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…

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.