The book that has most influenced my life is Yellow Ore, Yellow Hair, Yellow Pine: A Photographic Study of a Century of Forest Ecology, written by my father, Donald R. Progulske. It chronicles George Custer' s 1874 expedition through the Black Hills of South Dakota, but it also represents my own childhood adventures as a participant in my father' s project to trace the ecology of the Black Hills through time.

Custer' s 1874 expedition into the Black Hills was the first white incursion into a territory belonging by treaty to the Sioux Indians. The expedition set out
from Fort Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1874, with an impressive contingent of 1,200 soldiers armed with Gatling guns, 110 wagons, 300 head of cattle, 16 Rhee Indian scouts, several journalists, two miners, one woman cook and laundress, a geologist, a naturalist, a military band and a photographer.

The journey took 60 days to complete, covered hundreds of miles and discovered ‘gold in them thar hills.' Word of gold released a flood of white settlers into the Black Hills, leading to violence and the US breaking treaty with the Sioux. Custer's fall two years later during the massacre at Little Big Horn assured his place as a figure of tragic hubris in American folklore.

Fast-forward more than 90 years: my father, a young professor of wildlife ecology at South Dakota State University, became aware that original images in the form of glass plate negatives documenting Custer' s expedition were available in several museums around the country. He was determined to obtain prints from as many of the plates as possible with the idea of finding the exact locations captured in the images, photographing them as contemporary landscapes, and using the comparisons to document the impact of the white man' s civilization on the ecology of the Black Hills.

Once images were reproduced from the original glass plates, the work of finding the sites where each photograph had been taken took several years. Finding the photo locations became a family project, and we spent many of our summer vacations hiking the Black Hills National Forest with dad, his maps and photos of the expedition, a log cabin with no running water or electricity serving as home base. Usually my father would tell us some fascinating fact about the particular site related to the personal side of the expedition, which made the search even more interesting to us. I still remember most of these details 40 years later.

The resulting book was named yellow ore for the gold discovered in Black Hills stream beds, yellow hair for the Sioux name for Custer, and yellow pine for the lofty Ponderosa pines growing abundantly throughout the South Dakota mountains.

By the time the book was published in July 1974, fully 100 years after Custer's expedition, my family had moved to New England, where my siblings and I pursued professions, married and scattered across the country. We returned only once to the Black Hills for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary several years ago.

On the occasion of their anniversary, we all spent a week in the Black Hills. None of us had been back to the Black Hills since the final summer we spent there and none of our spouses or children had ever been there. Towards the end of the week, my father, who was in his 70's at the time, lead us in the climb up the mountain to the sheer cliffs from which four of the Custer photos had been taken. We discovered that the US Forest Service had placed markers at the photo sites and that interested individuals hike through the Black Hills, with Yellow Ore, Yellow Hair, Yellow Pine in hand, following Custer's route.

As I stood with my dad on that cliff, I pondered the experiences and insights I had gained from dad and his Custer book, as our family had come to call it.

I learned that passion for a project makes the hard work fun and engaging. I learned in life sometimes the journey is as important as the end goal. I gained a lasting interest in the history of places and people. Finally, from my perspective many years later, I understand that the experience of the Custer book is one of the bonds that keeps my family close, even as we live far apart.

Our family is proud that my father's work has provided not only scientific literature (for example, the book addresses the impact of the lack of natural fires on forest ecology) but we also take pleasure in the fact that others have enjoyed learning the expedition' s history while following Custer's trail as seen through my father' s lens.

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Ann Progulske-Fox, Ph.D., is one of the world's leading bacteriologists examining the molecular mechanisms the oral pathogen Porphyromonas gingivalis uses to infect the human host. P. gingivalis causes periodontal disease and has been implicated in cardiovascular disease and the birth of low birth weight/premature babies. She is the director and founder of the UF Center for Microbiology, and her work was recognized this year by the International Association of Dental Research with the Distinguished Scientist Award for Basic Research in Periodontal Disease.

Photo by: Dwight Bennett, Ned Davis & Martine Horrell
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