Henry Peter Bosse

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Henry Bosse and I worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers St. Paul District.  Mr. Bosse was born November 13, 1844  at his father’s estate in Magdeburg Prussia.  He immigrated to the United States in 1865 at 21 years of age.   By 1870 he’s working in Chicago, Illinois at a  stationery business.  In 1875 he travels to St. Paul, Minnesota where he begins working for the Corps’ St. Paul District.  By 1878 the Corps transferred him to Rock Island, Illinois where he worked as the Corps’ Rock Island District chief draftsman until his death in 1903.

The St. Paul District’s greatest historic treasure is now available, for the first time ever, to a global audience. The district owns a large bound collection of photos produced by renowned photographer and cartographer, Henry Peter Bosse (1844-1903), an engineer and draughtsman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the reshaping of the Mississippi River for modern transportation.

Taken between 1883 and 1892, his images include long-vanished vistas of bluffs and coulees, rapidly growing cities, workboats pulling snags out of the new channels, rock quarries, dredging operations and construction of wing dams and bridges. These images depicting the history of the Mississippi River comprise a rich essay on the evolution of one of the world’s greatest rivers — The Mississippi — and have distinguished Bosse as one of the foremost landscape photographers of the late 19th century.

In an effort to secure a digital archive of the collection and to make the Bosse photographs more widely available to the public, the St. Paul District loaned the original Bosse album to the Minnesota Historical Society, which safely captured digital images of the entire collection. Copies of these images are now available for public viewing and downloading through Minnesota Reflections, a collection maintained by the Minnesota Digital Library.