He arrived in Yosemite for the first time by bicycle in 1895 while still a student in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. He had been drawn there by stories from an old friend of his mother's Susan B. Anthony, who was then making a tour through California speaking on the issue of women's suffrage. The young man fell in love with Yosemite and in 1897 bought a studio there. But his young wife refused to spend summers in the wilderness and left him. Despondent, he took his newly finished senior project, the first circuit panorama camera, and went to the Yukon where he photographed the opening of the mining towns and fields.