Update on 20 January 2026: This post is getting action, so I should add that my son and I visited Love Ranch two years after I posted it. Here is a gallery of photos, all captioned. And the title one:
— is John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains.
It’s one book among five collected in Annals of the Former World, which won a Pulitzer in 1999. In all five, McPhee follows a geologist around. And all five of the geologists are interesting characters—none more so than J. David Love, who grew up on a hardscrabble ranch in the center of Wyoming, became one of the world’s most accomplished geologists.
And yet David Love is still less interesting than both his parents. His father, John Love, was an endlessly resourceful Scottish builder and re-builder of the family ranch (also possibly, McPhee suggests, a one-time member of Butch Cassidy’s gang). His mother, Ethel Waxham Love, was one of the finest diarists ever to put pen to paper. The pair met and settled by Muskrat Creek, in the barren center of Wyoming, at a time that was still the Old West.
I’ve read and re-read Rising From the Plains so often that the pages are browned at the edges, simply because I love the writing and the characters in the stories that braid through the text (which is actually about geology, though you can ignore that).
I bring all this up because last night, on my sister’s Netflix, we watched Episode Eight (1887-1914), of The West, a Ken Burns documentary that ran on PBS so long ago that the picture is in 3×4 low-def, shaped to fit old vacuum-tube TV screens. In the episode is a section titled “I Will Never Leave You,” which is about the trials endured by the Love family at their ranch. It features photos of the Loves I had never seen, along with interview footage of David Love, then in his 80s, telling stories I had read countless times, yet loved to hear again, straight from The Man Himself.
The old ranch house was still standing when Love and McPhee visited it for the last time, sometime before the mid-1980s, when Rising From the Plains was published.
Visiting Love Ranch (which David said was “one hundred miles from wood, water, and women”) has long been among the few to-dos on my bucket list.
A few bonus links:
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- David Love’s obituary in the LA Times (he died in 2002, at 89)
- A 1996 interview with David Love
- A feature on Love Ranch
- High Country News on David Love
- Geo Times on David Love
- A David Love biography
- Made in Wyoming on David Love
- USGS Hall of Fame on David Love, a member
- FindaGrave.com entry on David Love (text borrowed from many sources)
- Jane Matteson Love’s obituary in the Casper Star-Tribune (she was David’s wife, a fellow geologist and collaborator, who lived almost to 100)
- A collection of relatives is on this Findagrave page.
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