This was taken around the time that my father moved off the farm and took a job in the town of Kilgore. This set of photo prints is stamped with “OCT 58,” and this specific picture looks like it was probably taken at the family farm in Todd County, South Dakota. Apparently 1958 was a…

This is the cemetery of the French settlement at Kewanee, in northeastern Cherry County, Nebraska. Several of the original settlers of Cherry County from the 1880s and their children are buried here, including two sets of my great great grandparents, and one set of my great grandparents (the larger monuments at the back left, one…

This photo shows the tower raising for a relay tower that brought television signals over the horizon to the remote town where I grew up. I believe it relayed signals from an NBC affiliate in North Platte, Nebraska, so that in my earliest memories, rooftop antennae in town could pick up (I believe) five stations…

Clayton Lake in the northeast corner of New Mexico was formed by construction of a dam. In the 1980s, a flood scoured the top surface off the dam spillway, revealing a layer of Cretaceous mudstone that contains about 300 dinosaur footprints (and at least one groove from a dragged dinosaur tail). On the day I…

This is from a roll of 120-format negatives for which I don’t have a definite date. Based on the ages of my relatives elsewhere in the roll, it has to be sometime in the early 1960s.

This is the ground where the Fetterman Fight (or Fetterman Massacre, or if you’re indigenous, the Hundred-in-the-Hand) happened on December 21, 1866. A group of infantry and cavalry under Captain William Fetterman were sent out from Fort Phil Kearney to deal with raiders who had harassed a woodcutting party. They went over a ridge and…

This is presumably either the parade kicking off the Cherry County Fair in late summer 1968, or else (perhaps less likely) the homecoming parade that fall.

I took this shortly after seeing the first roadrunner of my life, which ran across the road in front of my car too suddenly for me to avoid hitting it.

Calving in the area where I grew up mostly happens in late winter, and then in mid-to-late spring people bring the calves in for branding, vaccination, and castration. Doing it all in one day is generally too much for any one family, so branding at each ranch is a full-day gathering of many neighbors and…

This is the Kilgore Elevator, where my father first worked after moving off of the farm. I believe he was doing carpentry work in the town of Valentine by the time he took this picture in 1962. The 1960 census has the population of Kilgore at 157. By contrast, the booming metropolis of Valentine (20…