[Ruins in the desert.]

James A. Michener wrote the following concerning the images from this series: "A very important collection of slides and negatives of photographs taken in the years 1936-1938, showing my interest at that time in dryland farming, water problems, rural life in Colorado and the west, Indian affairs, and especially the life of Mexican workers in Chihuahua region. Anyone studying these photographs carefully and comparing them with the imagery of my novel on the Platte will find almost all the great visual impacts already defined by 1936. Almost everything I wrote about in the novel had been earlier defined by me, and carefully sought out: the look of the land, the character of the children, the sandstone figures along the Wyoming border, and the sunsets, the roll of the prairie, the look of an old house. Missing are the Herefords; I used to study them carefully at Roggen but never when my camera was with me. If I had not taken these photographs in 1936, and implanted them on my mind, studying them often when I was miles away from Colorado, I would never have written the novel. It was the persistence of these images that kept the ideas vital, and some of them appeared in Iberia years before I got around to writing about Colorado."

These images exist as archived TIFF images and one or more JPEG versions for general use. They were scanned at 4800 dpi, 48-bit from the original.

Scanned on Epson Perfection V750 Pro using SilverFast AI scanning software. Resized using Adobe Photoshop CS5.