Table Of ContentP G Wyoming
Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., is Guest Curator at the Draper res oo
to d
Natural History Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in n ye
a Grasslands
Cody, Wyoming. He is the author of numerous books, includ- r
ing Contemporary American Realism since 1960 and Neil Welliver.
Charles R. Preston is the Willis McDonald, IV, Senior
Naturalist John James Audubon found the Great Plains
Curator of Natural Science at the Draper Natural History
and their wildlife so riveting when he visited the region in
Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming.
1834 that he broke off a letter to his wife because he was too
His publications include Golden Eagle: Sovereign of the Skies
excited to write. In the almost two hundred years since then,
(with G. Leppart, photographer) and An Expedition Guide to the
W the Wyoming landscape, deemed the “Italy of America” by
Nature of Yellowstone and the Draper Museum of Natural History.
landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, has retained its glory if not
its place in the imagination of the American public. This
Dan Flores is A. B. Hammond Professor of History at the y
book reminds us of the remarkable bounty contained in the
University of Montana, Missoula, and the author of Visions of
o
wild beauty and rich history of the Wyoming grasslands—
the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky
m even as these riches are under threat from both human and
Mountain West and The Natural West: Environmental History in
natural forces.
the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Wyoming Grasslands
i This landscape is now captured in all its spectacular
n
diversity in the photography of Michael P. Berman and
g William S. Sutton, two of the modern American West’s most
Photographs by Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton accomplished and well-known landscape photographers.
Volume 19 in the Charles M. Russell Center Series
G
Essays by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston
on Art and Photography of the American West
provide a contextual framework for the images. Goodyear
r
By Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston introduces us to the imagery of the American West and
a
explains the place of Berman’s and Sutton’s work within that
s Foreword by Dan Flores
tradition, and Preston focuses on the natural history of the
s
l grasslands, illuminating the area’s ecological diversity and
a
changes through the seasons and over the years.
n
In 2012 Berman and Sutton launched their massive
d Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project, a partnership
s between The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, and the
Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Working in the tradition of
late-nineteenth-century explorers and photographers of the
American West, Berman and Sutton shot more than 50,000
digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red Desert
of southwestern Wyoming to the Thunder Basin National
Grassland of the state’s northeastern corner. The best of their
On the jacket: (front and back) COWS AT TANK, FREEMONT COUNTY, extraordinarily sensitive, revealing, and powerful images
MAY 22, 2014 (detail), WILLIAM S. SUTTON ; (center) WHEAT FIELDS II, appear in these pages, documenting the sweep and the seasons
LARAMIE COUNTY, MAY 20, 2013 (detail), MICHAEL P. BERMAN. of the Wyoming landscape.
In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by
PRINTED IN SINGAPORE environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers
dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of
Audubon and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still
holds and demands our attention.
Wyoming Grasslands
The Charles M. Russell Center Series
on Art and Photography of the American West
B. Byron Price, General Editor
Grasslands-final pages V6.indd 1 2/13/15 1:21 PM
Wyoming Grasslands
Photographs by Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton
By Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston
Foreword by Dan Flores
University of Oklahoma Press : Norman
ii
Grasslands-final pages V6.indd 2-3 2/13/15 1:21 PM
Throughout this book, duotone photographs are by Michael P. Berman,
and color photographs are by William S. Sutton.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data THE FOLLOWING IMAGES APPEAR UNCAPTIONED ON THE PAGES NOTED:
Goodyear, Frank Henry, 1944-
Wyoming grasslands: photographs by Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton / by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., PAGE II. GRASS, DEVIL’S TOWER NATIONAL MONUMENT, CROOK COUNTY, MAY 24, 2013
and Charles R. Preston ; foreword by Dan Flores.
PAGE V. BLACK AND WHITE, NATRONA COUNTY, JUNE 17, 2013
pages cm. — (The Charles M. Russell Center series on art and photography of the American West ; volume 19)
Includes index. PAGE XXII. RAIN, HEWARD RANCH, CARBON COUNTY, JUNE 13, 2013
ISBN 978-0-8061-4853-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Grasslands—Wyoming—Pictorial works. 2. Landscape PAGE 14. GREAT DIVIDE BASIN AREA, SWEETWATER COUNTY, JUNE 23, 2012
photography—Wyoming. 3. Wyoming—Pictorial works. I. Preston, Charles R. II. Berman, Michael P., 1956-
III. Sutton, William S., 1956- IV. Title.
QH87.7.G66 2015
577.409787—dc23
2014043444
Copyediting by Melanie Mallon
Index by Liz Coelho
Design by David Skolkin
Typesetting by Angela Taormina
Image prepress by University of Oklahoma Printing Services
Printed by Tien Wah Press (PTE) Limited, Singapore
Wyoming Grasslands: Photographs by Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton is Volume 19 in
The Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. ∞
Copyright © 2015 by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston. Manufactured in Singapore.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except as permitted
under Section 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act—without the prior written permission of the University
of Oklahoma Press. To request permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, University of
Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Drive, Norman, OK 73069, or email [email protected].
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Grasslands-final pages V6.indd 4-5 2/13/15 1:21 PM
Contents
Published in cooperation with The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, ix | Foreword: Looking for Lost Magic
and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and its Draper Natural History Museum. DAN FLORES
Funding for this book has been generously provided by the xvii | Curators’ Acknowledgments
Buffalo Bill Center of the West and its Draper Natural History Museum,
the Apache Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation. xix | Photographers’ Acknowledgments
1 | Deep Roots: An Ecological Perspective
on Prairie Grasslands
CHARLES R. PRESTON
15 | The Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project:
Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton
FRANK H. GOODYEAR, JR.
29 | Duotone Photographs by Michael P. Berman
and Color Photographs by William S. Sutton
207 | Index
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Foreword
Looking for Lost Magic
DAN FLORES When you do not grow up in the West, and I did not, western space and western light are an
acquired taste. The season I acquired and also refined my own taste for the West was the summer of
1973. It was a kind of “free” three-month span before I started a doctoral program in Texas, so I took
the opportunity to move to Wyoming—to Sheridan, to be precise, where many mornings of that
summer I raced sunrises to see the West up close, driving an old-style Ford Bronco through peach-
hued light into the Wyoming of my fantasies. One morning I’d explore the backcountry Forest Ser-
vice roads of the Big Horns, eat my lunch beside bouncing mountain streams. The next dawn I’d
have a dust cloud rooster tailing behind me as I investigated every dirt road coulee of the Powder
River country, an impossibly taut blue sky dome overhead, like a blue sheet billowing, staked down
at the horizons to keep it from flying off the planet, I sometimes thought.
From the vantage of southern bayous, I’d eyed the West through books and magazines—and
television, absolutely, which westerns entirely dominated in the early sixties—and the place that had
spoken to me was Wyoming. Owen Wister and Shane weren’t so much the cause of that as two qual-
ities about Wyoming that appealed to me then, and clearly appeal to the authors and photographers
of this volume. One was Wyoming’s glorious emptiness, which promised a predominance of nature
that even the simple rectilinear shape of the state implied. The other was that maps and images of
Wyoming showed a West that combined in an especially fetching way the two western landforms I
ix
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painfully wanted to explore—the snowcapped peaks and alpine meadows of the Rockies, and the and art, and grasslands and photography. As for me, I view the photographic images that follow as
vast yellow sweeps of the Great Plains, the rolling, sensuous grassland savannahs fronting the moun- visual salvage testimony of the historical trajectory I have briefly laid out in this foreword. Once the
tains and sweeping eastward beyond the curve of the earth. As Chuck Preston writes, in his essay in Great Plains grasslands were such a riveting part of wild America that John James Audubon, visiting
this volume, about his own somewhat startled discovery of the Great Plains, by the second half of the the region in 1843, broke off a letter to his wife by telling her that the Plains and its wildlife simply
twentieth century, the grassy savannas of the West were no longer a destination for most Americans. left him too excited to write. The topographic and ecological magic that produced Audubon’s
But Chuck discovered them. So did I. excitement can still be visible in Berman’s and Sutton’s photographs 150 years later. But you have to
More than a century before Wyoming’s mountains and plains transfixed people like Chuck be open to the magic, because the western grasslands can also present the look of a used-up back lot,
Preston and me, they had done the same to a young man about to become one of America’s most the country itself not much different from the abandoned, dilapidated homesteads crumbling into its
famous nineteenth-century artists. Trained as a landscapist in Europe, Massachusetts painter Albert prairie soils.
Bierstadt managed to get himself attached to the party of Colonel Frederick Lander, chief engineer The color of primitive Italy is still here, though. The grasslands are no longer an entire heaven
of a wagon road across South Pass. On June 24, 1859, during the long days of summer solstice, they or an entire earth, but the promise of the country remains. Turn these pages and you will see, and
reached South Pass at the southern terminus of the Wind River Mountains. Americans had read then you can decide what you think.
about this range in the narratives of John C. Fremont, but even Fremont did not capture Wyoming’s
spell the way Bierstadt did with a single line in his correspondence that year to The Crayon: “The
color of the mountains and of the plains, and, indeed, that of the entire country, reminds one of the
color of Italy; in fact, we have here the Italy of America in a primitive condition.”
In the nineteenth century, to legions of Bierstadt’s contemporaries, the grand grasslands of the
Great Plains were America’s wilderness garden. From our perspective a century and a half later, with
wildness now synonymous with the Rocky Mountains, the grasslands—except for sites of various
energy booms—are hemorrhaging people and are widely regarded as flat, boring flyover country.
This is one of the supreme ironies of the whole western story. How did this happen?
It’s a tale at the heart of the history of the American West. Within seventy-five years after
Bierstadt saw Wyoming as a kind of primitive Italy, Americans had somehow drained the grasslands
of their magic. The historical processes that served as cause de-buffaloed, de-grizzlied, de-elked,
de-wolfed, de-prairie-dogged, and almost de-grassed the place. In the West’s environmental history,
the Rockies were targeted for public protection, and they became the wilderness sanctum sanctorum
of much of the remarkable ecological diversity that had once made the West the American equiva-
lent of East Africa. The unexpected outcome is that by our time, the Rockies have become the fairy-
land, and the grasslands the forgotten quarter. Lacking so much of its original wildlife, the entire
Plains grasslands—except in a few exceptional places of the kind Chuck Preston describes in his
essay here—morphed into a ghost town on a gigantic scale.
In 2012 the Wyoming Nature Conservancy and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody,
Wyoming, asked photographers Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton to commence work on a
massive Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project across the state. Between them, Berman and Sut-
ton—two of the modern American West’s most accomplished and well-known landscape photogra-
phers—shot more than fifty thousand digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red Desert
of the southwest to the Thunder Basin National Grassland of the northeast. A marvelous selection of
their best, most telling images appears in the pages that follow.
Frank Goodyear’s essay in the following pages puts Berman’s and Sutton’s work in fine histori-
cal and artistic context. Reading it will rearrange the artistic furniture in your head about grasslands
x xi
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WHEAT FIELDS II, LARAMIE COUNTY, MAY 20, 2013
xiii
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COWS AT TANK, FREEMONT COUNTY, MAY 22, 2014
xv
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Curators’
Acknowledgments
CHARLES R. PRESTON We are deeply indebted to the many individuals who have generously assisted us in many ways
Willis McDonald, IV during the past three years to make this project a reality. In particular, we wish to acknowledge the
Senior Curator of Natural Science support of Bruce Eldredge, Bonnie Smith, Gretchen Henrich, Kelly Jensen, Rebecca Taggart, and the
Draper Natural History Museum
staff of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West; Andrea Erickson, Molly Hampton, Lisa Price, and Kerry
Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Brophy Lloyd of The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, who have supported this project from
its inception; Frances Clymer of the Park County Library; Sharon Dynak, Ruth Salvatore, Brenda
FRANK H. GOODYEAR, JR.
Stark, Cindy Brooks, and Mike Latham of the Ucross Foundation; Dennis Knight, professor emeri-
Guest Curator
Draper Natural History Museum tus, University of Wyoming; B. Byron Price, Charles E. Rankin, and Stephanie Evans of the
Buffalo Bill Center of the West University of Oklahoma Press, as well as copyeditor Melanie Mallon and book designer David
Skolkin. We also extend our gratitude to anonymous reviewers of our draft essays for their encour-
agement and very helpful suggestions for improvement.
We are especially indebted to Dan Flores for his insightful and provocative foreword. Dan
always elevates the conversation in both mind and spirit.
We are grateful to Anne Young for her generous support of the education program con-
nected to this project, as well as to the Apache Foundation and Ucross Foundation for supporting
this publication.
xvii
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