A sod house and a Pie Town rodeo

A house with grass on the roof

Custer County, Nebraska, had almost no timber. Homesteaders cut the prairie itself into bricks and built with that. A sod house was cool in summer, warm in winter, and always a little alive, because the walls had been a field. Solomon D. Butcher set out to photograph the county's settlers with the seriousness of a census. He had them drag their best things outdoors so the glass plate could see the life, not just the door.

In 1886 he photographed the Sylvester Rawding family north of Sargent. The picture, Library of Congress LCCN 2005693378, from the Nebraska State Historical Society's holding, lines the family up in front of the soddy with the possessions that mattered, including a pump organ. No one is pretending the house is made of clapboard. The roof is prairie. The organ says the prairie was also a parlor. Butcher's project is full of pictures like this, and the Rawding frame is the one people remember, because the house and the instrument are both telling the truth.

Pie Town, 1940

Half a century later the Farm Security Administration sent Russell Lee to Pie Town, New Mexico, a high, dry homestead community on the continental divide. It was 1940. Lee photographed in black and white and in color transparencies, which the FSA did rarely enough that the color still surprises. The government owned the pictures, so they are public domain. Two of them are a rodeo.

The fair and rodeo at Pie Town was a local production, neighbors and a corral. Lee's picture of the rodeo, Library of Congress LCCN 2017877722, is the event: dust, riders, a crowd that is mostly the town. The second frame, LCCN 2017877744, is the boys driving calves into the corral for the roping. That drive is the older skill. Rodeo began as ranch work done in front of people. In Pie Town in 1940 the work and the show are still close enough to share a fence. Lee caught both, the spectacle and the chore, in the same week.

The war had not reached that fair yet. Within a couple of years a lot of the young men in western towns would be somewhere else, and the FSA itself would be folded into the Office of War Information. The Pie Town pictures are the last ordinary season. A rodeo, a calf, a color sky. Hang the two Lees as a pair. They are one fair, two distances.

The Big Dry

L.A. Huffman was the post photographer at Fort Keogh, near Miles City, Montana. In the 1880s he hauled a glass-plate camera across country that was changing under him, from buffalo range to cattle range, in about a decade. The picture in the shop is horses and cattle beside water in the Big Dry, northern Montana, about 1886. The National Park Service's gallery holds a scan. Huffman was documenting a handover. The herds in the frame are the new economy. The empty distance is what the bison had been.

Three photographers, three grasslands, one habit. Butcher posed a family with an organ because the sod house was an achievement and he wanted the achievement in the frame. Lee stood back and let a fair happen because the government had asked for rural America and a rodeo is rural America telling the truth. Huffman pointed the camera at stock on the Big Dry because the stock was the news. About 1886 in Nebraska and Montana, and 1940 in New Mexico: the plains, still being lived on, still worth a large negative. The sources are the Library's call numbers and Huffman's Montana work. The organ, the calves, and the cattle are the proof.