Otis Boyden
The story of Little Bay’s first photographer is incomplete. It’s an unfinished puzzle which hints at a fascinating whole if it could only be put together. The pieces I’ve assembled, however, resist joining neatly.
The first piece was the name Otis Boyden. I found him listed in the Supreme Court Documents as Little Bay’s photographer. His name led me to an online blog about the historic photography of the Boyden family, tracing its lineage back to Elijah Boyden. Elijah’s brother’s name was Otis and he’d ended up in Newfoundland. This looked like it could be it. It seemed to fit. I made contact with the researcher behind the site, a descended of Elijah’s named Lana Christopher Rankin. A riveting piece of Canadian photography history was presented.
Otis and his brother Elijah were traveling photographers. The oral history kept by Elijah’s descendants on the mainland told that he was on assignment for Prime Minister John A. McDonald. His brother Otis traveled with him. Otis was also a photographer. I thought I could connect the Boyden brother’s journey to Little Bay’s history. The Boyden brothers had been sent by Canada’s first Prime Minister to document the Railway Route across Canada. Along the way they were to show photographs of Western Canada to Eastern Canada in the hope that demonstrating the beauty of British Colombia to the folks on the East Coast could keep the country from splitting apart. That was a concern at the time. What a responsibility!
I don’t know if Elijah made it all the way to Newfoundland but his brother Otis decided to travel to the colony which was not yet part of Canada. That was where he stayed. Had Little Bay’s first photographer been sent on a vital mission of national importance by John A. McDonald? It certainly seemed that way but like I said, the pieces of this puzzle won’t fit together easily.
The first problem was glaring. Otis Boyden, the famed Canadian photographer, had died in Harbour Grace in 1881. That was the year before he appeared in Little Bay very much alive. Our Otis was in Little Bay by 1882. That’s when he shows up on the Voter’s List. It’s signed “O. H. Boyden” and next to it is scribed the word “photo.” The same name and occupation of Elijah’s brother, right down to the middle initial. He was a resident of Little Bay at the time of his wedding in Nipper’s Harbour in 1884 when he married 19 year old Rosanna Swatridge. In 1886 he appears in the Supreme Court Records for Little Bay. This Otis Boyden was working as a photographer in Little Bay from 1882 to 1886.
The obvious solution was that they were father and son. That didn’t fit either. The first Otis did have a child named Otis but he was too young to fit the story, he would have been 7 years old at the time of Otis and Rosanna’s wedding in Nipper’s Harbour. Otis H. Boyden wasn’t the son of Otis H. Boyden, despite them both being in Newfoundland at the same time and both being photographers. He wasn’t obviously the child of Elijah either. No matter which way I twisted the pieces they wouldn’t join together. Was it possible that they were not related?
From here I considered a story between the lines. A hypothesis built around the few facts I did have. What if our Otis was an imposter. I have no record of him until the year after his namesake died. It would have been tempting to impersonate a photographer, especially if he’d had access to the equipment somehow. Maybe our Otis was a con, a young man out of Harbour Grace pulling the wool over Little Bay’s eyes. A little more digging into the court case he’d been involved in found him in legal trouble with Little Bay’s mine. It revealed that he may not have left Little Bay by his own accord. For you see, he’d been renting his property from the mine and in 1886 they evicted him. So whatever photography he was doing, he wasn’t paying his bills. If it was a scam it’d partially worked as he’d married well in Little Bay. Rosanna Swatridge was the daughter of Hugh Swatridge out of St. John’s. At least one genealogy site claimed they’d had their second child in St. John’s. That was the year after they’d gotten the boot from Little Bay. If so, they were only in St. John’s briefly before showing up in Sandy Point, a town they had no family in and no obvious connections in. Maybe her family didn’t like him anymore than the Little Bay mine had. Could our Otis Boyden be a fake? It was playfully interesting of course, but obviously all circumstantial. I couldn’t really justify this interpretation but at least nothing contradicted it. At least it presented a story that fit the facts. Or so I thought. While I was busy trying to jam two puzzle pieces together I was still looking. The next fact made sure I’d never fit the puzzle together this way: Otis and Rosanna’s first child, a son named Elijah Boyden.
By 1884 the first Elijah Boyden in this tale was back in BC running a studio in Nanaimo. At the same time, in Newfoundland, Otis and Rosanna named their first child after him. There was no chance an identity thief would name his first son after a family he didn’t belong to. It’d been too much of a stretch already. Little Bay’s Otis H. Boyden, photographer, was related to the historic photography family somehow, despite the puzzle pieces refusing to fit together. Otis and Rosanna moved to Sandy Point by 1889. That’s where they spawned the whole of the Newfoundland Boyden family which, judging by the number of Boyden graves there, mostly came out of St. George’s Bay.
I present you with a mess of puzzle pieces that I hope somehow can fit neatly together. From 1882 to 1886 Little Bay had a resident photographer. He was connected somehow to the Boyden brothers photography. That photography is important to Canadian history. It’s also mostly lost. Elijah’s descendant, Lana Christopher Rankin, is attempting to locate any of their surviving work and I would love to find the Otis Boyden photographs of Little Bay. There’s a chance some of those photographs are hidden on this island and if so the best bet may be an old family photo-album in the Stephenville area.
The photographs I have included of Little Bay may be his work but I cannot be sure. I can place them into the timeframe that he was there though. The same will likely be true of photographs taken in Sandy Point in the 1890s which may be relevant to any researchers working on the history of that area. If you have these photographs and would be kind enough to take some shots of them to send along we would certainly be thrilled!
Someone out there could be holding the missing piece of this puzzle. I’d like to find them. Please share this post so it has a better chance of reaching the right people. Thanks for your help!
