William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) was one of the most renowned 19th-century landscape photographers of the American West.

William Henry Jackson was born April 4, 1843 in Keeseville, New York. He was a man of great energy and love for the outdoors and especially the breadth and heights of the mountain west. His life spanned the first century of the new visual art of photography and the great era of westward expansion. He began his photography career in 1858 in New York as a photographic retouching artist in the burgeoning photography industry and ended it in New York City with his death in 1942. In between these years he became increasingly proficient in his chosen field through his studio and field work in Omaha, Nebraska, his nine year odyssey as the official photographer with Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden's United States Geological Survey of the Territories, his fifteen years in Denver, Colorado, seventeen months of Asian and Pacific travel with the World Transportation Commission, his twenty-seven years in Detroit associated with the Detroit Photographic Company and its successor the Detroit Publishing Company, and finally his highly productive "so-called" retirement years from 1924 to 1942. He died June 30, 1942 in New York, New York, at the age of 99.