OT : Opinions On Civil War Era CDV

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Posted By: Jeff Lowe

Is this a young Wild Bill Hickok in uniform or not ?


He would have been about 28-29 years old but so few pics of him to compare . Thanks for any input at all .




Jeff Lowe

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Posted By: leon

Hopefully one of our resident CDV experts can help us out. Very neat looking item..........

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Posted By: ramram

Hickock...no, soldier in uniform...yes. Looks like a trimmed CDV. Just to make sure though, look at the image through a loop and make sure there is not a dot pattern. Lot of fake civil war images anymore (imagine that), but usually they fake bigger dollar images (imagine that).

Rob M.

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Posted By: steve f

Looks as though the actual photo is intact that just the backing/cabinet is cut? It doesn't look like Hickok or any well known Union or Confed generals, but there were hundreds of generals I believe. That face does look familiar (Molly Hatchet concert in '78?). Send along a scan to Dr. Farley at the Civil War Museum in Richmond. Keep us posted.

If it's a ranking officer, he'd know it. lkeenerfarley@nationalcivilwarmuseum.org

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Posted By: Jeff Lowe

Thank you very much Steve . I will email him . Its a CDV for sure and its trimmed . Its a real CDV for sure I have it in my possession .




Jeff

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Posted By: ramram

Believe it or not, we can probably thank the civil war for our baseball card collecting mania. The obvious is that the civil war is what spread the National Game throughout the country but along with that was the collecting of cards. Daguerreotypes (produced on silver), ambrotypes (produced on glass) and then tintypes (produced on tin), in that order, were the method of photographers in the earliest years but this process was not cheap and did not allow for mass production (each image was unique). About half-way through the war they came up with a way to produce relatively cheap images on paper (carte de visites aka CDV's). Individual soldiers could then afford one or possibly a few copies of a CDV image of themselves to give to family and friends. Some photographers then started mass producing images of famous generals/officers and selling them to the general public. There are literally thousands of cdv's still out there of some of the most famous and can be picked up relatively cheap (however, confederates are harder to find and therefore more expensive because they ran short on photographic supplies and even paper so they didn't produce nearly as many). After the war, the photographers became resourceful, since they didn't have an endless supply of soldiers to take pictures of anymore, and began mass producing cdv cards of famous celebrities.

Rob M.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Not sure that it's Hickok, though there is a resemblence. The CDV is vintage Civil War era.