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Reviews
ON THE ROAD AGAIN: MONTANA'S CHANGING LANDSCAPE
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by William Wyckoff
foreword by William Cronon
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006.
Photographs, maps, bibliography, index,
197 pages. $26.95. |
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| Rarely can a little book say a lot, but such is the case with geographer William Wyckoff's study of the Montana landscape through historical and contemporary photographs. The image carries the story — and what a set of images are presented in On the Road Again: Montana's Changing Landscape. Wyckoff selected a set of historic photographs of Montana roadsides largely taken by the state highway department from the 1920s to the 1940s. He then hit the road himself and searched out the exact spots where the photographs were initially taken. Then he took a new photograph, compared the two, and the two images lead readers to think about the meaning of the landscape in new ways. |
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The organization is straightforward. The introductory "Journey into Montana" provides context and perspective to the study. "Along Montana Highways" comprises the bulk of the book, a documentation process that includes subsections on boundaries, rivers, railroads, passageways, forested lands, open spaces, sacred places, landmarks, rural legacy, main street, urban life, suburbs, old west, and new west. Wyckoff offers a conclusion in his final section, "Destinations," and closes with a useful bibliographical essay on his secondary sources. |
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Within the documentary subsections, the format of On the Road Again is disarmingly simple. One side of the page contains the two photographs, expertly reproduced by the press, and the other side contains Wyckoff's history and commentary on the location. |
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Those who have traveled the state's roadsides will each have their favorite examples. Mine tend to be the photographs that focus on the state's evolving infrastructure, be it highways (there are naturally many, many road pictures), powerlines, signage, bridges, or town plans. The impact of the engineered landscape, always prominent in the Montana past, became far greater by the end of the century. The human scale and presence manifested in an iron bridge of the 1920s, for instance, disappeared by the time of Wyckoff's travels, with the steel frame replaced typically by the flat mass of concrete that celebrated the power of materials and the belief in functionality in our times. |
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The interplay between the highway and the railroad is another constant theme of the images. When first composed and taken, the railroad dominated and the road appeared to be a poor substitute. By century's end, that relationship had reversed, perhaps best documented in Wyckoff's photographs at Superior in western Montana (p. 42). |
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The end result of Wyckoff's careful work is an insightful, enjoyable book. It is of great value to historical geographers, students of landscape, and historic preservationists. Wyckoff is correct to emphasize that the greatest changes to the western landscape are happening now, but the change is focused in places such as Belgrade, Bozeman, and Manhattan and not so much in the Circles and Winnetts of Montana. He also makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature on how capitalism on the frontier changed the western landscape in the twentieth century and how corporate power dictated the paths of steel, roads, and powerlines. |
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On the Road Again will be of equal interest to those who travel, especially off the interstate along the older state and federal highways of Montana. The author hopes that others follow his lead in looking at and thinking about what changes in the landscape mean. His simple yet effective approach opens this process of discovery to anyone with a set of historic photographs (perhaps those from their own families), an automobile, and a good camera. |
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"There is nothing quite like looking through a camera lens and seeing exactly how a cultural landscape has changed over the past sixty to eighty years," Wyckoff admits (p. xiii). I certainly agree. I continue to travel and photograph favorite places — often repeating locations — almost twenty-five years after taking three thousand photographs for projects with the Montana Historical Society and the Montana State Historic Preservation Office. It was apparent then that the story of the Big Sky Country is best told through its landscapes. The power of the landscape is even more impressive through the lens and the prose of William Wyckoff's most interesting study. |
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| Carroll Van West
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Middle Tennessee State University,
Murfreesboro |
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