Interior wall of the Gibson House at Bannack State Park showing various cattle brands. (click to enlarge)
Here is an image of an interior wall of the Gibson House in Montana’s Bannack State Park. The park’s tour book provides the following history of the Gibson House:
Built in 1862, this large two-story building was known as the Montana Hotel. When the Gibson’s acquired the building in 1890 they continued to use it as a rooming house. The smaller building on the left was the Gibson family home. At some earlier time it served as a blacksmith shop, which is indicated by the brands still visible on the interior wall.
This wall is located in the smaller house, in the room to the left as you enter the front door. I originally envisioned converting the image to black and white, but was not happy with the finished conversion. Looking at the image, the bottom two and top two logs are different colors. There is also a color difference in the top two logs between each end and the middle.
These color changes are lost when converting the image to black and white. I liked that in the above version, these color changes form a dark vignette around the left, bottom, and right side of the image drawing the viewer to the SS and clover shaped brands (maybe the clover is four horseshoes?).
Here is a Google Earth screen capture showing the location of the small Gibson House within Bannack State Park.
Branding Iron Wall: N45 09 41 W112 59 49
Cemetery Fence Post, Bannack State Park, MT (click to enlarge)
The above image is the corner post of a tombstone enclosure located in the Bannack State Park cemetery. The wood in these enclosures, many in a state of disrepair, show great texture from their time spent in the harsh weather conditions. It appears that the tombstone itself has been removed from most of the enclosures.
I processed the image using Google’s Nik Software Silver Efex Pro 2. If you use Photoshop, get the Nik Software collection. Besides being free, these plug-ins can add great effects to your image while simplifying your workflow.
The approximate location of the above image is marked by the yellow pushpin on the Google Earth screen capture below. The white elipse on the picture shows the location of a several of these wooden enclosures. This set of enclosures line up nicely to serve as backgrounds for each other when shooting down the line.
Bannack State Park, Montana, Cemetery Fence Post Location
Bannack State Park Cemetery N45 10 29, W113 00 55
