Dana Boardman Chase was born on September 20, 1847, in Waldo, Maine, to John A. Chase and Lydia Sylvester Lane Chase. By 1860, the family was living in Atchison, Kansas, where John A. Chase operated a photography gallery. His son, Henry A. Chase, also practiced photography in that city. Dana most likely learned the trade from his father. On September 16, 1863, at age sixteen, Chase enlisted in the Union Army as a private in Company F of the Kansas 13th Infantry Regiment. He served on garrison duty in Arkansas from March 1864 to January 1865. In March 1865, the regiment performed guard and provost duty at Little Rock until it was discharged in June.
In the spring of 1873, Dana and his father arrived in Colorado. They worked together as Chase & Chase. A year later, after his father returned to Kansas, Dana and Henry O. Morris established the Erie Photographic Company in a red and white tent between Jordan’s store and the Lindell Hotel in Pueblo, Colorado. In January 1875, the men rented gallery space above Jordan’s store. That fall, they moved their gallery above Stockgrowers’ Bank, on Santa Fe Avenue.
In November 1875, Dana’s father returned to Pueblo for health reasons. He resumed work in the photography field, operating a photo car out of Las Animas, Colorado.
On May 11, 1876, Pueblo’s Colorado Daily Chieftain reported that “Mr. D. B. Chase and Henry O. Morris, of the Erie Photograph gallery, start out this morning in a photograph car for Cañon City and other points in southern Colorado, to take photograph and landscape views of mountain and plain—not forgetting Cañon’s big sideshow, the grand cañon. Messrs. Chase and Morris, are artists in their line of business, and we commend them to our friends all over the country. Mr. G. G. Withers, of the CHIEFTAIN corps, accompanies the out-fit as “special artist on the spot,” to do up accidents, arsons, murders, neck-tie festivals, Beecherism, or any other kind of ism, for the paper of vim, vinegar, vitriol and enterprise.”
In the fall of 1876, Chase worked out of a tent gallery in Saguache, Colorado, a supply town for miners and settlers along the Old Spanish Trail, for about a month, making portraits. He then moved his tent to Lake City. On December 1, 1876, he married Ella May Burt in Saguache. They had five children, and one, Gladys, died a few days before her third birthday. He returned to Saguache in the summer of 1877. Later that year, he opened galleries in the mining towns of Alma and Del Norte, Colorado. The Del Norte business was a partnership with Danforth N. Wheeler. Dana’s father passed away on December 18, 1878, in Pueblo, leaving his estate to his wife and giving each of his children five dollars.
Chase operated the leading gallery in Trinidad for more than a decade. In 1884, he opened a branch gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the west side of the Plaza, selling local views to tourists. He advertised in Santa Fe’s Spanish-language newspapers, highlighting his experience with the Mexican community. During this period, he also made many portraits of Native Americans. He hired Eben B. Headley as the studio’s photographer. He maintained studios in New Mexico through 1891.
In 1888, he divorced Ella May and later that year married Belle Bybee in Santa Fe. Bybee was an experienced photographer, who had operated her own studio in Harper, Kansas. It is likely that Belle assisted Dana in the studio. In July 1889, Mr. and Mrs. Dana traveled to the Taos Valley to view pueblo ruins and cliff dwellings, leaving Frank E. Scott, Chase’s studio manager in Trinidad, in charge of the Santa Fe gallery.
Scott took over Chase’s new studio in San Pedro, New Mexico, with all the finishing completed in the Santa Fe studio.
In December 1890, Chase placed an advertisement in the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, offering his gallery for sale, describing it as “cabinets $6 per dozen; best climate for cure of pulmonary troubles in the United States; military post with elegant band.” Chase sold his Santa Fe gallery to Thomas J. Curran.
My next post will examine the later years of Chase’s career.