Ken Nollett

This is one that I took of mostly-frozen Hackberry Lake, on the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge in the middle of the Nebraska Sandhills.

This is a photo my father took of the property owned by Leonard Crow Dog, probably about a year before Crow Dog became a leader of the American Indian Movement. He was a Lakota traditionalist and spiritual leader, and the great grandson of the Crow Dog who killed Spotted Tail. The location is roughly 20…

My father’s first 35 mm camera was a viewfinder camera of a brand called Lord that I have seen nowhere else. I think he probably bought it at an Army post exchange near Sasebo, Japan in 1953 or 1954. He passed it on to me in the summer before I turned nine, and it was…

My father presumably took this picture on a trip bringing cattle to market with a truck from the family farm, though he himself had been off the farm for a decade at that point. The building in the background is the Omaha Livestock Exchange. This is during the postwar period, when the meatpacking industry of…

The hill in this photo is a large cuesta known as Como Bluff. It’s about a mile north of the path of the Union Pacific Railroad, and railroad personnel found rich fossil beds in the northwest face of the hill – the one seen here – during construction. There followed a scramble by competing groups…

Sometime around Labor Day every year when I was growing up, a threshing bee was held with antique equipment in the Lakeview community of Todd County, South Dakota, on the Epke farm. This was about 10 miles north of the town of Crookston, Nebraska. People brought their restored (or just still running) antique tractors and…

This is my hometown, Valentine, Nebraska, in 1964. The vantage point is the hill north of town and across the Minnechaduza canyon, known locally as Big Rock for the sandstone cap at its top. The grain elevator and St. Nicholas Catholic Church are both visible, as well as the tree-lined canyon of the Niobrara River…

My father took this picture in late 1955 or early 1956, soon after he returned home from his military service in Japan and Korea. The location is Todd County, South Dakota, a few miles east of the road between Kilgore, Nebraska, and St. Francis, South Dakota.