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Meetings with Mrs. Collins

Mary Bridget Collins survived the Irish Potato Famine and endured hard years of homesteading in Minnesota. In 1880, she set off with her young daughter Rose, and made her way across the Great Plains to Montana working as a cook for the Northern Pacific Railroad construction crew. Mary settled in the rough frontier town of Terry, Montana, where, in 1893, she befriended the aristocratic Englishwoman Evelyn Cameron and her ornithologist husband Ewen, who were escaping the confines of British society to create a new life as horse ranchers. Donna M. Lucey, author of Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: the Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, states, "Colleen Carter has created an evocative portrait of frontier life by focusing on the unusual friendship between two strong-willed and accomplished pioneer women--one a well-born Englishwoman who came to this country in search of adventure and reinvented herself as a master photographer of the West; the other an Irish immigrant who had to escape starvation in Ireland and an abusive husband in Minnesota before becoming a successful entrepreneur and land owner in eastern Montana. Carter has opened a fascinating window onto the history of and settlement of the West and the central role women played in it."

TERRY, MONTANA
TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 1900

At twelve thirty on a cloudless spring day, a horse and rider entered the small town of Terry, Montana. They headed down a muddy street to Laundre Avenue, the thoroughfare that ran along the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. The rider was a woman, whose long split skirt allowed her to sit astride her horse, in a style which had so recently scandalized the citizens of Miles City.

She carried a large, heavy box, fastened to her waist; a gun scabbard was lashed to the back of her saddle. She alighted before an old wood-frame building, a former store, now home to Mrs. Collins, one of Terry's oldest and most colorful residents.

Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend, Evelyn Cameron. She could see from the presence of the box and scabbard that Evelyn had, as promised, come to photograph her. From the gun scabbard, Evelyn pulled a tripod and quickly assembled it. To the tripod she fitted the box, a No. 5 Kodet camera. While looking on, Mrs. Collins confessed, in her thick Irish brogue, that she had not only misplaced her gown, but that she had also lost her false teeth.