Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 0 78 for art, eventually starting a business that raised the family wages and enabled the couple to rent or own property. She charged "$2 for a family portrait" and traveled the wide, strong landscape soliciting business. By 1902, she had a photographic "calling card" and repeat customers, and by the end of the summer of that year "she'd made $94.40 selling photographs," according to one source. She developed them on five-by-seven-inch glass-plate negatives and printed them in a makeshift darkroom. By the summer of 1904, she was staying up into the early morning hours to complete her orders. Evelyn's hundreds of letters and handwritten journals, starting in 1893 and kept for approximately 40 years, give us an insight into the rustic side of life in those days, the pitched battle of civilization against wilderness. The diaries lend credence to the legend of the West as a place where ordinary men and women overcame great difficulties and rose to meet the challenges of a giant, empty, unfor- giving environment. EVELYN ENSHRINED THE WEST It would be her black-and-white images, however, that would forev- er enshrine the remarkably unconventional, stubborn and tenacious environment of early Western life. As defiantly independent as her chosen homeland, Evelyn depicted the transformation of Montana— granted statehood on November 8, 1889—and the development of its prairies and the cultivation and expansion of its land. The harsh realities of Montana were no fiction. From 1894 to 1928, Evelyn braved both the extreme cold and heat, and the pesky presence of rattlers, to photograph its evolving nature. From horse and cattle drives, sheep herding and the wool trade, and the expansion of the railroad, the nature of occupational life informed her work. In this, she became acquainted with many wagon-masters, cattlemen, teamsters, wolf hunters, sheepherders, skinners and trappers, and learned a great deal about the business of handling cattle and mules in the process. As homesteaders and pioneers flooded the prairies, Cameron's camera was there to greet them, too. Evelyn was known to embark on many wild and exciting treks to find a suitable photo. Indeed, Evelyn often bounced on horseback for "fifty miles or more" and "frequently climbed precipitous mountains on foot" with her heavy camera equipment strapped to her back to capture magnificent vis- tas, geographical spaces, and rich archeological ruins. She preserved the geology of the surrounding bad lands, its birds of prey, its pests and critters, and its oeat menagerie of domestic pets, such as eagles, wolverines, kestrels, coyotes, wolves, and dogs. Evelyn had a strong eye for period and place, for the communal, ritual, and collaborative ties that, somehow, improbably, helped to form a shared idea of kinship. She relished photographing homesteaders in their social settings; there is something sensitive and yet authorita- tive in these intimate works. Out of images of weath- ered faces posed in front of paltry shacks, the documen- tation of simple moments of celebration in Western lives, from weddings and reunions to Fourth of July festivals, Cameron achieved high art. She captured mothers hold- ing their prized hens, chil- dren dressed in their Sunday clothes, inaugurations, parties of Italian railroad workers and their families, gatherings at river ferries, the first brandings of young cattle, even chuck wagons packed high with furniture and supplies. Evelyn seemed to be everywhere at once, traveling over the area and preserving these, the trademarks of her work. Cameron's photographs attest to the strength of frontier women; they rope and ride, tend to animals and gardens, bake and fry for fami- lies, sheep-shearers and farm crews, and harvest in the wheat fields. As Donna Lucey, a biographer of Cameron, summarized: "Evelyn was fascinated by what she referred to as the 'New World type,' the colorful frontier characters who were drawn to the remote areas, and by the how-to of life in the West—how to 'thrash' a field of wheat; how to shear a sheep; how to drive a herd of cattle across the Yellowstone River. She did on-the-scene documentary photography of them all." Evelyn lived deeply yet modestly. From 1893 to 1900, Evelyn and Ewen rented a three-room log cabin with a stone foundation, six miles south of Terry. While her diary emphasized that the money she had earned from her photography had kept the family solvent, she also stressed that she owned the burden of the gardening, cooking, and washing responsibilities. And on top of this, she wrote and illustrated magazine articles about the demanding effects of life on Montana ranch women. DEATH AND DISCOVERY After Ewen died in 1915, Evelyn remained, alone, at her ranch, writing a friend that she was "as busy as a one-armed man with hives." On November 13, 1916, she bought another 40 acres in the Terry area at $3.55 an acre; $142 total. On April 9, 1918, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States and voted in that Novem- ber's election. She was 60 when she died on December 26, 1928,

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