When you’re in a car for hours and hours and hours on a long road trip, con­ver­sa­tion is bound to pro­duce a few ideas, some bet­ter than oth­ers. Some­times, you actu­al­ly remem­ber some of these crazy ideas after the road trip is over. The 2,500-mile dri­ve Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Andy and Intre­pid Researcher Tom™ took over the sum­mer to Robert’s old stomp­ing grounds in and around the Rocky Moun­tains was no exception.

Since Andy and Tom were head­ing west to vis­it some of the ren­dezvous grounds Robert vis­it­ed when he was in his ear­ly twen­ties, the ques­tion arose: What did Robert look like when he was a twen­tysome­thing? The only images we have of Robert are when he was a mature man, in his 50s and 60s. When Tom returned to St. Louis, he start­ed research­ing what he could do to get a pic­ture of a young Robert.

After sift­ing through many web­sites, Tom found Pho­Joe, a com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in pho­to restora­tion, col­oriza­tion, age pro­gres­sion (mak­ing the sub­ject look old­er) and age regres­sion (mak­ing the sub­ject look younger). Obvi­ous­ly Tom was inter­est­ed in age regres­sion, so he sent their artists the pic­tures we had of Robert. After some minor tweak­ing, this is what they came up with:

Robert, age 25.

To give you a com­par­i­son, here are some of the pic­tures Tom sent to Phojoe:

Detail of a paint­ing that was done by A.J. Conant between 1879 and 1888, after Robert died. Robert died at the age of 75 in 1879.

A pas­tel of Robert that hangs in Vir­ginia Camp­bel­l’s bedroom.

Sure, when Robert was spend­ing months at a time in the wilds of (what is now) Wyoming, he prob­a­bly was­n’t that clean shaven or wear­ing a suit, but it’s an inter­est­ing image to con­sid­er. This youth­ful man was the Robert who fought in the Bat­tle of Pier­re’s Hole. This was the Robert whose exploits were immor­tal­ized in Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing’s The Adven­tures of Cap­tain Bon­neville. What do you think of the com­pos­ite? Any ideas for what we should do with our new pic­ture of Robert? Send your strokes of bril­liance here by leav­ing a com­ment, or send an email to shelley@campbellhousemuseum.org.