Author Description

Sometimes, gifts come in strange packages. This one arrived in my life wrapped in a green 1960s-era Crescent department store paper shopping bag, handed to me by our mother Elinor Compton some years ago. In the bag was an embossed black Victor two-ring loose-leaf binder, vintage 1920, perhaps, tied up with red thread; and inside of that was a scrap book strung together with lavender ribbons. This was our grandmother Mariam Lawton Clayton's hand-written account and pages of "kodacs" of her honeymoon trip with Grandpa Earl to western Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park in the year 1910. Grandma's penmanship was stellar. Her cursive was laid down in black ink using a fountain pen with a fine nib. Her spelling and grammar were very good, though not perfect. I have left them as I found them. In the text of the book, you will find crossed-out and italicized words, where I have tried to approximate her own edits. The italicized words are those she added later; some much later, I believe. The photos in the scrap book had been glued to the pages. Most were faded and some nearly ruined, but inside the Victor cover with the manuscript were two other groups of pictures. One was in an envelope inscribed in the familiar hand of the old woman we knew as Grandma Mary: "Extra prints of the 1910 Yellowstone Trip." If you were one of her progeny, you knew how fitting it was that the envelope was one "recycled" from the University of Idaho Agricultural Extension Service, addressed to her at the house in Sandpoint, Idaho, she shared with us after Grandpa Earl died in 1966. The other batch of pictures was tucked into a Northern Pacific ticket folder, circa 1955. These were the best, a true treasure. Grandma used a Kodak bellows camera that shot two-and-a-quarter-inch film, and many of the prints from the Northern Pacific folder, all developed by Grandpa Earl, are contact prints, made when the negative was laid directly on the photographic paper and exposed, making them as sharp as Gran