Biography

Isaiah West Taber was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. At nineteen he went to sea before joining a gold rush party bound for San Francisco but managed to make some money by selling a thousand pigs he had bought in the Marquesas Islands. After a spell in Syracuse, New York he returned to the west coast in 1864 and by 1871 had established his own photography business and gallery in San Francisco. Taber ran this successfully until the earthquake of 1906, when he lost all his glass plates - 20 tons of view negatives and 80 tons of portrait work.