I was predestined to want to see more. My great-grandma on my mom’s side grew up in Maine, joined the Army during World War II, lived in Germany for a time after the war, and traveled to the Great Wall of China. My dad was his own kind of traveler in the Air Force, at one point tasked with the United Nations. He always says the better question is, “Which country hasn’t he been to?”

History itself came just as naturally. Every summer, my grandma and aunt, both on my dad’s side, would drive down from Montana and haul my sisters and me back north for the season. The thousand-plus-mile drive was long, flat, and monotonous—but they broke it deliberately. Picnic lunches at rest stops where Oregon Trail wagon ruts still cut the ground. Stops at Fort Scott National Historic Site. Detours that were never accidental. I wasn’t always thrilled about it then, but as I do now.

But my sisters and I loved the Big Horn County Historical Museum, where my grandpa worked. From southwest Montana, we’d go on weekends to see local sites, including those in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska—museums, small and large, each telling a fragment of the frontier past. Little Bighorn National Monument was a familiar stop. There, we were reminded that an ancestor’s brother served as a scout for the 7th Cavalry before its ill-fated final charge.

While we all have an interest in history, Grandpa is particularly vocal about his. He told me George Washington Hogan influenced him as a child. He has funneled his own passion toward projects like Weatherman Draw’s “Valley of the Shields,” Pompey’s Pillar, and the wild horses of the Pryor Mountains. One day, probably around the 4th grade, grandpa told me that I was wasting my time reading fiction, ie, things that never happened. 

Then, one day in the 6th grade, in the school library, I checked out the right book, and it hit me: he was right. 

Of course, as my grandma and Aunt dragged me around the Midwest, I have dragged my kids to Civil War battlefields, Europe’s historical sites, and any museum we come across.

This segment is where that curiosity goes now—a place for the photos that up until now lived on in my Google Cloud and historical insights I learned at those places that bounce around my brain like random facts without a home.

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