Nelson Wadsworth's book includes four hundred examples of the best surviving frontier photographs taken, beginning in 1853. The images capture the progress and moods of the Utah Territory over a forty-year period as the Salt Lake temple rose from the valley floor and other buildings began to emerge on neighboring blocks. The frontier people in these photographs are featured both in formal portraits and informal group poses. One can see the changes in urban technology and fashion, in the look of the surrounding landscapes, in recreational pasttimes, and even a more refined look in the people themselves. Miraculously, many of these priceless scenes are as clear today as when they were originally captured on glass plates.

Wadsworth presents the lives of these pioneer photographers as trail blazers in their own right, working with light and shadow rather than in soil and stone. Four of the artists are well-known: C. R. Savage, Marsena Cannon, Charles William Carter, and George Edward Anderson. The others left a similarly impressive library of photos. Together, their collective odyssey blends seamlessly with the epic story they captured on film.

Writes Wadsworth, "There were no 'candid cameras' in those days because of the very nature of the technology at the photographers' disposal, yet the pictures they left behind capture the times in a spectacular way." In any case, snapshots would not have done justice to the panoramas these artists framed through their camera lenses.

Nelson B. Wadsworth is an emeritus professor of journalism at Utah State University. He is the author of Through Camera Eyes and of Set in Stone, Fixed in Glass: The Mormons, the West, and Their Photographers, and is co-author of The History of the Mormons in Photographs and Text: 1830 to the Present (republished in Germany as Der Weg zum Licht: die Geschichte der Mormonen in Bildern und Texten) and of Utah--with photography by Floyd Holdman and text by Nelson Wadsworth.