JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1108

I wonder when it was that working people (which would mean the overwhelming majority of people on the planet) first decorated their non-cave walls with art?  There aren’t all that many images in the history of art (that I know of, anyway) that depict the inside of a yeoman’s residence with some sort of artwork hanging or stuck on the wall. This is a tricky and potentially meaningless question, trying to differentiate bits of newspaper illustrations nailed to a wall in Montana in 1882 from messianic Aboriginal millenia-old cave paintings and such.  

Inside-the-bunkhouse photographs from the American West like this are pretty scarce things–almost as scarce as nighttime photos of sleep-disturbed cowboys on the trail.  They’re just not around.  The remarkable thing about this photograph (from the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society) is that it also shows a not-subtle vignette into what passed for provoking, night-stabbing man-images for a society of the working stiff. 

These guys may be cowboys, or may not–there is a rifle on the wall over the shoulder of the striped suspenders guy on the left, and there seem to be a couple of dusters hanging on the wall, and some broad-rimmed hats.  Maybe they really are cowboys. 

In any event they’re in a rough-hewn bunkhouse with not very much to pass the time, save for these few broadsides and mounted magazine pages.  I find it an interesting peep into an interior life that didn’t get seen very much, especially with such period-hot images of women. 

And perhaps this paper is nothing more than the barrier that we see so often from FSA photos of the American Dustbowl West–paper put up on the wall to stop a cold draft or dust.  But these look too determined for something as simple as that…