Pictures

I started writing this story about Truman Everts five years ago. It's been a plauge upon my soul, as has been the whol 1870 Washburn party. I spent a good amount of time a few years back at the Montana Historic Society library researching. I found many articles, letters, and pieces from individuals' journals. In Samuel Hauser, the late governor of Montana and part of the 1870 party, he drew a few things from the trip. I'm very drawn to them because I don't know what they are. They seem impressionistic to me. From reserach, I know that Trumbull has ascribed to his name the first drawings of the Yellowstone wonders, but Hauser's from the same trip are never mentioned, probably because you can't tell what they are, but they are beautiful.

The first one here, I don't know what to think. I get the idea that in the middle there might be an overhead view of a river. I think I believe this to be an over head simply because of his Yellowstone Lake drawing below.The second one here I believe to be of the grand canyon of the Yellowstone, but again, I have my doubts because of the river looking thing at the bottom of the drawing, but I love this one!
The third one is of Yellowstone Lake, he even labels it so. This exploration party created the first real drawings of the lake, before this it was known there was a lake, but the shape and size was totally unknown. Hauser again isn't mentioned as being one of the first to create this drawing, that is attributed to Langford, who drew it all from the top of a mountain on the east side of the lake, which was subsequently named after him and this feat. After reading Langford's journal again recently, there was a lot of copying of journals going on, which was to save time and have a separate reference of the trip. So, Hauser could have copied Langford's drawing is all I'm trying to get at, or he could have drawn his own. I don't know. Either way, it's a great drawing.
I plan on using a cropped version of the drawings randomly dropped into the my story, which is in journal form to add a little spice and wonder to my story. Oh, as a random aside, part of the goal with this book was to mix reality and fiction. I take true historic events, people, and quotations and place them into my story. Some are quite obvious in their reference, others are built right into the characters dialog. I have found this to be one of the hardest aspects of this project, it guides the work in a certain direction, which I flow with, and in the end, I have a dillema still, I'd like those quotations to simply be in my manuscript without quotation marks, footnotes, or anything else. That they sit there like they are part of the flow of the story, but also little gems for the reader to discover if they so choose to discover for themselves. Yet, not quoting others' words is unethical and perhaps a little illegal. So far I've been highlighting the parts that I'd like to see removed before publication, which includes citations. So that's the writing life for now. Peace.