Rare Photos Of Famous Figures Are Showing An Entirely Different Side To History

From U.S. presidents and Wild West outlaws to groundbreaking scientists and brave civil rights campaigners, the 19th century is packed with iconic figures. But how many of those do you think were actually photographed? Well, the answer is more than likely to truly amaze you. Read on to see 40 unexpected images from the dawn of photography that captured iconic figures like you've never seen them before.

1. Calamity Jane

Calamity Jane’s life story is a murky one, and has been very much embroidered over the years — not least by herself. It’s reasonably certain, though, that after a mythically wild life, Jane eventually found a berth with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Sadly, she passed away in 1903 and was buried next to a fellow legendary figure: Wild Bill Hickok.

2. Vincent van Gogh

If we are to judge artistic merit in dollar terms, Vincent van Gogh is near the very top of the tree. Yet during his lifetime, the artist sold only one of his paintings. And that thing about his ear? In reality, he actually only chopped off a part of his ear lobe. That's not to minimize his mental health struggles, though — they resulted in his death in 1890.

3. Geronimo

Born in 1829, Geronimo was a legendary leader of the Chiricahua Apache. He stood at the head of his people as they resisted the incursion of settlers onto their ancestral lands. His nemesis was Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles, who induced him to surrender after years of resistance in 1886 with a promise of exile in Florida. Instead, Geronimo and his reduced band of followers were handed a term of forced labor.

4. Edgar Allen Poe

Here we see a somewhat disdainful-looking Edgar Allen Poe in a portrait from 1849. Born 40 years previously in Boston, Massachusetts, the author is best remembered for his spine-chilling short stories which have terrified generations of readers. These include such classics as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Fall of the House of Usher.

5. President Andrew Jackson

You might criticize this photograph of Andrew Jackson for its murkiness, but it’s worth pointing out it was taken in 1844 or 1845! Jackson was 78 years old at the time of this portrait. For a clearer picture of the man, take a look at a $20 bill — they’re graced by his face. He served two terms as president starting in 1829.

6. Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownwell Anthony was around 28 when this photo was taken. Raised as a quaker, she was born in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. Anthony is remembered for her pioneering work on women’s rights and with the temperance movement. Sadly, the activist didn't live to see women attain universal suffrage in 1920.

7. Billy the Kid

Given Billy the Kid’s reputation as a ruthless gunslinger, this 1878 photo of him – he’s on the left – is somewhat confusing. We guess it shows that even murderous outlaws need a bit of downtime! By the way, this photo reportedly turned up in a junk shop for $2 and went on to sell for $2.3 million.

8. Charles Dickens

This photo of the great author was taken in 1867 or 1868, when Charles Dickens had already published such timeless works as Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812. As a 12-year-old, his father’s financial woes forced Dickens to leave school and work for a time in a factory. This was a harrowing experience which he never forgot, and it colored much of his work’s humanitarianism.

9. John Brown

Ardent anti-slaver John Brown is seen here in a daguerreotype – one of the earliest forms of photograph. Brown led a dramatic armed raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 in the hope that his action would trigger a slave uprising. But soldiers attacked the rebels, who were forced to surrender.

10. Belle Starr

Sat on a handsome mount and elegantly kitted out, Belle Starr cuts a dashing figure in this 1886 photograph. Styled as the “Bandit Queen,” Myra Maybelle Shirley was one of the Wild West’s most notorious female outlaws. The man in the photo is believed to be Deputy U.S. Marshal Charles Barnhill — her arresting officer at the time.

11. Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud — born in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic — poses in this 1872 photograph with his mother Amalia. Freud’s known for inventing psychoanalysis, a discipline which has paid for many a modern psychotherapist’s leather chaise longue. He’s perhaps best known for his divise Oedipus complex theory.

12. Wild Bill Hickok

James Butler Hickok is credited with being one of the lawmen who made the Wild West a little tamer. His character is well observed in a scary encounter he had with a bear in 1858. Wild Bill apparently won the battle by drawing his knife and — well, you get the picture. Hickok met his maker during a poker game in 1876.

13. Thomas Edison

In this image, probably taken around 1878, a young Thomas Edison poses next to his prototypical phonograph. The machine was able to record and play back sounds, which at that time was an impressive feat. In fact, the origins of all of our marvelous communication gadgets can be rightfully traced back to Edison’s work on telegraphy and telephony.

14. Emily Dickinson

Taken around 1847, this image is a graceful portrait of renowned American poet Emily Dickinson. Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, she is revered for her verse. Yet of the almost 1,800 poems she wrote, only ten were actually published while she was alive. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes her work as being “distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance and lack of high polish.”

15. Butch Cassidy

Looking every inch the dapper gent with his bowler and watch chain, Butch Cassidy gazes confidently at us from sometime around 1900. Cassidy went on to become a leading member of the Wild Bunch outlaw gang, who specialized in holding up trains and robbing banks. No one knows for sure when Cassidy died. It might have been in 1909 in Bolivia, 1911 in Uruguay, or 1939 in Nevada or Washington.

16. President Franklin Pierce

President Franklin Pierce looks rather stiff in this photo from sometime between 1855 and 1865. The immobility is thanks to the limitations of early photography, which required long exposures accompanied by almost deathly stillness by the subject. Born in 1804 in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, Pierce served a single term in the White House from 1853.

17. Conrad Heyer

What makes this picture utterly astonishing is that Conrad Heyer, a Revolutionary War soldier, was born in 1749 — a century before photography even existed. And he was indeed 103 years old when this image was taken in 1852. The centenarian lived on until 1856. It’s said that he is the American with the earliest birth date ever to have been photographed, making this image a stunning window into the past.

18. Grigori Rasputin

The extravagantly-bearded Grigori Rasputin is known to history as the “Mad Monk.” A group of aristocrats who were angry over his inordinate influence over Tsar Nicholas II plotted to kill him in 1916. They fed him poisoned cakes and shot him twice, but he managed to survive. Finally, he was tied up and pushed into the icy St Petersburg’s Neva River, and at last he drowned.

19. Annie Oakley

Annie Oakley looks undeniably sharp in this portrait from the 1880s. Born in 1860 in Ohio’s Darke County with the name Phoebe Ann Mosey, she’s said to have been a crack shot from an early age. Oakley rose to fame as a sharpshooter with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. One of her crowd-pleasing tricks was to shoot from 30 paces at a playing card held sideways — slicing it in two.

20. Buffalo Bill

With his immaculately groomed facial hair and his rakishly angled hat, Buffalo Bill looks positively debonair in this photograph from more than a century ago. Bill's working life — which started at the age of nine — included jobs as a buffalo hunter, a Pony Express rider, and a U.S. Army Scout. But he’s best remembered as the impresario that ran Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which made him internationally famous.

21. Frederick Douglass

Looking every inch the distinguished elder statesman in this image from 1879, Douglass was around 60 when he sat for this portrait. He escaped his bondage in 1838 and took the name Douglass to evade slave hunters. He went on to become perhaps the most prominent African American of his era. He was a fierce campaigner against the inhumanity of slavery.

22. Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — is seen here in a photograph when he was 15 years old. Of course, he would go on to write such classics as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its companion volume The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also known for his pithy epithets such as “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

23. George Armstrong Custer

Of course, this man’s name inevitably evokes the phrase “Custer’s Last Stand.” That happened at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 when Custer and his 7th Cavalry were overwhelmed by warriors from the Sioux and Cheyenne peoples. They were defending the women and children of their nearby village. And all of Custer’s battalion – 210 of them – were killed.

24. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Born in 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a prominent campaigner who highlighted the misery of slavery. She came to national attention in 1852 for her best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which achieved sales of 300,000 within a year of publication. The book’s anti-slavery message is said to have done much to mobilize large sections of public opinion in opposition to human bondage in the U.S.

25. Prince Albert

This hand-colored print of the grandly named Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — AKA Queen Victoria’s husband — dates from 1848. Victoria proposed to her cousin in 1839 and the happy couple married the next year. Tragically, typhoid took his life in 1861 at the age of 42. Grief-stricken Victoria remained in mourning for the subsequent 39 years of her life.

26. President James K. Polk

James Knox Polk served a single term as the 11th U.S. commander-in-chief from 1845. Unlike the presidents before him, Polk did not stand for re-election. It was poor health that stopped him, and indeed he died in 1849 just three months after leaving the White House. His most notable achievement as president was the acquisition of Texas and California for the U.S.

27. Jesse James

Jesse James certainly looks like a dangerous outlaw — which, of course, is exactly what he was. This portrait dates from around 1864 when James was a youth of about 17 or so. After fighting for the Confederate cause, James and his brother Frank turned to banditry. They formed the notorious James Gang, and they held up banks and trains.

28. Booker T. Washington

Born a slave in Virginia’s Franklin County in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was a hugely prominent voice in the African American community. Despite his extremely difficult start in life, Washington gained an education through his own efforts and became a teacher. He acted as an advisor on African American matters to two presidents: Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

29. Wyatt Earp

In an eventful life, Wyatt Earp pursued a variety of callings including gambler, saloonkeeper, and gunslinger. But it is as a lawman that posterity best remembers him. The most storied incident of his colorful career came in 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, with the infamous shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Earp, three of his brothers, and Doc Holliday shot three bandits from the Clanton Gang, with whom they’d had a disagreement.

30. Harriet Tubman

This portrait of Harriet Tubman was taken in 1895, although her age at that time is uncertain. Her life as a slave was miserable, but Tubman’s spirit remained untamed. She’s remembered with reverence today for her part in the Underground Railroad, which transported slaves from the South to freedom in the North. Amazingly, Tubman guided more than 300 African Americans from their bondage to liberty.

31. Confederate President Jefferson Davis

This image shows Jefferson Davis with his wife Sarah Knox at some point before he became president of the Confederacy. He held that position from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The cause he led was of course defeated, and in 1865 he was arrested by the victorious Unionists. He was imprisoned, though he was released after two years and never brought to trial.

32. Emmeline Pankhurst

This early example of news photography shows eminent British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested at the gates of London’s Buckingham Palace in 1914. Born in 1858, she is the best known of the British women who campaigned energetically for women’s right to vote. Sadly, she died just weeks before the British Parliament passed the 1928 Representation of the People Act, which granted women the same voting rights as men.

33. President Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren poses in this early 1860s shot with a quizzical smile and some of the wildest hair ever seen atop a U.S. commander-in-chief. Van Buren served a single term from 1837, and he was unfortunate enough to be at the nation’s helm when a financial crisis hit just months after he’d taken office. The voters decided not to give him a second chance at victory in 1840.

34. Leo Tolstoy

Count Leo Tolstoy, photographed here in 1897 when he was just short of 70, provided some of literature’s most enduring works. The Russian’s great novels Anna Karenina and, of course, War and Peace remain absolute classics today. Despite a wild upbringing, Tolstoy became devoutly religious later in life, though he was ultimately excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.

35. Nikola Tesla

This photograph of the inventor Nikola Tesla, which was taken around 1896, shows a thoughtful-looking man who has an unmistakable look of keen intellect. He was truly a prolific innovator, and his work still underpins alternating-current electrical power as well as radio technology. Although his inventions brought him adulation, they earned him little in the way of personal wealth. Sadly, later in life he became increasingly eccentric and died penniless.

36. Ulysses S. Grant

This 1864 image shows Ulysses S. Grant looking for all the world like the archetypal rugged military leader in the field, which is exactly what he was. By common consent, Grant was the foremost of the generals who secured victory for the Union in the grueling Civil War. Once the conflict was at an end, Grant won the presidential election of 1868 and served two terms in the White House.

37. Laura Bullion

This rather stark portrait is actually a mug shot taken by the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1893. Laura Bullion rose to fame — or infamy — because of her close association with the Wild Bunch gang and some of their train-robbing exploits. Bullion was captured in 1901 and sentenced to five years in prison. She was released early and moved to Memphis Tennessee, where she lived on – apparently blamelessly – until 1961.

38. Walt Whitman

This 1862 portrait of a magnificently-bearded Walt Whitman shows the great poet in a pensive mood. Whitman's 1855 collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, is recognized as a seminal milestone in American literature. Before he found his métier as a poet, Whitman worked as a journalist, teacher, printer and house builder.

39. Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth sat for this portrait in 1870 when, historians believe, she was in the first half of her 70s. She was born into slavery around 1797 in Ulster County. Since New York State abolished slavery in 1827, Truth gained her freedom and became an ardent anti-slavery campaigner. Her first campaign was a legal one to free her son who had been sold into slavery in the south — a battle she won.

40. The Sundance Kid

Harry Longabaugh gives every appearance of being the most respectable of citizens with his top hat, tailored coat, and elegant companion Etta Place. In reality, he was much better known to the world as the notorious bandit known as the Sundance Kid. Along with his buddy Butch Cassidy, he was, of course, a member of the Wild Bunch gang of outlaws.