Empty Quarter

Amidst the cadence of windshield wipers and blur of squashed insects on glass, I became acquainted with first impressions of Montana's north-central plains—stretches of land running beneath the Saskatchewan border and above the Missouri River. Driving along Highway 2 and the Great Northern Rail line, I saw small towns emerge like barnacles on a vast sea of grass and rugged, empty space. Steady accretion of abandonment seems ever present—dilapidated farmhouses, wooden granaries, and abandoned old automobiles. It appears the land has mutinied against its inhabitants.

In 1910, railroad man James Hill used the name Highways of Progress to promote the potential of Montana's northern plains. Hill had a vision of "thriving cities," "checkerboards of grain," and "prosperous citizenships." Today, counties such as Blaine and Phillips, counties almost the size of Rhode Island or Connecticut, contain dwindling populations of less than 5,000—about one person per square mile. According to demographers, clusters of humanity living within such spaces are called "frontier populations."

Counties such as Phillips are often labeled as case studies for depopulation, yet cattle inventories remain robust under adversity. And despite such cattle production, dreams and notions of grassland sanctuaries and buffalo commons spark new ambitions. The ideas of reserves of biologically diverse grassland and Serengeti-like tours have caught on and taken hold. There is some talk of a new potential for bison herds to overtake cattle.

Unforgiving scrolls of land stretch from the north-central plains of Montana all the way to the Rocky Mountain front. Winters can blow arctic winds. Summers often heat up like torrid deserts. This oceanic prairie is known as Montana's Hi-Line, a land often snubbed as a place of nonevents, country not belonging to the familiar iconography of the American West.

Many times while photographing the Hi-Line I find myself in a familiar predicament, placing one foot on a weathered post of a barbed-wire fence and awkwardly hopping over with a dangling camera bag, in the role of trespasser or interloper. My intent always seems to be an inspection of some cadaver-like scene—perhaps the rusty teeth of a tractor blade stabbing the earth next to an old car frame with doors swung wide open as if the driver had just escaped. My eyes get carried away with such artifacts. Great Depression clichés swirl in my mind while searching for rhythms in empty spaces. Wallace Stegner's childhood memories along the Canadian-Montana border resound: "Intimate understanding of a land and a place is a long, slow and enormously incomplete process."

Starting back in graduate school, I have returned off and on to the Montana Hi-Line to photograph, coming back to indulge in and gaze out at open country. Sometimes I manage to make images. On other occasions I stop in and pay a visit to acquaintances. Montana's Hi-Line proves unique to America—a home to Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Hutterites, and homesteaders, a hidden America of less familiar individuals.

One autumn, I find myself searching for an old abandoned schoolhouse that was mentioned to me by a man in a retirement home who had finally given up and sold his homesteaded farm. I drive to the town of Wagner, a few miles south of the Great Northern line. Wagner has almost vanished. A few trailer homes exist alongside the sprawl of ghost shacks, run-down drilling machines, crumbling foundations, and a century-old schoolhouse.

As I stumble around looking, a voice echoes in the wind. I jump back. Behind me an old man wearing a cowboy hat sits behind the steering wheel of a pickup truck with his dog. This old cowboy blacksmith is one of two or three people left living in Wagner. We talk for a while. "I have not gotten closer to water than a bathtub since Iwo Jima," he informs me.

From as far away as Seattle and Los Angeles, junk collectors travel to disappearing towns such as Wagner, searching for old signs, lamps, and buggy wheels, all...