Hockaday exhibit chronicles work of forestry icon K.D. Swan

Like seeing a moose emerge from the timber, Bud Moore's encounters with K.D. Swan were sudden and unexpected.

"I was out with the troops, you know, working on trails and fires," recalls Moore, a Montana icon for forestry and the U.S. Forest Service. "And he would just sort of pop up."

Kenneth Dupee Swan would be there, deep in the woods, with his bulky Graflex camera and tripod.

"I probably saw him 20 times," Moore recalls, adding that he was acquainted with Swan as a passing figure.

As a forester by summer and trapper and hunting guide by winter, Moore was tied to the Lolo and Bitterroot national forests for most of his early career. But Swan ranged widely across Montana and Idaho from 1911 through 1947, always carrying his cumbersome camera gear.

Highlights from Swan's travels can be seen in an exhibit at the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell as part of the Forest Service's Centennial Celebration. Moore was on hand for the exhibit's opening Thursday, sharing his memories and impressions of Swan.

Before there were Forest Service "public information officers," Swan was doing the job through photography. The agency's brass recognized the need to chronicle the public's western forests, along with the people who worked on them and lived near them.

Moore, 88, recalls that when he joined the Forest Service at age 16 in 1934, Swan was already well into his career in the Northern Region. By that time, Swan had been involved with forestry, surveying, firefighting and many other duties. But all along, he had been taking pictures and his superiors increasingly devoted him to that pursuit.

The Hockaday exhibit shows a sweeping range of subjects covering the expanse of the region, but the distinctive Swan images are stunning landscapes, many of them dotted with horsemen in cowboy hats.

There's the pack string skirting the Chinese Wall in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the ranger watering his horse at Big Salmon Lake, the forest supervisor on a mountain summit overlooking the Custer National Forest.

The photos are clear windows into the past, showing the way things were in Swan's time. There are lookouts, lumberjacks and sheepherders. There's a fisherman casting a fly rod on the Swan River and swimmers at Holland Lake.

In his 1968 book, "Splendid Was the Trail," Swan recalled taking one of the "the most exciting" photos of his career - an image of a bull moose wading into the shallows of Hoodoo Lake on the Lolo National Forest.

"Just as I was unscrewing the long lens from my Graflex I heard a cracking of branches across the lake and a large bull charged out of the timber, plunged into the shallow water of the lake, and started to feed on vegetation growing on the bottom. The next half hour proved to be one of the most exciting I ever spent with a camera."

Moore remarked that Swan's affection for the outdoors started in his native Massachusetts, where as a boy he roamed through a forest tract that covered only a few square miles. After graduating from Harvard, joining the Forest Service and arriving in Missoula for work in 1911, Swan discovered he was "involved with a huge chunk of majestic western country," Moore said.

To prepare for his presentation at the Hockaday, Moore said he read Swan's book once again and was nearly as impressed with Swan's writing as he is with his photos. If the photographs don't do it, Moore said, then Swan's prose reveals his attachment to the big country he spent so much time capturing on film.

"He was right in there," Moore said. "The land had a grip on him and he liked it."

Swan retired from the Forest in 1947 and died in 1970. Moore said he actually got to know Swan's son and daughter fairly well in the years after their father retired.

Moore said the best advice he got from "the K.D. clan" came from Swan's daughter Helen, who long ago wrote him a note suggesting that he should photograph wildlife rather than trapping and hunting it.

"I called her yesterday," Moore said Thursday. When she hesitated to speak on the phone, he wondered if she didn't remember him because they hadn't talked for years.

"But she said, 'you know, I've been meaning to apologize for that letter,'" Moore said.

He did take her advice, though, or part of it at least. Moore continued to hunt and trap, but at the same time he took up photography. He said his images aren't as impressive as Swan's, but he took lots of them.

Moore said he has 10,000 photos stored at his Swan Valley cabin, and with some help, he is starting to organize and archive those images so they can someday be shared with the public.

The Swan exhibit will be on display at the Hockaday through Aug. 12.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com