WILL HUDSON COLLECTION
of early news film.

 

Will E. "Bill" Hudson began working as a staff newsreel cameraman for Pathe News in 1916 and covered the Pacific Northwest for Pathe until his death on November 12, 1945. During the era in which newsreels reached the height of their popularity in the United States, Hudson was the acknowledged "dean of Newsreel men in the Pacific Northwest." (Patsie V. Sinkey, "Farewell Traveler," International Photographer, December 1, 1945).

While the Whatcom Museum's collection of Hudson’s work consists almost exclusively of moving image material, Hudson's early professional work was in still photography. While attending college in Pullman before the turn of the century, he sold photographic prints to help pay his expenses. In 1903 Hudson and his wife, Dora, returned to Pullman and jointly ran a successful photographic studio. The Hudsons and their two young daughters later spent two years in China, where Will shot outdoor photography under a contract with a Mr. C. L. La Munyon. Raising their two children far from home became difficult, so the Hudsons returned to the Northwest, and Will took a job as a photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Sinkey, "Farewell Traveler").

Hudson had a keen interest in motion picture photography, however. The earliest surviving footage credited to him is that which he shot at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle on the University of Washington campus. Footage of the AYP’s opening day ceremonies, a downtown parade, and panoramic views are part of the Whatcom Museum’s collection.

In 1912, Hudson purchased his own motion picture camera, and shortly thereafter he sold his first subject to International News for sixty cents a foot (Sinkey, "Farewell Traveler"). In 1913-1914 he accompanied a Harvard-Smithsonian expedition destined for the Arctic aboard the ship Polar Bear in order to provide a filmed record of the trip. The expedition was not a success, and Hudson, along with Captain Louis Lane and others, had to hike out to safety when their ship became caught in the ice.

At the same time, another expedition aboard the ship Karluk was missing in the Arctic. Hudson’s party were the only ones who could get out the news that the crew of the Karluk were safe. Hudson's account of the expedition, along with several of his photographs, was published in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, which had been following the Karluk’s fate (New York Times, February 1, 1914, V, 10:3). Hudson’s 1937 book Icy Hell tells of the entire adventure, and brief footage of the Polar Bear in the ice, of Hudson aboard the ship, and of the Arctic landscape, forms part of the Museum’s collection.

Sobered by the Arctic experience, Hudson was only too happy in 1916 to take a job which kept him closer to home, filming Northwest subjects for Pathe News. In addition to his newsreel work, Hudson did camerawork on his own. With cutbacks in the newsreel business early in the 1930s, Hudson decided to shoot his own film. Adopting the style of African game-hunting films, which had been popular since Paul Rainey’s 1912 African Hunt, Hudson shot his own "game picture" in the wilderness of his own back yard— the Pacific Northwest (Will E. Hudson, "Legions of Wild Animals at Home," international Photographer 19, February 1932). The Whatcom Museum’s collection includes substantial surviving footage from this endeavor, which Hudson entitled Bits of Outdoor Life from a Newsreel Cameraman. Of particular interest among the footage are scenes of former commercial fishing practices, including a whaling expedition aboard the vessel Aberdeen.

The Collection

The bulk of material held by the Whatcom Museum is from Hudson’s Pathe years. This includes early Armistice Day parade footage in Seattle after the conclusion of the First World War; footage (likely early 1920s) of festivities at the Pendleton Round-Up; 1920s Mount Rainier National Park scenes, including tour bus arrivals, ice caves, and mountain climbers; wheat harvesting scenes in eastern Washington and Oregon (both mechanical and team-drawn); early timber-industry footage showing obsolete logging techniques; and dozens of other scenes of Northwest life (refer to the Museum for a complete listing). In all, the Will E. Hudson film collection is a rich source of all-too-rare moving images documenting Pacific Northwest life in the first half of the twentieth century.