AA-2026-A5F876
On the image
Somewhere in the high desert, a man in a straw hat and pressed khakis has stopped to deal with a badger, the way a man might stop to deal with a flat tyre. He carries a hammer in one hand and a pistol on his hip, the standard toolkit of a decade that believed most problems in nature could be solved with either.
The badger, for its part, is already moving off through the sagebrush with the unhurried confidence of an animal that has negotiated with humans before and expects to win. Rangeland in the 1950s was administered on the theory that predators and burrowing animals were a nuisance to be managed rather than a system to be understood, and a man with a hammer counted as management.
Nobody here looks alarmed. That was the era's real specialty: treating a wild animal encounter as a Tuesday chore, worth a photo but not a change of pace.
Visually related — by likeness
Man and Badger in the Sagebrush, American West, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-A5F876. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-and-badger-in-the-sagebrush-american-west-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026A5F876,
title = {Man and Badger in the Sagebrush, American West, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-A5F876},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-and-badger-in-the-sagebrush-american-west-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Man and Badger in the Sagebrush, American West, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-A5F876 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/man-and-badger-in-the-sagebrush-american-west-1950s ER -
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