Don Pollack: South of the Yellowstone

"Over a hundred years ago, my grandfather registered as a homesteader with the Department of the Interior Land  office in Buffalo, Wyoming just south of the Yellowstone River. Building a cabin on a remote 640 acre plot, he  worked as a ranch hand at the neighboring cattle company, ‘Tipperary Ranch’ thirty miles east of the Big Horn  Mountains. My father would also inherit this love of the west and he too would venture into the landscapes along  with his father. They both dreamed of staying in Wyoming but both ended up living and working in Chicago.  I believe my grandfather was drawn to the area to see the last remnants of the western frontier. As a rancher, he  had a personal stake in the matter,—his father worked in the family meat packing business, ‘Stock Yards Packing  Company’ (that his father, my Great Great Grandfather began in 1893 in Chicago).

Several years ago I found a set of Wyoming maps from my grandfather and a series of architectural floor plans from 1959 that my father drew up for a house he intended to build in the area. The landscape was carefully surveyed  and a set of renderings were made that included structural diagrams, heating duct work routes, ventilation  plans, and plumbing diagrams. The house was never realized and the drawings sat undisturbed as an unrealized  conceptual space for sixty years. As an homage to my inherited passion for design and the love of wild places,  I undertook a collaborative drawing project with my father’s renderings and grandfather’s maps and layouts. I  added the animals as well as others native to the Homestead, North America, Yellowstone National Park, and  the Cloud Peak Wilderness region of Wyoming.  

I believe there is an urgency to build new relationships to our natural spaces and the beings that inhabit them.  This project is also a reconciliation between the generations of peoples that have struggled, dreamed, and  worked the landscapes that we all inhabit and must share."

Don Pollack 2025