Proving Up on a Claim in Custer County, Nebraska: Identity, Power, & History in the Solomon D. Butcher Photographic Archive

FAIN: FT-57813-10

Melissa Wolfe
St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO 63110-1380)

Between 1886 and 1892 Solomon Butcher photographed over 900 residents of Custer County, Nebraska. Though ubiquitous as western illustrations, the archive also offers a rare case study of how a specific community negotiated Plains settlement during a transitional period when progressive and agrarian ideologies, the Plains environment, and a fledgling regional identity all increasingly put pressure on settlers' beliefs and identities. Through rigorous visual analysis I identify visual patterns that manifest these dynamics, as well as sitters' strategies to convey visually their accommodation, assertion, or opposition to them. I conceptualize the photographs as a nexus, a specific site where the convergence of various competing beliefs and activities are given a visual record. This book project offers a critical structure that accommodates settlers' complicity and disempowerment, while considering the very real pressures on them that resulted in their decisions to enable such dynamics.