Real Photo Postcard of Lake Louise by Byron Harmon

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.

Back of Lake Louise RPPC

The back of the card reads “Along the Line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada.”