OVERVIEW

Legacy of the Land is a 294-page coffee table book detailing a 500-million-year tale of geology and natural history, Native Americans, the homestead era, the dude ranch years, and the ranches today. When I set out to produce and write this project, I wanted to avoid Hollywood tropes about cowboys and Indians. The scrappy homesteader work-a-day cowboy holds little in common with the crisp-scarfed John Wayne cowboy. Our goal was to present the most nuanced and truthful version of history we could as told through the players themselves or their descendants, to honor the struggles and triumphs of all those playing a part on this Montana stage.

MAKING IT HAPPEN

We had a 10-month deadline in which to complete production —studio portrait shoots and museum shoots, mountains of research, securing archival imagery, site visits, and then the actual writing itself. To reach book form, it took another eight months of post-production. In the end, we collaborated with 150+ museums, private collections, artists, essayists, and individuals to pull together the final tale. The story of these two ranches in the Paradise Valley carried us into the lives of people from Sheridan, Wyoming to Crow Country; from Pray to the heart of the Blackfeet Nation; from the basement of the Yellowstone Heritage Center in Gardiner to the digital archives of the Smithsonian Institution. 

We wanted this story to tie in the old to the new, to look at the past to understand the present and possibly, the future. Visually, that meant including contemporary Western art alongside archival imagery. Story-wise, that meant speaking from a researched third-person perspective alongside a present-day first-person perspective.