The driveway was scattered with all the usual debris of a Midwest garage sale. Long-outgrown clothes spilled from cardboard boxes. Foldout tables full of chipped dishes and cheap mementos lined the pavement, alongside faded chairs and broken lamps. 

But there, in the middle of what could only be described as a bunch of old junk, were 40 boxes brimming with possibilities.  

Historian Michael Amundson opened the first with bated breath. Inside were dozens of film slides, each bearing the memory of an era long since passed. The images were flush with color — a rarity, Amundson knew, for 1939 and 1940, when the photos were dated. A quick glance at the remaining boxes revealed a tantalizing array of photo subjects: San Francisco World’s Fair, Zion National Park, Glacier National Park. 

Most exciting to Amundson, though, was the pictures’ ability to come alive. Most of the 1,800 images in the collection were actually composed of two separate photographs, taken at the same time but spaced a few inches apart. When viewed simultaneously through a spectrometer, the human brain combined the photos into a single three-dimensional rendering.  

“I was interested because it was 3D. I knew it was rare,” Amundson said. “But the more I knew about it, the more interesting the story got.” 

“This is what historians do,” he added. “We chase stories and tell stories.”   

At first, there wasn’t much to chase. 

After haggling the seller down to $150 for the entire photo collection and a projector to view the slides with, Amundson shipped the whole bundle of goods back to his home in Arizona. There, he inspected each slide in detail. The only clue to the photos’ origins remained a signature inked in the corner of each slide, denoting the creator as a certain “Clyde McCoy.” 

It was 1997, and the clunky internet databases available to Amundson were far from helpful. When Amundson searched "Clyde McCoy” in the databases that predated Google, the only hits he got were for a jazz trumpeter of the same name. He posted queries on antique photography websites, asking if anybody had ever heard of Clyde McCoy, but nobody responded to his pleas. Eventually, Amundson resigned himself to the idea that McCoy’s story would remain a mystery. 

Then, in 2008, Amundson’s email pinged.  

A man in Fort Wayne had found a few newspaper clippings about Clyde McCoy in a scrapbook he inherited from his deceased grandmother. Intrigued, he looked up the name and stumbled upon one of the posts that Amundson had made years ago. 

“I was floored,” Amundson said of the interaction. 

His shock only grew once the stranger shared copies of the newspaper articles. “Clyde McCoy found dead in Detroit hotel: attractive young woman detained in death of Ft. Wayne attorney,” read one headline. “Girl held for murder: find nude body of Clyde McCoy in hotel room,” decreed another.   

Someone had poisoned McCoy’s Coca-Cola in 1941, abruptly ending the young photographer’s life. Nobody was ever charged with the murder, despite all the hubbub about the “attractive young woman” he had been seen with the evening before his death. 

“His death reads like a mystery,” Amundson said. “His life was a mystery.”   

With clues gleaned from the newspaper articles, Amundson dived back into his research. He requested documents from employers mentioned in the articles and gradually worked backward to craft an outline of McCoy’s short life. 

Born in 1905, Clyde McCoy grew up on a ranch in Wyoming and eventually found employment as a service inspector for the Pullman Company, a major manufacturer of locomotive sleeper cars. McCoy rode the rails on the company’s dime, reporting back on service and conditions during the trip. 

“He was basically a company spy,” Amundson said.  

While reaping the benefits of free railway travel, McCoy turned an extra profit selling images to the Society for Visual Education, a company that distributed slide film to classroom teachers. 

Nearly all the far-flung locales McCoy had photographed aligned with passenger railroad routes, and Amundson discovered the photographer also had a habit of taking multiple photographs from the exact same spot. He might stand on a street corner a few blocks from the train station in Denver, for example, and create four different 3D images facing each of the cardinal directions.  

The clear exception to McCoy’s habit of rapid-fire photography was a collection of about 90 images taken in Glacier National Park. Amundson eventually estimated that it would have taken McCoy about a month to take all the images, many of which featured backcountry camps and remote peaks. 

"Being in Glacier for a month had to be like being in heaven," Amundson said. "So, I think he must have just loved it." 

In 2018, Amundson and his wife traveled to Glacier National Park in the hopes of recreating McCoy’s pictures more than 50 years later. He had undertaken the same exercise in some of the other locations McCoy photographed, but Amundson quickly discovered the Glacier collection would be far more difficult to replicate. 

“When Clyde went there in 1940, he was 35 years old. He was on horseback. I was 53, and I had bad knees,” Amundson said, a hint of humor in his voice. “I couldn’t get everywhere.” 

In some cases, Amundson wasn't even sure where, exactly, he needed to go.  He shared McCoy's photos with a local historian and a researcher who had been part of the United States Geological Survey's long-term glacial photography project, both of whom identified some of the mysterious locations.  

For some, Amundson had to rely on Google Maps. For three years after his in-person visit, the historian trekked through a virtual rendition of the park, painstakingly identifying the exact location where each photo in McCoy's Glacier collection had been taken. 

Three decades after he first unearthed the 3D images, Amundson presented the fruits of his labor at the Northwest Montana History Museum in July. After detailing his years-long struggle to learn about Clyde McCoy, Amundson instructed the crowd of about 50 people to put on the paper 3D glasses they had received upon entering the room.  

He clicked forward in his presentation, revealing a photo of a high alpine trail flocked by yellow flowers. To the raw eye, the scene appeared slightly askew. Red and blue shadows crisscrossed the alpine landscape and stirred up a vague sense of motion sickness.  

Through the bicolored lenses of the 3D glasses, the shadows disappeared. Focus a little and the photo shifted again. The trail accordioned outward, and the flowers burst to the foreground while hazy mountain peaks lingered in the distance. 

Click. An image of a pack train, the horses lined up like dominoes. Click. A close-up of a lake, the water so clear you could almost feel the wetness underfoot. Click. A woman, who Amundson said he was never able to identify, leaning against a railing, trees and water and sky falling away behind her. 

The pictures are, to put it simply, beautiful, but Amundson believes their importance far exceeds artistic expression alone. McCoy photographed Glacier National Park in 1939 and 1940, at the tail end of what Amundson considered the first wave of outdoor tourism in the Americas.  

In the first decades after Glacier National Park was established, visitors most often viewed the mountainous landscape from horseback. They often spent days or weeks riding pack animals through remote areas of the park, stopping over at semi-permanent tent camps or backcountry chalets before hopping on a train back to civilization. 

The completion of the Going-to-the-Sun Road in 1932 offered a new and convenient way to tour the expanse of Glacier National Park in only a few hours. By the time McCoy visited the park in 1939 and 1940, most visitors had already made the switch from horse trains to automobiles.  

“He was documenting the end of an era really, which is pretty cool,” Amundson said. 

“These are all glimpses to a lost world, and they’re glimpses in color and 3D,” he added. 

At the time, few photographers lugged camera equipment into the backcountry, and McCoy’s use of 3D color imagery at a time when black-and-white still photography was the norm set his work even further apart. Amundson believes he may very well hold the only 3D renderings of Glacier National Park ever created before World War II. 

He considers the collection to be McCoy’s magnum opus. And, after decades of research, the photographer has become Amundson’s own great work. 

A few years ago, Amundson decided to stop by McCoy’s grave while driving through Indiana. Flowers would be nice, he thought, but the town McCoy had been buried in was so small there were no flower shops. In fact, there were hardly any businesses open on that Monday evening, so Amundson stopped at a gas station and bought the one treat he knew McCoy enjoyed. 

He left a can of Coca-Cola on McCoy’s grave, a small tribute to a man he knew only through records and photographs. 

Reporter Hailey Smalley can be reached at 406-758-4433 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support. 

    Michael Amundson recreated three-dimensional photos of Glacier National Park that Clyde McCoy had originally taken in 1940. (Courtesy of Michael Amundson)
  

    Clyde McCoy took a self-portrait in front of Grinnell Glacier in 1940. (Courtesy of Michael Amundson)
  

    Horses mill outside Many Glacier Hotel in 1940. (Courtesy of Michael Amundson)
  

    Michael Amundson recreated Clyde McCoy's photo of the corral outside Many Glacier Hotel nearly eight decades later, in 2018. (Courtesy of Michael Amundson)