E.D. Meyers

Edgar Deffinbaugh Meyers was born on July 23, 1874 in Roanoke, Indiana and grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He attended school with Orville Wright, who with his brother built the first successful airplane, and kept in contact with Wright through the 1940s. In 1894, he married Emma L. Kurtz at Stark, Ohio. They added 10 children to the family, three of who died in infancy. By 1918, the family had moved to Keeline, Niobrara County, Wyoming. In the 1920s, they moved to Cheyenne, where Meyers worked as a house painter for many years. In the 1930s, theye moved to Kirkland, WA, where he and Emma are buried.

Joseph Shimitz

Joseph Shimitz was born on the family farm near Riverside, Iowa on March 24, 1873. He dreamed of becoming a cowboy and headed West, settling near Cheyenne around 1900. In 1901, while recovering from an injury, he purchased a photographic studio. The following April, he married Mrs. Susan Belle Oakes. With this marriage came a stepson named William Chapman. The couple later adopted a girl named Alma, who died at the age of 14 in 1918.

Over the next 28 years, Shimitz grew his photography business, changing locations and equipment often. By the early 1910s, he had acquired an artificial light to aid in taking interior and studio images. Portraits were his bread and butter. Many negatives show masterful retouching to smooth skin, remove freckles and moles, reunite families, or remove unwanted subjects. Shimitz’s nearly blind younger brother Sylvester worked in the studio for many years.

Shimitz was active in many local organizations including the Eagles and Rotary Club. In 1921, he was named the 100% Rotarian of Cheyenne for having never missed a meeting or convention. He also sponsored a city league baseball team during the 1913 season called the Shimitz Terrors.

Around 1929, Shimitz learned that he had a terminal cancer and decide to sell his studio. He died at Watertown, South Dakota on September 1929. His body was returned to Cheyenne for burial. Ralph Russell Doubleday

Ralph Russell Doubleday was born on July 4, 1881, near Canton, Iowa. His interest in photography was kindled after the family moved to Sycamore, Illinois in 1900, where he photographed local events. He photographed his first rodeo at Cheyenne, Wyoming, in August 1910. The successful sale of these photos launched his career as one of the first professional rodeo photographers. For the next 40 years, Doubleday traveled around the continent, following the professional rodeo circuit, taking photos and printing postcards and prints in borrowed darkrooms along the way.

He was a favorite among the competitors, especially the cowgirls, and they readily posed for him. Not one to let danger keep him from a good angle, Doubleday was a fixture in the arena, close to the action.

In addition to his rodeo photography, Doubleday captured images of Pancho Villa, the only known clear image of the five Allied generals of WWI, and American Legion National Conventions.

By the 1950s, Doubleday was nearly blind and in 1952 he was forced to retire from photography. He continued to tour the US and Europe speaking about his adventures and started to sell off his collection of negatives in chunks to interested parties, including E.D. Meyers, the Wyoming Historical Society, the National Cowboy Museum and the Smithsonian. Doubleday died in 1958 and is buried in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Doubleday was posthumously inducted into to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum's Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1988 in recognition of his photographic accomplishments and his promotional and documentary activities with regard to the sport of rodeo. During his career, he is credited with the first image of a man in midair being thrown by a horse as well as one of the first images of a horse with all four feet off the ground during an event.