Reflections

Milk River, Alberta

The one thing that fascinates me more than anything else with North America is the past.

Inparticular the First Nations, The Native Americans, The Settlers, The Emigrants, thats why i have dedicated a large part of this Blog to history. Now i have always had an interest in the subject, even back in UK i loved visiting museums and castles and historic battle sites.

The one thing i like to do is to stand quietly alone and to try to see the scene through the eyes of the people who were there at the time, try to think what they were thinking and try to recapture the moments. Thats proberbly why i love photography so much, in my own small way i am creating little pockets of history.

Since i moved to North America i have experienced so much history, i try to stop at all the rest areas that are on historical sites and i photograph all the information boards. The one that affected me the most was the wagon ruts on the Emigrant Trail in Idaho, you could actualy see the ruts still there and if you walked up to the top of the hill, as you came to the brow you could see the exact sights that the emigrants saw all those years ago.

These early settlers faced hardship every day of the journey, there were no roads as such it was just a case of following those ruts from the people who went before them, if there was a mountain you either went over it or had to find a way round it, nowadays we take the roads for granted.

Another thing i like to do is to look at the names of places and try to work out the reason for that particular name, some are easy like Wolf Creek, or Prickly Pear Canyon.

I saw one place a couple of months ago called Strawberry Creek and as i approached it the sun must have in exactly the correct position because the grass along the edge of the Creek had a lovely strawberry coloured tinge to it.

Every week i drive passed a town called Milk River and since i have been here i have often wandered why it had such a strange name, how on earth could a river look as though it was flowing milk.......................

then winter came...................

And i got my answer.

However Lewis & Clarke had other ideas but i still think my theory is nicer !

The waters of the Milk River are nearly always milky in color. The river passes through the badlands and whenever there has been a heavy rain, the white silt from the badlands is washed into the river making it look milky. The river gets its name from this milky-looking water. From the journals of Lewis and Clarke, we can read "...The water of this river possesses a peculiar whiteness, being about the color of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoon of milk. From the color of its water we called it the MILK RIVER...."