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Book Review: Pictures from an Expedition

© Beverly Eschberger

Montana novelist Diane Smith's 1999 debut novel Letters from Yellowstone is the story of a young woman who joins a botanical expedition to Yellowstone National Park in 1898. The novel is told entirely in the form of letters, and won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for best novel.

I had high hopes that Smith's second novel, Pictures from an Expedition, would also prove to be an interesting book. Pictures from an Expedition is the story of Miss Eleanor Peterson, a spinster who works for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a scientific illustrator. Miss Peterson is invited by a mysterious character known only as "the Captain" to join a paleontological expedition to Montana in 1876 as its illustrator/visual documenter. The story is told years later (in 1919) through her correspondence with the Smithsonian Institution concerning photographs, drawings, and paintings from that expedition.

Accompanying Miss Peterson is her friend, the portraitist Augustus Starwood, whose paintings it is that she is corresponding about. Posing as an elderly, chaperoning cousin for the sake of propriety during the expedition, Starwood is a colourful character who liberally spouts Shakespeare at any opportunity, and immediately falls in love with the "wild west."

The novel is replete with colourful characters. There is Mrs. Maggie Hall, the practical and extremely capable frontierswoman, who joins the expedition as its cook after the original cook leaves due to fear of Indians. Her young son Jeb joins the expedition as a general helper, and he talks about the old bones that he has found on the Hall's land. Dr. Patrick Lear is the leader of the expedition, he has a sad and mysterious past that is only hinted at. Lear's student Jack stays on with the expedition even after the other students leave, also because of the Indians.

Lear's old friend Mr. James Huntington is building a house on the frontier, one that will hold his large collection of books and natural history specimens while he is away exploring. Mr. Huntington cannot be a love interest for Miss Peterson, as one might expect him to be, as he is awaiting the arrival of his beautiful fiancé from the east coast. Then there is Little Bear, a taciturn white man who chooses to dress as an Indian (although his garments are from several different tribes) and travel with a pet bear. Little Bear also has a sad and mysterious past that is only hinted at.

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