Historical photographs of ranch life tend to be so
full of men that an observer might think no women ever lived on the
range. But in 1898, Mabel Souther did more than just live on the
Big Red Ranch in northeastern Wyoming – she took pictures that
documented the working life there. Perhaps her cowpoke subjects
bristled when the ranch manager’s wife made them stand still for a
photograph. But she earned their respect every time she
photographed, hauling her camera, tripod and a suitcase full of
accessories across the Wyoming landscape. One of the cowboys from
Big Red collected many of her photographs, which are on view at the
ranch through Dec. 4 in a show called One Hundred Years Ago: Big
Red Ranch and the Photographs of Mabel Graham McIntosh
Souther.
Big Red Ranch, now owned by the Ucross
Foundation, is one-half mile east of the junction of U.S. Highways
14 and 16 in Ucross, Wyo. For more information, call 307/737-2291.
*Gabriel
Ross
TRADING
AWAY
THE WEST
After a team of
four reporters at the Seattle Times spent nine months researching
federal land exchanges in the West, the newspaper published a
six-part series that scrutinizes a string of recent land trades.
The series, “Trading away the West,” begins with a report on the
Huckleberry Mountain land exchange in western Washington. In that
deal, Weyerhaeuser Corp. traded 7 acres of mostly low-value
timberland for every acre of old-growth forest it received. But
what the reporters found in their own backyards was only the
beginning. The report also explains how Congress arranges swaps on
its own, overriding federal agencies and leaving the public in the
dark. In fact, 50 separate land exchanges are now awaiting a vote
in Congress. “Even when proposed with the best of intentions, such
as protecting natural resources,” the reporters write, “land trades
executed by Congress often share troubling features.”
For a copy of the “Trading Away the West”
series, send $2 to “Trading Away the West,” Seattle Times, P.O. Box
70, Seattle, WA 98111-0070 or call 206/464-2011. Or read it on the
Web at www.seattletimes.com/-special/landswap/.
* Dustin Solberg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Trading away the West.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
