In 1849 near Sierraville, California, James Warner Woolsey (1826-1885) secured his place in Gold Rush history with his whopping eight-pound nugget discovery. Originally from New York, Woolsey traveled an estimated 171 days to reach California, sailing from Boston to Panama and then on to San Francisco. After his monumental discovery, Woolsey remained in California where he eventually founded a small mining town near Nevada City called “Woolsey Flats,” which still bears his name today.

For three or four dollars, successful miners like Woolsey could walk into a daguerreotype studio and commemorate their success with beautiful a cased image. Occasionally, customers requested two daguerreotypes in order to keep one for themselves and send the other back home to loved ones.

While we have catalogued this image as being reproduced in William Johnson's book, The Old West: The Forty-Niners, Time Life Books, New York, 1974, n.p., it should be noted that our daguerreotype is laterally reversed and has different hand tinting and casing. Thus, it can be deduced that one or the other of these two images, is a copy of the other (either a copy daguerreotype, ambrotype or tintype that was subsequently hand tinted). While there is information online indicating that the work reproduced in The Old West: The Forty-Niners was previously held in the collection of Matthew Isenburg, there is no record of that work at the National Gallery of Canada where the Isenburg collection is presently housed.

Marjorie "Marge" Neikrug (1913–2017) was a trailblazer in the New York photography world, recognized for her impactful work as a gallery owner, art dealer, and appraiser. She played a crucial role in promoting and legitimizing fine art photography in the U.S. Although she began her career dealing in pre-Columbian art, a life-changing encounter with photographer Cornell Capa in Mexico led her to shift her focus to photography. In 1971, she opened Neikrug Galleries, Inc. in a townhouse she lived in on East 68th Street in Manhattan. The gallery, designed by architect Charles Gwathmey, became a hub for photographic art. Some sources cite 1963 as the founding year of her business, but the gallery itself officially launched in 1971.

Neikrug was a pioneer in exhibiting photography as a fine art form, showcasing a wide range of renowned photographers—many for the first time in the U.S.—such as Josef Sudek, Robert Mapplethorpe, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and W. Eugene Smith. Her bold annual exhibit series "Rated X," which began in 1978, gained attention for its daring and experimental content.

She also played a key role in the professional community, co-founding the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) and serving as both its president and treasurer. Her gallery hosted some of the group's earliest meetings. Even after closing her gallery in the mid-1970s, Neikrug continued to contribute to the field as a senior appraiser certified by both the American Society of Appraisers and the Appraisers Association of America.