The Willard Cundiff scrapbook contains 64 photographs as well as poems, cartoons, illustrations, and inscriptions compiled by a young man visiting El Paso, Texas, and other western locales while being preoccupied with unrequited love.
Sometime between 1905 and 1908, Willard Cundiff became enamored with a young woman in El Paso named Argyra White. Both were teenagers at the time and while they may have seen each other on a few occasions the infatuation was clearly not mutual as Argyra was apparently more interested in a young man named Eldon Burns. By 1909 she had married a doctor and moved to Chicago. Various captions in the scrapbook suggest that the volume was mostly compiled in the aftermath of Cundiff’s rejection.
The scrapbook (26 x 33 cm) has green cloth covers and is framed as a personal tribute from Cundiff to Argyra White. Photographs of El Paso and other towns in the southwestern United States and Mexico (including Cloudcroft and Mesilla Valley in New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona) taken by Cundiff may have started out as potential postcard material for his employer at the time, Humphries and Co., yet Cundiff compiled and reimagined these scenes as places he might have enjoyed with Argyra. Small illustrations and verses he included with the photos express both his devotion to her and his disappointment at being rejected. Nearly every drawing includes a small image of a bleeding heart with an arrow driven through it. Some illustrations are of scenes near Antwerp and Innsbruck, suggesting that Cundiff also may have traveled to Europe. A few of the drawings seem to record actual encounters that Cundiff had with Argyra on a street, at a theater, and at a skating rink. The album ends with a picture of a cemetery captioned “we go to the last long sleep, the end of all disappointment.”
Cundiff appears to have recovered from his ill-fated romantic endeavors eventually. By 1908 he had relocated to southern California and became a successful illustrator. In that same year he published a cartoon version of Who’s Who in Riverside California, and in 1914 he came out with an innovative book of road maps envisioned from the air, The Panoramic Automobile Road Map and Tourist Guide of Southern California, published by The Cadmus Press in Los Angeles.
