CANAL DREAMS

An amateur photographer goes to Panama in 1915

“My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.”

William H. Taft

In 1915 someone, or more likely a group of people, set out to experience the best America had to offer, which that year meant the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the opening of the Panama Canal. The result is this bundle of photographs. Crudely printed on printing out paper and heavy, fibre based paper, they have the quality of work carried out in a home darkroom, by someone who was yet to master the trickiest part of amateur photography. Some of them may have turned out to be excellent images had they been finished by someone who knew what he or she was doing, but high standards aren’t a synonym for interesting.

Take this shot of the Washington Monument: an object lesson in why someone needed to have read the Kodak photography made easy manual, but there are so many millions of photographs of the monument that get everything right. Do we really need any more dusk or night shots? Finally we have one that catches the eye.

There is a gap in the sequence between Washington and California. That’s a shame because if we follow the logical progression from Washington to Panama, through the Sierra Nevada, it means they probably drove across the country. Bear in mind that in 1915 that meant unreliable cars on unsealed roads, for at least a couple of weeks. Not many were willing to try that. Unless I have made a mistake in identifying a couple of photos, this image comes next. The sign on the garage indicates it is Lassen County, up in the Sierra Nevada and one of the most picturesque areas in California. There’s a small ‘school’ of photographers: Jervie Henry Eastman, Lawrence Engel and Burton Frasher (kind of), who started out in the county’s timber industry and took up photography in their spare time until they learned to make a profit from it.

Eagle Lake in Lassen County. All of these prints are 4x7 inches, which makes a difference when you realize how large this one is. Its one that breaks all the rules in the Kodak photography made easy manual: subject too far away, too much white space, ignorance of the rule of thirds etcetera, but would they have improved it? 

Richardson Springs, just over 100 miles south west of Susanville, Lassen County, and one of several hot springs in the Sierras that were drawing the tourists in the 1910s. There are a couple of postcards going on Ebay taken from a similar point of view. Did our photographer think about buying one then realized he or she could do better themselves?

An unknown town, somewhere. Like some others, this has the typical light, yellowish look of printing out paper. The uneven printing supports the theory. Like the scene from Eagle Lake, it doesn’t break the rules so much as show ignorance of them. Good.

We’ve arrived in San Francisco, in time for the Panama Pacific Expo, but before we go there, let’s head to Ocean Beach and to Seal Rocks, (note the swell) and to …

The view from Cliff House. So much to look at in this view. In the distance we get the windmills at the edge of Golden Gate Park, the crowds on the beach, the cars, the smokestack, and the curious looking structures on the sands are likely to be building materials for the sea wall that was being constructed.

Here, on the cliffs above the beach we have the Sutro Baths before they were a ruin. There’s an argument that in the late 19^th century capitalism achieved a kind of social apogee. This was the so-called gilded age, when wealthy industrialists ameliorated their extravagance by returning some of their gains to the people in the form of universities, opera houses and museums. The Sutro Baths are often cited as an example. Having made his fortune exploiting labour, Adolph Sutro showed his benevolence by building venues for public entertainment across the city. Historians who don’t hold back on Leland Stanford, who see his altruism as little more than self-aggrandisement, reserve some affection for Sutro.

This one makes me think our photographer was Canadian. Well, given the photos were bought in Montreal, you might expect that, but without this image we’d have no real reason to think so. It’s hard to imagine an American showing special interest in the Canadian Hall at the Expo. 

What was it about international expositions that dictated the architecture had to look as tacky as it was ostentatious? Right at the moment when neo-classical architecture was being derided as outmoded and bombastic, the one place you could still find it was at a world’s fair, which was supposed to celebrate the modern world. We can probably blame the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, though the Parisians deserve a finger pointed their way as well. Here we have a view of the Tower of Jewels that completely fails to express any of the grandeur the building was supposed to have. It looks like it was built out of papier-maché.

Here’s an extract from a brochure, sourced from the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco. It says it all:

“An expenditure of fifty million dollars in construction.

Fifty millions more in the intrinsic value of exhibitions.
Six hundred and twenty-five acres of Palaces and gardens entrancingly beautiful.
Eleven great Exhibit Palaces crowded with objects of interest from every portion of the globe.
Spacious courts and miles on miles of ornamented avenues.
More than two hundred and fifty groups of statuary by world’s masters.
Huge mural paintings, masterpieces by the greatest artists.”

That means money, size, more money, even bigger sizes, and no accounting for taste. 

The choice of San Francisco as venue for the World Expo in 1915 had a lot to do with the Panama Canal, but just down the road at Balboa Park, San Diego had the more official event; the Panama-California Exposition. For political and military historians, the U.S entry into World War 1 is a watershed in the nation’s inexorable rise to global domination, but economic historians look more to the opening of the Canal a couple of years earlier. Taft was right when he suggested European trade wouldn’t be greatly affected by the Canal, except that it secured American authority over the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards.

The very brief account of the Canal goes as follows: Under the directorship of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French begin construction in 1881. Tens of thousands of workers are killed by malaria and industrial accidents. It is generally considered a fiasco. In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt annexes Panama with a naval blockade. A succession of engineers are appointed to oversee the project. Most who visit the site wisely resign as soon as possible. The project is bigger and more complex than anyone, including Roosevelt, imagined …

This synopsis makes no mention of the ways debate about the Canal fractured U.S Congress, the creative economics, the figures showing that black workers were ten times more likely to die from yellow fever and malaria than white workers, and various other statistics that baffle the imagination. All that is put aside when the Canal is officially opened in August 1914. It is widely acclaimed as one of the great engineering triumphs in world history. It is this point – the fact America could pull off what Europe couldn’t – that really establishes the nation in international consciousness as the power to reckon with. 

The 1915 Expo and the construction of the Canal were well documented by professional photographers. Amateur views are much less common. Even rarer are collections like this that give them a shared context, and suggest a bigger story of a journey across the U.S. If the view of the Washington Monument came at the end of the journey, there’s still a sense of people heading out to document the country and be witness to its history.

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CANAL DREAMS

OH, CANADA

Canada, from B.C to Nova Scotia in Snapshots

“Some countries have too much history, we have too much geography”

William Lyon Mackenzie King

Here’s something you can try at home. Use Google Maps street-view to set off from Victoria British Columbia and follow the Trans-Canada Highway to Sydney, Nova Scotia. Given it takes an average five days to cross Canada this should take about ten, but you’ll give up before then. Frankly, the activity is as interesting as watching aquarium scenes on television. Even skipping large sections you realize the prairies look much the same from one side to the other but they are nothing compared to the monotony of the pine forests in Ontario. Actual driving is different. After a couple of days of the same landscape you enter a zone the Buddhists call the Fifth Jhana, where material consciousness has begun to dissipate, the beginning stages of incorporeal tranquillity. You can’t get that from a computer. 

Let’s start at the western edge: Victoria, B.C. if there is something essentially British about this scene of the lake and medieval bridge at Beaconhill Park, (taken on Sunday the 2^nd of August 1942) that is no accident. To the city’s aldermen and landscape designers in the 1880s, the essence of a beautiful park lay in its evocation of old England. We see the same ideas in Australia. They were supposed to transport us ‘home’, a place more and more people had no experience of.

Still in B.C: in Chilliwack. The word bounces off the tongue. It has its roots in the local First Nations language but we must credit our ancestors for taking words from indigenous tongues and mangling them into something that could be spelt. The results can be poetic. Just weeks ago (March 2013) Chilliwack’s Paramount Theatre was bulldozed. The opposition was passionate but small. In time more will regret its loss.

Into Alberta and the Canadian Rockies, to Lake Louise, named after one of Victoria’s numerous offspring though I prefer Lake of the Little Fishes, the translation of its original Nakota title. The royal family had lots of places across the empire named after them and they’re always dull by comparison to the local word.

Banff, oddly enough, is Scottish. The president of the Canadian Pacific Railroad had the privilege of naming it so chose that of his birthplace, Banffshire, a coastal town set among low, rolling hills, ie, nothing like this Banff. Today Banff, Canada, is said to be populated by Australians who come for the real snow and mountains; things they (we) don’t really have at home.

Traditionally totem poles were erected then left to rot, which on British Columbia’s wintry coasts could be a matter of weeks. This totem pole outside Jasper’s railway station stood for over 70 years but then its authenticity was always unreliable. It is a Haida totem pole, from B.C, which is a bit like saying Hans Christian Anderson was French on account that he lived nearby. It may not be apparent so far but we are following the train line across Canada.

Which brings us to Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Everybody, from the original Assiniboine through to the French and the English, has always known this place by some reference to the river currents. The Assiniboine called it Minihaha, which coincidentally is the name of Hiawatha’s main squeeze in Longfellow’s cringeworthy epic. A good photo, this one. It looks like an accidental discovery of Modernism.

Moose Jaw … It sounds like a place the characters in L’il Abner would go for a holiday. The name English surveyors first gave it was Moose Jaw Bone Creek, which deserves a revival. ‘Army Navy Stores’, the cars, the signage - this looks like a mash-up of Fred Herzog photos. There are Internet forums dedicated to Moose Jaw’s Royal Theatre and the Exchange Café. Moose Jaw was never a big town and these were the gathering spots for its artistic community.

We are on the Prairies, and an image Robert Adams couldn’t find fault with – except of course for the edge of the train window in the top right. It is conceivable someone took this to prove to friends there was nothing out on the Prairies, only to discover that was what made them special.

This rather excellent hall was designed by three architectural firms; Northwood & Chivers, Pratt & Ross, and J.N. Semmens. Only the last names means anything to me. I once had to look at some photos of buildings in Vancouver that Semmens had designed and would have liked to have pointed out to the photographer that he had done a very good job of making fine buildings look trite. Anyway, Winnipeg is close to the geographical centre of North America, which according to some people explains its abundance of paranormal activity.

Back to the Prairies. Canada has four major geographical areas; the arctic, the mountains to the west, forests to the east and the Prairies in the middle. When you drive across big, empty spaces like this it’s the little things you notice.

Mink Tunnel, on the edge of Lake Superior. We are in Ontario and gradually we’ll see more towns, more people, more details. But for now we need to stop and think about the nation’s spine, the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Until it was built in the 1880s the only way to get from Vancouver to Ottawa or Montreal was overland by wagon and that took weeks. Americans can get nostalgic about their railway building the West but Canada’s was longer and more necessary. No wonder there was a whole side industry devoted to its promotion.

Sudbury was a mining and factory town. The men were tough, the women tolerated them. I know people from Sudbury. They are very polite. Whenever you ask what the city is like they provide you with a pregnant pause so you can fill in the details yourself.

Somewhere on the Great Lakes or the St Lawrence River in Quebec. Unlike most of the photos we can’t be sure where in Canada this was taken but it is too good to waste.

Quebec, 1939, as the banner welcoming George VI and Elizabeth indicates. The store was called Henry Morgan’s, on the corner of St Catherine and Phillips Square. The building still exists. It is now the Bay, after the Hudson Bay Co. So far as a lot of Inuit people are concerned, it switched names from one pirate to another. A great photo, probably taken with a Minox or a half frame camera, which explains the toytown appearance.

Technically speaking, the Central Station still exists but it has been renovated and improved upon so this is no longer recognizable. You can see from this scene, especially the way it fits so neatly with the overpass, that in its time it was a triumph of contemporary design.

The road to Gaspe, at the mouth of the St Lawrence.  Just across the water lies Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an island that still belongs to France and beyond that it isn’t so far to Ireland. A current theory has the first inhabitants of North America, pre-dating the Clovis culture, arriving from the Brittany coasts, able to do this because the distance between Europe and Canada was broken up by enough small islands to make a canoe crossing possible.

If or when these early arrivals sighted Percé Rock it wouldn’t have looked anything like it does now. In the 1600s Jacques Cartier claimed there were three arches on the rock formation. One was recorded as collapsing in 1845. So far as North American geography is concerned, Percé Rock is the edge of the world.

We started in Victoria and end at the other side in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, which is a tautology if you think about it. I don’t know how Scottish it appears but it certainly has the Victorian look to it. In any case, we have bypassed Newfoundland (a common error and cause of some sensitivity), forgot Ottawa and Toronto and really got no further north than the railroad would take us, so in a sense we have failed. But then MacKenzie King was right. This country has too much geography.

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OH, CANADA

MOTOR HEAD

Snapshots of cars

“I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.”

J. D Salinger

“Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.”

Francoise Sagan

It’s no wonder people used to take so many beautiful snapshots of their cars. From the 1920s through to the 1950s a car was the most expensive possession a lot of people were likely to own and they loved them. A first car was often like a first relationship; it gave you trouble and broke your heart but years later you looked back and realized everything that came after was somehow connected to it. Technologically speaking, the car reached its zenith sometime in the late 1970s. Before then, designs changed radically within a decade and innovations like the automatic gearbox, radios and power steering changed the whole concept of driving. Post late 1970s, all we’ve had are improvements. No, GPS helps you get from point A to B but its doesn’t change driving the way the dashboard mounted automatic gearshift, disc brakes or fuel injection did. All of these photos express a love of cars, of people’s own cars, the idea of driving or the acknowledgement that without cars the world would be emptier and less engaging.

Take this photo: from Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian empire, some 30 kms outside of Baghdad. On the back the photo is dated tentatively to be 1920, but it could be earlier, when Ctesiphon was still in the Ottoman Empire. Note the men wearing fezes. We can say it is earlier than 1925. The point is however that if the men are Turkish and resident in Baghdad, to get out to the ruins in the days before cars, which was not so long before this photo was taken, they probably needed a day. Now, with the Model T in the background (I tend to assume all cars in the 1910s are Model Ts), it took a couple of hours at most and once there they could marvel at the splendours of Ancient eastern Empires, so much more civilized than the vicious and untrustworthy British one crowding in on their land. The invention of the automobile didn’t just bring the world closer, it also brought history, national identity and cultural memory into the fold.

According to the back of this snapshot – and it was written fairly recently, by a car enthusiast – this is a Durant, C1929. The Durant wasn’t just a car. William Durant cared about cars in a way Henry Ford didn’t. He thought they should be fine objects assembled from the finest components available, which were the two points Ford disagreed on. If there is another plane inhabited by visionary capitalists he is probably there now, looking down on the parlous American automobile industry and saying; ‘I saw that coming’. Durant’s vision destroyed him. He made great cars that few could afford but, being American, he was loathe to go all the way and produce a luxury car for the elite, hoping for some compromise. None appeared and Durant was bankrupted. Today, in an era of easier credit (until recently anyway) the Durant would thrive. Notice how the car has been taken off-road so to speak. I suspect the owner wanted a loving portrait of his car but if he kept it on the tarmac the shot was liable to be spoiled by other traffic. Notice too how well placed the power line is. He, or she, cared about the car and the way it should look.

What an excellent photo – of a Packard, probably the 120. It was taken somewhere in the South West USA, as is evident from the building and the man’s outfit. He looks like he could be law though I’m inclined to think he could also be some kind of guide. She definitely looks like she has come from the city. Observe the way they stand; typical of what you’d expect of two people who’d only recently met but had no reason to feel uncomfortable with each other. Look at the dust on the car too. This vehicle is not used to the backroads or the desert. Chances are, it was driven out from LA, San Francisco or Phoenix. Not sure at all what the bike is doing there.

Two Turkish people, somewhere on the French Mediterranean in the 1930s. No idea what the car is but it’s a fine example. Did they drive from Istanbul? It’s possible though I doubt it. In the 1930s that would have involved crossing Yugoslavia and the roads would have wreaked havoc on the car. My guess is they drove down from Paris or hired the car in the town. Note the sign, “John Taylor and Son” behind them. The company still exists and still specialises in real estate around Monaco. The couple are on the holiday of a lifetime. It will probably end in tears on the steps of a casino. Passing them on his way in, Graham Greene will make a mental note: ‘foreign couple, streaked mascara, car keys hanging limply from his trembling fingers’.

Montreal, or more accurately, Quebec. Again the car is a mystery but it is expensive, and she is standing in exactly the position women of particular breeding did when the chauffeur was taking the photo. Of course, it could be her husband but maybe in the not too deep recesses of her mind she sees little difference. Needlessly we point out the obvious; it is winter, she is cold but this is the age before miracle cures like Wynn’s anti-freeze, when cars were expected to deal with all kinds of weather so they did. I can’t help feeling that what the photographer loved about this photo wasn’t her – come on, she looks a little tough in her Astrakhan coat and spectacles – but the life; the car, the neighbourhood, the rare pleasures a Quebecois could afford in the 1950s.

Still in Quebec, (look at the number plate) on the 19^th of August 1951. It is high summer, time to get away, though not too far out of town. I have a number of theories about this photo and why it was dated. One is that the man just bought the car it looks new and he leans on it with a certain affection. It’s the date though that matters. Whoever took this photo cared about the car only so much as it tied in with the date. He could have bought it two weeks earlier but this was the first day they went out for a drive, or no matter what he thinks or even told the photographer to do, the car isn’t the detail that makes the photo special to whoever took it.

Turkey, the land of Kool Kola Koka, and let’s be frank, the boy looks like he has had one or two bottles in his life. But that is not why the photo is great, and neither for once is the car. All the elements, from the pattern on his knitted cardigan, the sign and the car in the background and the curve of the one he rests on make this a snapshot of a boy any mother would be proud of. He knows it is good but he has no idea about the parts at work behind him. That’s what makes a snapshot great; all the elements are oblivious of each other.

The same principle but a little more mysterious. There are three main components here; the car, the sign and the two people in a kind of symmetry. What was the photographer looking at? The scene as it unfolded? This reminds me of Fred Herzog’s photos, except he was working with colour slides. It has a similar ambience and when I had cause to look at Herzog’s photos recently one question kept bothering me. When you look at his work it’s hard to say whether you are drawn in by the composition or the nostalgia. So many of his photos are full of such details as the beautiful cars that you need to remind yourself you are looking at work by someone who maybe didn’t care about those things. Or maybe he did. Maybe he thought that 1960s Cadillacs had a special way of transforming images. Maybe if you found cars and Neon a bit dull, you’d think the same about his photos. There’s so much movement in this image. Don’t you love the way Americans could think “Sav-on TV and Appliance Co.” made sense? “Let’s butcher the language: Ah, now I understand it.”

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CARS 2

HIGHWAY STAR 3

Real photo postcards from Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota

"Leave me alone and let me go to hell by my own route."

Calamity Jane, 1903

In America a village of 200 people can be called a city and a dirt track a highway. For years Pikes Peak Highway was just that, a stretch of gravel winding to the summit, 4300 metres above sea level. Like a lot of US highways in the first part of last century it was a privately built toll road. Why mining magnate Spencer Penrose thought in 1915 that Pikes Peak needed a highway to the top is unclear. Weather conditions could close it down for a lot of the year and when you got to the end there wasn’t much else to do except turn back and go down again. Maybe that was why he set up the Race to the Clouds the next year. It became one of the premier vehicle endurance races in the country and a testing ground for automobile companies. Bottomless Pit is near the top, just after the Devil’s Playground and before Bighorn Sheep Pullout.

The photographers who specialized in real photo views were tougher and more ruthless than we give them credit for. They marked out their territories, bought concessions and didn’t appreciate intruders. Harold Sanborn’s turf was Colorado and parts of Wyoming and Montana, hence with one exception, every postcard from these states that we’ll see came from his company. In 1995 Colorado businessman Derick Wangaard bought the Sanborn Postcard publishing Co and discovered some 40 000 of Harold Sanborn’s negatives and his journals wherein he had annotated every photo he had taken. Wangaard offered the archive to the Colorado Historical Society, which agreed it had extraordinary value but doubted they could raise the $500 000 he was asking. We’re not sure what happened after that. The usual story is that the archive gets broken up and scattered about then a few years later someone in the government realizes they lost an invaluable record of the state’s history.

A camera and a car were useful but what every itinerant photographer needed was the willingness to travel. That might sound banal but in the 1930s and 40s it meant putting up with car breakdowns, awful weather and hours of solitude behind the wheel. Often as not the photographer knew exactly what he was after and the best time to get it but there were times he chanced across a scene. This postcard was mailed in 1949 from Oakland California to Hingham in Massachusetts by ‘Meg’. She had just driven across the country and somewhere in Wyoming, probably Fort Bridger, she saw this in a rack and it reminded her of the miles of open road she had just experienced.

When the Lincoln highway system was proposed in the 1900s the planners were possessed with the notion that the route needed to be scenic. A straight route might be cheaper  but if it missed a scenic wonder the added expense in rerouting was of little concern. What was the point of driving across America if you missed all it had to offer? To cross Wyoming without passing by Tollgate Rock was like visiting Paris and skipping the Louvre. In the 1970s and 80s a new breed of planner came along. Cut costs and forget what the world looked like outside the windscreen, they said. Since government had handed responsibility to private corporations it could hardly complain.

Another view of Tollgate Rock, this one not by Harold Sanborn. Notice the highway and the speck of a car between the Rock and the cliff face in the foreground. It would have been easy to photograph Tollgate Rock from both vantage points and not include the road but this was an era of massive engineering projects and Detroit was building cars for the world. Scenic views we as much about America’s power as they were about its timeless landscape.

By 1925 the first age of the Wild West was dead and buried but the second was just climbing into the saddle. An industry built on cowboy nostalgia was hitting its strides and ranchers in Wyoming realized there was good money to be made if they diversified from sheep and cattle into tourism. For a weekend guests at dude ranches could don Stetsons, strap a lasso to their saddle and ride out along a mountain trail. At night they sat around campfires singing Big Rock Candy Mountain and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and maybe listened to a grizzled old timer talk of Sitting Bull. Sounds unmissable, but it wasn’t. The ranches were so popular that there was soon a demand for a place of worship the guests could head to on a Sunday and so the Chapel of the Transfiguration was built. It was constructed in the Western Craftsman style, which was as authentic as a Boston accountant in woollen chaps, but never mind. It fitted with the setting. Anything else would have been either ugly or absurd.

Since we were speaking of engineering marvels and scenic wonders, a detour to the Spiral Highway in Idaho is essential. Built in 1917 to connect Lewiston with Moscow, the problem to contend with was the 2000 foot incline out of Lewiston and though it could have been solved by avoiding the hills altogether, why pass up a challenge like that? The Spiral Highway wasn’t quite a folly - the point to so many curves was to slow traffic down to a manageable 30 mph – but try to imagine the detail involved in the surveying and engineering. It did inspire at least one song; Hot Rod Lincoln by Charlie Ryan, a 1955 answer song to Hot Rod Race. The basic premise was that Californian hot rodders were all talk until they’d taken on the Spiral Highway.

Gardiner, Montana, population about 850 and entrance to Yellowstone National Park, which officially begins once you have passed through the Roosevelt Arch to the left of the photo. Sanborn took this photo in the 1940s and though the neon signage has gone, the cars have long since turned to rust and we can assume the dog passed away some time back, most of what you see still survives. But for how long? Some scientists claim the next time the subterranean volcano bubbling away under Yellowstone blows its stack it will wipe out Montana, Colorado and most of Nevada. Since the last eruption was 640 000 years ago, another is due, maybe tomorrow.

Assuming Yellowstone’s volcano doesn’t blow its stack, by the time you read this, the Two Medicine River Bridge in Montana will have been dismantled anyway, its structural flaws making restoration a waste of time and money. It was only built in 1940 so arguments about its heritage value are a little thin and the plans for the replacement suggest that won’t completely ruin the view. Two Medicine River has its place in American history as the only site where the Lewis and Clark expedition had a violent conflict with Native Americans. Guess who started it. Lewis, the one with the flaky sounding first name, told a group of Piegan people he intended to sell guns to the Shoshone, their long time enemies. (Arms trade was already big business in America; the Piegan controlled the region’s gun market so Lewis was effectively threatening to break their monopoly.) Two casualties, both Piegan, and another omen of what was to come.

Into South Dakota, and if the number of postcards floating about the internet is any indication the Badlands were the most photographed area in the USA between 1930 and 1960. Why that should be is only speculation though geographically they were the entrance to the West for the north-eastern cities and a relatively short drive from Chicago and Minneapolis. Rise Studio was run by optometrist Carl H. Rise until his death in 1939 though it remained in operation until ‘fairly recently’, whenever that may mean. 

On some of Rise’s postcards this stretch is labelled ‘Satan’s Speedway’, which is much better than ‘road scene’. Once again we have a magnificent landscape serving as a mere backdrop to a photo of a highway, but who is to complain? Remove the road and you would think something was missing from this image. Rise was born in South Dakota in 1887, ten years after the Battle of Little Bighorn and the death of Crazy Horse. Deadwood’s heyday had passed but Calamity Jane was very much alive. It’s unlikely anyone thought they had lived through an era that would become mythical. They probably welcomed progress, whether that was a railway, running water or a dirt road. The point is, when he took his photos, Rise could remember a time when cars let alone highways were unimaginable in the back parts of Dakota. 

In 1937 21 year old amateur herpetologist Earl Brockelsby figured he could make money from his hobby by opening a roadside attraction. Back then, not long before this photo was taken, the idea was that travellers would pull in off the highway, buy a soda and look at the rattlers slithering about in their cages, which was more fun than finding one in your sleeping bag. These days the Black Hills Reptile Garden claims to have the largest collection of venomous reptile species of any zoo in the world and to be internationally recognized for its work in protecting species. 

 Which is the better prospect for getting you to pull off the road, a hissing snake showing off its fangs or a fake tree? Another of Brocklesby’s ventures was the nearby Skyline Petrified Forest, which didn’t have quite the same success as the Reptile Garden. This giant log, which stood at the entrance to the park, was basically a timber frame with a concrete and wire façade. It burned down in 1965 and wasn’t replaced. Had it survived, doubtlessly it would now be venerated along with the concrete dinosaurs, cowboy towns and giant portraits of four presidents and one Lakota warrior that, depending on your point of view, enhance or disfigure South Dakota’s landscape. It is time to leave the American West, to head south to the flyover states.

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HIGHWAY STAR 3