 In the 1850s, he worked variously as an illustrator for a Boston periodical, the "Carpet-Bag", and provided illustrations for books such as "Hunter's Panoramic Guide from Niagara to Quebec" (1857).The period during the American Civil War was a time when all images in a publication had to be hand drawn and engraved by skilled artists.Photography existed but there was no way to transfer a photograph to a printing plate since this was well before the advent of the halftone process for printing photographs.