When his boyhood inside Up to date England, Jackson fought in the American Civil War, including the battle of Gettysburg, then joined the caravan running west on the Oregon Trail in 1866-67. Within 1869 he won a commission from either a Union Pacific Railroad to document the scenery along their route for promotional reasons. a resulting season, Jackson had a survive-microscopic invitation to join the U.S. government survey of the Yellowstone Flow of any stream & Rocky Mountains led by Ferdinand Hayden. Painter Thomas Moran was also a portion of a expedition, & them creative person worked closely together to document the Yellowstone region. Hayden's studies were annual multidisciplinary expeditions intended to chart a largely-unexplored west, watch flora, animal, & geologic conditions, & identify around all probability navigational routes, therefore Jackson was in a position to capture the 1st photo of legendary landmarks of the west.

Jackson worked inside big format under conditions that were ludicrously hard. He traveled using 3 cameras, & fragile, heavily Eleven" x 14" glass plates which he experienced to evolve in places. These wet-collodion negatives required preparing a surface & keeping it not dry prior to a exposure; focus & exposure days were guess, between 5 seconds & twenty proceedings based in lightly conditions. Preparing, exposing, fixing, cleaning so drying out one image would require a better a share of an hour. He carried his devices on the backs of mules. A weight of a glass plates & his personal darkroom limited the total of imaginable exposures within any 1 hike, & these images were taken in primitive, pathless, & physically challenging conditions. after when his mule wasted its footing, Jackson misused the year's operate.

Despite these difficulties Jackson come back using photographic grounds to believe of american landmarks that got antecedently seemed todays hearsay: a Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of Yellowstone, Colorado's Rockies and a Mount of the Holy Cross, and a disobliging Ute Indians. Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone helped convince Congress to produce it a 1st National Park in March 1872.

Jackson exhibited exposure & clay system of Anasazi dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He continued traveling on a Hayden Researchers until the previous 1 around 1878. He late established the studio within Denver, Colorado and produced photographic reports and paintings for Harper's Weekly magazine.

Jackson moved to Washington, D.C. in 1924, and produced murals of the Old West for the new U.S. Department of the Interior building. He as well acted as a technical indicator adviser for the motion-picture photography of Gone with the Wind. Around 1942, he was honored per Explorer's Club for his 80,000 photo of the Western West. Jackson died at a age of 99. Recognized when one of a survive surviving Civil War veterans, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.