The F. Jay Haynes Yellowstone album (26cm x 19cm) contains 48 pictures of natural landmarks in Yellowstone National Park taken by Haynes circa 1880s. Each 12cm x 20cm print is surrounded by a gold border printed onto the album's removable pages. The volume is bound with a tied string and the title "Photographs" is stamped onto the front cover in gold. A bookplate for F. Jay Haynes is pasted onto the back page.
The photographs show numerous landmarks from the part of Yellowstone National Park that lies in present-day Wyoming. The album contains pictures of several geysers and geyser craters, sometimes with tourists present, and a hotel is visible in pictures taken near Mammoth Hot Springs. Included are sights such as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River, the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, and the Golden Gate. One picture taken beside the Snake River shows "The Three Tetons" rising above the horizon, and one without a caption shows horse-drawn carriages beside a long building. For a list of landmarks pictured, see Additional Descriptive Data below.
Frank Jay Haynes (known professionally as "F. Jay Haynes") was born in Saline, Michigan, on October 28, 1853. Haynes apprenticed in Saline, presumably under the only professional photographer in Saline at that time, Miss Lucretia A. Gillett. Destined to become one of the most successful commercial photographers of the American West, Haynes photographed extensively in the upper Midwest, along the Pacific coast, and the Missouri River region in the 1870s. He had studios in Moorhead, Minnesota; in Fargo, North Dakota; Yellowstone National Park; and in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His first photographs in Yellowstone Park were taken in 1881. He became the official photographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 and was provided with a studio and darkroom on rails built to his design for $13,000, the "Palace Car Studio." Haynes' Log Cabin Studio at the Old Faithful geyser opened in Yellowstone National Park in 1897. He produced promotional photographs of the Dakota Territory, the Pacific Northwest, western Canada, and Yellowstone National Park for the Northern Pacific Railroad and Canadian Pacific Railway. He handed his business to his second son in 1916, and lived on at St. Paul until his death on March 10, 1921.