Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Abstract:: The Buckaroos in Paradise Collection presents documentation of a Nevada cattle-ranching community, with a focus on the family-run Ninety-Six Ranch. The documentation was largely the work of the Paradise Valley Folklife Project (1978-1982), a research initiative conducted by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. This collection presents 41 motion pictures and 28 sound recordings that tell the story of life and work on the Ninety-Six Ranch and of its cowboys, known in the region as buckaroos. Motion pictures produced from 1945 to 1965 by Leslie Stewart, owner of the Ninety-Six Ranch, are also included. An archive of 2,400 still photographs portrays the people, sites, and traditions on other ranches and in the larger community of Paradise Valley, home to persons of Anglo-American, Italian, German, Basque, Swiss, Northern Paiute Indian, and Chinese heritage. About 2,200 of these photographs were made during the folklife project and about 200 photographs date from 1870 to 1958. Background texts provide historical and cultural context for this distinctive Northern Nevada ranching community.

No Strings Attached

Grant-Kohrs Ranch

Abstract:: The Grant-Kohrs Ranch commemorates America's frontier cattle era. The ranch, located north of Yellowstone in Deer Lodge, Montana, is among the best surviving examples of an economic strategy based on the western cattle industry of the 1850s-1970s. A German immigrant, Conrad Kohrs, purchased the ranch in 1866 and began by supplying to mining camp butcher shops.

Abstract:: " "What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world." - Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook If you are what you eat, what are you? Food is at once the stuff of life and a potent symbol; it binds us to the earth, to our families, and to our cultures. In this class, we explore many of the fascinating issues that surround food as both material fact and personal and cultural symbol. We read essays by Toni Morrison, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, and others on such topics as family meals, eating as an "agricultural act" (Berry), slow food, and food's ability to awaken us to "our own powers of enjoyment" (M. F. K. Fisher). We will also read Pollan's most recent book, In Defense of Food, and discuss the issues it raises as well as its rhetorical strategies. Assigned essays will grow out of memories and the texts we read, and may include personal narrative as well as essays that depend on research. Revision of essays and workshop review of writing in progress are an important part of the class. Each student will make one oral presentation in this class."