Back twenty years to... Saturday, June 10th, 2006. Day 63. From the Columbia Plateau and into The Rockies. Night-time in beautiful downtown Moscow. Trestle bridges, a great many churches, free bibles – and a wiry gunslinger in the supermarket parking-lot.

"I need groceries, and in the mammoth parking-lot of the 'Save More Food Store', I manage to snap a shot of a mean-looking guy stepping out from his pickup-truck. He has a fully loaded gun belt and holster strapped around his waist, with a six-shooter and bullets – and looks right at me through the half-opened window. Thankfully, he walks away. You just don’t find that at 'Tescos', back-home in the UK, on a sunny Saturday morning.

It’s unclear to me why the guy feels the need to 'pack a lethal weapon' to go food-shopping. It’s because – quite unbelievably perhaps – he can. It’s all back to the finer detail of the Second Amendment, and the 'right to bear arms'. 'Open Carry' refers to the practice of visibly carrying a firearm in public places – as distinct from 'Concealed Carry', where they must not be visible to the casual observer. 'Brandishing' though – where the gun is actually in the hand – is unreservedly 'verboten'. Indeed, it’s a felony punishable with prison-time. Well thank heavens for that at least.

At eleven-thirty, I’m back on the road – and back on US-93, north once again. A long section of the 'Lewis and Clark trail'. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, in 1803, were funded by the Government to 'discover' the Northwest. In so-doing, they became – grade-one, five-star – 'All American Heroes'. Every school-kid knows all about them. Eventually, I reach 'Lost Trail Pass', and at seven thousand feet, it’s the highest I’ve yet been in Idaho. It also marks the border with my tenth State.

We coast on down the grade and into the Bitterroot Valley. The earlier rain has now turned torrential – but now it’s falling on us all, to the east – in Montana."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.