Merritt D. Houghton

Merritt Dana "M.D." Houghton, a little known western artist who started working in the early days of Wyoming Territory (organized as a U.S. Territory on July 25, 1868), was born in 1846 in Otsego, Michigan. He came to Wyoming in the 1870s. He settled in Laramie in 1875 and later lived in both Encampment and Saratoga. The town of Encampment evolved from a fur trapper rendezvous site, and Saratoga, known for its spring water, began as a stage stop. Houghton lived and worked throughout Wyoming Territory recording forts, ranches, mining and logging operations in pencil, pen, ink and watercolor. He left Wyoming in the early 1900s after it was admitted to the Union as a State and died in 1918 in Seattle, Washington. In 1903 the Herald Publishing Company of Grand Encampment, Wyoming published a collection of his views under the title “A portfolio of Wyoming views: the Platte Valley and the Grand Encampment Mining District: Saratoga, Pearl, Dillon, Rambler, Rudefera" (LoC) and in 1904 another one titled “Views of southern Wyoming” (LoC, Yale). Those publications are now very scarce. The Library of Congress has Houghton’s circa 1915 bird’s-eye view titled "Spokane, Wash., relief map of northern and central portions" and two untitled bird’s-eye views of Ft. Collins located just south of the Wyoming border in Colorado. The first view [Panoramic Maps 66.1] shows Ft. Collins circa 1865 as a small military encampment with a few barracks in an open field. The second view [Panoramic Maps 67] is dated June 1899 and shows Ft. Collins as a well developed large city with a number of streets, buildings and a railroad. Those three bird’s-eye views are the only individual perspective maps of M. D. Houghton at the LoC. There are none at the NYPL, Harvard or Yale. Michael A. Amundson did research on the works of Merritt Dana Houghton. In 1991 he privately published a catalogue raisonne´ of Houghton’s works titled “Catalog of Houghton's landscape drawings, chiefly depicting Wyoming scenes” but it was located only at 2 Wyoming institutions. In 1994 he published an article titled "Pen Sketches of Promise: The Western Drawings of Merritt Dana Houghton" in Montana: The Magazine of Western History 44, no.4 (Autumn 1994): 54-65. The Wyoming State Museum holds the largest known collection of Houghton's works, which includes both pen and ink drawings and watercolors. The Amon Carter Museum of Western American Art lists works by M.D. Houghton in its 1972 catalogue.