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FRONTIER YEARS: L. A. HUFFMAN, PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE PLAINS, Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket (price never printed), illustrated with 125 photographs by Huffman, 1955. ITEM CONDITION: good. The text block and illustrations are in near fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. Pages are age-toned. No bookplate or signature of a prior owner. Not a library book or remainder. The dark brown cloth boards are in fair condition (shelf wear on bottom edge, bumped spine, and spotting along lower portion of front board). The dust jacket is in poor condition (intact, but with tears, rubbing, and age-toning). 11 ¼ x 8 ½, 272 pages, 38 ounces XX [From the dust jacket] Before the railroad came, in the time just after the last war with the Sioux, L. A. Huffman came to Fort Keogh as post photographer. He set up a studio in Miles City. He went into forbidden reservations among the Indians. He trekked through Montana territory, went on hunting expeditions for the bear, the buffalo, and the buck. He ranched to make ends meet. He explored deep into Yellowstone country, made pictures there of sights no white man had seen before; and famous warriors and scouts loafed in his studio and told stories of the days of Sitting Bull, Joseph, and Dull Knife and Little Wolf. He learned the soldier's life, the life of the Indian, the economics of the buffalo slaughter, the wolfer's job. He photographed the Indian, the animal-hunter and the manhunter, the racks of bones on the field where Custer stood, wagon tracks, tree burials, skinning the buffalo, cabin interiors, the winter, hostile Sioux villages, General Phil Sheridan, Calamity Jane, the roundup, the river in flood, the freighters hauling into own, the plains. Always the people were his favorites: he caught them well and saved them for another day. And his pictures wanted background, so he kept letters, diaries, and notes of every description. His sketches have an intimacy and grass-roots authority, and they are equal in value, now, to the photographs they describe. Huffman was a modest man in a new and wonderful country. The life of the man and the story of the country were almost one and the same. Both of them are here in THE FRONTIER YEARS. From 1200 negatives Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton have culled 125 - pictures that Huffman called the best of his gathering. From 600 volumes of choice Western Americana, and from many years of devoted study and the tales of many old-timers, Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton have distilled a text which does full justice to Huffman's magnificent photographs, which complements and embraces the superb notes Huffman left with his photographs.
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