Pictures from an Expedition by Diane Smith (review)

4 7 0 W E S T E R N A M E R IC A N L ITE R A T U R E W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 to explain the sense of family that exists between ranch owners and employees, no book has captured it more sincerely and fairly. The mutual pride and respect come through clearly. The employees know and decide what needs to be done every day and do it. The owners pay what they can afford. Together they struggle to make it all work. An extensive collection of family photographs that begin each briefchapter bring the people and times further to life. The book also paints a balanced picture of government programs. On the plus side are insights into Roosevelt’s CCC camps and a system of BLM water spreaders that improved the Lazy B grass so considerably that O’Connor’s father even tried to claim credit for the idea in later years. On the negative side, she explains that “the number of employees in the Safford BLM office went from 4 people to 115 during the time Alan was managing the ranch.” She calls this “bureaucratic overkill” and explains that all these employees had to find something to do (308). Sadly, in the end, the family sells the ranch, not because they are failing or the BLM is choking them out; they sell because none of the next generation want to take on the hard work, isolation, and responsibility. Their oldest and most faithful employees are all dead. And the ranch was so large and so mar­ ginal that it had to be split into several smaller pieces in order to sell. Since I have also lived this life, I am usually highly critical of most books about ranching, but I consider Lazy B the best book I have ever read on the subject. As a New YorkTimes bestseller, perhaps it will help to heal some of the rifts between urban and rural views of ranching. It would make an excellent text for southwestern literature or history, reading or writing memoir, women’s studies, border studies, or even modem agriculture. Between the lines of great reading, O’Connor and Day weave in suggestions to modem ranchers about managing water, cattle, horses, employees, neighbors, and themselves. They give the outside world an authentic glimpse into the ranching life and its people. Pictures from an Expedition. By Diane Smith. New York: Viking Press, 2002. 277 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by O. Alan Weltzien University of Montana-Western, Dillon With Pictures from an Expedition, her second novel, Montana writer Diane Smith has furthered her reputation for producing finely honed historical fic­ tion. Smith established her reputation with Letters from Yellowstone (1999), set in the late nineteenth century and organized around a pioneering botanical expedition into “the National Park.” The focus of Pictures from an Expedition shifts from botany to early paleontology—an appropriate subject in bone-rich Montana, home of “Egg Mountain,” T. rexes, and Jack Homers. Picturesfroman Expedition opens in 1919, with the protagonist, Eleanor Peterson, correspond­ ing with Smithsonian Institution officials about the collection of paintings, B o o k R e v ie w s 471 drawings, and other memorabilia left by painter Augustus Starwood, her men­ tor and friend. In her opening letter, Peterson, now an old woman, asserts, “I am now confident that there is the smallest window, a mere heartbeat really, when man and weather and geology and time all align, and the secrets of the earth are revealed” (5). The plot, then, moves back to the summer of 1876 to elaborate on this credo. Peterson, working temporarily as an illustrator at the Academy of Science in Philadelphia (for the Centennial Exhibition) and hoping for an appoint­ ment at Yale College, accepts an offer to join a summer dig in the Montana Territory, and her older friend Starwood decides to join her, ostensibly as her guardian. Smith sets the novel in the neighborhood of Judith Landing, some distance up the Missouri River from most of the contemporary dinosaur digs. Peterson, the narrator, is repeatedly told that she is a very good illustrator. Readers looking...