaughlin’s collection of Harmon RPPCs (look for #118). Toni also has images of a dozen white border postcards of Harmon’s published in the early 1920′s, the first of which is Lake Louise taken from an ever so slightly different angle.
The back of the card reads “Along the Line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada.”
From Toni McLaughlin:
Dear Chris, I would just like to ask you to make a correction on this page… the links you have to “Rod Land’s Harmon Postcards” are not Rod Land’s. Rod is my brother and while he’s a fabulous photographer (I write a website for him) I am the postcard collector and webmaster in the family. The Byron Harmon postcards you are linked to above are a my personal collection and a part of my website “Soultones”. You can view my entire collection of postcards by visiting this link.
From Chris Overstreet:
So noted, and corrected in the original post. Thanks for the correction.