When the Confederate army fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Alfred Mathews — a man opposed to slavery and secession — found himself in a discomfiting position as a schoolteacher in rural Alabama. Under threat of arrest, he was compelled to join a...
He was long-haired, full-bearded, and could have been a veteran of the 1960s. He’d been a champion of socialist causes, a chronicler of war yet an advocate for peace, a witness to the execution of presidential assassins and a restless patriot, an artist discarding old...
Perhaps it’s ironic that within the wide-ranging photography of Julia Tuell, one of my favorite images was not snapped by Tuell herself, but by her husband. By Tuell’s standards, the photo might have seemed haphazard, and her rather serious expression suggests she worried about whether...
The story of early photography in the West is largely (and necessarily) a history of outsiders looking in. It’s a story about preexisting biases and seeing what we want to see. The educated and affluent capturing a moment in time to show it to the...
When the light was right, it was hard to keep Montana photographer Charles Edward Morris indoors; he wanted to be out on the plains with his camera. He knew what he liked: the environment of Native Americans, the context of underpaid, laboring sheepherders, and the...
“His face was lined and careworn, but he was filled with the old spirit of hope. I couldn’t help admiring the courage of his optimism. Another thing that excited him was that some oil surveys had been made in the Big Horns. Somehow he’d managed...
In 1940’s Butte, a cabbie drops his fare before the Finlen Hotel’s Park Street entrance, looks up and spots a four-story-tall sign in red, white, and green, hawking Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. The image is of its package tilted rakishly, its spear angled skyward. The green...
The making of a hunter-conservationist...
Capturing a town’s enduring character...
When the National Park Service emerged as a new federal agency in the Interior Department 100 years ago on August 25, 1916, nobody in Montana took much notice. It did not make the front pages of the local newspapers — or even the back pages....