Poignant Images From Sagebrush Country

Among the most arresting images in “Great Ghost Towns of the West,” by Tom Till and Teresa Jordan (Graphic Arts Center Publishing, $39.95, 128 pages), is a photograph of an abandoned morgue in Bodie, Calif. The reader’s eye is drawn to such details as a half-assembled violin and a fully assembled coffin, the handiwork of some gifted craftsman who attended to both the living and the dead before the whole place was turned over to the ghosts.

The photograph is typical of the 130 painterly images that Till contributes to “Great Ghost Towns.” Some are bright and bold, some hazy and haunting, but all of them are deeply affecting in one way or another.

The weathered facade of Fraternity Hall in Elkhorn, for example, glows like burnished brass against the brilliant blue of a Montana sky. A “rock cabin” in Whitney Pockets, Nev., is eerily tomblike in appearance--a fissure in a rugged cliff face that has been walled up with crude masonry. And the collapsed roof of an old house in Tinton, S.D., rusty red and sprinkled with morning frost, looks like some strange form of vegetation.

Till’s photographs are framed and explained by Teresa Jordan, whose accompanying essay allows us to understand that all of the now-abandoned places that caught the photographer’s eye--more than 100 ghost towns scattered across the West from British Columbia to Texas--were once fully alive and deeply alluring.

“Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie,” a young 19th century girl confided to her diary as her family headed toward California, leaving behind the tedious safety of home and literally going for the gold. Today, as we see in another one of Till’s photographs, the roulette table in the Sam Leon Bar in Bodie is littered with dusty chips, as if the ghosts are still gambling, invisibly but unmistakably present in the shadows.

The California Gold Rush was the single most powerful factor in the making of ghost towns, as Jordan allows us to see through the eyes of various historians whose work she quotes. “On doors and counters, the posted notice ‘G.T.C.’ meant only one thing,” wrote historian Remi Nadeau, “Gone to California.” At a crossroads on the westward trail, according to one tale of the Gold Rush era, pioneers encountered a curious pair of road markers: “A pile of gold-bearing quartz marked the road to California; the other road had a sign bearing the words ‘To Oregon,”’ according to Dorothy O. Johansen, a Western emigrant. “Those who could read took the trail to Oregon.”

But gold was not the only cause of death for the places that we see in “Great Ghost Towns”--a thriving community might turn into a ghost town when it was farmed out or mined out or fished out. California itself is the site of nearly a dozen of the ghost towns that Till photographed, including famous ones like Bodie and Calico and more obscure ones like Timbuctu, a place that was reputedly named by a former slave for his hometown in Africa.

Till’s photographs are the glory of “Great Ghost Towns,” but it is Jordan’s graceful and insightful text that points out exactly why ghost towns are not only hauntingly beautiful but somehow comforting and reassuring, too. “We remember the temporary nature of our time on earth,” she writes, “and this brings a curious satisfaction: The ones who once lived here are gone, but here we are, and that’s something.”

Not every settlement in the Old West ended up as a ghost town, of course, and the point is made in “Woven on the Wind: Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West,” edited by Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier and Nancy Curtis (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 312 pages). Here are the musings of some 150 contemporary women “who have set their roots deep in the soil,” as the editors explain, and who have vowed to “stay ‘close to the wind, earth, creeks, grasslands,’ learning from the land and from each other.”

“Woven on the Wind” is a sequel to “Leaning Into the Wind,” an earlier anthology of writings by Western women about “love of the Western landscape.” Now the same editors have invited women in 16 Western states and two Canadian provinces to share their thoughts on friendship among women. Nearly 1,000 manuscripts were submitted, they report, and some 150 are included in the book.

The selections in “Woven on the Wind” include poetry, letters, memoirs and confessions, ranging in length from a single paragraph to a few pages, all of them earnest and revealing. The very best of these short pieces offer an intimate understanding of how a life in the rural West is deeply rooted in traditions that link generation to generation and yet, at the same time, hot-wired to the stresses and strains that make it so hard to keep a family intact in the postmodern world.

“Preserving,” by Caroline Patterson, for example, appears to describe the annual family ritual of putting up preserves. “Last year, it was strawberries,” writes Patterson, a resident of Missoula, Mont. “The year before huckleberries, picked at the family cabin.” Yet something more is going on here: “Everything has to be measured at least three times,” she explains, “because, as we talk, we forget the number of cups we have and have to start over again.” And here we begin to see the real meaning of the ritual.

“As I skim pink foam from the kettle, my mother tells me about my grandmother, who baked tiny versions of the famous cakes she called ‘try cakes,”’ Patterson recalls. “About how each month my great-grandfather gave my great-grandmother a day to do anything she wanted, which she called ‘Going to California.”’

Not every contribution is quite so soaked with sweetness. “The Concubine” by Mary Garrigan, for example, is a cry of pain from a wronged wife toward the woman whom her husband has impregnated. “This pain made me crazier than a rat in a coffee can for a time,” she writes. “I was the kind of crazy where I had to stop saying the Hail Mary, because the part about the ‘fruit of thy womb’ brought thoughts of murderous rage to my mind, which seemed to defeat the whole purpose of praying.”

At yet other moments, the meanings are more obliquely expressed but no less heartfelt. Jane Elkington Wohl, for instance, contributes a short poem titled “Daily Acts of Courage” about a cowhand who carries a stray calf across her saddle and searches the snow-covered prairie for its mother while reflecting on more intimate moments in her life.

*

Those were extraordinary times:

unlike those mornings of inner storms,

still black highways, bright indifference.

Her mind swollen with old words,

she faces sage and rising dust,

and drives alone across the plain.

*

Sage, in fact, is the emblematic image that the editors have selected to symbolize the lonely stretches of the West where these women live out their lives: “Sagebrush, the predominant plant in the setting for these writings, suggested itself as an icon,” they explain. “Sometimes misunderstood and vilified, sometimes glorified and praised, sagebrush impresses us with its diversity, its hardiness, its practicality, its symbolism, and its loveliness--like the women in these pages.”