 Butcher has been compared to painter George Catlin, who painted Native Americans in the 1830s, and to Nebraska writer and photographer Wright Morris, who depicted rural Nebraska in the 1930s and 1940s. Like them, Butcher recognized that an era in Plains history was passing, and tried to document it visually before it was gone. Even during his short career, the face of Nebraska changed; the sod houses of his earlier photographs are increasingly supplanted by frame buildings in his later ones.
