July 7, 2017 - Anastasia Suen

Evelyn Cameron: Photographer on the Western Prairie
by Lorna Milne (Author)

Booktalk: In 1889, a young spunky British woman of genteel upbringing set sail for the United States against her family’s wishes. She traveled with a friend, Ewen Cameron, the man who later became her husband. They were bound for eastern Montana to hunt big game along the Yellowstone River, only thirteen years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The next fall the Camerons returned to England, packed up, and moved to Montana, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Snippet: Evelyn and Ewen’s adventurous honeymoon–the trip that led to Montana grizzlies living out their lives in a British zoo–was the first of many long forays the Camerons took into the badlands. Sometimes they hired a cook, often they went with friends, and before long they became the guides. Evelyn waxed poetic about the sporting life:

Where the wife shows any liking at all for life in the open I consider a hunting expedition one of the most desirable ways for a couple to spend a holiday. It is wonderful what comradeship is developed between them. All sorts of cobwebs get blown away in the long days together on the windswept prairies or in the gulches and trails of the Bad Lands.

It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)