Matt reconstructs the dinosaurs, exhibits them, and then sends them off to paying customers like the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He's built dozens upon dozens of creatures, including Ice Age mammals, several tyrannosaurs, and a couple of quetzalcoatlus,the largest creatures ever to fly, with a wingspan of 38 feet, about as long as a school bus. More to the point, of the 50 dinosaur species that once existed in what is now China, Matt has built or is building 25 of them, in Livingston, Montana.

Guan Jian, the head of the department of paleontology at the Beijing Natural History Museum, invited Matt to a dig in southern China in December of 1996, and the two men have worked closely together ever since. Matt Smith's artistry, Guan told me on one of his Montana visits, begins at the excavation site. The biology of the creature, how it functioned, is important. The geology of the region will dictate excavation techniques. Taphonomy—the study of what happens to the creature from the moment it dies—is of supreme importance. How, in fact, did it die? Were the bones disarticulated by scavengers? How is it that some of the animal is preserved while other parts are missing?

Chinese workers, Guan said, were fast and efficient, but they weren't "attentive." Digging dinosaurs was a kind of hard-rock mining to them. I sort of liked the idea that, 100 years after Chinese miners worked the discarded silver-mine tailings in Castle, Matt was working digs in China in a similar way.

Most of the visiting Chinese museum technicians who would work with Matt in Livingston had never been to the United States. They flew into Seattle, where Matt picked them up in a rented van. Then they drove 750 miles to Montana.

In essence, all that the technicians knew of the United States at the time I first spoke with them came from a two-day road trip across the Northwest. Their impressions had to do with cars, and highways, which they found impressive and even artful. The "system of transportation" was "beautifully constructed," and it wound through a land they thought was virtually deserted. Even when they pulled into some town for lunch, the first thing they asked Matt was, "Where are all the people?"

Along the way, they had seen beavers and deer and eagles, which was very exciting. It was different from China in so many ways. For instance, if you sit down in a restaurant in America, the waiter will give you a glass of cold water, without asking. In China, you'd get a pot of hot water.

One of the technicians said, "America is only 200 years old, and yet you are all so very interested in your history."

"What makes you think that?" I asked.

"Because every town we stopped in had one or more shops that sold old things. Everywhere you go, you see the sign: 'Antiques.'"

I wasn't sure this didn't say more about the acquisitive nature of Americans than their love of history, but I decided to keep my own counsel.

"What we especially noticed," one of the women said, "was that rich people live out of town, with a lot of land all around them. We wondered: Do they do that because they are afraid of the poor people?"

Did they? Or did it have more to do with the boom-and-bust cycle of the American West? Something to think about, anyway.