Personal Papers
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7313, Edward Royal Warren Negatives
Edward Royal Warren (1860-1942) was born in Waltham, Massachusetts and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, 1881) and Colorado College (1883). Although originally trained as an engineer, spending his early professional career conducting surveys and assaying mining claims throughout Colorado, by 1902 he was a full-time naturalist, documenting the state's flora and fauna. It is his work as a naturalist and ornithologist that is represented in this collection, but the photographs also document ranch life in the American West c. 1890s: cowboys, cattle, ranch architecture, western towns, and Colorado landscapes, mostly in the vicinity of Crested Butte.
Warren used photography and detailed observations to document Colorado's plants and animals. In addition to papers published in "The Auk," "Bird Lore," and "Condor," he
also produced two major works on Colorado wildlife,
This collection is comprised of consecutively numbered glass plate negatives, film, and lantern slides of Colorado plants and animals (1882-1915), associated logbooks, and miscellaneous papers. The logbooks for plate numbers 1-2342, created between 1882 and 1905, provide the plate number, the date of exposure, and notations regarding subject matter, copyright, sales, and occasional scientific classifications for the subject. While there are no log books for plates created 1906-1915, most are numbered and/or grouped according to subject.
This record series is indexed under the following controlled access subject terms.