Bad Land: An American Romance

3. Pictures

THE NEW ARRIVALS FOUND THEMSELVES IN COUNTRY that defeated the best efforts of the eye to get it in sharp focus. It went on interminably in every direction. In late summer (the season recommended to homesteaders as the best time of year to come to Montana), the yellow land looked like bad skin — a welter of blisters, pimples, bumps and boils. With no trees to frame it, no commanding hills to lend it depth and perspective, it gave people vertigo. You couldn’t get your bearings — or, rather, you had no sooner selected them than they went absent without leave. Was it this pimple? or that one? — or that one over there? It was scary country in which to take a stroll. You felt lost in it before you started.

It was not quite raw land, but nor was it a landscape. The northern plains had long ago been grooved by dainty-footed buffalo, then lightly patterned by winding Indian trails. Ranchers, driving cattle from Texas to Montana, left ribbons of trodden ground as broad as superhighways. The army, under generals like Custer, Miles and Terry, built compass-course military roads that marched up hill and down dale, disdainful of contours. The railroad companies ran tracks along the creek and river bottoms. Yet all these routes added up to no more than a few hairline scratches on the prairie.

You would need to know what to look for in order to notice the really important landscaping work — the wooden stakes, protruding twelve inches from the ground, and mostly hidden by the sagebrush. Since the 1870s, survey teams from the federal Land Office had been mapping Montana and turning it into a grid of six-mile-square “townships,” each subdivided into thirty-six sections, with every section pegged out into quarters.

The Rectangular Survey of the West was begun by Thomas Jefferson, who headed a 1784 Congressional committee which drafted the Land Ordinance of 1785. The project reflected both the rationalist, French Enlightenment temper of Jefferson’s mind and his personal interest in the craft of surveying. His father, Colonel Peter Jefferson, had led a survey of northern Virginia, and Jefferson grew up familiar with the instruments and the immense, finical labor of map making from scratch.

The Land Ordinance was a dizzyingly ambitious document. Beginning at an arbitrary point on the Ohio River, where it left Pennsylvania on a westward course, a vast, ghostly graticule of numbered squares was flung over the expanse of undiscovered, unsettled North America. On the slopes of mountains yet unseen, in valleys that were still the domain of unknown “savages,” grid-ded townships awaited the arrival of explorers like Lewis and Clark and surveyors (like Clark himself, who became Surveyor-General of Missouri in 1824, and his son, Meriwether Lewis Clark, who was appointed to the same post in 1849). In Jefferson’s scheme of things, the townships were out there, in the unknown world, as Platonic entities. To bring them into physical existence, they must be located and staked. Even as you hacked your way through the brush, you’d know the number of the township you were in and the number of the square-mile section on which you stood. According to the Ordinance, one section (No. 16, near the middle of each township) was to be reserved for educational use and four more were set aside for the U.S. government. So the unmapped townships were already equipped with ghostly schools and colleges, ghostly post offices, courthouses, barracks, licensing departments and all the rest of the machinery of an ordered civilization.

It took nearly 140 years to square up the West like a sheet of graph paper, and at the beginning of the twentieth century surveyors were still at work on the Montana prairie, laying down section lines with Burt’s Improved Solar Compass. Distance was measured off in chains, using a standard chain of a hundred links, sixty-six feet long, or one-eightieth of a mile. As the chain came taut, a chainman stuck in the ground a steel tally pin decorated with a red rag. At five chains, the forward chainman called “Tally!” and the rest of the chainmen came back in chorus, “Tally!” before the pins were removed and the gang moved on to the next stretch. At forty chains, a wooden post, thirty inches toll, with Arabic numerals neatly chiseled on its face, was set in a hole eighteen inches deep (the instructions in the survey manual resemble those of a religious ritual) to mark the quarter section.

Every chainman was sworn into office with the Chainman’s Oath:

I, ________, do solemnly swear that I will well and faithfully execute the duties of chainman; that I will level the chain upon even and uneven ground, and plumb the tally pins, either by sticking or dropping the same; that I will report the true distances to all notable objects, and the true length of all lines that I assist in measuring, to the best of my skill and ability, and in accordance with instructions given me.

Moundmen, axemen and flagmen took similar oaths — though none of this ceremonial gravity did much to hide the fact that a job on the Land Survey brought with it all sorts of interesting perks and opportunities. Of the fourteen surveyors-general of Montana between 1867 and 1925, two were removed from office, one was suspended and four were forced to resign. At the very least, a spell on a survey team could lead to a profitable career in real estate, and most of the locators, who showed up in their buggies at railroad stations whenever an emigrant train was expected, had done time on the Land Survey. For an ex-chainman, the locating business was money for jam at $25.00 for a light morning’s work.

The locator knew exactly where he was. Leaving his horse in its traces to graze on the springy buffalo grass, he marched confidently across the prairie in high-heeled boots, and exposed a weathered stake. Coded messages were carved on it, front and back:

Four notches had been cut on one side of the stake, two on the other. Fearing to seem a fool, the client was shy of asking his locator what these symbols meant. Ten minutes later, after a jolting ride over the rough ground, the locator was at it again, using his boot toe to conjure from the undergrowth another stake; more letters, numbers, notches.

The locator was the Columbus of grass and sage. To the client, his navigational skills were uncanny: far out on the disorienting prairie, he was like a man pottering among the geraniums in his backyard. The locator’s easy familiarity with the land only made the client feel more confused. The stakes were lost to sight within a few yards. “Your place”—as the locator kept on calling it — was a brain-teasing abstraction. The moment you grasped it, it dissolved on you. A sandy hillock marked the southwestern corner of the property — but then you blinked, and the hillock was gone, and the place had slithered off elsewhere.

There were some shaping features, to which the newcomers would gratefully cling. Fallon Creek, and its inky-green gully of cottonwoods, ran SE — NW. It held the Milwaukee Road line and connected the towns of Ismay and Mildred. Close to the creek, where homesteaders had settled on quarter-section spreads before the passing of the 1909 Congressional bill, one could see the surveyors’ grid beginning to make itself manifest, in tidy squares of land, fenced with barbed wire on twisty posts of juniper. A new gumbo road, the color of sour milk, ran dead straight along the section lines. So long as one stayed close to town, and looked at the land with the prophetic eye of Ismay’s anonymous poet, one could almost see the orderly checkerboard of farms and farm roads. The stern, dependable geometry of Iowa was starting to emerge out of the undifferentiated space of the far West. In a year or two …

But the prophet would falter on the unclaimed benchlands, where the earth lay as wide open as the sky and the wind set up a mournful grumbling in the dry stalks. This was no Iowa. It looked (though one tried to censor this thought) more like the Great American Desert of the Old maps.

The locator pointed out a pile of fist-sized rocks atop a sandstone knoll — a shepherd’s landmark, and not far from the fourth stake. The sight of this lonely cairn wasn’t half as reassuring as the locator intended it to be. It meant that in this country even shepherds were scared of getting lost.

And you? Having beaten the bounds of your new estate, would you ever succeed in finding it again without professional help?

In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, traveling on a Union Pacific emigrant train, passed about 320 miles south of here. Looking out at the Plains from the open platform of the car, he was excited by their comfortless monotony.

What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope. He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to the object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance … His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.

This sickness — a version of the “calentore” suffered by ocean sailors — was further described by the painter John Noble. In a 1927 interview with a journalist writing for the American Magazine, Noble brought up an incident from his Plains boyhood in the 1870s and early ’80s.

Did you ever hear of “loneliness” as a fatal disease? Once, back in the days when Father and I were bringing up long-legged sheep from Mexico, we picked up a man near Las Vegas who had lost his way. He was in a terrible state. It wasn’t the result of being lost. He had “loneliness.” Born on the plains, you get accustomed to them; but on people not born there the plains sometimes have an appalling effect.

You look on, on, on, out into space, out almost beyond time itself. You see nothing but the rise and swell of land and grass, and then more grass — the monotonous, endless prairie! A stranger traveling on the prairie would get his hopes up, expecting to see something different on making the next rise. To him the disappointment and monotony were terrible. “He’s got loneliness,” we would say of such a man.

The lost traveler of Noble’s story died later that evening. Noble himself made a brief shot at homesteading in Oklahoma, then went to Paris, where he studied painting, and later became famous for his moody seascapes. He explained to his interviewer:

I began to feel that the vastness, the bulk, the over-whelming power of the prairie is the same in its immensity as the sea — only the sea is changeless, and the plains, as I knew, were passing.

Noble might have added that the sea was also a lot easier to paint. Just as the disorienting, oceanic emptiness of the plains could make the traveler sick, so it usually induced a helpless painter’s block. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, artists began to cross the plains on their way to the supremely picturesque snowcaps, crags, ravines and chiaroscuro light effects of the Rockies. For members of the Hudson River School, like John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Gifford and Worthington Whittredge, the Rocky Mountains represented the summit of the American Sublime. First you conquered Niagara with a paintbrush, then you mounted an expedition to Colorado. These overland western trips led the artists through 700 miles of what appeared to be the least paintable country in the world.

After the scrolled, gleaming surface of the Mississippi, with its wooded bluffs and water traffic (a gift to the luminists), the land began to flatten, and to lose its trees. Soon the traveling artists came into a region with no foreground, no background, no natural frame or lines of perspective. The plains defied the pencil and sketchbook. From the art-school point of view, they were empty of every feature that students had been taught to draw. Even the sky — the big subject of the flat-country landscapist — was a vacant blue, top to bottom, wall to wall. Only when the mountains at last assembled themselves on the horizon, and trees began to sprout beside the trail, were the easels and painting gear unpacked, as the artists reentered a world that could be represented on paper and canvas.

That the plains lay outside the conventions of nineteenth-century picture making is a measure of how intimidating they were to the ordinary traveler and settler. There was no Constable or Corot to give shape and meaning to rural life in this part of the West. Your house and its surrounding land had no precedent in the culture — were beyond every known standard of natural beauty and harmony. The plainsman was condemned to be a visual orphan.

Some artists did try to paint the plains. Albert Bierstadt, who made his first trip to the Rockies in 1859, was a compulsive workaholic. He insisted on making sketches along the way, even when the terrain resisted every attempt at conventional composition. Unable to put his brushes away as the long flat miles unrolled, Bierstadt amassed a pile of mostly formless daubs. But in one oil sketch, Surveyor’s Wagon in the Rocky Mountains, his industriousness was rewarded. The picture is a startling success, and quite outside Bierstadt’s usual range of massive theatrical landscapes.

The title is getting ahead of itself, for we are still a long way short of the Rockies, which stand at a Distance of forty miles or so, pricked out in hazy blue. The surveyor’s wagon is temporarily halted on a sweep of prairie, billiard-table flat, tufted with gray sage. It’s a liquid space, in which the wagon, a loose horse, a rudimentary mounted figure, his arm raised to shield his eyes from the glare, and a small herd of grazing cattle appear to be separately adrift, strung out, at random, across the paper. The painting leads the eye rapidly — too rapidly — from right to left, where it peters out into nothingness. It’s unsettling in exactly the same way as the plains themselves are unsettling: the objects in it are weirdly out of relationship to each other, and to the shining, lakelike ground on which they’re placed.

The painting seems to yearn for the mountains in the far distance. There the rules of composition will apply again. There lies the romantic sublime. There the painter will execute landscapes worthy of the name, with majestic pines, heroic pinnacles, cascades, real lakes, the fantastic play of sunshine and witchy gloom. Somewhere out there, hidden in the haze, is Lander’s Peak — the subject of the painting that Bierstadt would eventually sell to James McHenry, the British railway magnate, for the fabulous price of $25,000.

On his second trip to the West, Bierstadt stopped in Nebraska to paint On the Plains, a muddy little panorama that measures 7½ inches by 19 inches. It’s a trick picture. What you see at first sight is a confused brown sea breaking on a flat beach, and it takes several moments for the waves to reveal themselves as receding banks of eroded gumbo clay, while the beach is actually the smooth surface of a tan-colored creek. The sea is land, and the land is water. The picture disorients the viewer as the plains themselves might do: it is a troubling mirage, seen by someone of whom Noble and his family would say, “He’s got loneliness.”

In his hit-and-miss way, Bierstadt found in the plains a kind of countersublime. The more they defeated his technical skills and his rather commonplace romantic sensibility, the more they induced in him the “sensation of agreeable horror” that Burke defined as the essence of the sublime in nature. Bierstadt was fascinated by the plains’ sheer unpaintability. The pictures that he made of the plains — rank failures, by his severe picture-postcard standards — are more strangely rousing and true to life than any of his oppressively scenic and overvarnished lake-and-mountain tableaux.

In Bierstadt’s sketches, one sees the painter himself humbled by featureless space. On the plains, Bierstadt, the great professional of his age, was a tentative amateur, and his sense of personal diminishment shines through his pictures. In An Artist in America (1937), Thomas Hart Benton exulted in the prairie’s capacity to turn people into incredible shrinking men:

In the West proper, there are no limits. The world goes on indefinitely. The horizon is not seen as the end of a scene. It carries you on beyond itself into farther and farther spaces.

Cozy-minded people hate the brute magnitude of the plains country. For me the great plains have a releasing effect. I like the way they make human beings appear as the little bugs they really are. Human effort is seen there in all its painful futility. The universe is stripped to dirt and air, to wind, dust, clouds, and the white sun.

Yet the real effect of space on the Great Plains is more ambiguous and disconcerting than Benton would have one believe. It inflates as well as shrinks. Frederic Remington, for instance, was able to use the dirt and air of the plains to make a bare stage for his larger-than-life cowboy-and-Indian dramas. In Remington, the prairie is often hardly more than a wash of ocher tinged with green — a neutral background against which men and horses marvelously swell in stature. Far from being reduced to little bugs, Remington’s characters are enormous. His scouts and broncobusters would look like nonentities on a crowded city street; but on the plains they walk tall, ennobled by the empty space in which they act.

The truth is that both Benton and Remington are right — and simultaneously so. On the Montana prairie, I’ve been a Benton bug and a Remington cowboy in the same instant. It fattens you with self-importance to be so alone, and so conspicuous a figure, in an arena whose enormous circumference reduces you to a dot. You’re very big and very little all at once — and being both, are neither. This sudden, acute loss of dimension is dubiously pleasurable — like the head swirl you get from smoking a cigarette after a week of giving up. You have the peculiar sickness of the vision. Like Stevenson’s tortured settler returning to his cabin, you walk, a bit unsteadily, back to the car, where the enclosed space and the familiar diameter of the wheel restore you to your usual size.

I tried taking my own pictures of the plains. Every few weeks, I absented myself from home and drove the thousand miles from Seattle to eastern Montana, where I holed up in my now-regular room in the Baker motel and conducted “research.” This research consisted of long, exhilarating drives on dirt roads over the prairie and through the badlands, punctuated by occasional Calls on ranches and farms. I bought a straw hat, and a pair of knee-high boots to deflect rattlesnakes, also a wooden jack to claw the boots off my tenderfoot feet. I traded in my Dodge Daytona for a 4-wheel-drive Jeep. My wife watched all this with poorly feigned enthusiasm.

Baker, Montana, was an unplace to her; both insufficiently remote and insufficiently neighborly to be interesting. I might as well have been leaving my wife and small child in order to hang out for days on end in a sports bar.

“But you must have some image of it?”

“Not much. It’s flat and colorless. That’s about all.”

“You’re looking out of a plane window. You’re halfway between Chicago and Seattle.”

“Oatmeal. Lumpy oatmeal. That’s my only image.”

I wanted to make the country real to her, to bring back pictures from my travels that would somehow justify the travels themselves. So I kept on braking the car and taking snaps. I photographed fence lines dwindling to the horizon, straight as bullet paths; abandoned houses with sky filling their gaping windows; the balding grass; the crumbling buttes and pillars of layered clay; the zigzag creek beds; the rusted remains of a Ford Model T lying on the prairie as if it had fallen out of the sky. I photographed the timber ruins of Ismay and Mildred. I photographed my own car, the driver’s door open, to put myself by proxy into the picture — and every time I lifted the camera to my eye, I could see that the picture was going to be a dud.

The camera, a Pentax Zoom 105, had always seemed the perfect instrument for someone like me. It was versatile and idiot-proof. I am no photographer, but pictures I had taken with it had been published in several magazines and newspapers. I’d long ago noticed that the obvious difference between professional and amateur photographers is that professionals get through a lot more film. If one learns to dispose of a 36-exposure roll of Ektachrome in a couple of minutes, and to show the art editor perhaps one in fifty of the resulting transparencies, it’s easy to pass oneself off as a competent illustrator. In the Jast two or three years I had grown fatly complacent on this theory. With a modern camera, I boasted, anyone could do it.

I was thrown by what I now saw through the viewfinder. It wouldn’t do. When the lens on the Pentax was fully retracted it had a focal length of 38mm, which gave an angle of vision of about 45 degrees. This had been more than wide enough for the landscape pictures I had taken in England and the Pacific Northwest, but on the Montana prairie it gave me the POV of a severely blinkered horse. The view through the lens fell hopelessly far short of what I could see with my naked eyes. It took in the deserted house, the Model T, the plinth of scoriacious rock, but it robbed them of the vast defining space in which they stood — that 180-degree sweep which turned even Baker, a city of two thousand-plus people, into a lonely huddle of buildings on the plain. If I got far enough away to include the space in the frame, the object of the picture disappeared; if I got close enough to see the object, it lost its meaning and became anyone’s junked car or disused shed.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Head swiveling like an owl’s, I tried to shoot a panorama in 40-degree liths, but the exercise only emphasized even further the inadequacy of the lens, its congenital tunnel vision. Or, rather, it revealed to me my own congenital tunnel vision. Bred to looking at landscape as if it were a picture, to the posted scenic viewpoint, I was responding to the prairie like a shut-in taking his first walk across a blinding city square. It was all periphery and no center, and I could feel my eyes doing some kind of calisthenic workout in their sockets.

Back at the wheel, I blamed the landscape painters for my habitual telephoto view of things. It would take a very long, narrow-angled lens to frame Flatford Mill or Salisbury Cathedral as John Constable painted them — and the art of the traditional landscapist is all about excluding most of what the eye naturally sees and focusing on a tight rectangle, a “vista.” The word is inseparable from its association with narrowness and containment; with the avenue of trees framing the Palladian villa, or the sudden opening in the wood disclosing a prospect of water.

In late Georgian England, the highlight of a weekend in the country was a guided tour of the estate to admire the scenery through a Claude Glass. Landscape architects, known as “improvers,” like Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, created vistas designed to be seen from selected vantage points. On arrival at each of these spots, the visitor was handed a Claude Glass — a rectangular sheet of tinted glass (sometimes a mirror) in a gilt picture frame with a handle on the bottom. Holding this instrument at arm’s length, one aimed it at the view. In the correct position, it would contain a living landscape painting by Claude Lorrain. At a guess, based on the only Claude Glass that I’ve seen, the horizontal angle of vision can’t have been much more than 30 degrees, with the vertical angle about 25. Driving at 60 m.p.h., with my eyes on the road, watching the verges for kamikaze antelope, I was peering through a similarly constricted window.

The prairie made all my received ideas about landscape seem cramped and stultified. There were no vistas in it. It blew the picture frame apart, and taking a camera to it (or at least my taking a camera to it) was about as much use as trying to capture it in a Claude Glass. In Seattle, I collected my prints from the processors’ and laid them out on the dining-room table. My wife made polite noises, but I could see what she was seeing: a hundred perfectly exposed snapshots of a badly maintained golf course.

So I looked at the photographs of Evelyn Cameron with the jaundiced admiration of a failed practitioner. The Terry museum had a small, whitewashed gallery, once an attorney’s office, devoted to her work — sepia images of badlands and prairie, ranchers ers and homesteaders, and of towns like Terry, still so new that one could almost smell the sawn timber used in their construction. Cameron’s pictures had been taken with lenses that had a longer focal length and a narrower angle of vision than the one on my Pentax, but they were full of the emptiness and distance that had eluded me. Using a bulky plate Kodet, she’d caught the ambiguous and disquieting character of western space. Nearly all her people looked as if their presence in eastern Montana came as a bewildering surprise to them, and they were photographed in surroundings that were either much too big, like the open prairie, or much too small, like the dog-kennel interiors of their claim shacks. The woman behind the camera clearly took an ironic relish in this sort of incongruity. In several of her pictures she had allowed the extended shadows of herself and her equipment to fall across the foreground. In black silhouette, elongated by a low evening sun, stood a woman in a tropical pith helmet beside a shrouded camera on a tripod. The camera looked like a giant, trespassing, science-fiction spider, and appeared to be preying on the scene whose picture it was taking.

I spent a long time in front of one particularly odd photograph. It showed the town of Fallon in 1904—though “town” was not quite the word for the seven widely scattered buildings, plus two sentry-box-like outhouses, represented in the picture. The photographer had clambered up on top of a railroad car, and was looking down over an irregular plaza of bare earth, littered with sticks and horse droppings, where an insufficient crowd had gathered for the occasion. There were four horsemen, four men on foot, a horse tethered to a hitching post, and a woman, who was half in, half out of the picture on the left-hand margin. In the middle distance, a group of barely decipherable figures sat or stood on the front step of C. Hanson, General Merchandise.

Most of the men in the photograph carried rifles, as well they might, for each of the nine principals stood on his or her patch of ground as if defending it against the others. The whole composition (Cameron had probably asked her subjects to spread out as far as possible in order to give the bald space an air of habitation) was weirdly disturbing to the eye. The buildings failed to connect with each other. So did the people. Meanwhile the photographer had positioned herself so far away from the scene, and at such an awkward angle to it, that the camera seemed estranged from the picture it was taking, as if the spider was having second thoughts about the feast in view.

It was a long exposure. At Mrs. Cameron’s signal, the people froze stiffly for the picture, while the indifferent horses tossed their heads and swished their tails, leaving blots on the prints to mark the tense passage of time.

“Fallon, 1904” had the power to haunt long after one had moved away from it. Out on the dusty, too-wide street, flanked by too-low buildings, walking stiffly in new boots, I was pursued by Mrs. Cameron’s eye. Terry’s houses and business had been shaken out over the prairie at random, like dice. The massive courthouse had surely fallen on Terry by mistake, and been intended for some other city altogether. Here lived 659 people, in a cross-hatched grid the size of eight New York avenues by twenty New York streets. An acre apiece to each man, woman and child. In what passed for downtown, the cross streets were as broad as they were long, and a tall man could, at a slight stretch, place his hand on the average rooftop. It was like being Gulliver in Brobdingnag and in Lilliput all at once. Evelyn Cameron had seen this, felt it, fixed it on a photographic plate, and as I tramped through Terry I was grateful that she had put me in the picture.

We’d come to Montana from similar starting points. Evelyn Cameron grew up in Furzedown Park, between Tooting and Streatham. In 1868, when she was born Evelyn Flower, her father had set up his second family in a gentleman’s residence just over six miles south of the City, where he had East India Company business interests. As a child, Evelyn would have seen London coming — stealing over the fields in an unlovely tide of brick, slate and bulbous gothic stucco. Furzedown Park was quickly swamped by suburbia, its green and pleasant past whimsically commemorated in street names like Nimrod Road, Edencourt Road, Rural Way, Rustic Avenue. Its address changed from the County of Surrey to the bank-clerkly and insurance-agentish London SW17.

The Flowers were members of the Victorian mercantile upper-middle class; wealthy, well connected, but faintly stigmatized by their connection with “trade” and not — quite — of the top drawer. Evelyn’s half-brother, Cyril Flower, married a Rothschild and became a Liberal MP, first for Brecknock, then for Luton. He served as a junior minister in two of Gladstone’s governments, and when Gladstone carne to stuff the Lords with “Gladstone peers” (as they were sourly known by his Conservative opponents) Flower was given the Trollopean title of Lord Battersea. Cockayne’s Complete Peerage of 1912, published five years after Flower’s death, dismissed him in witheringly snobbish terms: “An advanced Liberal, ennobled on Gladstone’s recommendation, and certainly not one of the most successful efforts to adorn the Upper House. He was one of the numerous peers who have been directors of public companies.”

Evelyn’s looks must always have set her a little apart from the Home Counties smart set. The self-portraits that she took in Montana when she was in her thirties and forties show a robust, broad-shouldered woman with a commanding nose, shaggy eye-brows and a mouth like a mailbox. Her lower face is pitted with acne scars and she’s decidedly whiskery. But it’s a face full of humor and worldly competence. She looks like one of those intrepid British aunts who slipped the traces of the English class and gender system and made their names adventuring in the Middle East and Africa; a cousin to Mary Kingsley, Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark.

In 1889, when she was twenty-one, Evelyn married Ewen Cameron, fourteen years her senior. He came from an old Scottish family now fallen on hard times. His childhood had been spent at Barcaldine Castle in Argyllshire, where he became a crack shot and a keen ornithologist. Watching birds in the nineteenth century was often inseparable from sighting them along the barrel of a gun. Like Audubon, Cameron combined a scholarly interest in natural history with a passion for field sports. In his pictures he looks slight, febrile, introverted, with distracted, deep-set eyes. His mouth is masked by a mustache that looks a lot dandier than he does himself. Beside his wife, he appears old and prematurely defeated.

Before his marriage, Cameron lived alone on Eynhallow, more a rock than an island, in the Orkneys, where he spent his time shooting, stuffing and cataloging the local seabirds — an existence beside which life on a remote Montana ranch might seem unduly gregarious. Evelyn’s mother and brothers (Mr. Flower died when she was four) thought Cameron a poor fish, and the wedding took place in Scotland, under a cloud.

The plan was to go out to Montana to raise polo ponies for the British market. This ingenious idea would keep the Camerons in touch with the grand world when they disappeared to the back of beyond, and the arithmetic looked unassailable. A good polo pony fetched about a hundred guineas in England—$420. Suitable colts could be bought on the plains in the United States for between $2.50 and $5.00.

Most of the venture capital for this scheme came out of Evelyn’s trust-fund income of £300 a year. The couple sailed from Liverpool, ready to become millionaires. Arrived in Custer County, Montana, they rented a ranch and, in the socially elastic milieu of the far West, became known as Lord and Lady Cameron. Ewen had his noble ancestors, Evelyn had her connection to Lord Battersea; neither had any money to speak of, and a title was useful when it came to raising credit and not paying bills.

For there were unanticipated snags in the polo-pony gold mine. Good yearlings could, indeed, be bought in Montana for small change, and it cost little to raise them on open rangeland. But they traveled badly. The transatlantic voyage made them sea-sick, and, weakened by starvation, they developed pneumonia and died. Of the survivors, some went for good prices: Ewen sold a pony to the Earl of Howth for £88, another to an officer in the Lancers for 80 guineas, and he arranged to supply a rich English brewer with regular shipments of Montana ponies. However, British buyers showed “great prejudice” (Evelyn’s words) against the necessary American practice of branding the animals’ rumps. Branding was simply one of those things that was not done in England; and therefore it was “not done” to have a horse with this plebeian signifier on its hindquarters. Worse, the Cameron ponies were wild to the point of being uncontrollable. One very nearly succeeded in chucking itself and its rider into the Thames, over the railings of Putney Bridge.

Very soon, the Camerons were badly strapped for cash. Ewen took to the high ground, escaping into ornithological research. He wrote articles on Montana birds for The Auk, a bird-watchers’ magazine that paid its contributors in offprints. “Bohemian waxwings,” he wrote, “shot across our path in swarms, alighting to feed on the berries close at hand, while the sound of their rushing wings awoke the silent cedars.” He decorated his prose with allusions to Milton and Virgil, and covered page after page with fastidious, miniature handwriting, which Evelyn would later type up and mail to the editor. He also appeared in print in the Miles City and Terry papers, where his name was published in the lists of tax defaulters.

More constructively, Evelyn took in boarders — visiting Englishmen, scouting out their prospects of ranching in Montana. For £200 a year she provided a home for her feckless and quarrelsome brother, Alec, who was the despair of his trustees, and was the model of the ne’er-do-well remittance man. (Alec had a delicate, girlish face that Evelyn herself might once have been glad to possess.) She dug and planted a kitchen garden, from which she sold vegetables in town. She raised chickens, and sold the eggs. A small herd of cows yielded salable quantities of milk, butter and cream. Evelyn’s canny tough-mindedness and patient labor kept Ewen in the polo-pony business long after it should have bankrupted him.

Her crown-octavo diaries, bound in green and claret morocco, and manufactured by a Bond Street stationer, are part of the Cameron archives, held by the Montana Historical Society in Helena. Leafing through them now, in the strip-lit second-floor reading room, one is held at a teasing, ironic distance from the world on which they report. Outside, at midday, under a January sky of unsmudged blue, the temperature is 4 degrees Fahrenheit, the warmest it has been in a week of Arctic weather. In the reading room, it’s 72, winter and summer.

The weather in the green diary open in front of me exactly matches the weather outside the reading room. But the ranch house is heated by a potbellied stove, fed with gray lignite coal, quarried by Evelyn from an open seam on the prairie, which pops and whistles in the grate. “Chores Galore” is the day’s headline. “Arose at 6. Bt. 8. Killed 3 roosters and disembowelled them. Calf dead. Baked brown bread. Varnished. Cooked chicken. Sundry …” Evelyn’s handwriting is bigger than Ewen’s, her capital letters, especially the C’s and S’s, prettified with confident curlicues.

That she kept a diary at all, writing around two hundred words a day, every day without fail, is surprising enough, given the life that the diaries describe. Keeping the ranch animals alive, keeping her abstracted husband and her boarders fed and warm, looking after her truck garden, milking the cows and breaking in the wild ponies, Evelyn had chores galore around the clock. Yet the habit of leisure, acquired in Surrey, where a full platoon of servants ran the Flower household, stayed with her in Montana. She was brought up to be a lady; ladies have time for reading and hobbies; and so, somehow, Evelyn made time with the same resourcefulness that she made money.

She liked parlor tricks, and copied their instructions into a commonplace book. “Carefully choose nine matches and challenge onlookers to pick them all up at once with one match …” (Neat perspective drawings of the matches accompanied this one.) She cut out snippets of gossip from the English papers and pasted them into the endpapers of her diaries; peers who went to jail and peers who married housemaids were favorite items. She transcribed a 2,500-word article in Country Life on outdoor mushroom culture for pleasure and profit. She made notes on immigrant life in Australia, field sports in Egypt, the rise of the motor lifeboat and the fertility of the mule. She made a wind harp, and sent away for a banjo.

She did a lot of reading. She kept abreast of England with the back numbers of the Bystander, the Lady, Punch and London Opinion that were mailed to her by her mother and her mother-in-law. She gutted novels late at night by candlelight. From George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, she copied out Mrs. Poyser’s remark: “I’m not denying that women are fools. God almighty made ’em to match the men.” Her growing irritation with Ewen surfaced in fugitive entries: when he was away in England with a shipment of ponies, she found her feelings reflected in an amended proverb that she may have found on the back of a matchbox: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder — of the other fellow.” When he was back in Montana, she came across another quote to fit her mood: “A Hermit and a wolf or two/My sole acquaintance constitute.” She adopted for herself the fierce motto of the Scottish kings: Nemo me impune lacessit—no one provokes me with impunity. Ewen, in his withdrawn oddity and with his capacity to fritter away her modest private income, must have been a constant source of provocation.

She went in for newspaper competitions. Always on the lookout for the windfall of a cash prize, she filled in quizzes, supplied the endings to uncompleted mystery stories, and, when the Santos vacuum cleaner company offered a first prize of $500 for the best six-word slogan associating its product with health and cleanliness, Evelyn spent a fortnight trying to cook up a winning phrase. “Always Alert To Abolish Dirt,” was her first effort. “Dirt Flies Out When I’m About.” The preposition was the problem. Evelyn’s understanding of the principle of the machine was shaky: she seemed to think that vacuum cleaners blow rather than suck. “Disease, Decay, I Blow Away.” Disease was a little vague; she needed a more precise word — something more modern and scientific. “Microbes Die When I Am By.” “Microbes Despair That Feel My Air.” “The Housewife’s Delight, The Microbe’s Blight.” She tried a blander line: “Santos Cleaner Assures Health & Cleanliness.” “In This Arena The Only Cleaner.”

Another thought struck her. “The Spectre Death Abhors My Breath.” This was, perhaps, a little strong for advertising copy, so she toned it down. “This Cleaner Buy, And Death Defy.” She spent a long time mulling over her collection of slogans. Out on the prairie, her head was full of vacuum cleaners and $500 checks. Her last attempt seemed to her the most succinct statement of the Santos message, and she sent it off to Philadelphia. This Cleaner Buy, And Death Defy. One only entry per competitor was allowed, and Evelyn passed on her unused slogans to a neighboring family. After the closing date, the mail was anxiously inspected, but there were no letters from Philadelphia.

In the meantime, Ewen, possibly pushed by his wife to try to earn guineas rather than offprints for his writing, worked on an ambitious two-part article titled “Sport in the Badlands of Montana,” and destined for Country Life. He wrote:

… Apart from the pleasant emotions which the expectation of seeing game evokes, badlands derive a definite charm from their solitude and geological features. Miles may be traversed without finding sign of a human being or hearing sound more civilized than the howling of a wolf. Huge petrified tree trunks are seen, either whole or in great blocks flung from the buttes by the forces of nature. Here and there, where the supporting clay has been entirely eroded, sections are left on gumbo pedestals, looking like gigantic toadstools, or forming two ends of what was once a bridge. More rarely, a silicified tree actually bridges a ravine. Putting aside the carnivores the only game animals which inhabit the badlands are mule deer (Mazama hemionus, Lydekker) and mountain sheep (Ovis canadensis) …

He brought this novel landscape to life on the page, furnishing it with careful details, and carne to climax in the excitement of the stalk and the kill.

… the buck stood with spreading antlers and proud demeanour cutting the sky-line. When exactly opposite to my position he twice gave a harsh grunting challenge, like a fallow deer only louder, and, although to wind-ward, it was evident he had heard some noise made by the horse.

I was using a 400 express and judging him to be about 200 yards away fired, holding for the top of his shoulder when he fell down with a broken back.

“Sport in the Badlands of Montana” came back from Country Life with a rejection slip.

So far as I know, the photographer first steps into literature in the person of Holgrave the daguerrotypist in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), where he’s presented as a new, quintessentially American character — mobile, adaptable, riding the tide of every latest fashion.

His name is his destiny. Holgrave = holo + engraving, the whole picture. “I misuse Heaven’s blessed sunshine by tracing out human features through its agency,” he explains to old Miss Hepzibah; and to Phoebe Pyncheon he spells out a defense of photography that sets it on a level above painting:

Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is a wonderful insight in heaven’s broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.

There’s an element of prophecy in Hawthorne’s creation. Within a few years of the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, the photographer became a key figure in American society. Photographs were at once precious keepsakes of the past, Back East or in the Old Country, and palpable evidence of a new life. In young western towns, where everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone needed “likenesses” to send home, photographers were as much in demand as saddlers, attorneys and Chinese laundrymen. Half scientist, half artist, the photographer was a tradesman with a touch of occult mystery in his occupation. Capable photographers didn’t starve. Every increase of population brought new clients to their doors. For someone with a little capital and a taste for the interestingly simple mechanics of developing and printing, photography was a surefire career; with a camera and a rented studio, an urban type with no agricultural experience could cash in on the western bonanza.

Two of Evelyn Cameron’s English boarders, Mr. Adams and Mr. Colley, were keen amateur photographers. The paraphernalia introduced by Adams and Colley to the ranch house were like a magician’s trunk of deceits and wonders: the black-cloth ritual, the box of foil-wrapped Velox papers, the tray of pungent hypo. The cameras themselves were lovely things: mahogany cabinets with drawbridge fronts, their lenses trundling forward on miniature railroad tracks. Every detail, like the glued seams on the pleated leather bellows, was a satisfying combination of 1890s high technology and patient old-fashioned craftsmanship. The camera was a jack-in-the-box for sophisticated grown-ups, and to a natural hobbyist like Evelyn, it was irresistible.

She learned how to change plates in the dark, to bring an image into sharp focus on the frosted-glass window, to count off the seconds of an exposure, to make daylight prints in a picture frame laid out on the grass. Under the supervision of Adams and Colley, she took pictures of Ewen and the ranch and posted them back to her relatives in Britain. She sent away for a mail-order camera of her own.

From the start, photography was a serious passion. Evelyn was childless, with a dry-stick husband. In 1907, when a family named Williams came to homestead in Prairie County, she began an intense, protective friendship with Janet Williams, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of the household, who was younger than Evelyn as Ewen was older. The relationship seems to have been the most powerful and longest-lasting love of Evelyn’s life. Her letters to Janet Williams are a torrent of affection — affection that she had long grown used to channeling underground, into her work and her hobbies. From 1894 onward, she made a darling of photography.

To begin with, she turned her lens on her husband and his pursuits. Ewen gazed into the middle distance with a look of uxorious forbearance. On their hunting trips in the badlands, Evelyn hid herself close beside the nests of eagles and other raptors, waiting for the birds to show in the prism viewfinder of her plate Kodet. Ewen indulged her. In his perfect handwriting, he wrote a bet into her diary:

This agreement witnesseth that the party of the first part (E. S. Cameron) has bet the party of the second part (E. J. Cameron) any book, not exceeding $3.00 in value, that her photo of the Yellowstone (between Fallon and Conlin) will be reproduced in the Auk.

As photo-illustrator of Ewen’s ornithological articles, Evelyn became a full partner on his expeditions (before, her job had been to mind the horses). Quietly loosening the screw on her tripod, she tilted the camera to bring the mirrored image of the ferruginous hawk, Buteo regalis, square into the frame. It gazed into the middle distance. She touched the focusing ring on the lens. The bird swiveled its head, its tweedy plumage stirring slightly in the breeze. Holding her breath, Evelyn squeezed the rubber bulb. Ewen flapped heavily away.

On these trips, Evelyn experimented with landscapes. She exposed several dozen plates, which she filed under the rubric of “Badlands Curiousities.” The weird rock formations gave her something to focus on and compose in the frame. Unlike the prairie, they yielded classic vistas, slabs of sunlight, dark masses of shadow, and they did not tax the restricted vision of the lens. Trying to arrange them in a pleasing composition, Evelyn went by the book.

Imagine your picture overlaid by a hairline grid dividing it into nine rectangles, and place your subject at one of the four intersections … Evelyn set the most spectacular of the sandstone overhangs on the upper-left-hand intersection, and rescued one corner of eastern Montana for the conventional picturesque. Squint, and the huge rock on its clay pillar might be a solitary tree, dominating a craggy view in the Scottish Highlands, with a stag by Sir Edwin Landseer just out of shot. In the badlands, Evelyn’s British eye was comfortably at home.

Her “curiousities” were useful tokens of the strangeness of the land on which the Camerons found themselves. But they were only tokens. The real strangeness of Montana lay not in the dramatic and capricious water sculptures of the badlands (which later photographers would seize on as the home territory of the Marlboro Man), but in the treeless breadth and vacancy, more space than place, of the nearby plains.

Coming to terms with that was far more difficult. For a long time, Evelyn tried to wrefnch the land outside her window into some semblance of the landscapes she had known back home. It wouldn’t go. Every time she came up with an analogy, it seemed pallid or risible. In 1893, the Camerons moved from their first ranch, near the Powder River, to a new place six miles southeast of Terry. Evelyn wrote to her mother-in-law (who had quit the family castle in Scotland and was now living in genteel penury in Tunbridge Wells):

I like this place much better than the old 4.4 which was in a low situation amidst heavy timber surrounded by hills, something like the old Barcaldine house, but this on the contrary more resembles Barcaldine Castle being high up on a hill sloping down to a hay meadow through which a creek runs.

Large numbers of wild fruit trees grow all around & when these are in full bloom and the grass is green there are little bits of views that will equal a Kent or Sussex landscape.

Little bits of views was an honest concession. Partly, of course, Evelyn was simply keeping her end up, as immigrants must. We’ve got a country estate, too … Since Mrs. Cameron had lately been forced to leave Barcaldine, there was an unkind sting in Evelyn’s attempt to promote her log house in Prairie County as a Scottish baronial pile.

I’ve sat in the spider-haunted remains of the living room where Evelyn wrote her letter, and looked out at the view she described, which doesn’t look in the least like Argyllshire, or Kent, or Sussex. Not even little bits of it. Not even slightly. The fruit trees are still there, at the back of the house, and the ground falls away steeply to the creek. The county sheriff’s house now stands where the hay meadow used to be, and the Cameron log house has long been used as the sheriff’s garden shed — a role far more naturally suited to it than the Barcaldine Castle of the West of Evelyn’s epistolary fantasy. The yellow prairie begins at Evelyn’s front door and goes on for ever; lumpy, scarred, like the pelt of a mangy coyote.

Writing to her mother-in-law, Evelyn was trying to coax the land in front of her to assume a kinder and more familiar expression, even as her camera insisted on revealing it in all its alien particularity. Her pictures of the neighboring ranches show ugly, makeshift buildings, set any-old-where on the prairie. Their ill-matched windows are askew. They sprout sticking-out ends of logs and lumber. Everything about them bears witness to the rough craftsmanship of the mallet and the six-inch nail, the inexpertly wielded axe, and the buckets of mud needed to keep the wind out of the joinery. Their fences, gates and corrals trail across each photograph; ramshackle adventures in wood and wire. The abundant Montana light required that Evelyn often stop-down to an aperture of f16 or less, resulting in a cruel deep focus, in which the empty foreground is as sharp as the ostensible subject of the picture. So one’s eye is caught less by the ranches themselves than by the ranchers’ litter: the dog bones, broken fence posts, crumpled cigarette packs, old kettles, woodshavings, squashed food cans lying on ground that is in urgent need of a cosmetic grass transplant.

These were not scenes for home consumption. The British relatives were used to seeing agriculture through the rose-tinted spectacles of the English pastoral landscape painters. From Gainsborough’s The Harvest Waggon to Constable’s The Haywain, farm life is represented as a tranquil rustic idyll, pursued in an orderly landscape of ancient hedges and drystone walls, shaded by towering oaks (for the manufacture of English ships) and willows (for the manufacture of English cricket bats). The farm, in this English way of looking at things, is the center of the true, the beautiful and the good. Evelyn’s Montana ranches, though, look like improvised camps, pitched by none-too-particular soldiers, and under the constraints of war. Her mother-in-law wrote to say that she was “disappointed” with Evelyn’s pictures; she must have looked at them with something close to horror.

It was a while before Evelyn learned to make the unsettling space of Montana into a photographic subject in its own right. She would certainly have seen the photographs of L. A. Huffman, who, until 1890 (when he left for Portland and San Francisco), had had a studio in Miles City, where his shingle read, “HUFFMAN’S NORTHERN PACIFIC VIEWS — BADLAND, YELLOWSTONE & BIGHORN SCENERY.” Huffman had come to Montana in 1878, in time to take pictures of the last of the great herds of buffalo and the last of the Plains Indians before they were driven out of their home territories.

Huffman’s eye for the country was very different from Evelyn’s. Born in Iowa in 1854, when Iowa was still the West, he grew up on the edge of the prairies. In an unfinished memoir that he wrote in the 1920S, he recalled his first, magical night spent alone on “the billowing plain” with its “wide sweep of sky and soft yielding turf.” He was bred to the 360-degree view — and bred, also, to the business of photography; his father, a failed farmer, had opened a studio in Waukon, Iowa, in 1865.

In Huffman’s Montana pictures, you see immediately a man who is comfortably at home in these landscapes, as he is at home with his camera. He instinctively composes along a horizontal line. He puts the horizon itself quite high up in the frame; in the middle ground, a long string of buffalo, horses or cattle trails out in parallel with the horizon; the foreground, of bare earth, grass and sage, occupies a space that matches the strip of empty sky. Though Huffman usually worked with 6½ inch by 8½ inch plates, his pictures tend to look longer and thinner than they really are, like fragments of an unspooling panorama that might go on indefinitely. A Huffman cattle drive looks as if one end of it is in Texas and the other in Saskatchewan. His photographs seem innocently untroubled by memories of traditional landscape painting. If Huffman ever set eyes on a copy of a Claude Lorrain, it didn’t get under his skin.

Many of the best of his elegant, austere landscapes seem bent on exploding the old schoolroom saw about there being no straight lines in nature. Huffman’s pictures are full of straight lines: the level skyline, the black line of cottonwoods along a distant creek, the line of cattle walking in single file, the rim of a flat-topped butte. Sometimes a single human figure, a hunter, an Indian, a mounted rider, provides the only vertical stroke in a world of relentless horizontals.

For a newcomer to eastern Montana, Huffman’s photographs are still a gift. Not only do they show the land (“The Big Open,” as Huffman called it) through a born westerner’s eyes, but they are full of hints and tips about how to take pictures of it. Looking at them now, I ache to take my own camera out to Ismay and try again: my next set of negatives will be imitation Huffmans, but at least they won’t come out looking like souvenirs of a day spent on a ragged golf course.

I think Evelyn Cameron was similarly excited by Huffman’s work. She graduated from taking snapshots of her neighbors and their ranches, and from the easy targets of her “Badlands Curiousities,” to the tougher problem of squeezing the Big Open into the little space of a photographic print. She copied into her diary a quote that took her fancy: “Photography has two sides: it is half a matter of processes and half a matter of pictures. Result aimed at — Artistic Interpretation.” By about 1900, she was comfortably in control of the processes. As she applied herself more and more to the question of artistic interpretation, so her photographs came to look strikingly like those of Huffman.

Like him, she discovered the picture-widening effect of the long line, and the way an empty foreground could make the subject seem to float in space. Coming to the land later than Huffman, she was able to use new objects to convey its dizzying breadth. Instead of a buffalo herd, a steam traction engine hauls a train of harvest wagons left to right across the picture. But some of Cameron’s photographs might have been taken by Huffman himself: in one, a hundred range horses form a string in the far distance, while in the exact center of the frame sits a mounted rancher in a Stetson; in another, a nose-to-tail herd of cattle, marshaled by cowboys, swims across the Yellowstone River (this picture is actually misattributed to Huffman in Before Barbed Wire: L. A. Huffman, Photographer on Horseback by Brown and Felton); in another, cattle trudge in a long dark column on the crest of a low range of hills, piebald with snow.

In these pictures one sees Evelyn learning to manage space and distance, to capture the magnitude of the plains in a 40-degree segment. But she is at her most original when she focuses on the discrepancy between outdoor and indoor space, or between the smallness of a fenced pasture and the bigness of the surrounding prairie. Her best photographs are startlingly odd. They force the viewer into a double take and are very close to being jokes. If you copied them in pen-and-ink, the drawings would look like old, enigmatic New Yorker cartoons.

When the first homesteaders came to Fallon and Terry on the Northern Pacific railroad, Evelyn rode out to their claim shacks to take their pictures. The shacks were usually either 10 feet by 12 feet or 12 feet by 14 feet, and were built with pre-cut lengths of lumber from the hardware store. Out on the open benchlands, they shrank from small to minuscule, like nesting boxes for gophers. Beside them, the Cameron ranch house might really have felt as grand as Barcaldine Castle.

For one of the most arresting of her pictures, Evelyn photographed a couple in front of their claim shack, which is small even by claim-shack standards. (I make it 10 feet by 10 feet.) But it’s a work of proud carpentry, with a steep pitched roof, neatly shingled, which gives the tiny house a height that is out of all proportion to its meager square footage. The doorway has more than 7 feet of headroom, and the wife, who stands by the open door, is a short woman — maybe 4-foot-8. Her 6-foot husband is standing just clear of the shack: he’s home from hunting, and holds a gun in one hand, a dead jackrabbit in the other. Two plain pine chairs have been placed outside on the grass, as if the open prairie were the couple’s living room.

Evelyn has mounted her tripod about ten yards farther away from the shack than one would expect, and it’s an artful move. The dollhouse homestead is framed by an oversized rectangle of earth and sky. The people in the picture are just too far away for their features to be distinct, and they look as if they’re there more for purposes of scale than portraiture. The photograph is a study in incongruity. The land is too big for the house, the house is too tall for its own good, and too small for the people who live in it. The chairs suggest another house altogether — a ghostly residence where a husband and wife might sit at a civilized distance. The prairie yawns all around the scene, as if to mock the spatial conundrum in the middle of the picture, where there isn’t room to swing a jackrabbit, but a giant could walk through the door without ducking his head.

This is Montana seen through an estranged Home Counties eye. Evelyn brings to the prairie a British, middle-class sense of scale and proportion, and her photographs are often statements of visual incredulity at what she sees. Looking at the picture of the homesteading couple, you know that these people and their house are making Evelyn laugh, and the laugh (which is not unkindly) is still here, preserved in a gelatin plate.

In 1899, L. A. Huffman came back from his travels and set up shop again in Miles City. His main business now was cataloging and printing his pictures of the old West, done twenty years before. He was greatly taken with Evelyn’s photographs. As she had learned from Huffman, so Huffman was able to look at his own home patch from the viewpoint of an amused and alert newcomer. He bought some of Evelyn’s work, and the two photographers became friends. When the homesteaders arrived, Huffman sold them prints, already “historie,” of trappers, roaming buffalo, Chief Spotted Eagle, Plenty Bird, Rain-in-the-Face, Fire Wolf, Two Moon and American Horse, while Cameron photographed them in their new lives, turning them into sepia images that would sit on mantelpieces in Europe and Back East, looking as remote in their context as the pictures of Indians in feather headdresses did on the walls of the homesteads.

In 1905, Evelyn bought a new camera, a Graflex with a 9-inch Goerz lens. It cost $225.50. Considering the Camerons’ chronic budget deficit, this must have meant that quite a few tradesmen in Terry and Miles City had to sing in vain for their past-due accounts. But in the words of the matchbook epigram that Evelyn copied into her commonplace book, “Buying cheap goods to save money is like stopping the clock to save time.”

The Graflex was the best camera of its kind on the market, a stout single-lens reflex with a pop-up hood and a folding concertina front end, made by Folmer & Schwing, a division of Eastman Kodak. Its focal plane “curtain” shutter had speeds of a tenth of a second to a thousandth of a second. It was designed for use by photojournalists, and a slightly later version, the Graflex 3A, which took roll film rather than plates, was a favorite of war correspondents in Flanders. Folmer & Schwing went on making Graflexes, with only small modifications, until 1926. Evelyn’s camera, vastly expensive at a time when a Kodak No. 1 Brownie cost $1.00, put her on a technically equal footing with photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.

Buying the Graflex, she was investing in her own future in Montana. The $225.50 was a message to herself and Ewen—we’re not going anywhere. There had been much talk about going back to England. The Camerons had been nearly ruined by the polo-pony scheme; they were now raising cattle and selling garden produce, but on a scale so modest that they were lucky to break even. Ewen’s hunting country was disappearing fast, as lines of fence posts sprang up overnight on the open range. In 1904, an English friend, J. H. Price, once of Bognor Regis and Oxford University, who had a horse ranch nearby, wrote to Evelyn: “I hear reports that you are going back to England for good — for our sakes I shall be sorry if this is so.” Evelyn copied out this note: she needed all the support she could get in her determination to stay on.

The ranchers watched the arrival of the homesteaders with skeptical resentment. They called them “honyockers”—rubes, greenhorns, idiots. But to Evelyn the new people, coming in by the trainload, were potential customers. They would make the Graflex pay its way.

In 1907 she wrote to her sister Hilda:

This country is experiencing a sort of boom & the curious sight may be seen at Terry of two railroads run^g. parallel with each other. We changed our plans as we thought it a pity to go home & not derive some advantage from the boom, more especially as it is very hard to live in Great Britain & keep up appearances on a small income …

The twin railroads were the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road, whose agents were scouting for photographers to picture the amazing for-free riches of Fallon, Custer and Prairie Counties.

So Evelyn landed a corporate commission, from the Milwaukee Road, for “a number of Agricultural photos for their pamphlets and folders.” In private, she echoed the line taken by her ranching neighbors: “For the last two years settlers have been coming in & taking up all the available Governt. land & their little cabins dot the prairie in every direction. They constitute a great nuisance to the ranchers who want free grazing. The new settlers think that dry farming will pay but old timers shake their heads.” But as a photographer in the pay of the Milwaukee Road, she set about creating seductive images of the land on which she and her husband had failed.

On a farm in Custer County she took pictures of fertile black earth under the plow. Splaying wide the legs of the tripod, she positioned the Graflex a few inches above the ground, so that the seated plowman rose clear of the horizon; a looming, heroic figure, seen from a mole’s-eye view. The late-afternoon sun picked out the fresh furrows in the foreground in bands of shine and shadow.

The photograph chimes happily with the painting on the cover of the pamphlet — of the bespectacled young farmer plowing gold coins out of the prairie. In the pamphlet are several other pictures that I believe were taken by Evelyn: another plowing scene; a line of fat cattle with a lone horseman in the distance; a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, shot indoors, and titled Ready for Market at Terry.

In 1911 she wrote to her brother Percy (who had visited the Cameron ranch in the early ’90s):

The range country that you knew so well is about gone now & the prairie swarms with farmers who plough up the land with steam & gasoline engines. The only consolation we have is that they have not begun to plough the badlands although someone may soon invent an effective contrivance for even this. The summer of 1909 (their first year) the crops were very good which gave a wonderful impetus to the so called ‘Dry-land farming’. Opinion is divided as to whether it is to be an ultimate success or not. The game is about all gone now & the country nearly all fenced up. Our greatest friend here an Oxford man who owns the largest horse ranch in eastern Montana [J. H. Price] has gone to have a look over British Columbia with a view to moving his best horses over there …

Evelyn didn’t tell her brother that she herself had helped to bring about this mass depredation of the open range. She must have felt a little queasy about her “Agricultural photos.” The Milwaukee Road money came as a milestone in her photographic career, but she was being paid to teach her camera to lie. Left to herself, she had made the land of eastern Montana look magnificently bare, strange, disproportionate. Working for the railroad, she did her best to make it look as desirably familiar as the pretty farmland of her childhood, now buried under the cement and brick of postal district SW17.