COW TALK: ECOLOGY, CULTURE, AND POWER IN THE INTERMOUNTAIN
WEST RANGE CATTLE INDUSTRY, 1945-1965
by
Michelle Kathleen Berry
______________________
Copyright © Michelle Kathleen Berry 2005
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2005
2
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation
prepared by Michelle K. Berry
entitled “Cow Talk: Ecology, Culture, and Power in the Intermountain West Range Cattle
Industry, 1945-1965”
and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Katherine G. Morrissey
Date: October 11, 20005
Karen Anderson
Date: October 11, 2005
Sarah Deutsch
Date: October 11, 2005
Lydia Otero
Date: October 11, 2005
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s
submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and
recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
Date: October 11, 2005
Dissertation Director: Katherine G. Morrissey
3
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an
advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library
to be made available to borrowers under rules of the library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided
that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended
quotations from or reproduction of the manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by
the holder of the copyright.
SIGNED: Michelle K. Berry
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Graduate school, in many ways, is a marathon. And like any arduous athletic
undertaking, the athlete needs commitment, stamina, and a world-class support network.
I often ran out of the two former requirements, but thanks to the latter, I was able to not
only finish the race, but become a better person in the process. First and foremost, I
thank my partner Anne. She was unwavering during times when I was certain that the
decision to get a doctorate was the wrong one. Thanks for pushing me and helping me to
never completely lose the faith that this was the best direction for me and for us.
When I arrived at the University of Arizona, I was fortunate to have access to a
faculty that was inspirational and patient. Linda Darling and Alison Futrell gave to me a
historiographical foundation for which I continue to be grateful. Reeve Huston would
eventually expose me to an amazing world of labor history. While we could never quite
find a way to have him as an official member of my committees, he has had as much
effect on my scholarship as anyone. Thanks too, Reeve, for always being someone who
understood that play was just as important as work!
Immediately upon embarking on the MA at UofA, I found a committee of “power
women” who would become my most inspirational mentors and, I hope, lifelong friends.
Karen Anderson, I was scared to death of you when I first sat in that colloquium in 1998.
You have since become someone who I aspire to emulate in scholarship, teaching and
life. I especially appreciate your humor and your unabashed enthusiasm for the sport of
basketball! Sally Deutsch, when I first met you I had never encountered anyone whose
mind moved so quickly and whose spoken dialog was just as fast! I never thought I
would successfully absorb all you had to share. I probably never have, but I benefited
immensely from the little bit I could imbibe. Thanks too for always being so supportive
of me, my goals, and my work. I hope Duke knows how fortunate it is to have you. I’m
not even sure what to say about and to Katherine Morrissey. Certainly I would never
have become the scholar I am without your guidance and your high standards. But
you’ve been so much more than just an academic advisor. If grad school is a marathon,
you were the best coach I could have asked for. You are, simply, the best. Thank you – I
hope I’ve done you proud. I am grateful to the UofA history department and all of the
financial support and professional development they provided me over the years. I am
also in debt to those institutions that were kind enough to offer me research fellowships,
including the Huntington Library (and Peter Blodgett for his ceaseless enthusiasm for my
cow work), the Montana Historical Society, and the Charles Redd Center at BYU.
Last but not least, I have so many dear friends and family to thank. The list is
endless, and would require much more than the one page limit of the UofA graduate
college. Thanks to: Adam Geary – who read every word; Megan Mulligan who always
listened; Rachel Kram – who believed we’d make it when I wasn’t sure; Luke Ryan who
was always willing to buy me a beer; E2 for the perspective and for eating meat; and to
Les, Dave, Sophie, and Lily for stories that took my mind off of history! Thanks to
Mary, JP, Joe, Merc, and Kay – you guys are the best and I love you. Thanks also to
Mom and Dad. This degree is in honor of both of you. Thanks for teaching me to love to
learn and to always think critically – and thanks for knowing a thing or two about cows!
5
DEDICATION:
For Anne who nurtures my imagination and keeps me balanced.
This Ph.D. is as much yours as it is mine. I love you.
Here’s to the next adventure.
6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:.................................................................7
ABSTRACT:.........................................................................................8
INTRODUCTION: BUILDING FENCE: CONSTRUCTING THE
PARAMETERS OF THE STUDY..............................10
CHAPTER 1: HUNTERS & HIGHWAYS:
THE POSTWAR CONTEXT OF RANCHERS’ LIVES,
1935-1965..................................................................48
CHAPTER 2: BRANDING THE PAST:
COLLECTIVE HISTORY AS COHESIVE AGENT.124
CHAPTER 3: COW WORK:
THE SOCIAL WORLD OF PRODUCTION ON RANGE
CATTLE RANCHES...............................................188
CHAPTER 4: CORRALLING THE HERD:
THE ECOLOGICAL ECONOMY OF RANGE CATTLE
RANCHERS............................................................258
CHAPTER 5: BEEF FUDGE:
THE MARKET AS UNIFYING PRACTICE IN RANCH
CULTURE.... .........................................................310
CHAPTER 6: COW TALK:
RANCHERS’ CULTURAL LANGUAGE................382
EPILOGUE: SHUTTING THE GATE:
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS..................................447
REFERENCES:........................................................................................... 457
7
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 Cover of The Montana Stockgrower, 1955...............................................10
Figure 2 Picture of rancher with new hat, ca 1950.................................................48
Figure 3 Cartoon from The New Mexico Stockman.................................................88
Figure 4 Image from Wyoming Stock Growers Association, 1959.........................96
Figure 5 Image of chuck wagon from Wyoming Stock Growers Association.......104
Figure 6 Modernization cartoon from The Montana Stockgrower, 1955...............116
Figure 7 Cows in Convention Culture....................................................................155
Figure 8 1957 Brand Book, Phillips County Livestock Association.....................167
Figure 9 Cover from the 1959 Diamond Jubilee edition of
The Montana Stockgrower.........................................................................169
Figure 10: Photo Great Falls Daily Tribune, Sunday, May 31, 1959...................177
Figure 11: Representative association publication covers.....................................230
Figure 12: Association Stationary..........................................................................231
Figure 13: Examples of individual rancher stationary...........................................232
Figure 14 Sagebrush removal demonstration photos, Cow Country......................269
Figure 15 Grazing Experiment Demonstration article and photographs,
Cow Country, 1952.....................................................................................279
Figure 16 Spraying Demonstration on John Greer Ranch, 1948............................292
Figure 17 Cover of The Montana Stockgrower, 1956............................................307
Figure 18 Overproduction cartoon, 1959................................................................310
Figure 19 Montana Cowbelle parade float, 1958....................................................313
Figure 20 Reward Sign for Cattle Theft, New Mexico, 1960................................322
Figure 21 Drought in the mid-1950s.......................................................................330-31
Figure 22 Price support cartoon, 1949....................................................................349
Figure 23 Livestock market space, 1950s...............................................................355
Figure 24 Lil’ Dudette, Arizona Cattlelog, March 1955.........................................364
Figure 25 Connie Cook posing as Lil’ Dudette near the family plane....................365
Figure 26 Examples of Beef Promotion Materials..................................................375
Figure 27 Montana Slim..........................................................................................375
Figure 28 Two different covers of Cow Country illustrating modernization..........397
Figure 29 MSGA membership advertisement, 1965...............................................400
Figure 30 Pictures of “typical” Wyoming ranches..................................................412
Figure 31 Cow talk cartoon, 1960...........................................................................414
Figure 32 Ace Reid, “Cowpokes” cartoon, 1956....................................................415
Figure 33 Cow Inventory.........................................................................................448
8
ABSTRACT
This dissertation offers a cultural history of a special interest group – namely, the
range cattle ranchers in the intermountain West states of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado,
Arizona, and New Mexico from 1945-1965. In these years, ranchers joined together in
their special interest group organizations in unprecedented numbers and proceeded to
create and present a dominant culture which helped them to appear more unified than
perhaps they really were. This, then, is a cultural history of a political group as opposed
to a study of the politics of a cultural group. Rather than taking for granted the status of
their political, economic, and environmental power in the postwar decades, ranchers
came to fear for their place in the West. This fear motivated them to gather together in
their collective organizations and enabled them to present to the non-ranching public an
image of a cultural group well-congealed. This dissertation utilizes ranchers’ personal
papers, ranchers’ publications, and cattlegrower association records to examine the varied
components of ranch culture that dominated ranchers’ collective conversations (including
their cultural valuation of masculine labor with cows, the importance of ranch women in
promoting the culture, and the magnitude of technological modernization of the ranching
industry) and suggests that in spite of profound tensions within ranch society, a dominant
culture facilitated ranchers’ unity and helped them to assert claims to political power. The
shared symbolic universe of ranchers’ everyday lives manifested itself in a cultural
system of language and images (cow talk) that had prevailing patterns across the region.
These patterns allowed ranchers to unify around a dominant culture. And although
ranchers certainly did not agree on everything, their divergences were of degree so that
9
while ranchers sometimes disagreed about specific policies or which insecticide really
worked best on bed bugs, they did not disagree on cultural principles. They then used
those principles to justify their claims to political, economic, and environmental power.
10
INTRODUCTION
BUILDING FENCE: CONSTRUCTING THE PARAMETERS OF THE STUDY
“Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined.”
~ Benedict Anderson, 1983
Figure 1 Cover of The Montana Stockgrower, 1955
In September of 1955, more than 4000 cattle men and women went to their mailboxes
and found their monthly Montana Stockgrower waiting for them with this image on the
cover.1 As ranchers gazed at the artistic rendition of themselves as cows herded together
in “mutual” protection, they may have nodded knowingly, since by the 1950s, range
ranchers in the United States West believed themselves to be under attack from all sides.2
1
Epigraph quote from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. Image from the cover of The
Montana Stockgrower, September, 1955. The Montana Stockgrower was the official publication of the
Montana Stockgrowers’ Association. Each of the state stockgrowers’ associations considered here
(Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming) used a monthly publication in order to
communicate with the “community” of cattle ranchers in their state and their region.
2
There is a long history of discussion about what and where “the West” is. Is it process? Is it a place? Is
it a fluctuating frontier or a coherent region? Many have entered into this debate since Frederick Jackson
Turner began it in the late nineteenth century. As David Emmons, William Cronon, and others have so
rightly discussed, both potential definitions of the West (process and place) are problematic. For clarity, I
have decided to offer a rather simple and inexact “definition” of the “West” as I refer to that term
frequently in this dissertation. For the purposes of this dissertation, when I refer to the West, I refer to the
11
The image is, of course, a kind of advertisement for the Montana Stockgrowers
Association as it tries to convince Montana cattlemen that they need to stand together to
protect themselves from an onslaught of threats. Yet it also suggests that Montana
cattlemen are already united behind the business of beef. “Back to back” the ranchers as
cattle face particular threats in the post World War II West. The image culturally
reinforces ranchers’ insularity and uniqueness. The image indicates that not just anyone
could literally embody cows as the cattlemen above do, and not just anyone had to deal
with the threats running rampant in range country. Montana cattlemen were situated
uniquely and had to protect themselves and one another against drought, disease, theft,
wildlife, competition, and that most slithering of all threats, prejudice. Each of these
issues was both a modern phenomena and an age old concern. The solutions to each
threat had never been simple, but the image intimates that ranchers could easily make it
through by herding together with other “cattlemen.” Simple enough.
The overt simplicity of the picture, however, belied the complexity of real life on
the range in the mid-twentieth century. No ranch was the same. Some ranches held large
region West of the 98th meridian that has, at certain moments in time, experienced historical phenomena
differently from other regions of the United States. The examples of this “historical phenomena” are,
according to my definition, resource-based and could include things like bison/grassland ecological system
(by using the term ecological system I intend to include American Indian interactions with the
bison/grasses, etc.), hard rock mining (including atomic mining), open range cattle ranching, and the
creation of massive irrigation systems, to name only few. My definition, then, is that the West is a region
of place-based processes that were not the same as those encountered in other regions of the nation-state. I
do consider “the West” as a distinct region while at the same time recognizing that culturally, politically,
environmentally, and socially the region is profoundly diverse. And while I do agree that “the” West is a
place, I agree with both Richard White and William Cronon, that that place has been linguistically,
culturally, and historically constructed. This dissertation undertakes to examine one of those resourcebased historical phenomena, at a particular moment in time. For discussions about defining the West see
William Cronon, "The West: A Moving Target," Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1994); David
Emmons, "Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West," Western Historical
Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1994); Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the
American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
12
numbers of deeded acres, others were rather small; some ranches in the intermountain
West existed in high altitude country in valleys surrounded by mountains, while some
were located on the Great (and seemingly endless) Plains, surrounded only by small
shrubs and a sea of grass; some ranchers had access to water while others did not; some
utilized hired labor, while many relied on family labor to make their way; and some had
large amounts of capital, while others operated in the red much of the time.
The image above, like other icons of the range cattle special interest group,
performed important cultural work by reducing the complexity of range ranching to a
vision of seeming accord. In downplaying both the complexity of the issues as well as
the response necessary to meet the challenges of those issues, ranchers’ cultural
productions allowed them to overlook the potential and very real tensions and divisions
within their group in order to assert an appearance of shared identity, unity, and power. It
is important to note here that when the image deemphasizes diversity, it renders all those
in the business of beef who were not range ranchers (whether feedlot owners, meat
packers, or dairy operators) as others outside of and peripheral to the main herd of range
ranchers. Clearly, this separation of beef producers is arbitrary and false. There are
myriad layers of the cattle business and at times range ranchers did have dairy operations
or did “finish” their cows by feeding them in corrals rather than on the range. Still, for
range ranchers, the range itself was what mattered in the construction of their group
identity and, as a result, I chose to focus exclusively on the range cattle industry and to
exclude dairy or feeder groups. In addition to range ranchers’ own characterization of the
range as unifier, it has historically been the range industry which has taken up the most
13
space (geographically, politically, and culturally) in the intermountain West and which, in
the popular imagination, people associate with the labor culture known as “ranching.”
When I refer to “ranchers,” therefore, I mean range cattle ranchers (of both
genders) who were owners and/or operators of small to large-sized operations in
Montana, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. I include in that wives and
daughters of ranchers who may not have considered themselves “owner/operators” but
who did consider themselves to be “ranchers.”3 In this dissertation, I have decided to
define “ranchers” as anyone engaged in the growing of cows on the ranch.
By
owner/operator I mean the class of people who owned and/or operated the ranch and
engaged in the growing of cows through grazing on range grasses. Included in this
definition, then, are the men and women who actually owned a ranch and ran any number
of head, but also included are those ranch folk who may or may not have owned part of
3
In subsequent chapters, I explore more critically the gender and racial tensions between ranchers as well
as the power relations between owners and hired hands. Because of the available sources, however, I have
mostly the voices of ranchers who either owned deeded property and/or utilized grazing permits to run
large to mid-sized herds or sources of managers who ran larger ranches off of the Indian Reservations
which pepper the West. Many American Indian tribes ran substantial operations, but the nature of these
enterprises (many were tribally owned) make them different from non-reservation ranches. As a result, I
have included American Indians whenever they belonged to the general stockgrower associations (as in the
case of Alvin Tso, a Navajo rancher in Arizona – see Chapters 4 and 6). I did not, however, address
associations on the reservations (such as the San Carlos Apache Cattlegrowers Association). A comparison
of the two would make interesting future research. Despite my inability to incorporate the reservation
aspect of twentieth-century ranching, Peter Iverson’s work seems to indicate that American Indian ranchers
very much engaged in cow talk as well. For discussions of Indian ranching see both Harry Getty, The San
Carlos Indian Cattle Industry (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963) and Peter Iverson, When Indians
Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1994) With regard to class as a category of analysis, at times, it was impossible to tell the
economic position of any given rancher (especially in the correspondence files of the state association
papers). What was interesting was that ranchers rarely discussed the size of any rancher’s holdings thus
serving to homogenize the group in interesting ways. When I could find out the size of the ranch, the
source base tended to come from larger ranches. I used these sources to read against the grain, looking for
the voices of those less commonly represented in the archives (especially female ranchers and hands, and
male ranch workers). For examples of those papers of prominent ranchers that have been kept safely in the
archives across the West see Conrad K. Warren Papers, Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site, Deer Lodge,
Montana and George F. Ellis Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
14
the ranch, but who were crucial to its “success.” I chose this broad definition because
while the bulk of my sources come from owners who were also operators, there is some
material that includes the voices of non-owner laborers on the ranch. While a dominant
culture with certain attributes arose in the larger society of range ranchers in the postwar
years, there was also a cacophony of voices suggesting that there might be tension just
beneath the smooth, unified surface of the group’s image.4
The diversity within ranching meant that no rancher experienced life in exactly
the same way as another and that each had her/his own individual interests. In addition to
this diversity of experience and opinion, the issues surrounding the industry were
profoundly complicated and, at times, threatened to divide ranchers.
Foreign
competition, taxes, predators, and federal regulations (to name only a few) all included
complex systems (whether human or ecological) that ranchers could not manipulate
easily. In the modern world of the post World War II decades, ranchers had to decide
how to react toward each of the “threats” to their livelihoods. They could have chosen to
do that on an individual basis – quietly grappling with the problems of the everyday on
their separate ranches. Instead of doing that, however, they increasingly joined their
collective, representative special interest groups.
In the postwar years, ranchers seemed to buy into the notion that they could find
strength in numbers, but this had not always been the case in the twentieth century. In
the mid-nineteenth century, ranchers began coming together in voluntary livestock
associations to advocate for their access to the grasslands of the West. In the early
4
For more discussion on this see Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6.
15
twentieth century, however, ranchers’ involvement in those groups tapered off. From
1945-1965, ranchers in the intermountain West again began to swell the ranks of their
collective associations with unprecedented numbers. By 1955, the main cattlegrower
associations in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona each could
boast of having 2000 or more members. Membership rosters continued to grow into the
early 1970s and these numbers had increased substantially from the lower numbers of the
1920s and 1930s. The New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, for example, reported
400 members in 1939, but by 1960 had 5500. In Montana, 502 members had belonged to
the MSGA in 1929, but by 1951, 4587 members had joined. Other state associations
reported the same kinds of increases in membership.5 In most states, 1 in every 3 ranches
had a membership in the cattlegrower associations – in some places, like New Mexico
5
It is important to note that all five associations based their membership on the ranch. So most of the
members had paid dues, based on the number of head the ranch ran, for the ranch. 4000 members meant,
generally, 4000 ranches, which could mean that multiple individuals actually belonged. It is impossible to
figure out how many individual ranchers belonged because it is impossible to know how many people lived
on each ranch. “Membership in the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association,” The New Mexico Stockman,
January, 1960, 61. “Membership Reaches All-Time High,” The Montana Stockgrower, May 1951, 28.
Because of the sparser population, the WSGA had the fewest members, numbering 2700 in 1957. Yet, still
in the mid-1950s, the Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association was adding as many as 70 members per month.
See “Honor Roll,” Cow Country, February 15, 1958, 17, in Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association
Collection, Box 251, Folder 6, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie and John
Rolfe Burroughs, Guardian of the Grasslands (Cheyenne: Pioneer Printing and Stationary Co., 1971), 338.
In 1955, Bob Schafer, membership chairman of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, went on a statewide
membership recruitment campaign. In that year, Schafer traveled 12,000 miles and recruited 800 new
members for the CCA. See Unknown, “Bob Schafer’s 12,000-Mile Tour Brings 800 New Members into
CCA,” Cattle Guard, May 1956, 12. Much of the increase in numbers came thanks to the tireless efforts of
the Executive Secretaries and committee members of the various associations. Ralph Miracle in Montana,
Abbie Keith in Arizona, Russell Thorp, and Robert Hanesworth in Wyoming, David Rice Jr. in Colorado,
and Horace Hening in New Mexico, for example, organized intense membership drives throughout the late
1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. These secretaries were also often the editors of the association
publications (as was the case in Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming and Arizona) which were the main
publicity and communication organs for the organizations. We will learn more about these professionals in
Chapter 6.
16
and Wyoming, it was 1 in 2. In addition to increases in membership in the main organs
6
of the livestock associations, thousands of ranch women joined the newly formed
women’s “auxiliary” of the livestock associations, the Cowbelles.7 The image above,
then, captures the historically specific phenomena of ranchers’ renewed congregation. In
the immediate post World War II years, ranchers decided it was worth coming together to
offer one another “back to back protection.”8
This dissertation undertakes to understand some of the motivations behind cattle
ranchers’ collectivization. Ranchers had to overcome great paradoxes in their lives and
tensions with one another in order to join the associations and in order to believe in their
common interests. The paradoxes vary. On the one hand most ranchers hoped to
maintain some sense of autonomy from government regulations, but also expected the
government to “protect” them from competition, and rescue them in emergency
situations. They prided themselves on their traditional “way of life” but felt the impetus
6
Importantly, these numbers have decreased in the latter twentieth century. Today, for example, the
MSGA has approximately 2000 members and the ACGA reports having about 1500. In many ways, then,
the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were the heyday of membership in the cattlegrowers’ associations. See
Montana Stockgrowers Association at http://www.mtbeef.org/ (current as of May 17, 2005) and the
Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association http://www.arizonabeef.org/ACGA.htm (current as of May 17, 2005).
7
The Cowbelles had formed in Arizona in 1939, but the most substantial membership increases occurred
from the late 1940s through the late 1960s. Michelle K. Berry, "'Be Shure to Fix the Fence': The Arizona
Cowbelles' Public Persona, 1950-1960," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25, no. 2 (2004).
8
It is hard to know exactly why ranchers came together when and as they did. The idea that interest groups
can and do form during times when a group’s welfare is threatened by changing socioeconomic and
environmental circumstances is a well-known theory of group formation in political science circles. The
first to suggest this theory was David Truman in his 1951 The Governmental Process. Truman asserts that
threat and potential harm tend to motivate humans to gather more closely together in groups since they are
already socially inclined animals (an idea he draws from Aristotle). There are many other theories on why
interest groups and social movement groups form. Mancur Olson, for example, suggested in 1965 that
collective action groups form not because of affinity for others in the group, but purely out of self-interest.
While certainly ranchers belonged to their associations in order to benefit individually, they came together,
I believe, because they had a group culture that promoted a belief in the righteousness of their persistence
as a group. For further discussions of this, see Chapters 1, 2, and 6. Mancur Olson, The Logic of
Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965) and David Truman, The
Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).
17
to embrace modern technological innovations. As a group, ranchers celebrated their
individuality and their identities as “business people,” but increasingly understood that
there was, in the postwar years especially, political, and cultural strength in numbers. As
they confronted a changed and changing postwar West, ranchers came to believe that
they had to overcome those paradoxes in order to appear a unified and powerful special
interest group.
In what follows, I suggest that ranchers used specific topics (such as
modernization, memory, labor, cows, and the non-human environment of their ranches)
around which to organize a culturally specific language (something I have termed “cow
talk”) which then enabled them to convince themselves that they were all experiencing
the same kinds of troubles. The image above is an example of the kind of cultural
production ranchers shared within their voluntary associations to make it seem as though
the tensions within their community were not nearly as important as the issues they had
in common. Grounding their culture in their material experiences with the ecology of
their ranches, ranchers resolved, at least superficially, the paradoxes and made
themselves appear collectively united. It may be easy to dismiss the cartoon-like image
above as simply being visual polemics, but I suggest we take the image seriously,
because I believe range cattle ranchers in the mid-twentieth-century West took the image
seriously, as it is but one source of many in which ranchers overlooked the diversity (and
division) within their group (note that all the cows are the same) in order to project an
image of cohesiveness.
18
In the postwar years, ranchers routinely used tools like this image to create a
cultural repertoire of language and image. This study is not, therefore, an in-depth social
history of the lives of individual ranchers, but is, instead, a cultural history of a political
group. By culture I mean the shared beliefs and understandings of a group that are
presented through language, rituals, and images. Visual cultural productions produced by
and for ranchers in their collective groups in the immediate postwar decades served to
highlight their claims to (and sometimes their loss of) power. While I agree with Donald
Worster that we need a comprehensive history of range management, my purpose is not
to detail the ins and outs of range policy and practice, but rather to gain insight into
dominant rancher culture – to discover the things most (if not all) owner/operator
ranchers had in common, and to reveal some of the stories ranchers shared with one
another about their life ways.9 Ranchers employed those stories to appear as though they
all were united in a shared commitment to, at least nominally, the same goals. Part of the
ranching community’s ability to maintain their influence and power in formal political
circles during the postwar years stems from their cultural cohesion as a group which they
then used as a foundation on which to base their attempts to preserve their economic,
political, and environmental power.
In many ways, then, this dissertation investigates also ranchers’ claim to and quest
for power. Ranchers concerned themselves most with the power they believed was
present in economic solvency and environmental use and access. They hoped to maintain
their economic power by pursuing policies advantageous to their businesses (such as
9
See Chapter 3, “Cowboy Ecology,” in Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the
American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 34-53.
trade policies which prohibited foreign beef imports).
19
They sought to retain their
environmental power by advocating for access to and use of the grasslands of the West.
They participated in lobbying and policy formation at the state, local, and federal levels,
and urged public representatives to consider their interests above the interests of other
constituent groups. In order to access new power and retain what power they had,
ranchers engaged in activism and advocacy that most would recognize as traditionally
“political.”
But they also sought power through their culture.
They based their
maintenance of formal political power in an image of a steadfast and righteous economic
culture grounded in a timeless use of the land. I argue that in the case of range ranchers,
and perhaps in the case of other special interest cultural groups, we cannot uncouple
political power from cultural power as they inform one another.
Power emanated not just from ranchers’ official positions on “political” topics
such as grazing fees and tariffs, but also in the cultural texts they created for one another.
In the 1970s and 1980s, theorist Michel Foucault suggested that power exists everywhere
and emanates from all places and can be studied through discourses. His work has great
application for this particular group of historical actors because ranchers produced an
abundance of texts (including letters, articles, plays, autobiographies, images, and, even,
events) that reveal the power relations they had with one another as well as the power
relations they had with “others” who were not in the ranching business. Using Foucault’s
ideas, I read the texts for issues and assertions of power coming from multiple places.
Foucault referred to multiple origins of power as “force relations” and suggested that in
recognizing the dissemination of at least some level of power among all people we can
20
begin to have a clearer understanding of the ways in which hierarchy and resistance
works. In this case of range cattle ranchers, I did not use Foucault’s theories to look for
resistance as much as I used them to help illuminate the ways in which ranchers worked
diligently to both maintain their power (over the land and particular sets of “others”)
while at the same time arguing for a concept of community in which all “ranchers” could
exercise power within the group. This important use of power by ranchers in their group
also forced or at the very least allowed ranchers to accept a certain level of hegemony
within their culture. If all ranchers were to be “created equal” and at least appear to be
united, then their dominant group culture, that culture which they projected publicly, had
to privilege those cultural emblems that all ranchers could appreciate as having
definitional power within the group. Foucault also argues that “force relations” exist not
only in the larger structures of economics or politics, but in the relentless workings of the
everyday.10 Ranchers gained power from precisely that -- their experiences everyday on
their ranches. It was the power they gained from those everyday experiences with their
cows and with the non-human world of their ranches that they then used to create a
collective culture.
This culture had many components. It included a collective memory that ranchers
created using the experiences of early cowmen on the range (which is in essence the topic
of Chapter 2). It incorporated conversations about and concern over their experiences
10
In trying to understand the ways in which hegemonic cultural emblems came to fore in ranch culture, I
rely on Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualizations of hegemony. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); Antonio Gramsci, A Gramsci reader: selected writings, 1916-1935
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988); T.J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony:
Problems and Possibilities” American Historical Review 90, No. 3 (1985): 567-593.
21
with modernization and the non-human ecology of their ranches (Chapter 1). It
integrated a subtle, but hegemonic celebration of the masculine (refer to Chapter 3 for a
discussion of this). The prevailing gender ideology of ranch culture valued the male
experience with ranching over the female. In short, a valuation of masculine work and a
vision of the righteousness of patriarchal relationships claimed hegemony, and thus
definitional power, in the culture of range cattle ranching. The final component of ranch
culture involved ranchers’ celebration of their labor as ranchers (see Chapters 4, 5, and
6). They believed themselves to be part of a unique and threatened work culture which
they should also seek to defend. The use of these topics to create a dominant culture
allowed ranchers not only to believe in their collectivity but also to trust in the
righteousness of their advocacy as a special interest group. Each of these topics will
comprise the chapters which follow and help to address various aspects of historical
scholarship. Before turning to a discussion of the chapters and the scholarship, however,
I want to first set the historical scene.
To non-cattle folk, of the twenty-first-century West, the image of ranchers as a
cohesive group fighting angrily for their “rights” may smack of the familiar. Many
westerners and even some western-oriented easterners are well-aware of ranchers’ zeal in
protecting what they refer to as their “way of life.” On any given day in towns across the
arid West, one can read a newspaper article about some rancher taking a stand – against
developers, against the federal government, against “illegal” immigrants.11
11
See for example: Associated Press Wire, “Ranchers Ride into the Sunset: Cowboys Can’t Afford Land,”
Denver Post, November 17, 2003, 1E; Leo Banks, “Under Seige,” Tucson Weekly, March 10, 2005, 23-28;
Brian Maffly, “Independent Ranchers fight corporate control,” High Country News, September 30, 2002, 4;
Tim Vanderpool, “Klump Country Blues,” Tucson Weekly, May 20, 2004, 23-28; Ann Wendland, “Fewer
22
This zealousness is not completely new as ranchers have been fighting for
continued access to the resources of the West. Ranchers have been one of the most
successful groups in the United States West in maintaining their collective power over
the long twentieth century.
Indeed, since the late-nineteenth century, range cattle
ranchers have maintained considerable control over range resources (both publicly and
privately). In the late-nineteenth century, for example, the livestock associations in the
United States West formed when cattle barons gathered together to protect their chattel
property from rustlers. These organizations remained quite influential during the heyday
of open range ranching, but as more human beings arrived in the arid West, over the
course of the twentieth century, competing cultural values clashed over land use
priorities.
These contests over appropriate resource use become ever more urgent after the
mid-twentieth century because, beginning after World War II, the open spaces of the
West increasingly became filled by newcomers.12
During this period, ranchers
successfully maintained not only their ubiquitous position in regional and national
cultural mythology, but also their access to public resources for financial gain. As
Thomas L. Fleischner, a professor of environmental studies at Prescott College in
Arizona, explains, “No other interest group has ever played...[the]...game of
Hats...More Heads: Ruminations on the Quivera Coalition Trying to Find Harmony Between Agriculture
and Environmentalism,” The Canyon Country Zephyr, June/July, 2003, 22.
12
For an excellent study of the conflict between competing interests in one area of the arid West, see
Nathan Sayre, Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest : Species of Capital
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). For other discussions about the changing context of the post
World War II West see Chapter 4 of this dissertation as well as R. Douglas Hurt, ed., The Rural West since
World War Ii (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1998), Gerald D. Nash, The American West
Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
23
institutionalized self-interest as effectively as ranchers. During the legislative battles
concerning the Taylor Grazing Act in the 1930s and FLPMA [Federal Land Policy and
Management Act] in the 1970s, ranchers succeeded at diffusing the laws' regulatory
authority.”13 Ranchers maintained low grazing fees, kept public lands open for grazing
(including designated “wilderness” areas), and successfully lobbied for federal assistance
in the form of research, development, and protection.
Non-ranchers, such as
environmentalists, in the “new” West of the postwar decades have not accepted ranchers’
presence on the western range as a given, and they have protested against the power of
ranchers both through formal political channels as well as in less formal ways (such as
vandalizing ranchers’ property, including cutting fences).
As increased conflict
contentiously seeped out into the range spaces of ranch country, ranchers erected “No
Trespassing” signs, circled their wagons, and set about shoring up the remaining power
they had left.
Their success in maintaining that power speaks volumes about the tremendous
persistence they have had as a group, and it is ranchers’ power as a group that I am most
interested in this dissertation. While I do not want to reify their harmony and promote
their image as fully united, I do think it is their image as a unified group that has had the
most influence in their maintenance of power. And that belief in the righteousness of
their culture and their fear of losing that culture propelled ranchers into their collective
13
Thomas L. Fleischner, "Land Held Hostage: A History of Livestock and Politics," in Welfare Ranching:
The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, ed. George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson (Sausalito,
CA: Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2002).
24
organizations in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The industry that gathered together in
these decades, however, was quite unlike that of the ranching of popular imagination.
Indeed, cattle ranching in the United States West encompassed a long history by
the postwar decades. Many, if not most people, are aware of some history of cattle in the
US West. For the majority of Americans, the exciting moment in cattle ranching came in
the mid-late nineteenth century – the era of the great cattle kingdoms and the “heroic”
cattle kings. It is this “golden” era of cattle ranching that most captures the collective
imagination about the West. Cowboys, Indians, homesteaders eking out a living in a
harsh land and pursuing “the American dream” of life, liberty, and property have
captured much of the popular imagination about the West’s over the long twentieth
century. The heroic, progressive, and triumphalist narrative of the open range is, of
course, painfully inaccurate and incomplete, but it is an enormously important plank on
which the myth of the American West rests. Historians, for a long time, promoted this
focus on the late-nineteenth century. The broader preoccupation with Frederick Jackson
Turner and the frontier in Western United States history compelled historians to focus
their early studies of cows and their care-takers on the nineteenth-century cattle boom.
The cattle kings were part and parcel of the frontier age and whether one wishes to
celebrate or critique the era, many historians have asserted that the cattle industry of the
late nineteenth century was one of the most vital industries in the cultural, political, and
economic emergence of “the West.”14
14
For an enduring and broad discussion of the importance of the mythic West in both culture and
scholarship see Robert G. Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence: University
of Kansas, 1986). See also Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). The better-known and most important of scholarly
25
Ironically, however, despite the amount of scholarly and imaginative attention the
years of the open range has received, the era was quite fleeting and only encompassed a
few decades. The brevity of the phenomena of open range ranching might well have
been what has made it so interesting to so many. Ranching as we know it in the latetwenty first century, however, is nothing at all akin to the nineteenth-century industry.
The industry and “ranchers” as they appear to us today really solidified its form in the
mid-twentieth century. After the difficult winter of 1887 on the Great Plains, during
which most ranchers lost upwards of 90 percent of their herds, cattlegrowers across the
intermountain West region realized that an era had come to an end.15 Beginning with the
reserving of forest areas in the 1890s and gaining speed throughout the early twentieth
century, fences began to dot the once open rangelands. By 1934, and the passage of the
Taylor Grazing Act (which effectively closed the public domain in the West to sale),
ranching had become fixed. The endless motion of vast herds moving across unfenced
treatments of the late-nineteenth-century in the West, are Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier,
1830-1860 (New York: Harper, 1956); Howard Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial
History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of
the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985); Robert Utley, The
Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984);
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1952). Those works dealing
specifically with the cattle boom are Blake Allmendinger, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an
American Work Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Edward E. Dale, The Range Cattle
Industry (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1930); Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns: A Social History
of the Kansas Cattle Trading Centers, Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City and Caldwell, 1867-1885
(New York: Atheneum, 1976); David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of
the Far West, 1850-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd., 2001); James A. Young and B.
Abbott Sparks, Cattle in the Cold Desert (Logan: Utah State University, 1985). Terry Jordan examines the
earliest years of cattle ranching in his sweeping book, but also devotes considerable time to the “cattle
boom” of the late nineteenth century. See Terry Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers:
Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993).
15
The winter of 1887 brought unprecedented blizzards to most parts of the Great Plains and had been
preceded by a prolonged drought. These two ecological phenomena, coupled with the arrival of cheap
barbed wire (invented in the 1870s) and the shifting environmental ethics of the “progressive” federal
government in the early 1900s meant the end of open range ranching. For Arizona and eastern New
Mexico, the end of the open range came a bit later. The “big dry up” of the 1890s was brought the ultimate
demise of the open range phase of ranching in the Southwest.
26
spaces from Texas to Montana had ceased. Certainly cattle still moved from here to there
– to market in trucks and rail cars, and on hoof to and from winter pastures – but the days
of a cattle baron grazing his (and they were almost all male) cattle on millions of
“unclaimed” lands was over, forever.
Still, ranching persisted. Indeed, Wallace Stegner once wrote that “ranching is
one of the few western occupations that has been renewable and has produced a
continuing way of life,” but interestingly enough, there are comparatively few studies on
the ranching occupation after the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act and World War II.16
There are several searing critiques of range ranching in the late-twentieth century and
parts of these books do contain a chapter or two on the long twentieth-century history of
range cattle ranching, but none address the industry in a solely historical context.17 It is
an examination of twenty years of this context that I hope to lend to the debate about
ranchers’ power and place in the twentieth-century West.
So why focus just on the twenty years after World War II? In short, the economic
boom that arrived at the end of World War II set up two decades that were both typical
16
Paul Starrs quotes Stegner in Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 155. Starrs’ book is one exception to the dearth of literature on
ranching in the West post-1945. For other exceptions that focus, at least partially, on the postwar decades
see R. McGreggor Cawley, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental
Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Grosskopf, On Flatwell Creek: The Story of
Montana's N Bar Ranch (Los Alamos, NM: Exceptional Books, 1991); Karl Hess, Visions Upon the Land:
Man and Nature on the Western Range (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992); John T. Schlebecker,
Cattle Raising on the Plains, 1900-1961 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Robert L. Sharp,
Big Outfit: Ranching on the Baca Float (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974).
17
For three presentist studies see Lynn Jacobs, The Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching (Tucson: L.
Jacobs, 1991); George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson, eds., Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized
Destruction of the American West (Sausalito, CA: Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2002); Jeremy Rifkin,
Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992). Like the other books
listed here, Eric Schlosser’s best-selling book is also generally anti-ranching in orientation, but he does lend
what appears to be a less-biased view of the use of the range for the growing of red-meat protein products.
See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2001).
18
and atypical for ranchers.
27
As had always been true, prices and precipitation fluctuated
throughout the period covered here. The five years after the war were one of the most
lucrative times in history to be a rancher in the US West, but beginning in 1950 and
continuing through 1957, ranchers hit some of the hardest times any of them had
witnessed. Prices soared directly after the war, but dropped precipitously in the early
1950s due to prolonged drought throughout the region. Thus the ebb and flow of cattle
prices and range health, which can generally be characterized by extremes, was no
different during this period. What was different in this period was the radical socioeconomic changes the region experienced more broadly. As we will see in Chapter 1, the
rise of the military-industrial complex brought an influx of social, cultural, and economic
change to the West. New residents brought new demands on the open spaces of the
region and threatened ranchers’ time-honored place in the territory. Some form of these
demands can be said to have culminated in the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.
For this study, then 1965 (the year the Wilderness Act took effect) represents a good
ending point, since for land use and environmental values in the West, it was a watershed
moment.
Additionally, the 1940s-1960s was, historically speaking, both the zenith and the
nadir of family ranching. Family-based ranching simply refers to ranches that were
18
I chose not to begin the study in 1935, when the Taylor Grazing Act passed, mainly because decade
between 1935 and 1945 was exceptional for most ranchers. Prices were the lowest they had been in years
in the late 1930s, and the droughts the worst. Furthermore, wartime for the cattle industry (like most all
industries in the United States) was unusual due to the ways in which the government controlled production
and prices. There are several studies that address the Taylor Grazing Act, both its creation and its
immediate aftermath. See Cawley, Federal Land; Karen Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meaning:
Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them (Berkeley: University of California, 2002);
William D. Rowley, U.S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands: A History (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1985).
28
owned by family groups rather than publicly-traded corporations (like present-day
Monsanto or Con-Agra). From the late 1940s through the mid 1960s, the number of
ranches in each state fluctuated, but averaged between 6,000 (in New Mexico) and
10,000 (in Wyoming).19 During the immediate postwar era, the ranching industry was
more family-based than ever in its history. The average rancher ran about 300 head of
cattle on approximately 3500 acres during the years covered in this study. And while the
number of ranches decreased (and the size of ranches increased) during the 20 years in
this study, they were not gobbled up by large corporations (as was the case for citrus
farms in California in these same years), but rather by other, family-owned ranches. The
rise in membership numbers in the associations in these years, therefore, is paradoxical
when compared to the decrease in numbers of ranchers overall in the same period. Ranch
size was increasing, minimally, but still increasing, while the aggregate numbers of
ranchers (and all agriculturalists in the United States) was declining.20 In the 1950s and
1960s, then, range ranchers, always the minority in the West, became increasingly aware
of their precarious position and their need to assert a singular collective identity and
purpose.
Additionally, the huge spreads so common in the open range era of ranching
became uneconomical during the postwar decades for two reasons. First, the Great
19
See Homer J. Berkshire, “New Mexico’s Livestock Business,” The New Mexico Stockman, December,
1939, 10. William Chapman, Commissioner of Agriculture, to Mrs. William E. Dover, 7 October 1953,
Box 183, Folder 8, Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of
Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
20
See Mark Friedberger, "Cattle Raising and Dairying in the Western States," in The Rural West since
World War II, ed. R. Douglas Hurt (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1998), 198-206. Richard
White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 520-521; James R. Gray, Ranch Economics, (Ames:
Iowa State University, 1968), 6-10; and John T. Schlebecker, Cattle Raising on the Plains,185-86. The
aggregate numbers of cattle in each of the five states in this study increased in these decades due in part to
technological developments in the raising of cattle. For numbers of aggregate livestock in each of the state
see agricultural statistical reports for the years 1945-1965. For example, Richard K. Smith, Agricultural
Statistics 1949 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1949).
29
Depression had sapped capital from most all ranchers. And secondly, the increasing need
to feed (rather than graze) cattle in certain times of the year became essential due to grass
shortages on the range. Thus, if ever there was a “democratic” era of ranching, and an
era when family ranching appeared most vulnerable, 1945-1965 was it. After 1965, the
trends of ranchers selling out to large buyers accelerated (although it never kept the
corporatized pace with other agricultural enterprises in the United States).21
I focus on the intermountain West of the 1940s-1960s for ecological and
geographical reasons.
While I chose to do a multi-state study (and thus sacrifice
microsocial for macrosocial historical inquiry), I still had to draw limits to the study in
some manner. Any number of states could have also been included here.22 I selected the
five states of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona because they
experienced the historical context of the postwar decades similarly. They also are unified
ecologically in interesting ways.
While there are specific and diverse bioregions
throughout the area, each state/ecological zone is linked by the spine of the Rocky
Mountains, aridity, and the presence of grass lands. Of course, the species of grass in
each state varies not just between state lines but within state borders. Thus eastern
Arizona has as much in common with western New Mexico as it does with western
Arizona. Similarly southeastern Colorado is situated on the Great Plains and so shares
the traits of shortgrass country with eastern Wyoming, Montana, and New Mexico, and
21
Feed is notoriously more expensive than grass as one has to either have the irrigation and machinery to
grow ones own feed or one has to buy feed. These issues will be addressed in more detail in chapters 3 and
5. See Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 520; James R. Gray, Ranch Economics,
(Ames: Iowa State University, 1968), 6-10; and John T. Schlebecker, Cattle Raising on the Plains, 19001961, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 185-86.
22
Texas, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada come readily to mind and perhaps some enterprising scholar will follow
up this study with a comparative study of other cattle growing states.
30
has very little in common with the high country of west central Colorado. In short,
ranchers in each of these five states lived in bioregions that paid little attention to the
arbitrarily drawn political demarcations of state borders. While any given rancher may
have had much in common ecologically with others in her/his state of residence s/he
might also have had much in common with ranchers in a neighboring state, at least
ecologically. This transcendence of boundaries by grassland ecologies, therefore, also
helped ranchers to transcend political borders and come together regionally in interesting
ways.
Additionally, the intermountain West ranching industry was united in a range
ranch work culture during the postwar decades because most ranches in this region still
focused on range ranching in this era. Feedlots became more common in the postwar
years, but they did not come to dominate this region in the immediate postwar years (as
they did in California and even Texas to some degree) so that cow/calf and/or steer
operations still reigned supreme.23 In short, all ranchers in these five states had one
omnipotent goal -- to grow fat, healthy cattle in disparate and diverse ecological niches.
Weather (including temperature and precipitation), grass species, topography, wildlife,
and soil types all varied immensely from one ranch to another, but ranchers still engaged
in common labor – the growing of cows for sale and/or breeding. In addition to having to
23
For this study, I have chosen to focus on beef cattle rather than dairy cattle because the two industries
had little in common. On a cow/calf operation, the primary goal is the breeding of mature cows and heifers
(mature cows are females that have already produced at least one calf and heifers are females that have not
yet produced any offspring). The calves can be used both as future breeding stock and/or feed stock. Steer
operations were less common in range country. Generally these steers (castrated bulls) were fattened either
for finishing at feedlots or for slaughter. Many of the ranchers in the postwar decades blended both kinds
of operations – resulting in a diverse business focus (and some ranchers even had a few dairy cows to
supplement the family’s diet). All range ranchers in this study raised beef cattle. The primary breeds
grown in the five states in this study were Hereford, Angus, and Brahman.
31
overcome political paradoxes as they came together in their collectivity, ranchers also
had to figure out ways to discuss ecological similarities and disparities.24 But it was the
very dominance of environmental diversity that often enabled ranchers to find their
commonalities.
In understanding the culture of a political group (instead of just the politics of a
cultural group), we can discover insights into how such a diverse people could come
together to project a hegemonic image of togetherness.
Additionally, studying the
political power of “culture,” may suggest a new way for thinking about cultural history in
the context of power. Historians Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert Johnston both
have both that rural historians would do well to reclaim the political in their narratives,
but they situate the “political” in the governmental realm, arguing that “after nearly twodecades-long hegemony of social history that neglected...the study of governmental
institutions, many scholars have finally begun to return to...[the viewpoint]...that politics
is central to our study of the past.”25 Two excellent examples which study the relationship
between ranchers and the federal government historically in the twentieth century are
24
The ecological biogregions of this broader intermountain West region are complex and comprise
numerous species of both shrubby plants and grasses. The Great Plains, for example, comprises four
grassland types and are dominated by four species of grass in the central and southern parts: Andropogon
gerardii, Schizachyrium scoparium, Panicum virgatum, and Sorgastrm nutans . While in the northern
portions of the region the dominant grass is Stipa spartea. Southwestern desert grasslands obviously vary
from this. For discussions of the myriad of grasses found throughout the region and for discussions of the
climatological and topographic differences between ecological bioregions see Steven J. Phillips and
Patricia Wentworth Comus, eds., A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000); United States Forest Service, The Western Range. Letter from the Secretary of
Agriculture Transmitting in Response to Senate Resolution No. 289: A Report on the Western Range - A
Great but Neglected Natural Resource (Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1936); Martin
Vavra, ed., Ecological Implications of Livestock Herbivory in the West (Denver, CO: Society for Range
Management, 1994).
25
Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston, ed., The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State:
Political Histories of Rural America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 6.
32
William Rowley’s U.S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands, A History and Paul
Hirt’s Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World War II.
These would be the kinds of work for which McNicol Stock and Johnston call. In these
works, however, rural actors themselves (ranchers in these cases) are not at the center of
the story.26 Rather, the federal government commands the focus of critical analysis for
both authors. Ranchers in each of these studies remain largely objects of history, living
at the whim of an impersonal state. Paying attention to formal politics is important, but
when the definition of the political includes only actors’ involvement with “the” state
apparatus, it is too narrow. This dissertation underscores the point that a group’s culture
can be as political (and as powerful) as their voting behavior and lobbying tactics.
Ranchers based both their culture and their politics in their environmentally-based
labor experiences and ethics. In this study, then, ranchers’ labor with the ecological
system of the ranch is a central organizing concept because they themselves used their
labor as a unifying emblem. Richard White’s suggestion that people know the nonhuman world most intimately through work is particularly applicable to people in the
range cattle business. Their work did not simply orbit around domesticated ungulates,
but also relied on the ecological interconnections of rain, grass, soil, microbes, and
wildlife. Both Donald Worster and White agree that when people transform the earth
through their work (be it in agricultural, industrial or “white” collar sectors) they also
transform themselves, their social relations, their political goals, and their cultural
26
See Paul Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World War Two
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); and Rowley, U.S. Forest Service.
33
ideologies. Labor is crucial for understanding both the environmental perceptions and
interactions of ranchers as well as understanding the identity, culture, and politics they
created for themselves.
White has encouraged environmental historians to begin to address workers
outside of the “traditional” earth-dependent professions (e.g. farmers, ranchers, loggers),
but the literature does not yet addresses these professions from both labor and
environmental perspectives (especially in the latter twentieth century), and this is why it
is important to address agricultural workers’ quest for collective influence.27 Historians
have long artificially separated agricultural and environmental history, and this study
bridges that divide by infusing agricultural economic history with ecology.28 Neither
environmental historians nor agricultural historians have considered cattle folk as
environmental actors whose work informs their environmental knowledge and beliefs.
The two must be connected in order to understand their relationships.29
27
Richard White, ""Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?"" in Uncommon Ground:
Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton and Company, 1995).
28
Primarily, my work answers both Richard White’s and Donald Worster’s calls to wed labor, agricultural,
and environmental history. Worster suggests, and I agree, that there has been a disconnect between
agricultural history and environmental history. See Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth:
Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” The Journal of American History Vol. 76, No. 4,
(March 1990): 1087-1106.
29
For examples that offer exceptions to the rule by doing an excellent job blending the environmental and
agricultural see Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American
West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness:
Agriculture as Colonization in the American West, ed. Jack Temple Kirby, Studies in Rural Culture
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), and John Walton, Western Times and Water
Wars: State, Culture and Rebellion in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Donald
Worster’s, Dust Bowl attempts to connect a people’s (agri)culture and their agrarian practices, but the
culture of Great Plains farmers becomes staid in Worster’s hands, and the people there emerge as
unfettered, one-dimensional capitalists. I hope my story about western cattle folk’s culture is more nuanced
by being particularly aware of the paradoxes under which ranchers lived everyday. See Donald Worster,
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Nathan Sayre’s
book, Ranching, endangered species, and urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2002), is an excellent account of the intersections between ranching and the
34
Because they labored within a broader ecology, ranchers understood themselves
to be dependent on (and yet in control of) the non-human world of their ranches and thus
they lead us to reconsider the effect the non-human nature can have on human beings.
Historians Linda Nash and Bruno Latour have suggested that social scholars begin to
consider human beings as enmeshed in ecological systems of “actor networks.”30 Range
ranchers’ everyday experiences with the non-human world of their ranches created a kind
of socioenvironmental world with which they had to grapple physically and cognitively.
In order to “make a living” and to maintain their “way of life,” ranchers had to work with
and then conceptualize the broader ecological worlds of their ranches. I have chosen to
define the ecological world of the ranch as broadly as possible, because not only did
environment of the borderlands, but does not address the culture of ranchers in any meaningful way.
James A. Young and B. Abbott Sparks, Cattle in the Cold Desert (Logan: Utah State University, 1985)
weds the human and the non-human but addresses only the early period of ranching in the Great Basin
desert. Richard L. Knight, Wendell C. Gilgert, and Ed Marston have edited an anthology which is one of
the most thoughtful works regarding the important intersections of ecology, economics, and culture but,
while it is informed by a certain kind of historicity, it mainly addresses policy making and current range
management strategies. See Knight, et al. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology and
Economics (Washington: Island Press, 2002). Other agricultural histories tend to be focused more on rural
sociology and/or on issues of rural policy. This literature is enormous. For some of the best agricultural
history for the twentieth century see Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco,
and Rice Cultures (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1985); Cindy Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor:
Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1997); R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames: Iowa State
University Press, 1994); Hurt, ed., The Rural West since World War II; Mary Neth, Preserving the Family
Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
30
By actor networks, these authors mean to suggest that both humans and non-humans interact with one
another with a certain amount of agency. I do not necessarily believe that as humans we can understand the
consciousness or intentions of non-human beings, but I do believe that non-human elements in
environmental systems exert power over the humans involved in their ecological networks. That is
certainly true for ranchers. The presence or absence of rain or of cattle microbes exerted power over
ranchers and their lives. Not only were these kinds of actors out of the ranchers’ control, they also directly
affected the decisions ranchers made and the actions they took. See Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays
on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Linda Nash, "The Agency
of Nature or the Nature of Agency?," Environmental History 10, no. 1 (January 2005): 67-69. Thanks to
Doug Weiner for turning me onto these ideas and works. See also Douglas Weiner, "Presidential Address
American Society for Environmental History," (Houston, Texas: 2005).
35
humans exercise power within ranch ecological systems, so too did non-human nature.
Everything from soil to precipitation to wildlife to microbes to cows to other ranchers
acted within ranchers’ ecological networks.
In working within the actor-networks of their ranches, ranchers created “cognitive
maps” which they then shared with another through language and iconography. As
anthropologist Tim Ingold has so skillfully suggested, human beings know themselves
and their world through sensory explorations of it.
Ingold views humans not as
organisms outside of non-human ecology, but rather as embedded within both human
social relations and non-human ecological relations. Humans’ capabilities "of action and
perception" are "indissolubly” experienced through both “mind and body."31 Historian
Mart Stewart, in many ways presaged Ingold’s theoretical suggestions in his ‘What
Nature Suffers to Groe’: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, by revealing
the intense effect the non-human ecology of the South had on recreating a southern
plantation owner’s relationship with the world.32
The new relationship required a
rethinking of the plantation’s labor regime and like Stewart, I center the historic labor of
the ranching community with the non-human world of their ranches in the hope of
unearthing the ways in which the “environment” shaped ranchers’ bodily labor
experiences, economic expectations and circumstances, as well as their cognitive
understanding of themselves as environmental actors.
31
Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 5.
32
Mart A. Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Grow": Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
36
Particularly interesting and complicated in an examination of ranch labor are the
ways in which the concepts of and experiences with ranch work differs among classes of
ranchers. Large owner-operators had distinct labor experiences compared with small
owners. Ranch laborers’ experiences differed even further. Ranchers understood and
justified this labor differentiation socially through a paternalistic world view grounded in
values of masculinized hierarchy and control. I utilize and contribute to the scholarship
on masculinity and comparative gender history by suggesting the ways in masculinzed
hegemony ordered the rural world of range ranchers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.33
And, importantly, it was not only male ranchers who participated actively in this
gender ideology. Ranchwomen too partook in the creation of patriarchal hegemony by
both resisting and consenting to it.34 They accepted the growing of the cow as central to
the maintenance (cultural and economic) of their families and lives, but, beginning in the
1940s, they also began to assert their unique importance to the industry through gendered
activities – namely, the promotion of beef consumption and their participation in their
33
We know quite a bit about the masculinist work culture of the nineteenth-century cowboy and have some
ideas about the ways in which the rise of technology and agribusiness changed lives on nineteenth and
twentieth-century farms, but little work has examined the nature of twentieth-century cattle labor and the
ways in which workers materially and ideologically linked their own gendered identities with their labor.
For the best examples of the scholarship on cowboy work and gendered farm labor see Allmendinger, The
Cowboy; Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds : Mid-Atlantic Farm Women,
1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) and Promise to the Land : Essays on Rural Women
(Albuquerque: New Mexico, 1991).
34
For discussions on patriarchy vs. modern male dominance, see Linda Gordon and Allen Hunter, "Not All
Male Dominance Is Patriarchal," Radical History Review 71, no. Spring (1998). For the best work on the
importance of gender within the West and within work cultures see Ava Baron, "Gender and Labor
History," in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991), 1-47; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of
Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Susan Johnson, "‘A Memory
Sweet to Soldiers’": The Significance of Gender," in A New Significance: Re-Visioning the History of the
American West, ed. Clyde Milner, II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Joan Wallach Scott,
Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
“auxiliary” organization, the Cowbelles.
37
In some ways, then, ranch labor culture
resembled traditional patriarchy (the father/head male in charge of “subordinates”
including wives and children), but it also took on an altered gendered form as
ranchwomen claimed producer roles and asserted their importance to the overall success
of the ranching enterprise.35
It was often the Cowbelles (and before their “official” organization, ranchwomen)
who were responsible for the organization of social activities and for the collection and
publishing of the groups’ cultural products and memories. The proliferation of the
woman-only chapters of the Cowbelles in the 1950s provides an excellent venue through
which to increase historical understanding of postwar, rural, Western women’s political
awareness, environmental consciousness, and labor identities. Gender historian Susan
Lee Johnson insists that the West has always been a place of disrupted gender roles.36
The appearance of woman-centered organizations during decades often described as “the
doldrums” for middle class, urban American women suggests that perhaps the rural West
continued to be a place of unstable and shifting gender relations throughout the twentieth
century.37
35
Unlike the male sources I uncovered for this work, some of which included the voices of hired hands,
most all of my female-authored sources come from owner/operator ranchwomen. I have little evidence
from the wives, daughters, sisters of ranch laborers and I have no evidence from female ranch hands. Thus,
my discussion of the gendered interactions within ranch culture is focused on and speaks to those women
who either owned a ranch themselves or who were related to a male owner/operator.
36
Susan Lee Johnson, “ ‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers: The Significance of Gender,” in Clyde Milner, II,
editor, A New Significance: Re-visioning the History of the American West (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 258.
37
The scholarship on postwar women is rich and varied. Some scholars like Elaine Tyler May have
asserted that the postwar decades (especially the 1950s) were intensively conservative years for middle
class, urban housewives, whereas other scholars, like Joanne Meyeowitz, have questioned that
interpretation and have discovered in the immediate postwar years intense organizational, intellectual and
political activity for vast numbers of women. For examples of some of the best scholarship in postwar
38
The dominant culture of range ranching that assumed hegemonic ascendancy in
the larger group of ranchers, therefore, grew out of not just commonalities, but also out of
negotiations, assertions, and seizures of power.38 The single most important tool ranchers
used to even out those negotiations of power and create a seemingly seamless cohesion
among one another was through the deployment of their cultural language, “cow talk.”
This language enabled ranchers to create identities based on notions of gender, labor, and
environment, and allowed them to claim a “way of life” that was unique in the
increasingly urbanized and uncertain world of the twentieth-century intermountain West.
Ranchers utilized cow talk most significantly when they created their collective
memories of work, environment, gender roles, and culture. Chapter 1 analyzes how
women’s history see Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The
American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amhearst: University of Massachusettes Press,
1998); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic
Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 19451960 (Philadelphia: Temple Unviersity Press, 1994); Leila Rupp, ed., Survival in the Doldrums: The
American Women's Rights Movement 1945-1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Rickie
Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in
the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Amy Swerdlow, "Ladies Day at the Capitol: Women
Strike for Peace Versus Huac," in Women's America: Refocusing the Past, eds. Linda Kerber and Jane
Sharron DeHart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
38
Perhaps one of the most important works on women’s cultural and intellectual engagement with the
natural world came in 1984 from Annette Kolodny with her pathbreaking work The Land Before Her:
fantasy and experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1984). My work will differ from hers in several ways, but regardless of the differences, the
importance of studying women’s understandings of the non-human world remains because it is still
troublingly understudied. In particular, rural women’s scholarship does an excellent job of looking at the
kinds of work rural women accomplished from colonial times to the present and is beginning to connect
this with particular power relations, but rural women’s intellectual engagement with their lives and their
place seldom appears in the historiography. Jellison, Entitled to Power; Jensen, Loosening the Bonds :
Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850; Sally McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: Dairying Families and
Agricultural Change, 1820-1885 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995); Neth, Preserving the Family
Farm are some examples of rural women’s historians who do investigate power relations and the political
ramifications of their lives. Most of rural women’s scholarship interrogates farm women (especially in the
South, mid-Atlantic and Mid-West) and neglects ranch women (and largely neglects the West). For an
exception see Dee Garceau, The Important Things of Life: Women, Work, and Family in Sweetwater
County, Wyoming, 1880-1929 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). My dissertation addresses
this gap in our historical knowledge by studying cattle women’s intellectual, political, labor, and cultural
contribution to a rural industry in a region west of the 100th meridian.
39
ranchers mobilized their collective and cultural memories. In the postwar decades, cattle
folk in all five states yearned for a by-gone past predicated on memories and personal
connections to those who lived on the range “in the good old days.” Between 1945 and
1965, there was an onslaught of memory-based publications written by members of the
cattle industry and each of these used memory and personal connections of a particular
past to give legitimacy to the culture and identity they were creating in the present.39 For
example, in justifying the need for an anthology on Montana “Cowboys and Cattlemen”
in 1964, Michael Kennedy, the editor of the collection claimed that his family heritage
gave him a particular link to cultural knowledge of the industry.
“Granddaddy
Lynch,
after
going
through
most
of
the
He explained,
adventures
of
a
frontiersman...finally settled down on one of the early cattle ranches where my mother,
aunts and uncles were raised in a real pioneer ranch setting...this is mentioned only to
indicate some first-hand intimacy with range history and a life-long appreciation of
cowboys, cowmen, and range talk.”40 In each of the memory productions, including
Cowboys and Cattlemen, a certain kind of past prevailed and stood in as “authentic.”
Using historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s theories about the ways in which certain
memories trump others in hegemonic memory productions, I analyze which pasts won
over others and suggest how and why these triumphant collective memory stories
39
For just a sampling, see Eulalia Bourne, Woman in Levis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967);
Arthur Carhart, Hi Stranger!: The Complete Guide to Dude Ranches (Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publishing
Company, 1949); Agnes Morely Cleveland, No Life for a Lady (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1941);
Jo Jeffers, Ranch Wife (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964); Agnes Wright Spring, 70 Years Cow
Country: A Panoramic History of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (??, 1943); Yavapai Cow
Belles, Echoes of the Past: Tales of Old Yavapai (??, 1955).
40
Micheal Kennedy, ed., Cowboys and Cattlemen: A Round-up from Montana, the Magazine of Western
History (New York: Hastings House, 1964).
41
“maintained their emotional charge” for the range cattle industry.
40
In particular, these
stories communicated ideas, values, and practices which held meaning for ranchers.42 I
incorporate the innovative studies of collective memory to “link representation with
social experience” and to explain how ranchers relied on an imaginary past to create
commonalities with one another.43
Using memories, cultural conversations about their physical interactions with the
ecology of their ranch operations, and colloquial language, ranchers re-inforced their
commonalities with one another. Needless to say, ranchers did not all agree with one
another, but in these years interesting patterns emerge in which ranchers focused on
issues they held in common. Of course there were other discourses occurring at the same
time (not to mention the discourses absent from the sources). My purpose, therefore, is
not necessarily to have the last say on range ranchers in the middle of the twentieth
century, but rather to begin a discussion about them. I am not interested in having the
last word here because as Clifford Geertz has told many a social scientist over the years,
historical investigation is a “strange science whose most telling assertions are its most
41
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," in Gender and
the Southern Body Politic, ed. Nancy Bercaw (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2000).
42
Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," American Historical
Review 102, no. December (1997). I rely on the following sources to help conceptualize the role and power
of memory in the history of the cattle industry: Susan Crane, "Writing the Individual Back into Collective
Memory," American Historical Review 102, December (1997); Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History,
Memory, Narrative (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The
Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); David Lowenthal,
The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Viking, 1996). To my knowledge, there are
no sources on the role of memory in the culture of rural associations in the twentieth-century and thus my
work will be original in this area.
43
Confino, 1402. This investigation into memory and identity will also illuminate agrarian studies by
revealing some of the ways in which a particular agricultural group understood themselves and their place
in a region during a time in which many perceived their industry to be experiencing economic hardship as
well as assault from outsiders (tourists, urbanites and federal government officials).
41
tremulously based.” While I am sure that I am telling this story accurately, I am acutely
aware that I am not telling the only story, and I am not even telling this story in the only
way it can be told.44 Still, the social discourse of ranchers suggests how ranchers have
imagined, maintained, and reified their collective power.
The papers of each state
cattlegrowers’ association, the publications of those associations, official histories of the
associations, rancher autobiographies, and ranchers’ private papers (including business
records, letters, and diaries) all tell the story of ranchers’ hegemonic culture. That culture
was comprised of a “cluster of symbolic” acts and words that, taken together, reveal the
“unapparent import of things” in the daily lives and political identities of range cattle
ranchers.45 My work, therefore, sheds light on the ways in which ranchers’ lived their
lives in material ways in the immediate postwar decades and also how they understood
their lives in a historical moment of profound change.
While I may not be able to claim that ranchers’ collective experiences can stand in
for political interest groups writ large, ranchers’ experiences from 1945-1965 in creating
institutional power based in hegemonic culture can lend insight into how special interest
groups in the larger sense work. Many social movement theorists tend to be sociologists
with little interest in historical sociology or social history. A few intrepid individuals,
however, are bucking the norm and are beginning to turn toward the past to lend insight
into how people act in concert. Elisabeth Clemens is one of those. While Clemens’ work
is focused specifically on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century rise of special
interest groups (and particularly on the politicization of organized labor), her ideas for
44
45
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: 1973), 29.
Ibid., 26.
42
how groups work have particular relevance for my discussion of cattle ranchers in the
mid twentieth century. She argues that until recently, scholars have been obsessed with
the question of “for what” and “for whom” people gather collectively. She suggests that
while the “for what” and “for whom” is important, scholars would do well to begin to pay
more attention to the how people organize and think of themselves collectively. Drawing
on Claude Levi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage, Clemens argues that groups of people
necessarily have repertoires of organization that they utilize in order to create collectivity,
and that these repertoires are, at least partially, cultural.46
Ranchers indeed used organizational repertoires in their postwar collectivization
largely because they inherited the organizational and institutional structures of their
associations from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Colorado
Cattlegrowers’ Association organized as early as 1867 to be followed by the Wyoming
Stockgrowers’ Association in 1873, the Montana Stockgrowers’ Association in 1884, the
Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association in 1904, and the New Mexico Cattle Growers’
Association in 1914. By the 1920s, each of the five associations had a least one full-time
staff member (and thus a true institutional structure).
As ranchers flocked to their
associations in increasing numbers in the postwar years, they naturally utilized this more
formal structure of institutionalism. But in addition to their institutional (or structural)
associations, ranchers also used what social movement theorists call “cultural tool kits.”
By the 1950s, a new world confronted ranchers. This new world was one where the
federal government, encroaching outsiders, and new modernization technologies, affected
46
Elizabeth Clemens, The people's lobby : organizational innovation and the rise of interest group politics
in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
43
their material realties every day. Ranchers, therefore, tweaked their cultural tool kit in
the postwar decades to create a script of identity that was grounded both in their material
experiences and on an imaginative construction of their “way of life.”
Cattle ranchers’ collective power was not solely structural. Mine is not a typically
Marxist conclusion about economics and materiality determining the culture
(superstructure) of a group of people. Like E.P. Thompson, I am interested in the ways in
which “material experiences are handled in cultural ways.”47 To discover the cultural
ways of range ranchers, I relied, largely, on a methodology of semiotics and have
benefited immensely from the literary turn in the historical discipline. Using Michel
Foucault, Hayden White, Lynn Hunt, and other cultural theorists, I have attempted to find
patterns and meanings within the texts produced by and for the ranching community in
the intermountain West.48 These texts revealed both the repressive aspects of power as
well as its creative capacities. The texts, therefore, are not completely unified and I read
them fully aware of the debates about the value and shortcomings of cultural history and
the literary turn. Certainly the texts may not reflect reality but neither do they simply
create an imaginative world that existed only in the authors’ minds. And certainly not all
ranchers “read” the cultural productions in the same ways. These texts (letters, diaries,
oral histories, memory productions, association publications, and images (including
47
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 10.
For the foundational texts of the literary turn see Dominick LaCapra, Rethining Intellectual History:
Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Hayden White, Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). For two of the
best New Western Histories that utilize, at least somewhat, semiotic analysis and cultural theory, see Susan
Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (London: WW Norton, 2000)
and Katherine Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997).
48
44
photography and drawings) all contained “an available stock of tropes” which served to
tie ranchers to the dominant ways of thinking of their group.49
Throughout the course of research, I discovered a prevailing pattern of certain
issues (cattle health, modernization, range health, weather, government intrusion, and
pride in their identity as ranchers, to name a few) as well as a patterned mode of
discursively signifying the importance of those same issues within ranching society.
While culture can be highly contested and divisive, it also can be quite unifying.
Ranchers certainly did not agree on everything, but their divergences were of degree.
They sometimes disagreed about specific policies or which insecticide really worked best
on bed bugs, but they did not disagree on principles, and they used those principles to
justify their claims to political, economic, and environmental power.50 As Lynn Hunt
notes, the real value of studying the culture of a group lies in the attempt of the historian
to understand how “linguistic practice...could actively be an instrument of (or constitute)
power.”51 The shared symbolic universe of ranchers’ everyday labor manifested itself in
a system of language and images during the postwar years that ranchers used to convince
one another that anyone in the ranching business, in spite of their differences, shared a set
of present circumstances and a shared stake in a common destiny. As Natalie Zemon
Davis has suggested, the texts of a group of people can help us understand how they
49
Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994).
51
Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt
(Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 17.
50
52
“made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience.”
45
So
ranchers did in the topsy-turvy years of the postwar decades. They came together in their
larger associations and used a cultural language (cow talk) to make sense of their world
in a way that enabled them to appear coherent and unified and to maintain a sense of the
justness of their claims to power.
A wise graduate student once explained to me that there are two kinds of history –
“The From To” and “The Age Of” histories.53 This study is most decidedly the latter. In
this way, “Cow Talk” is especially inspired by the work of E.P. Thompson and Michel
Foucault. Like both of these cultural scholars suggest, I did not look for “origins” of
ranchers’ lives in the postwar years nor have I written a progressive or declensionist
narrative. I discerned little change over time in ranch culture in the twenty years covered
in this study because what I discovered, like Thompson in his study of eighteenth-century
England, was a group of people interested not in becoming something else, but in simply
being in power.54 Like Thompson, I have found myself more interested in the existence
and attitude of this political interest group than in issues of causality (how/why did they
get where they were). How ranchers communicated with one another and what they said
has been as much of a concern for me as why (although I do offer some hypotheses about
the latter).
As I perused the texts, I found something new beginning in ranch culture in the
postwar years. It was in the immediate postwar decades that ranchers came together to
52
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century
France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
53
Thanks to Bob Morrissey at Yale University for this and other enlightening conversation.
54
E.P. Thompson, "Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History," Indian Historical Review 3 (1977): 251.
46
remake their image as a group and to act, for the most part, in concert, because they
found themselves situated in a particular socioenvironmental milieu. The new economic,
political, and social world of the post World War II West certainly affected their lives,
but ranchers were also affecting their own material reality with their actions and
discourses. They came together to discuss the best new machinery. They gathered to
share stories of droughts, blizzards, and bugs. They anted up the annual dues for their
associations (about 40% joined their state associations, many more joined their local
associations). They redesigned their official publications to make them more professional
and longer. Their collective meetings (state conventions, local association meetings, etc.)
increased dramatically in attendance. They joined together every week, and every day,
all across the region at auctions, government hearings, and picnics to listen to and discuss
the state of their economic and environmental lives. And as they did this, they created
discourses in their private and public texts that had larger patterns and “remarkable
synchronicity.”55
Following the patterns of ranchers’ concerns and discourses, this dissertation is
organized thematically.
Chapter 1 examines the broader context of the postwar
intermountain West.
In particular, ranchers experienced modernization and
mechanization intimately and intensely and used these material experiences to create
camaraderie with one another. Chapter 2 investigates the memory productions of cattle
ranchers in the mid-twentieth century to uncover the components of collective memories
that ranchers employed when creating a collective (and partially mythic) past. Chapter 3
55
MacLean, Behind the Mask, xvi.
47
uncovers the social world of production on “typical” range cattle ranches and reveals the
types of work conducted within the broader ecology of intermountain West cattle ranches
in which different ranch laborers engaged. Chapter 4 focuses on the more specific
ecological labor of ranchers – wherein ranchers physically interacting with the nonhuman world of their ranches. This chapter will also reveal the ways in which after
working with their cows, ranchers then came together to share cultural and cognitive
stories about those physical interactions to create commonality with one another.
Chapter 5 investigates the role of the market in ranchers’ lives and suggests the ways in
which competitive capitalism served to further unite ranches. Lastly, Chapter 6 offers a
more detailed explication of cow talk and will examine more closely ranchers’ collective
associations.
Wallace Stegner once wrote that “ranching is one of the few western occupations
that has been renewable and has produced a continuing way of life.”56 This dissertation
investigates just what this “way of life” included. More importantly, however, it also
suggests that we should pay particular attention to the ways in which this special interest
group, and special interest groups more generally, use culture to create affinity with one
another. The ways in which ranchers culturally valued their “way of life” goes a long
way in explaining how they maintained an image of unity as a group since the midtwentieth century.
56
Paul Starrs quotes Stegner in Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 155.
48
CHAPTER 1:
HUNTERS & HIGHWAYS: THE POSTWAR CONTEXT OF RANCHERS’ LIVES.
1935-1965
“It seems like progress always seems to destroy something in its wake.”
~ Abbie Keith, Arizona Cattle Growers Association, 1956
“People never want anything so badly as when they think it is about to disappear.”
~ Farrington Carpenter, 1935
Figure 2 Picture of rancher with new hat, ca 19501
The above image was tucked away discreetly in the back of one of the 200 some
odd boxes in the Wyoming Stock Growers Association’s (WSGA) papers. The undated
illustration was unsigned. It had not appeared in Cow Country, the WSGA’s monthly
periodical, and, with the way it lay seemingly unclaimed in the box, it appears to be an
image for which the WSGA record-keepers cared little. Perhaps the informality of its
placement in the historical record was a result of the fact that it has a slightly sad air
about it. It does not celebrate a youthful rancher looking ahead to a limitless future and it
does not depict an old, but proud cattle baron of the nineteenth century. Rather, the
rancher seems aged, somewhat weak, uncertain, and befuddled by the sparkling new hat
1
Unknown, Box 192, No Folder, Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association Records, AHC, Laramie.
49
he holds. The rancher’s face expresses dismay at the shape and texture of the garment
and his gaze seems tinged with bewildered fear.2
The tough, masculine air so prevalent in conceptualization of “cowboys” stands in
stark contrast to the rancher in the above drawing.
Instead of exuding an aura of
confidence and strength, the wide-eyed rancher seems perplexed and even angry at the
appearance of the new hat, and while many cultures, including perhaps the dominant
culture of the United States, celebrate modernity and “progress,” ranchers in the midtwentieth century confronted the modernization of their lives with profound uncertainty.3
The modernization, which began accelerated during World War II and continued
throughout the Cold War years (and beyond), affected ranchers unevenly. Even the term
“modernization” could have multiple meanings depending on a rancher’s individual
circumstance. To one rancher becoming modern may have meant having to decide
whether or not to add another tractor to his fleet of 50. For another, it may have meant
buying the first fossil fueled vehicle the family had ever owned.
2
For one rancher
Box 192, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Records, American Heritage Center, University of
Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
3
The term “rancher” is, in some ways, difficult to define. Throughout this dissertation, when I refer to
“ranchers” I mean generally the class who owned a ranch and saw to the day-to-day ranch operations on a
range cattle ranch. This group includes both small, large, and mid-sized ranch operations. Furthermore, the
term owner/operator includes women. Most ranches in this era were family operations wherein the owners
both owned and operated the ranch. There were, of course, exceptions – especially for the very large
ranches whose owners used hired labor to run the day-to-day operations. The Bell Ranch in New Mexico is
an example of this exception. Still even in these situations, while the operators were waged labor, they
often owned some cattle of their own and often owned or leased smaller plots of land near their place of
employment to grow their own herds. George Ellis, manager of the Bell Ranch, for example, both ran
cows for the Bell as well as owning a small herd of his own. The dominant ranch culture that solidified
itself in the postwar years was, generally speaking, created and reinforced by this owner/operator class. In
this chapter, when I refer to “ranchers,” I employ the term more broadly when I discuss modernization
because ranch hands as well as owner/operator ranchers, large ranchers and small, all felt the effects of
modernization acutely. The decision about which forms of modernized mechanization to bring to the ranch
(which I discuss in the second half of this chapter), affected a less general group of ranchers, namely the
owner/operators.
50
modernizing may have meant deciding whether or not to purchase an electric washing
machine, while for another it may have meant purchasing an airplane. For one rancher
modernization may have meant having to interact with the federal government’s grazing
regulation agencies, while for another it may have meant deciding to sell the ranch to
capitalize on the high property values of the postwar West. While modernization varied
tremendously for ranchers across the intermountain West, for all ranchers the process and
possibility of modernization literally enveloped them in the immediate postwar decades.
As a result, ranchers felt differentially riddled with bullets of rapid change.
Importantly all ranchers lived in an age of great changes, and, in some ways,
ranchers in the postwar era had much in common. New technology, mass produced,
awaited them at the feed store and in rural catalogs. Property values (and often taxes)
increased at a consistent rate, often because outsiders descended on range spaces in
search of summer homes, rural retreats, and weekend recreation. Federal and state land
managers found themselves in increasing regulatory control of public space in the West.
These trends did not originate in the postwar years, but their sheer depth and breadth was
new. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 bolstered the increasing regulation of federal
grazing land which began in the late 1800s with the creation of forest reserves. Peoples
of all races and classes had been flooding the arid West for centuries, but in the postwar
years the population of the region increased exponentially.
Every rancher in the
intermountain West encountered one or more of these phenomena during the postwar
decades. Regardless of whether or not ranchers welcomed it, modernity arrived in the
51
New West in what seemed to many old timers to be the blink of an eye, and it demanded
intellectual, emotional, and material responses.
Many historians have considered the vast changes wrought in the West as a result
of the Second World War, and it is not my purpose in this chapter to reconstruct the ways
in which the “Old West” became the “New West.”4 Instead I want to use this chapter to
highlight the broader context of ranchers’ lived experiences in the postwar decades in
order to set the scene for what follows in this dissertation. The context of the “new west”
affected the lived experiences of ranchers and led them to create a set of practices which
helped them to alleviate tensions among themselves and present an image of a unified
front to a broader public.
The term modernization connotes a process that includes multiple and interrelated
phenomena that are historically specific. In this chapter, I deploy the term in order to
suggest several ways that ranchers experienced a change in their ways of life due to the
historical context of the post Taylor Grazing Act and postwar world. Definitions of
modernization abound, but for ranchers from 1935-1965, modernization encompassed
4
For discussions of the emergence of the idea of a “new west” in the historical discipline, see the anthology
edited by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, and especially Limerick’s
essay “What on Earth Is the New Western History?” in Clyde A. Milner II, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and
Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1991).
See also Michael McGerr, "Is There a Twentieth-Century West," in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America's Western Past, eds. George Miles, William Cronon, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1992). For discussions specifically on developments in the twentieth-century West see Michael
P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain, The American West: A Twentieth-Century History (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1989); Kevin J. Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 1945-1989 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Center for the American West, 1998); Howard Lamar, "Westering in the
Twenty-First Century: Speculations on the Future of the Western Past," in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America's Western Past, eds. George Miles, William Cronon, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1992); Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War; Gerald D.
Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990); Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
four main elements.
52
First, there occurred a consolidation of policy-making and
centralization of organs of the state, especially in the arena of range management.
Second, a new degree of close interaction between the state and its subjects arose due to
the increase in regulation of range spaces. Third, western spaces underwent intense
urbanization which affected not just those in cities, but also rural inhabitants. Fourth,
unprecedented
economic
production
occurred
on
range
ranches
due
to
an
“industrialization” of agriculture. The process of modernization for ranchers, then, was a
process that included both changes in the social make-up of western spaces as well as
changes in the ways in which ranches operated.5
In this chapter, we will focus on some of the important ways in which the
modernity described above structured ranchers’ lived experiences and affected their
collective ideologies. We will consider how the context of the changing West meant an
influx of “outsiders” into ranchers’ worlds. It was in dealing with these outsiders that
ranchers created a language of localism, or cow talk, grounded in their rural sense of
identity as cow folk. Ranchers’ claims of local knowledge positioned them in conflict
with an increasing population of newly arriving “others” in the West, and allowed
ranchers to create an image of cohesion with one another. We also will examine the
ways in which ranchers’ decision-making about mechanizing (I will use the term
“mechanize” instead of industrialize because ranchers themselves used the term
“mechanize”) their ranches allowed them to enter into a cultural conversation with one
5
For interesting discussions of modernization, including the definition I apply here see Yoshiie Yoda and
Kurt Radtke, The Foundations of Japan's Modernization: A Comparison with China's Path toward
Modernization (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1996).
another.
53
Confronting constant technological and social change enabled ranchers to
believe they were experiencing common troubles and that they could overcome these
troubles, at least partially, through their association with one another.6 For many years,
ranchers had prided themselves on being the “guardians of the grasslands.” In ranchers’
minds, the events and changes from 1935 through 1965 offered them the chance to
promote rhetorically and to enact materially that guardianship in ways they had never
before felt the opportunity, obligation, or need to do.7
The modernization ranchers experienced in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, was
presaged by events in the mid-late 1930s and early 1940s. In particular, the year 1934
changed ranching in the West permanently. That year the federal government passed the
Taylor Grazing Act thereby exponentially increasing the regulatory control of the state
over range resources. The passage of the Act was influential for ranchers all across the
intermountain West, but it was exceptionally poignant in Montana as it occurred in the
year of the Golden Jubilee anniversary of the Montana Stockgrowers’ Association. Just
6
The idea that interest groups can and do form during times when a group’s welfare is threatened by
changing socioeconomic and environmental circumstances is a well-known theory of group formation in
political science circles. The first to suggest this theory was David Truman in his 1951 The Governmental
Process. Truman asserts that threat and potential harm tend to motivate humans to gather more closely
together in groups since they are already socially inclined animals (an idea he draws from Aristotle). There
are many other theories on why interest groups and social movement groups form. Mancur Olson, for
example, suggested in 1965 that collective action groups form not because of affinity for others in the
group, but purely out of self-interest. While certainly ranchers belonged to their associations in order to
individually benefit, they came together, I believe, because they had a group culture that promoted a belief
in the righteousness of their persistence as a group. In Chapter 2, we will discuss some of the cultural
productions that ranchers produced in order to reinforce this cultural belief in and commitment to their
longevity as a group. See Olsen, The Logic of Collective Action and Truman, The Governmental Process.
For work that tries to apply both Truman’s and Olson’s theories, see Paul A. Sabatier, "Interest Group
Membership and Organization: Multiple Theories," in The Politics of Interest: Interest Groups
Transformed, ed. Mark P. Petracca (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
7
See Chapter 2 for more information on the importance of grass in ranch culture and for a discussion of
ranchers’ collective memories of being guardians of the grasslands.
54
at the moment of profound and irreversible change heralded by the passage of the Taylor
Act, Montana ranchers were celebrating their long history of “free” access to grass. The
Miles City Daily Star commemorated the big occasion with the following blurb:
The picturesque traditions of the past fifty years bring back memories of
great achievements. The stockmen of Montana builded (sic) an institution
upon a foundation of soundness which has endured for these five decades.
Through the luster of the sunshiny days and the dimmed shadows of the
cloudy ones, the Montana Stockgrowers’ Association faces new trials to
test its enduring qualities at the close of a half century of effort and
attainment. Half-way to the century mark of activity, much is yet to be
accomplished...Further progress rests upon the tomorrows of sunshine and
promise.8
The article lauded ranchers’ great achievements and asserted a progressive narrative of
accomplishment, but by the 1930s, that progress had become severely threatened by the
lack of cloudy days. Indeed the tomorrows of 1934, to which the article referred, brought
much sunshine – but it was almost too much sunshine. The previous year brought severe
droughts and the 300 million grazing acres in the western United States were in terrible
condition. The 1933 droughts had hit the Southern Great Plains the hardest, and ranchers
all over the intermountain West experienced the pain of low moisture and low prices.
The drought of 1934, however, according to ranchers like J.D. Craighead in southeastern
Colorado, “was a heartbreaker.”9
June, 1934, was extraordinarily difficult for many ranchers as it was the height of
the near-crippling drought. High temperatures, low precipitation, and a price depression
that had begun after World War I, forced many ranchers out of business and those
8
Unknown, Miles City Daily Star, May 24, 1934, 1.
JD Craighead to Dr. Bessie Metz, 26 October 1943, Papers of Jacob D. Craighead, Box 5, Folder 1, The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
9
10
ranchers, who remained, finally realized that they needed help.
55
Help in June, 1934,
arrived from the federal government with the signing of the Taylor Grazing Act. It was
that Act that would bring the old days of ranching to a permanent close.
By 1934, the federal government, under the leadership of New Dealer Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, knew that something needed to be done in order to assist rural
Americans economically. In order to get agriculturalists back on their feet, New Deal
scientists, buoyed by the new science of grassland ecology, believed the land needed a
chance to recover. The ideal of recovery motivated government ecologists, western
cattlemen, and federal Congressional representatives to urge the passing of regulatory
legislation to monitor grazing on the public domain. With little opposition from western
ranchers in the final months of legislative wrangling, Congress and FDR passed the
Taylor Grazing Act.11
10
Census material reveals that the highest involuntary changes in land and “farm” ownership in the states
under consideration here occurred, not surprisingly, in the 1930s. During the Depression decade, 35 out of
1000 farms changed hands through delinquent taxes, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and administrator sales.
This out-paced the voluntary sales and trades category which shows 28 out of a 1000 farms changed hands
in this manner. It is important to note that ranches were not considered a separate category from “farms” in
the census during these years. In the five states here, however, it is clear that the majority of both private
and federal agricultural lands were used, at least partially, for the raising/grazing of cattle. For the former
statistics, see United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics (Washington, D.C.: United
States Government Printing Office, 1949), 569. For the latter statistics see United States Department of
Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics (Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1957), 427.
11
The passage of this act was not at all as simple as I make it sound here. Passage of legislation removing
the public domain from open access to ranchers has a long, convoluted history. Because it is not the
purpose of this dissertation to chronicle the ins and outs of public lands grazing, I will not go into great
detail about that history, but there has been much written about it, and I will give a quick overview here.
Karen Merrill has written the best book chronicling the policy debates and divisiveness engendered through
the removal of public domain from resource use by the federal government in the late decades of the
nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. She argues, quite convincingly, that at the heart of
the general conflicts about public lands grazing policy and the specific conflicts over the innards of the
Taylor bill stemmed from two different views of “property rights” – ranchers held the view that they were
entitled to access to public resources (invested through historical usage and through rights as members of
“the public”) and the federal government believed itself to be the ultimate steward (and owner) of those
lands. In spite of these tensions, the bill passed and, on the whole, ranchers approved of it because in its
final form, the Act gave considerable power to ranchers at the local levels. It set up advisory boards to
56
In its early years, the Taylor Grazing Act was popular within many sectors of the
livestock community.12 Part of the popularity of the Act in the West may have rested in
the fact that it was organically grown by a western rangeman from Colorado.
Representative Edward Taylor recognized that the soil in most range areas was badly
depleted and needed time to rejuvenate.
The Act, however, like most New Deal
environmental legislation, was much more concerned with the health of human beings
than with the non-human world. In typical anthropocentric prose Taylor wrote the Act in
divvy up the initial “permits” and to cooperate with grazing Service to decide carrying capacity of the
range. The livestock associations were intimately involved in and were often in charge of appointing the
rancher representatives on the local advisory boards. Because they had such an active part in the regulatory
enforcement of the Act, ranchers did not generally complain about the Act in the early years. In the 1940s,
in fact, ranchers’ ire was directed much more at the Forest Service, due to its heavy-handedness in deciding
animal unit months of grazing on forest service lands, than at the Grazing Service. The Grazing Service,
while not wholeheartedly loved by all, avoided much of ranchers’ anger until the early 1950s when it began
to threaten fee increases. For the best sources on the history of and problems surrounding public lands
grazing see Debra Donahue, The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to
Conserve Native Biodiversity (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Hirt, A Conspiracy of
Optimism; E.L. Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies, 1900-1950
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1951); Rowley, US Forest Service. For works specifically
on the Taylor Grazing Act, see Wesley Calef, Private Grazing and Public Lands: Studies of the Local
Management of the Taylor Grazing Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Phillip O. Foss,
Politics and Grass: The Administration of Grazing on the Public Domain (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1960); Gary Libecap, Locking up the Range: Federal Land Controls and Grazing
(Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1981); Merrill, Public Lands.
12
There were other policies wrought on livestock communities in the West which were not nearly as
popular as the Taylor Grazing Act. For example, John Collier’s decision to slaughter millions of Navajo
sheep without full support from the Navajo people undermined the tribe economically and brought cultural
hardship. Policies such as herd reductions, however, were very different from the creation of a permitbased grazing system, which was the outcome of the Taylor Act. For a discussion of the New Deal’s
impacts on Navajo sheep ranchers see Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence,
Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1983). For a general discussion of American Indian cattle ranching, see Iverson, When
Indians Became Cowboys. In the later twentieth century, Hispanic and American Indian pastoralists in
northern New Mexico and southern Colorado began ground-breaking cooperative ranching efforts to both
curb negative environmental effects of grazing and to aid in the cultural and economic viability of the
region. See Devon Pena, Chicano Culture, Ecology, and Politics (Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 1998); Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the
Southwest (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998).
13
order to “stabilize the livestock industry dependent on the public range.”
57
According to
the Act, the Secretary of the Interior had legal discretion to create grazing districts and
charge graziers a small fee for use of the public domain. Additionally, the act provided
for the creation of local grazing boards and a federal Grazing Service. These bodies,
appointed through the Department of Interior, were in charge of deciding fee amounts
and grazing allotments.14 The boards tended to be peopled by powerful ranchers in local
regions. These ranchers, following the language of the law, gave grazing permits to
livestock owners who owned property next to the grazing sections and who had water
rights in the area. The Act (after Congressional amendments) brought 146 of the 165
million acres of open grazing lands in the West under the control of the Grazing Service
(later the Bureau of Land Management, 1949). Without necessarily ending grazing
activities on those acres, the Act “represented a radical solution to the grazing issue by
injecting federal management into the administration of lands that previously had been
virtually ignored.”15 Ranchers welcomed the management as long as it remained locallycontrolled and conservationist (versus preservationist) in nature.16
13
Gerald D. Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West (Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1999).
14
There was a class-based aspect to the Taylor Act in that priority for granting permits was given to first,
those ranchers who owned property adjacent to Taylor lands, secondly to those ranchers who had claim to
water, and thirdly to all other ranchers. Poorer ranchers who owned no deeded property (although vastly in
the minority), therefore, were disempowered through the act as their access to “free” grass was curbed
substantially. See again Merrill, Public Lands.
15
William L. Graf, Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions (Savage, Maryland: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1990).
16
For discussion on the intellectual reaction of ranchers to the rise of conservation in the early twentieth
century, see Merrill, Public Lands and Rowley, U.S. Forest Service. For the seminal discussion of
conservationist values see Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive
Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). Ranchers did indeed
possess an instrumentalist view of natural resource usage – rather than supporting the “preservationist”
agenda of setting aside “nature” to view from afar (a political stance that began in the late nineteenth
58
Early in the enforcement of the Taylor Act, supportive ranchers and politicians
agreed that the act needed to “promote the highest use of the public lands pending [the
land’s] final disposal” (emphasis mine).17 Wording such as this left many ranchers to
believe that the act was meant as a stop-gap measure that would be only temporary. For
the most part, they welcomed the assistance in the 1930s, but because of its vague
language, the Act set the scene for intense conflict around definitions of “reasonable”
fees, the meanings of property and grazing “rights,” the federal government’s jurisdiction
over “public domain” lands, and the future of these lands.
Many of the foundations for the debate over federal management of grazing lands
began in the late nineteenth century in conjunction with the rise of the United States
Forest Service. The agency’s control over grazing in the national forest reserves, which
began in earnest in the 1890s, brought range cattlemen into contact with a new federal
agency whose goal was far different from the General Land Office (the other federal
agency with which the ranchers may have done business pre-1890). The General Land
Office, as well as the United States Department of Agriculture, had, throughout the
nineteenth century, encouraged private individuals to own and work the open spaces of
the far West. Leaders of the two agencies had long believed in the Jeffersonian ideal of
an agrarian democracy and, as Karen Merrill has explained, “throughout the nineteenth
century, the federal government sought ways to dispose of all its land (through sales,
grants, or homesteading) in the belief that its sovereignty would only be deemed
century, gained currency in the 1950s, and really took off in the 1960s), they supported political
movements that promoted management of those resources for use in present and future generations.
17
For wording from the actual statute see Taylor Grazing Act, 43 U.S.C. § 315 (1934).
59
legitimate if it could both transfer clear property titles to individuals and organize the
sparsely populated territories into states.”18 Range ranchers, too, had largely bought into
the idea of landed yeomen being crucial to the success of the republic. Ranchers even
went a step further, and by the early 1900s, fancied themselves the proper guardians of
the range. They resented, from early on, the incursion of the federal government into
resource control.19
By the early twentieth century, when the progressives had assumed control over
the federal government, a changing of the guard seemed to have taken place with regard
to the federal government’s management of its natural resources.
Many ranchers
disdainfully referred to Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot as the “cowboy” and the
“dude” respectively. Neither man was a “true” westerners or “true” rancher – and range
cattle barons viewed the conservation policies of both as examples of further eastern
colonization of the West. Beginning with the Forest Service, under whose jurisdiction
the grass of the early forest reserves fell, ranchers would have a long and sordid history
with agents of “the state.”20
18
This history between range ranching and the federal
Merrill, 9.
George Godfrey, New Mexico rancher, captured this sentiment when he wrote a letter-to-the-editor of
The Lordsburg Liberal in 1947. In arguing for the lessening of federal government land regulation in the
West, he explained that it was “the American way” to have “an agricultural population firmly rooted to the
soil of America through private ownership.” According to Godfrey, the federal government should step
aside and trust that ranchers would never “abuse the land, for we [ranchers] know we cannot for long and
show a profit.” See George A. Godfrey, "They Kicked Us Off Our Land," The Lordsburg Liberal August
8, 1947.
20
The United States Forest Service began its regulation in the 1890s. Cattlegrowers in the West, in their
associations, had begun to clamor for and receive government regulation about some livestock issues such
as disease control as early as the 1870s (especially regarding the spread of ticks from Texas). But the
enforcement of regulation in these areas tended to fall to ranchers themselves as there was not a
professionalized bureaucracy of range managers until the twentieth century. See Jimmy M. Skaggs, The
Cattle-Trailing Industry: Between Supply and Demand, 1866-1890 (Lawrence: The University of Kansas
Press, 1973).
19
60
government has been, largely, about conflicts over power and definitions about local
knowledge and property rights.
The conflicts around the public domain and the federal government’s sovereignty
began in the late nineteenth century, experienced a lull in the 1930s, when ranchers
needed help, and resurfaced fervently in the 1940s. The conflicts continue to this day and
are the focus of much of the history written on the western range industry. Indeed,
historians such as Karen Merrill, William Graf, and William Rowley have discussed the
causes, conflicts, and outcomes of federal control of grazing spaces at great length.21 For
our purposes, however, it is not necessary to recount all of those details. Suffice it to say
that while the creation of the Grazing Service in 1934 was the culmination of four
decades of policy debates and brought an important end to a long, violent history of range
use, it was also a beginning, as it brought the federal government into the world of range
cattle ranching in new and intensive ways, thus creating one of the most salient aspects of
modernization for ranchers.
The existence of the Grazing Service and the new grazing regulations affected
only those ranchers who had grazing permits. In the five states under consideration here,
about 1 in 4 ranchers had grazing permits either on Forest Service or Grazing Service
lands so that it could seem as though this aspect of modernization did not affect every
rancher. That would be true if, by modernization, one was talking about direct, daily
21
See Graf Wilderness Preservation as well as Merrill, Public Lands, and Rowley, U.S. Forest Service.
Paul Hirt also discusses some early Forest Service history in his excellent book. See Hirt, Conspiracy of
Optimism. For older, but useful studies on grazing politics see Foss, Politics and Grass; Peffer, The
Closing of the Public Domain; Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1970
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976); Harold K. Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976).
61
interactions with government regulators over specific permits, but even those ranchers
who did not have permits often owned property near Grazing Service or Forest lands and
thus dealt with the potentiality of interacting with government officials. Furthermore, at
any point, a rancher could purchase land (and thus the permit that went with it) and so it
behooved ranchers to know grazing regulations.
Those regulations changed constantly in the early years. While ranchers initially
accepted and even embraced the modernized trend of government controlled range
management, by the late 1930s, it was clear that the regulations might be quite
cumbersome and certainly required ranchers to remain up-to-date on the changes (which
came legislatively every year or so). Due to the complexity of the laws and their everchanging nature, the Grazing Service became the straw man for rancher complaints
across the West. In the early 1940s, thanks to wartime economic booms and the return of
moisture throughout the intermountain West, the cattle business became more and more
lucrative and ranchers increasingly resented the intrusion of the federal government in
“local” concerns. Most ranchers felt as though forest range managers and grazing service
officials tended to be bookish scientists with little “on the ground” learning. Ranchers
often relied on representatives of the Agricultural Extension Service for expertise, but
these same ranchers more often than not resented an extra-local forest or grazing official
who threatened herd reductions and grazing fee increases on public range.22
22
Louis Warren, in his introduction to The Hunter’s Game, discusses the importance of extra-local forces
in the management of natural resources (specifically game) in the early twentieth century. See Louis
Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997).
62
By the late 1930s, rancher association periodicals were attempting to keep
ranchers appraised of legislative changes in grazing regulations. The context of constant
fluctuating regulation and seemingly ever-changing rules preoccupied ranchers as is
evidenced not only by the amounts of copy devoted to understanding the regulations but
also through cultural productions such as the poem printed beneath a reiteration of the
changes in the range code in The Montana Stockgrower in 1938. In the poem, Ralph
Miracle, a rancher and eventual executive secretary of the MSGA, explicated the
problems with so much regulatory complexity:
Looks like the folks back in Washington
Are swingin’ an awful lot of rope.
A good hand
Can shake out quite a loop
And hang it where he wants.
But there’s a limit.
Too much rope
Can tangle up your own hoss.
And that’s the way it looks back there.
It’s damn risky
To stretch out a long twine
Tied to the horn
When you ain’t an expert.
A short rope
With a dally
Might be lots safer
And then
If you miss, you can gather it up
And have another try.
In using a language of localism, note the reference to folks in Washington not being
“experts,” Miracle drew an analogy between roping (a time-honored cowboy skill) and
regulation. Too much regulation (just as in the case of too much rope) could trip up a
person’s “hoss,” or horse – meaning that a rancher could become dangerously entangled
63
in federal regulations. When that happened a rancher would be in big trouble. As
Miracle’s poem suggests, many ranchers believed the federal government moved too
quickly with their regulations and had not left “a dally” or a way out of their policies.
The poem’s appearance at the end of a reprint of a letter from Farrington Carpenter, the
Director of the Grazing Service, illustrates well the ways in which the modern incursion
of the federal government in range regulations affected and promoted a particular kind of
“cow talk” among ranchers.23
Ranchers’ worries about the heightened consolidation of power in range agencies
prompted Western congressional representatives, such as Frank Barrett (R-WY) and
Patrick McCarren (R-NV), to lead early fights against the Grazing and the Forest
Services. These representatives, responding to the outcry from the livestock interests,
conducted public hearings throughout the intermountain West from 1942-1949 in an
attempt to force lenient, locally-controlled range policies. In 1946-47, ranchers even
suggested that federal range lands should be sold to the states with possible private
dispersal to follow.24 These attempts were never completely legislatively successful, but
23
Ralph Miracle, “Tangled Twine,” The Montana Stockgrower, April 1938, 4. See also Farrington
Carpenter, “The Federal Range Code,” Ibid., 2-4. The idea that the regulatory impulse of New Dealers was
not completely misplaced, but did become unreasonable over time continued to surface even years after the
New Deal. See for example, Jeffrey J. Safford, Jack Brenner Oral History, September 11, 1976, Montana
Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
24
The 1979 the Nevada state legislature’s demand that the federal government hand over the public domain
over to the individual states is probably the most familiar manifestation of this discussion. As William
Graf explains, however, the 1979 “Sagebrush Rebellion” had many precedents. As early as the late
nineteenth century, states’ rights advocates “rebelled” against the idea of a federal government landlord.
The 1940s hearings and rancher-led attacks against forest service officials was simply another in a long
string of “land rebellions” in the West. See Graf, Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions,
155-170. For the ways in which the 1970 movement was situated in a larger context of
“environmentalism” see Chapter 7 in Hal Rothman, Saving the Planet: The American Response to the
Environment in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000). For two other excellent studies about
the sagebrush rebels’ ideology and tactics see Cawley, Federal Land and Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer,
Green Backlash: The History and Politics of Environmental Opposition in the U.S. (Boulder, CO: Lynne
64
they were powerful symbolically and politically. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s,
national press outlets, including the influential Harper’s Weekly, chronicled the hearings,
legislative proposals, and investigations.
The stories, such as the famous Bernard
DeVoto articles railing against western stockmen, usually depicted ranchers as selfish
land-grabbers. In the 1940s and 1950s, Bernard DeVoto, a westerner-turned-easterner,
accused western ranchers (particularly large ranchers) of attempting to rob the nation of
its landed heritage. Ranchers then accused DeVoto of being a sell-out and and of not
understanding the real heritage of the United States, which they believed to be private
land ownership, a limited centralized government, and agrarian (as opposed to industrial
or recreational) use of lands west of the Mississippi.25 The accusations flew across the
continent as DeVoto sat in his Easy Chair in New York and ranchers sat in their recliners
in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and other places west – each believing s/he had “the”
West’s best interest at heart.26
The press war served to make ranchers appear as a self-seeking minority group
intent on robbing the nation of its right to the public lands. Many of those who believed
the “land grab” thesis of DeVoto were residents of regions other than the intermountain
West or were urbanites, but even many westerners, like O.E. Burnside, a resident of
Laramie, Wyoming, began to suggest that the stockmen, who were grazing permit
Rienner Publishers, 1997). For an interesting global examination of the reaction to “green” politics see
Andrew Rowell, Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environmental Movement (London: Routledge,
1996).
25
See an editorial written by Wyoming rancher Elmer Brock to the Denver Post. Elmer Brock, “Editorial,”
Denver Post, 2 February 1947. See also Bernard DeVoto, “The Anxious West,” Harper’s Monthly 93
(December 1946): 481-491; Bernard DeVoto, “The West Against Itself,” Harper’s Monthly 94 (January
1947): 231-56.
26
DeVoto’s essays on what he termed “the western land grab” of the mid-late 1940s, appeared mostly in
his column in Harper’s Weekly. The column, called “The Easy Chair,” was reprinted in book form in
1955. See Bernard DeVoto, The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
65
holders, were “self-centered, narrow-minded” and full of “false statements and
contradictions.” In a scathing letter sent to the WSGA in 1947, Burnside railed that he
and “140 million Americans” had “an interest in...[the] public lands.”
He accused
ranchers of asserting their “private” interests over the interests of all other American
citizens.27 Karen Merrill has accurately asserted that the discussion about public lands
ranching was inherently about definitions of property, but I would argue that these policy
debates were more than that, at least to the ranchers. Within ranching circles, the public
discourse over public lands grazing in the 1940s was about the use and ownership of
property, but it also served to convince ranchers that they were under attack by
unsympathetic adversaries from “the outside world” and they increasingly defined “the
outside” as being any entity who was not involved directly with range cattle ranching.
After World War II, extra-local forces encroached more and more on the range
spaces of the West.
The 1950s, in particular, witnessed intense local and regional
changes brought about by a newly created social, political, geographic, and economic
West. By the end of the war, the federal government and private enterprise had joined
forces to create the military/industrial/scientific complex for which the West became
famous in the postwar decades. As Kevin Fernlund has argued, the “Cold War decades”
changed the face of the region forever.28
27
O.E. Burnside to Elmer Brock, 3 January 1947, Oda Mason Papers, Box 1, American Heritage Center,
University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
28
Beginning with Gerald Nash in the 1980s, scholars have generally agreed that the militarization of the
American West had far-reaching effects on its social, cultural, economic, and political development. There
is some disagreement about when those effects really began. Nash argued that World War II precipitated
the changes while others, like the authors in Kevin Fernlund’s anthology The Cold War American West,
have argued that more substantial changes came due to the arms race of the Cold War years. This debate is
likely to continue. For ranchers, it seems as though developments during both the war years and the
66
First and foremost, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, states such as New York
were joined by western states in leading the way in military contracting. California was
the leader in this realm, but intermountain West states also underwent intense
militarization. New Mexico, for example, experienced an influx of funding (almost $1
billion) from the War Department (later the Department of Defense, 1947), which
contributed to the rise and continuance of research and development institutions such as
those at Los Alamos and the University of New Mexico.
In addition to the R&D institutions, vast areas of the West came under military
control as manufacturing and “testing” sites for the atomic build-up of the Cold War.
Nevada, experienced atomization most intensely, but Arizona, New Mexico, and
Colorado also felt the ramifications of the arms race. In New Mexico, in particular,
ranchers came into direct conflict with the United States military as it demanded access to
range spaces for the testing of new atomic technology.
Beginning in 1945, hundreds of acres were “condemned” by the War Department
in order to create the White Sands Proving Ground. Ranchers across the 4000-square
mile Tularosa Basin, where the federal government eventually located the missile testing
site, felt the effects of this militarization directly. Some, like Robert Boyd, felt the effects
more strongly than others.29 In an emotional appeal to his Senators and to the Secretary
postwar decades changed their lifeways forever. See Etulain, The New American West; Fernlund, The
Cold War American West; Nash, ed., The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World
War; Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War; Nash, World War II
and the West: Reshaping the Economy.
29
There is a rich oral history collection which documents some of the encounters ranchers’ had during the
mid-1940s with the United States military. See White Sands Missile Range Oral History Legacy Project,
Manuscript Collection 346, Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, Las
Cruces. An overview of this oral history project has also been published as Peter Eidenbach, Beth Morgan,
67
of War, Boyd explained that he hoped it was not “presumptuous” to appeal to the
political powers regarding the loss of his “home” to the White Sands Proving Ground.
The federal government had, according to Boyd, seized title to the most important part of
his ranch, namely his ranch headquarters (meaning the family’s home) and the ranch’s
only permanent water. Boyd explained, “the land that I am losing is my old home where
I grew up, and is where I have anticipated spending the declining years of my life.” He
tried his best to understand the need of the federal government for his property, but he
just could not make sense of the government’s need to own 800 acres on the west side of
the Organ Mountains.
Although he tried desperately to assure the federal powers-that-be that he could be
“reconciled” to the loss of his land if it meant the “protection” of the country, losing his
home and his water left Boyd feeling vulnerable and attacked. In order to defend his
power, which he located at least partially in his local autonomy, he enlisted the support of
the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association telling them in a letter that he “knew from
past experiences” that the group would assist him. Even the NMCGA was relatively
powerless in the White Sands event, however, and there is nothing in the record to tell us
eds., Homes on the Range: Oral Recollections of Early Ranch Life on the U.S. Army White Sands Missile
Range, New Mexico (Tularosa, NM: Human Systems Research, Inc., 1994). For an institutional history of
the White Sands National Monument, see Michael Welsh, Dunes and Dreams: A History of White Sands
National Monument (Santa Fe: National Park Service Intermountain Cultural Resources Center, 1995). An
exciting and growing subfield of inquiry in western history has focused on the atomic West. For some of
the best works see Len Ackland, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Michael A. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining
Communities in the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002); Peter Goin, Nuclear
Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Bruce William Hevly, John Findlay, eds.,
The Atomic West (Seattle: University of Washington Center of the Study of the Pacific Northwest, 1998);
Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2004); Raye Carleson Ringholz, Uranium Frenzy: Boom and Bust on the Colorado
Plateau (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1991).
68
whether or not Boyd successfully maintained ownership of his property. The outcome is
not as important for this story as the conflict itself because the incident provides insight
into the modernization of ranchers’ worlds in the postwar years.30 In his dealings with
the War Department, Boyd, like so many other New Mexico ranchers, came into contact
with a powerful force with which, only a few years earlier, he had had little contact. The
militarization of south central New Mexico, in many ways, transferred control of the
range spaces from local residents to an extra-local power.31 Ranchers felt keenly this
transformation of power and sought to maintain not just their property rights, but also
their sense of autonomy. In the minds of many ranchers, the intrusion of the military into
range spaces, like the incursion of the Forest Service in the early 1900s, and the Grazing
Service in the 1930s, brought yet another federal presence against which ranchers had to
defend themselves.
30
Approximately 97 New Mexico ranch families lost their land to the federal government during the midlate 1940s. Eidenbach, Homes on the Range, xiii.
31
For an interesting discussion of the mentality behind western support of the defense industry see Timothy
K. Chambless, "Pro-Defense, Pro-Growth, and Anti-Communism: Cold War Politics in the American
West," in The Cold War American West, 1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1998). Once the ranchers’ lands had been confiscated by the military, the testing
began. The increasing numbers of tests at the White Sands range are staggering. In 1948, a year after
Boyd’s protest, the military was testing seven projects and conducted a total of 52 tests. In 1950, there
were still only seven projects firing 63 projectiles into the New Mexico desert. But by 1955 those numbers
had, quite literally, sky-rocketed. In 1955, 36 projects conducted 1251 firings and ten years later, the
numbers had increased to 78 projects firing 2400 tests. White Sands Missile Range Museum, White Sands
Missile Range History available from http://www.wsmr-history.org/History.htm (last accessed February
16, 2005). It is beyond the scope of this work to consider the environmental and cultural impacts of this
kind of intensive testing, but fortunately journalists in the West and scholars of the West have been
theorizing the effect of atomiziation in the West for a number of years. For good and sometimes painfully
sad discussions of this see Hevly and Findlay, The Atomic West; Maria Montoya, "Landscapes of the Cold
War West," in The Cold War American West, 1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1998); Stewart Udall, The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic
Cold War Affair with the Atom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994); Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An
Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
69
The building of White Sands, like the construction of any military unit (of which
there were 22 established during World War II and the Cold War in the five states studied
here), did more than just bring the federal government’s hegemonic presence to the West.
The bases, and the concomitant growth that occurred in the West due to the rise of the
military-industrial complex, brought vast numbers of people as well. Seven million
people passed through the West at various times during the war, and upon its end, many
of these people became permanent residents. Most of the newcomers settled in western
cities and the majority did not work in the agricultural sector. Despite the fact that the
relative productivity of agricultural sectors (like ranching) increased, the numbers of
people working in agriculture as well as the amount of land under agricultural production
declined rapidly. For example, whereas in 1950, Wyoming and Arizona had had several
counties that had at least 20% of labor and residents’ income from farming. By 1970, no
counties in either state had more than 20% agricultural production.32
As agricultural space in the West declined, the demand for land ensured that
property values increased across the intermountain region. This elevation in property
values did not affect the region monolithically. “Warm winter” states, like Arizona and
New Mexico, grew more exponentially in population than the “cold winter” states, like
Wyoming and Montana.33 In Colorado, property values per acre for pasture rose from
32
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 500-503 and 562-565. See also Clyde A. Milner, II, Carol O'Conner,
Martha Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), 454-456.
33
I borrow the phrases “warm winter” and “cold winter” from Kevin Leonard. It is important to note that
population growth in the northern intermountain West states actually declined during the war. Both
Montana and Wyoming lost people in the war years, but after the conclusion of the war, both states joined
the warm winter states in experiencing population growth. See Kevin Allen Leonard, “Migrants,
Immigrants, and Refugees: The Cold War and Population Growth in the American West,” in The Cold
70
$11.86 per acre in 1945 to $33.70 per acre in 1965. Colorado experienced the highest
jump in land values of the states under consideration here, while Wyoming experienced
the lowest. Still, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming each experienced at
least a 35 percent increase in pastureland values during the postwar years 1945-1965.34
Land that had irrigation rose more steeply in value than land that had no water
improvements. And land that was located next to federal grazing lands and/or came with
grazing permits also increased more in value than land that did not have public grazing
access.35 In addition, rural areas located around urban centers (like the Salt River Valley
surrounding Phoenix) tended to experience inflated property values more quickly than
more remote areas, but the influx of newcomers created a ripple effect in which land
became an increasingly scarce and sought-after commodity. Ranchers could benefit from
this new land regime, but only if they sold the ranch. If ranchers wanted to remain
ranchers, the exorbitant land prices could spell trouble. For example, smaller ranchers
found it increasingly difficult to add to their land holdings and for many small to midsized ranchers this reality of the postwar real estate market in the West caused the dream
of climbing the agricultural ladder to die.
Take, for instance, J.D. Craighead’s experience in southeastern Colorado in the
early 1950s. In 1950, Craighead received a letter from the owner of 320 acres Craighead
had leased for many years. J.F. Gauger, the owner of the land, had received an offer from
some businessmen who wanted to buy the pasture land in order to speculate for oil.
War American West, 1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Center
for the American West, 1998), 36-37.
34
John Jones, Farm Real Estate [Microform] : Historical Series Data, 1950-92 (Washington D.C.: United
States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1993), Statistical Bulletin # 855.
35
Ibid.
71
Gauger offered Craighead, his long-time friend and business relation, the first chance to
buy the land at the same price the businessmen had offered, $11/acre. Despite good
cattle prices in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Craighead, like most ranchers, did not
have access to that kind of disposable cash, but he knew that he could not afford to lose
the 320 acres of pastureland since the grass was thin on all pastureland, due to a painful
drought that was gripping the region. After much haggling about the value of the ground
and after securing a loan from the Production Credit Association of La Junta, Craighead
purchased the acreage from Gauger for $10/acre. In a tart letter, Craighead explained to
Gauger that “the people from whom I am accustomed to borrow think the price you
offered to take for this land is much too high. I think so too, but I need the grass.” Lest
Gauger not believe Craighead about the local drought situation, Craighead explained that
“the papers have been minimizing the effects [of the drought around here], but parts of a
number of days have been so you could not see very far and could not work outside [as a
result of dust storms]. An unusual thing is the lack of water in even the older canals. The
result is we have not been able to plant much crop nor irrigate what we have planted.
Some cattle have been moved out and a lot have been sold.”36 The desperation of
Craighead and the scarcity of available land is palpable in this anecdote. On the one
hand, he knew that he needed the 320 acres of grazing in order to keep his cattle alive.
On the other hand, he knew full well that he could not afford to purchase the land with
his available capital. Craighead’s position as the president of the LaJunta Production
Credit Association meant he had better accessibility to lines of credit than many ranchers,
36
Letters from J.D. Craighead to JF Gauger, 19 March 1950 and 16 April 1950. Jacob D. Craighead
Papers, Box 5, Folder 8, The Huntington Library, San Marino.
72
but like Craighead, ranchers across the mountain West recognized a decline in the use of
land for grazing. Census statistics bear out this fear. Whereas in 1880, there had been
883 million acres of land used for grazing by 1930 that number had dwindled to 437
million acres and by 1954 only about 353 million acres were being used by graziers.37
Grazing land, for ranchers, is power. As land accessibility declined, so too did ranchers’
perceived and real power.
An increase in urban spaces in much of the West compounded the decrease in
agricultural land. From 1945 to the present day, metropolitan areas in the West have
grown phenomenally in space as well as in population. Between 1950 and 1990, for
example, Phoenix added 402 square miles to its municipal boundaries. In 1940, the five
states under consideration here had three “metropolitan” areas (areas defined by the
Census Bureau as a “core city of at least 50,000 inhabitants plus its contiguous suburbs).
Denver and Pueblo, in Colorado, and Phoenix in Arizona were the only “cities” that
could be quantified as metropolises before the beginning of World War II. By 1990, each
of the five states could claim at least one metropolitan area.38
In addition to the
sprawling metropolitan spaces, urban populations of the West increased from 11.8
million in 1940 to 63 million by 1990. This process of urbanization was, of course, a
gradual process, but its increasing swiftness in the postwar years accelerated the sense of
loss that the declining rural population felt. Phoenix residents, for example, grew from
37
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics (Washington, D.C.: United States
Government Printing, 1963), 435.
38
See Carol A. O'Conner, "A Region of Cities," in The Oxford History of the American West, eds. Clyde A.
Milner, II, Carol O'Conner, Martha Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 554-555.
Much of the urban growth in Montana and Wyoming occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, but the process of
urbanization, if not metropolinization, began in the immediate postwar years.
73
60,000 to 500,000 in the two decades following the war. Denver and Albuquerque both
doubled in population.39
This shift from a rural to an urban population base had intense ramifications. But
not all were negative. Some ranchers recognized that more people in towns and cities
meant more consumers for beef.
In spite of the profit potential of more mouths and
bigger appetites, however, ranchers tended to view the urbanites with skepticism. Lillian
Riggs demonstrated this skepticism, when, on a cool morning in mid-January, 1950, she
sat down at her typewriter to compose a letter for the Neighborly Gossip column in the
Arizona Cattlelog. Riggs explained that plentiful rains at Faraway Ranch had resulted in
good grass feed and the heaviest calves they had ever had. The blind, 70-year-old
rancher, then abruptly changed gears and began to philosophize on the ill effects of
modernity and urbanity. She wrote:
I wonder...what has become of all good, keen, piercing eyes of our early
Americans...I have known children coming from the city who had to
wear glasses constantly. After living in the country and using their eyes
for more distant vision for a few months, they were able to throw their
glasses away. Eyes growing constantly weaker. More electricity. More
‘proper’ lighting. Hydrogen bombs. Civilization?...I wonder! PS Sure I
lost my eyesight – but, because I was bucked from a horse I could not
ride.40
Riggs’ letter, at first glance, may seem the strange thoughts of an aging ranch woman
with little to do but ponder insignificant issues. Yet her words encompass a deep concern
about modernity and a tendency to characterize urban dwellers as “other.”
Differentiating theirs as the preferable way of life allowed range ranchers to assert an
39
Ric Dias, "The Great Cantonment: Cold War Cities in the American West," in The Cold War American
West, 1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Center for the American
West, 1998, 71-84.
40
Lillian Riggs, "Neighborly Gossip," Arizona Cattelog, February, 1950, 26-27.
41
identity grounded in anti-modern sentiment.
74
Echoing some of the gendered and cultural
concerns of progressive reformers of the early twentieth century and reverberating with
the conservative concerns of threatened masculinity during the McCarthy era, ranchers,
like Riggs, worried about the weakness of body and mind inherent in living in the city.
Ranchers often went on the rhetorical offensive as they railed against the turn from a
rural “way of life.” They saw the shift from urban to rural not just a historical curiosity
but as a potential threat to traditional patterns of (masculine) vigor and (patriarchal)
order.42
Despite the vituperative diatribes of ranchers against the urban turn, city folks in
the city were one thing. It was when those folks ventured forth into the range spaces of
the West that ranchers really became concerned. One of the most direct ways ranchers
experienced the flood of newcomers to the West was through increased tourism and
recreation. The presence of these “dudes” (as ranchers disdainfully referred to any nonrancher) was a continual source of conflict and discussion in the postwar intermountain
range country.43
41
For another example of a rancher lauding the “healthful” living on a ranch, see Evelyn Perkins, "Life on
a Cattle Ranch," Arizona Cattlelog, April, 1950, 22-23. It is difficult to quantify this sentiment for all
range ranchers, but a scholar at the University of Arizona attempted to do just that in the 1960s. In the later
years of that decade, Arthur Henry Smith conducted interviews with range ranchers in Arizona for his
dissertation on the motivations of ranchers to sell or keep their ranches. Of the responding ranchers, 73
percent cited that an important factor in their love for their ranches and their likelihood not to sell (despite
good prices) was their distance from cities. Smith calls this attachment to non-urban spaces, “rural
fundamentalism.” See Arthur Henry Smith, “A Socioeconomic Analysis of the Goals and Attitudes of
Arizona Cattle Ranchers,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Arizona, 1971), 146.
42
Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995); Suzanne Clark, Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in
the Rhetoric of the West (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
43
While many ranchers continually referred to all outsiders as “dudes,” most also referred to urban
interlopers as tourists and recreationists. I’ll refer to those who sought leisure in the rural and “wild”
spaces of the intermountain West interchangeably as both tourists and recreationists.
75
The West had long experienced the incursion of a citified gentry. Since at least
the late nineteenth century, Americans had ventured into western spaces to escape to
nature, learn about themselves, and create classed, raced, gendered, and nationalist
identities.44 As historians such as Margaret Jacobs and Anne Hyde have shown, much of
that early tourism took eastern visitors to “exotic” places such as national parks and
American Indian reservations.45
Railroads and transportation lines owned by the
railroads often pre-selected the destinations for their patrons, such as the Santa Fe’s
Harvey Houses and the Great Northern Railroad’s lodge in Glacier National Park. “Hot
spots” like Taos, Santa Fe, various hot springs locales across Colorado, and Yellowstone,
Yosemite, and Glacier national parks all experienced incursions from the riders of the
Santa Fe, Rio Grande, Northern Pacific, and Union Pacific railroads. Because of few
roads and the spatial limitations of the rail systems, these early tourist forays into the
hinterlands of the West generally did not come into direct contact with most of the
private land holdings of ranchers.46
By 1970, however, thanks to a slew of road-building during World War II and the
postwar years, ranchers and tourists had become affixed to one another. The Interstate
Highway Act of 1956 poured millions of dollars into a federal road system whose
purpose was to link forty-two state capitals, containing 90 percent of the nation’s
population. The act provided extra funds to build roads on federal property, including
44
Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Anne Hyde, An American
Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1990).
45
See Hyde, An American Vision and Margaret Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo
Cultures, 1879-1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
46
See Chapter 3 in Hal Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998).
76
Indian reservations, national parks, and Forest Service lands (the bulk of which were in
the West) – ostensibly allowing people a safe escape in the case of a national catastrophe
(including nuclear attack). The new federal emphasis on automobile infrastructures
changed the face of the transportation West in ways not felt since the completion of the
transcontinental railroads in the 1860s and 1870s.47
Ranchers experienced this area of modernization in mixed ways. Of course, new,
more passable roads meant that ranchers could transcend the boundaries of isolation both
economically and socially. The new roads, built by the USFS, the BLM, and the various
state highway departments, took both ranchers and their beef to town. The building of
roads came in fits and starts for ranchers especially in states with few urban centers (such
as Wyoming and Montana).
In 1953, for example, the average distance Wyoming
ranchers traveled to a “trading center” of any kind was 15 miles, and they traveled over
unpaved and/or barely improved roads. Fifty-two percent of Wyoming ranchers traveled
over 10 miles to get their cattle “to market” and themselves to town in the early 1950s.48
In the Southwest, ranches were little better connected with the broader world. In 1950,
Arizona ranch women were still bemoaning the isolation that came with poor
transportation routes. Rancher Evelyn Perkins, whose ranch sat in the Chino Valley in
47
Rothman, Devil’s Bargains.
William Chapman to Mrs. William E. Dover, 7 October 1953, Box 183, Folder 8, Wyoming Stock
Growers’ Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. Dover was the
public relations committee chair in 1953 and had written to Chapman requesting statistics on
“modernization” of Wyoming ranches in order to illustrate to the broader public how difficult Wyoming
ranchers had it. While ten miles may not seem like a long distance, most of the road were simply graded
dirt paths that were not paved. Traveling ten miles could, very easily take 45 minutes to an hour. In the
rough Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana winters, roads could and often did become impassable (as we will
see in the discussion about the blizzard of 1949 in Chapter 2). Additionally, ranch families rarely owned
more than one transportation vehicle and that vehicle often was needed for work on the ranch and thus only
infrequently could be used to get ranch families to town.
48
77
Arizona, told others at the Seventh Annual Country Life Conference that “a sign
appeared on our road...apparently placed there by some wayfarer who didn’t appreciate
our boulder-and-dirt highways. It read: ‘This road is not passable [by humans]; it isn’t
even jackass-able’...we have more and better roads today, but still the family and workers
on a cattle ranch are thrown close together...[and] even today on many of the...isolated
cattle ranches mothers [have to] teach their children [at home].”49 Ranchers continued to
believe in their isolation from the “rest” of society well into the 1960s, but they also
increasingly became aware that paved and improved roads were bridging their separation
from the outside world and that, in some ways, they could take advantage of these new
linkages.
In 1956, just as the discussion about the Highway Act was reaching a crescendo,
ranchers whose property aligned with state or federal highways began to invest in an
advertising scheme they believed would help promote their livelihoods. Beef councils
and stockgrower associations across the West joined forces to encourage ranchers to erect
Beefboards on their property facing the highways. As they discussed the merit of the
idea, ranchers reasoned that if outsiders in autos were to traverse range spaces, they
should at least be exposed to graphic road-side messages touting beef consumption and
reminding the interlopers that they were in cattle country. The boards would advertise
not just beef, but also the individual’s ranch on which the board was located.50 Abbie
49
Perkins, 23.
It is impossible to tell how many ranchers ultimately placed beefboards on their property, but the
advertisements appeared in all of the association publications in 1956, save for Colorado’s Cattle Guard.
See Arizona Cattlelog, September, 1956; Cow Country, December, 1956; New Mexico Stockman, January
1960.
50
78
Keith thought the idea excellent even though she was convinced that “by the time all the
highways are completed everyone will be using planes.”51
Despite Keith’s skepticism, highways served to connect ranchers together in new
ways.
In their cultural productions, ranchers did not necessarily associate the
construction of highways with their abilities to communicate with one another, but that
was indeed the case. These new roads took not just beef to market, but also transported
ranchers faster and more easily to feed stores, to sales and auctions, and perhaps more
importantly to their association meetings, conventions, and social events. In fact, this
aspect of modernization could account, at least partially, for the high numbers which
attended the state cattlegrower conventions in the postwar decades.
Despite some enthusiasm for and reliance on highway construction, this aspect of
modernization was not without its problems, and for many ranchers road-building was
nothing but a nuisance. The archives are littered with evidence about conflicts ranchers
encountered as highway crews descended on range spaces. Most of the conflicts were
minor scuffles, but their relative significance did not diminish ranchers’ belief in their
magnitude. Take, for instance, the experience of J.E. Magnum in the early years of New
Mexico state road building. In 1947, he wrote the NMCGA to complain about ranchers’
situations with regard to the incursion of state highway builders. Magnum explained that
his case was “the case of most of the new mexico ranchers.”
Magnum’s family had arrived to ranch near Bloomfield, New Mexico, in 1904.
There were no bridges and no roads at that time, so they made do until 1916 when a
51
Betty Lane to Abbie Keith, 24 February 1956, Box 5, Folder 8, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe. Abbie Keith to Betty Lane, February 29, 1956, ibid.
79
“makeshift” bridge was built. In 1945, all that changed. The highway department asked
Magnum to give up the right-of-way to a section of his land to enable the state to build a
highway nine miles south of Bloomfield. Magnum obliged and then the trouble began.
His unique style makes a rather lengthy direct quote worthwhile. According to Magnum:
first the contractor with one of the dump trucks run over a $500.00 reg.
bull i had to kill him [we can assume he means the bull, not the
contractor]...[then he] tore my telephone down put it intirely out of use
and it is still out of use cut fences as they come to them that i had spent a
lifetime putting up...they are still down [we can assume he means the
fences] as i am not able to do hard work and cant hire a man for love or
money...burnes me up [when] some people thinks we should just step
aside when see the outsiders comeing and give them what we have got
the hard way but they wouldn’t go through what we have for the
world...then to finish up the road story now we have a fine road from the
san juan river to Albuquerque...a fast road...so fast that acuple days ago
some one run over my fine stallion. worth $1000...i had to kill
him...now what we need is good 5 wire fence on each side of highway
for at least 7 miles...i would like you to use your influance to have this
done before we have alot of recks the cattle is still on the summer range
but i will bring them down in november then they will be in great danger
of being run over as they will be crossing this road everyday i have
wrote the Highways Department but i have very little [confidence in
them].52
Magnum’s letter, in grand style, suggests ranchers’ frustrations at dealing with an
impersonal and encroaching state.
Additionally, Magnum hints at many ranchers’
sentiment that road-building could be quite welcome in ranch country, note the way he
describes the road as a “fine” road. The moment, however, that “fine” road threatened
his property (in this case his livestock), Magnum became irritated. Note that his solution
was not to tear up the road, but rather to have the state install a fence to keep his cattle off
their highway. Magnum accepted modernization and the coming of outsiders, but he
52
J.E. Magnum to New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, 24 September 1947, Box 6, Folder 3, George
Godfey Papers, NMSU.
80
expected to be compensated for that acceptance, and he appealed to the larger community
of cattlegrowers (namely the NMCGA) to help him to persist in his ranching business in
spite of structural changes occurring due to the modernization of western spaces.
In Arizona, relations between the state highway department and ranchers were a
little better, but not much. In March of 1956, E.C. Aguirre, whose ranch sidled up next to
Highway 84 in northern Arizona, had had 100 acres of pasture accidentally torched by an
Arizona Highway Department crew which was burning unwanted brush alongside the
highway. Just as Magnum had almost a decade earlier, Aguirre wrote to his stockgrower
association in the hopes it could do something to stem the problems appearing from the
tide of blacktop rising near his ranch. Aguirre wished the highway building would stop
immediately, so that he could stop worrying about his cattle, but failing that he hoped that
something could be done to avoid such flammable disasters in the future.
In the
correspondence about the incident, Aguirre represented himself as an innocent victim of
an uncaring state which was acting on behalf of ignorant tourists. Abbie Keith, upon
receiving the correspondence from Aguirre, wrote to the Highway Department and
reminded the Department that cattle ranchers across Arizona had cooperated with the
Association to have cards printed to circulate amongst tourists in rural towns urging them
to be careful not to start wildland fires. As Keith reminded the state agency, Highway
Department personnel had even helped distribute the cards to the would-be combustibles.
Still fires continued to be ignited and both Keith and Aguirre were growing tired of the
constant diligence required by the newly passable roads. While Aguirre never received
compensation for his 100 acres, William Willey, the State Highway Engineer, admitted
81
his department’s culpability and promised that “extreme care will be used in all future
burning of brush along the highway.”53 Still, the conflagration between ranchers, agents
of the state, and newly arriving hordes of “outsiders” continued to blaze.
Just a month later, in fact, Tom Beaham wrote to Keith to offer his concerns about
the state’s decision to use part of his grazing allottment land for the digging of a material
pit for construction of US Highway 80. Beaham leased several hundred acres of state
trust land from the Arizona State Land Department. He had planned to use the pasture
(where the pit had been dug by the Highway Department) for summer grazing, but the
Highway Department’s actions had destroyed all of the grass. According to Beaham, the
State Land Department was most guilty because they had treated “a longstanding” lessee
“worse than a step child.” He recognized, however, that he could not afford to alienate
the Land Department officers, and so hoped simply to get them or the Highway
Department to re-seed the pasture. By the time highway construction had commenced,
however, it became clear that not only had the grass been destroyed, but most of the top
soil had been stripped away – thus ruining any chance for reseeding. Abbie Keith, in
responding to Beaham’s plea for help, explained that he was not the only rancher to
experience “trouble” on his leased state land. Keith explained, “we understand that in
Northern Arizona where the soil is very thin they [the highway department] scrape for
miles back from the highway and...the ranchers have been really perplexed to know what
do because of the loss of so much grazing area.” She explained to Beaham that nothing
could be done in his case, but she hoped that through “correspondence” ranchers, in
53
William Willey to Abbie Keith, 29 March 1956, Box 5, Folder 3, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
82
collectivity, could “head off similar attacks on other member’s State Lands when
highways are cut through their leases.”54 Even ACGA president Ernest Chilson believed
that the Highway Department’s habit of “scalping many, many” acres of soil to obtain a
small amount of road bed material rather than hauling the material great distances
“deprived” the stockmen of grass to which they were “entitled.” The shared mindset in
all of these anecdotes about road construction is representative of ranchers who
considered themselves to be under attack from a new world order. These ranchers
believed that their livelihoods, to which they were “entitled,” were being threatened by
modernization which was an impersonal process impervious to ranchers’ “rights” to
access soil, grass, and space.55 In ranchers’ minds, the lands being used and changed by
agents of the state did not belong to the public, but rather to the rancher who leased the
land. It was only out of a sense of duty for the greater good that the ranchers believed
they even needed to offer access to “their” lands. Modernization undermined the control
over all of the different kinds of land that ranchers believed were rightfully theirs.
In the 1950s, while President Dwight Eisenhower used a language of national
security to justify the expenditures on the interstate system, and ranchers struggled for
what they hoped would be a “just” road-building experience, tourists from all over the
country utilized the miles of asphalt to explore the recreational West.56 As men in gray
54
Abbie Keith to Thomas A. Beaham, 15 June 1956, Box 5, Folder 4, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe; Ernest Chilson to Thos. Beaham, 26 April 1956, Box 5, Folder 4, ACGA Manuscript Collection.
55
Ibid.
56
Scholars increasingly are studying tourism’s effects on the West, but this is still an understudied subfield
of western history. The first to undertake a history of tourism in the West, and still one of the best
treatments of it, was Earl Pomeroy in In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957) . For more recent works, see David Wrobel and Patrick
83
flannel suits sought to recover their masculinity and June Cleaver housewives craved an
escape from Levittown-type suburbia, camping, fishing, and hiking, “wholesome,”
largely middle-class family adventures, enjoyed a renaissance.57 As Hal Rothman and
other historians have shown, this “recreational” impulse of tourists began, for the West,
in the 1920s as automobiles became more available to more people and as industrial
society increasingly inspired an escapist culture.58 This recreational-based tourism only
increased in the post World War II era. In the words of historian Richard White, by the
postwar years, “more and more metropolitan residents viewed the land not in terms of the
Long, eds., Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2001).
57
For a good anthology of the peculiar manifestations of masculinity in the trans-Mississippi West see
Across the Great Divide. For a broader overview of the crisis in masculinity in the 1950s, especially as it
manifested itself in cultural forms, see Steven Cohan’s Masked Men. Elaine Tyler May also grapples with
gender roles in the 1950s, and is particularly insightful with regard to how ideas about masculinity were
reflected in and reflective of the domestic politics of the decade Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, Dee
Garceau, eds., Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York:
Routledge, 2001); Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997); May, Homeward Bound. There is some debate about women’s acceptance
of the gendered ideals of the 1950s. For an excellent anthology which adds women’s agency to the
discussions of their objectification in these years, see Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver.
58
Rothman, Devil’s Bargains, 143-152. Rothman is far from the only historian to discuss this trend, and it
is important to note that while the automobile was essential in making the West ever more accessible to
tourists, other modes of transportation laid the foundation for the western tourist industry. For the latter,
see Carlos A. Schwantes, “No Aid and No Comfort: Early Transportation and the Origins of Tourism in the
Northern West,” in Wrobel and Long, eds., Seeing and Being Seen; Leah Dilworth, “Tourists and Indians
in Fred Harvey’s Southwest,” in Ibid. For other works on the intersections of tourism and automobiles see
Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1979); Anne Hyde, "From Stagecoach to Packard Twin Six: Yosemite and the Changing Face
of Tourism, 1880-1930," California History 65 (Summer 1990); John Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in
Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985); Virginia Scharff, Taking
the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991);
Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). Belasco’s work traces the evolution of camping, but since
camping was such an important aspect of tourism in the West, it has relevance. Scharff’s work looks at the
gendered aspects of the automobile industry broadly, but has some wonderful vignettes about women’s
sojourning in the West on cross-country excursions. Her work helps to consider the importance of gender
in considering movement, while Dilworth’s article (and longer monograph) is excellent about revealing the
contradictory nature of imperialist nostalgia as the Harvey Company set out to appear to be “preserving”
“traditional” cultures of Puebloan peoples as it simultaneously destroyed them. Dilworth’s work, like that
of Margaret Jacobs, reveals the important intersections of race and class in the evolution of what Dilworth
calls “ethnic tourism” (especially in the Southwest). See also Jacobs, Engendered Encounters.
59
resources it produced but rather in terms of the experiences it could provide.”
84
Like
encroaching flood waters, urbanites and suburbanites seeped out of the metropolises for
weekend trips and summer vacations. When they left cities and small towns, the tourists
arrived in the rural and open spaces of the intermountain West demanding wellmaintained roads for their increasingly large automobiles.
They hoped for
accommodations that provided the perfect balance between ruggedness and
sophistication. They expected locals to be hospitable hosts with gallant stories and open
arms. Perhaps most importantly, the postwar tourists hoped both to glimpse the “old”
West and to discover themselves anew.
Some certainly came to see the same sights tourists had been coming West to
enjoy since the nineteenth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, almost every National Park
in the intermountain West experienced exponential growth in visitation.60 The more
traditional trip itineraries, however, began to change in the postwar era to include
experience–based recreational pursuits. Tourists came to hunt, to hike and, the more
hearty, to backpack. They came to camp, to bird-watch, and some to photograph the
“wild” – to consume and tame some element of nature “out there.” No matter why they
came, postwar tourists to the intermountain West came to re-create themselves in some
small way. Those who ventured into the rural West attempted to do just that through
recreational encounters.61
59
White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West, 552.
Milner, ed., The Oxford History of the American West, 790.
61
The Dude Ranchers in the West experienced these changes acutely. As revenues increased due to more
and more guests arriving, dude ranchers also noted that these guests came mostly to “ride,” to “fish,” and to
“hike.” In earlier years, these same tourists would have most likely expected to be exposed to the spectacle
of cattle ranching on the ranch rather than expecting to experience the “natural world” surrounding the
60
85
Perhaps the recreationist group who most inspired ranchers’ fury were the
“sportsmen” (otherwise known as fishers and hunters). No one can know exactly how
many men and women ventured onto ranchlands in the postwar decades and intentionally
poached wild animals, inadvertently killed domestic cattle, or “accidentally” cut
ranchers’ fences in their zeal to access recreational space, but based on the avalanche of
paper in the archives dealing with these very topics, it is clear that the intrusion of
recreational hunters on the private property of ranchers occupied a great deal of
ideological space for ranchers and their organizations.
The tension between ranchers and recreationists – especially the “game interests”
– is an interesting mid-twentieth-century continuance of natural resource conflicts that
had long been occurring in the West. As historians have illustrated, those conflicts
became especially pronounced in the nineteenth century when Anglo colonists attempted
to rob American Indian tribes of their traditional hunting and fishing grounds.62 Louis
Warren and Karl Jacoby have shown that game, hunting, and conservation became the
sites of contestation over access to natural resources and the power to define proper use
of those resources. In New Mexico, in the early twentieth century, ranchers had joined
ranch. According to a survey of dude ranches, by 1953, the majority of these recreating tourists, 64%,
arrived by automobile, a marked change from the railroad-powered business of the 1920s. See Surveys,
Box 4, Folder 8, Dude Ranchers’ Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming,
Laramie. For discussions of the early dude ranching business, see Chapter 5 in Rothman, Devil’s
Bargains, and Chapter 7 in Athearn. See also Lawrence R. Borne, Dude Ranching: A Complete History
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983).
62
These attempts were met with impressive and sometimes successful resistance. For the best discussions
of some of these encounters see Warren’s Hunter’s Game. See also Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the
Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999); Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of
American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman's
Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the
National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
86
forces with conservationists to define game as private property. Despite protests from
American Indian tribes, poor locals, and some progressive bureaucrats like Aldo Leopold,
the federal and state governments set up wildlife refuges on private ranches across the
state supposedly to conserve game. The result, however intentional, was a privatization
of game in the European tradition and “complicated racial and ethnic politics.”63
By the 1950s, New Mexico ranchers believed they were enveloped in an
increasingly uncontrollable hunting free-for-all, and their rhetoric turned from blaming
Navajos, Hopis, and other people of color, to blaming incoming tourists and recreational
(usually Anglo and middle class) hunters for invading their private lands in pursuit of
public game.
Ranchers were not wholly unified on the issue of hunting. During the 1940s and
1950s, some ranchers turned to dude ranching to supplement their uncertain income (just
as they had in the 1920s). Dude ranchers, whose main business was cattle ranching,
relied on hunting in order to attract interested guests to their ranches. These ranchers
often protested raising the fees for hunting licenses (especially for non-residents) and
found themselves constantly trying to convince other cattle men and women that tourists
were essential to the financial success of all ranchers in the mountain West.
Paul
Christensen, the president of the Dude Ranchers’ Association, was particularly vocal in
the 1940s and 1950s about the need to “impress into” the minds of cattle ranchers that
63
Warren, Hunter’s Game, 85.
87
“whether it’s the automobile tourist or any other type,” as long as “tourists come to
Montana they add a great deal to everyone’s income.”64
In addition to the suggestion by some ranchers that outside hunters were
important to the local economies of the intermountain West, many ranchers were,
themselves, avid hunters. Some of these ranchers relied on hunting to supplement their
own family diets. Some hunted predator species in order to “protect” their herds and
often they used the byproducts of such hunting in various ways on the ranch. Perhaps
more importantly, many ranchers used hunting to assert their control over an often
uncooperative, non-human natural world.
The rancher periodicals celebrated any
predator hunting success (such as rattlesnake hunts, especially in the Southwest),
mountain lion hunts, and/or coyote hunts, because in some small way successful hunts
allowed ranchers to believe in their own agency and ability to “control” a world slowly
spinning out of control.
64
Author Unknown, "Range Management from the View of Recreationists and Dude Ranchers, Dude
Ranchers' Association Records, Box 3, Folder 4, AHC, University of Wyoming, Laramie. The conflict
between dude and non-dude cattle ranchers flared up periodically, especially during hunting season. Their
goals were not completely at odds with one another, but dude ranchers needed inexpensive out-of-state
licenses to attract more guests, while non-dude ranchers preferred to keep the hunting trade local. In both
situations ranchers were torn because neither camp wanted to see the elk or deer or antelope vanish, and at
the same time needed grass to support their cows. In 1960, MSGA Executive Secretary Ralph Miracle
attended the DRA convention in order to “represent” non-dude ranchers’ to the dude ranchers. The biggest
sources of conflict between the two groups tended to be over 1) prices of out-of-state licenses and 2)
numbers of wildlife vs. numbers of cattle and sheep grazing on federal lands. Dude ranchers needed
inexpensive out-of-state licenses in order to attract tourists to their guest ranches, while non-dude ranchers
tended to want to keep outsiders out. In 1948 and again in 1955, dude ranchers opposed the increase of
out-of-state fees while the MSGA supported the increases. Unknown, “License Fee Increase,” Box 1,
Folder 4, Dude Ranchers’ Association Records, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming,
Laramie, Wyoming. For other correspondence about the ideological divide regarding tourists and wildlife
preservation among dude and non-dude ranchers see Paul Christensen to Ralph Miracle, 1960, Box 2,
Folder 1, Dude Ranchers’ Association Records, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming,
Laramie, Wyoming; Howard Kelsey to Paul Christensen, 5 February 1951, Ibid.
88
The discussions around this seizing of agency often were tinged with identity
politics as well. Take, for example, the story of the lion hunts on El Rancho Mio near
Tucson, Arizona, in 1949. Clyde Riggs (Mrs. F.D.) Perkins took the role of “supportive”
wife when inspiring her husband in his quest to trap and kill mountain lions that had been
preying on their ranch’s stock. Perkins wrote to other ranch readers that she reprimanded
her dejected husband and reminded him, “you’ve licked every other problem that has
come up here! Because the road was so rough a drilling outfit couldn’t be brought
in...you built your own well drill and drilled your own well...you’ve made good water
holes out of wasp seeps; you worked in town, leaving your wife here a widow...now get
busy and learn how to trap the lions yourself.” Hunting predators as well as game
animals enabled many male ranchers to enact their masculinity and maintain a sense of
patriarchal agency within their rapidly changing culture.65 Images like the following
cartoon, printed in 1960 in The New Mexico Stockman were not as common in ranchers’
cultural periodicals as stories about great hunting excursions, but they still existed and
served to create a testosterone-driven image of “the hunt.”
Figure 3 Cartoon from The New Mexico Stockman
65
For one of the best discussions on masculinity and hunting see John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of
Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
89
Ranchers, no matter how much they were irritated by “rude” hunters, often identified as
hunters themselves in part because such an identity reinforced an ideology of selfreliance that was linked to ranchers’ dominant constructions of masculinity and
femininity. Because of the importance hunting played in the definitions of rancher
identity, they rarely discussed the need to outlaw hunting or even to unduly regulate it.
What they wanted protected was not the game, necessarily, but their own private
property.66
Ranchers, therefore, were not “against” game per se. In fact, ranchers often took
credit for the health and proliferation of game herds, arguing that game herds spent a
majority of their lives on private land as they moved in search of forage. In the mid1950s, one rancher wondered “how many people who buy hunting licenses know that the
cow people furnish the water and salt for the elk, deer and antelope.” Another claimed
that ranchers actually “raised” the game herds, who spent “100%” of their time on private
land.
According to the incensed rancher writing in The Montana Stockgrower, the
ranchers, who “raised” game herds, often lost up to $1000 a year in grass, water, and salt
for doing so.67
66
“Of Interest to Southwestern Livestock Growers and Farmers,” New Mexico Stockman, January, 1960,
48. The editors of the Stockman seemed to see no irony in the fact that printed next to this cartoon was an
announcement that New Mexico was slated to receive $430,000 in wildlife and fish restoration funds from
the US government because of the concern that deer, antelope, quail, and certain species of fish were fast
disappearing due to adverse hunting/fishing pressures. For the celebratory articles and notes regarding
“successful” hunting, see Marvin Glenn, "Hunting Lions," Arizona Cattlelog, April, 1952, 40-41; Clyde
Riggs (Mrs. F.D.) Perkins, "We Lick the Cats," Arizona Cattlelog, July, 1949, 32-29; Henry Smith,
"Rattlesnakes," Arizona Cattlelog, March, 1948, 42-43; Unknown, "Livestock Commission Report,"
Montana Stockgrower, March, 1956, 12.
67
Unknown, "Antelope Hunting Season Controversy," The Montana Stockgrower, October 15, 1953, 14;
D.W. Wingfield, "Neighborly Gossip," Arizona Cattlelog, June, 1946, 9.
90
Ranchers claimed to “like game” and not to mind supporting reasonable numbers.
But if the availability of resources pushed ranchers to privilege one species over another,
they would almost certainly choose their domesticated bovines. In 1951, a controversy
erupted in Arizona that pitted a rancher against a rapacious elk. Earl Van Deren, a
Munds Park rancher, had found the elk in question ravenously devouring his grain field.
The frustrated rancher took matters into his own hands, and, rather than waiting for the
elk to get his fill, Van Deren shot the elk (out of season and without a license). The State
Attorney General prosecuted Van Deren and ordered that he pay a fine. The ACGA
quickly came to the defense of the Munds Park rancher and John Babbitt, president of the
ACGA, explained to the broader Arizona public in a letter entitled “Cattle or Elk?” that
“The true attitude of nearly all stockmen is that they like game.” The problem, Babbitt
not-so-calmly explained, was that ranchers had been very patient while watching elk
herds take over the ranges. At long last, ranchers had decided to take matters into their
own hands and defend their way of life. “What man, worthy of the name, will not fight
for his living, for his family, for his home?” demanded Babbitt.
Like so much of rancher language in the postwar decades, Babbitt believed Van
Deren and ranchers like him to be under attack. To protect themselves, ranchers would
(and Babbitt implies should) defend themselves both physically and discursively. As
Babbitt’s article suggests, ranchers’ asserted a value of entitlement to make a “living” and
maintain, through that living, family and home. Importantly, this preservation of a way
of life depended on ranchers’ ability to maintain control over the ecology of the ranch.
Their frustration was due to the fact that they lived in a context they could never control
91
completely. Extra-local officials (judicial and land management officials) seemed, in
Babbitt’s mind, to be offering ranchers little or no help. If the State Game Departments
were not going to increase licensure and extend hunting seasons, then ranchers would do
what they had to do to win the contest for grass and maintain their ways of life.68
The Fish and Game Commissions in each state had different motivations (perhaps
understandably) than simply preserving grass for the use of the livestock industries (both
sheep and cattle). Their decisions on numbers of licenses to issue and where/when to
issue them often rested on fiscal, public relations, and ecological management concerns.
Raising the price of non-resident hunting licenses might mean more fiscal revenue for the
state game department, but it could act as a disincentive to out-of-state hunters, which
would in turn hurt the state’s local and state economies. Decreasing the numbers of
licenses for one region of a state while increasing licensure for another region could
encourage hunters to hunt in a region whose game populations (of whatever species)
were dangerously high, but that often meant increasing game numbers in the regions for
which fewer licenses were issued. In addition to all of that, trying to keep hunters
coming often meant issuing more licenses for areas of the state that were more scenically
appealing. Game officials based the numbers of licenses for particular regions on where
hunters liked to hunt.
Ranchers, who believed hunters could be the answer to game over-population,
came into conflict with the game departments who believed they knew better than the
locals in any given area. In 1953, a group of determined and “half-angry” stockgrowers
68
John Babbitt, "Cattleman Refutes 'Anti-Game' Claim," Arizona Daily Sun, September 28, 1951.
92
believed they were being “financially hurt by having to support an excess of wild game”
and felt that they were being “ignored, lied to, and ridiculed. When they suggested that
they should have a say in the numbers of permits given to hunters, the Fish and Game
Commission turned a deaf ear. The problem of too much game, in the minds of ranchers,
was as devastating to the economy of their ranches as grasshoppers or prairie fires.69
Here, then, was one area where ranchers employed a language of localism to protest the
impersonal and imprecise knowledge they believed guided the state’s decision-making.
An Arizona rancher perhaps explained it best when he railed at the Arizona Game
Department storming that it was “very unfair” at a time when a drought was gripping his
region to “increase elk and deer herds” while ranchers were “compelled to reduce their
herds on account of drought.”70 In the conflicts over game numbers, ranchers often saw
the extra-local institutions of “the state” as the enemy impeding their economic success.
If the government represented one extra-local force against which ranchers had to
position themselves, recreationist hunters represented another. Throughout the 1940s and
1950s, ranchers met together in their collectivities (both at the state and local levels) to
figure out ways to facilitate communication between ranchers and sportsmen and to try to
come to some kind of balanced co-existence.
Indeed, the hunting public often
represented a far bigger threat in rancher ideology than innocent, procreative herbivores.
Louis Warren has shown that in the early twentieth century, New Mexico ranchers allied
with what he terms “conservationists.” By the postwar years, the term “conservationist”
69
70
Unknown, "Antelope Hunting Season Controversy,” 14.
Wingfield, Cattlelog, 9.
was fast becoming a slippery term.
93
Ranchers believed themselves to be
“conservationists,” but so too did the new recreationists.
These postwar disputes and discourse over wildlife “control” and “access” were
value-laden contests. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, livestock producers had
collaborated with state and federal governments to eradicate wolves, bears, mountain
lions and, most prominently, coyotes in a “conservationist” effort which resulted in the
proliferation of herbivores. Many ranchers understood the cause/effect relationship. In
these discussions, ranchers recognized that the decrease of predator species (mountain
lions, bears, coyotes, and wolves) was at least partially responsible for the increasing
numbers of herbivores. H.A. Porter, a New Mexico rancher, knew full well that “the
stockman has been forced into unfair competition with wild life” because “coyotes,
mountain lions and other predators have been so depleted that deer have no competition
at all for survival.”71
The proliferation of game, like mule and white-tailed deer,
threatened cattle’s access to forage resources. Even rodents, because of their abilities to
eat enormous amounts of grass, could be potential competition for ranchers and their
cattle. The control of wild animal numbers seemed gravely important to ranchers in the
quest to fatten their cattle.
Rabbits, deer, elk, and, especially, antelope provided
formidable competition for the cattle on the range. Rodents and herbivorous ungulates
fought cattle for the sparse grass and thus endangered not just cattle’s bodies but
ranchers’ livelihoods. Ranchers believed they had vested “rights” to the grass and saw
the competition between cows and wild game as an almost natural contest and ranchers
71
H.A. Porter to New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association, 23 April 1947, Box 6, Folder 2, George
Godfrey Papers, Rio Grande Historical Collection, NMSU, Las Cruces.
72
believed their role to be to help the cows win the contest.
94
Sportsmen, despite
positioning themselves as “conservationists,” were no less interested in triumphing in the
contest with and over wild game.73 The two groups, vying over limited terrain and
unpredictable game numbers, came to verbal (and sometimes physical) blows throughout
the postwar years.
The arguments inevitably centered around the notion of scarcity. In the postwar
years, it began to become apparent to many that there simply was not enough space to go
around. Despite the call for “Multiple Use,” a policy priority that was given legislative
mandate in the Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act of 1960, there were too many users
with varying priorities for every group to get exactly what it wanted. As Louis Warren
has discussed, game is a tricky entity to define and own because it moves.
The
discussions between sportsmen and ranchers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, therefore,
centered on when a deer was public property and under the jurisdiction of the state and
72
This belief of entitlement is prevalent in almost all the sources. For specific examples, see Sam Hyatt,
“Report of Public Lands Committee Before the Executive Committee,” 11 December 1951, Box 61, Folder
7, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Records, American Heritage Center, Laramie, Wyoming; J.L.
Finley, “What the Cattle Business Means to Cochise County,” 10 October 1949, Box 6, Folder 10, Arizona
Cattle Growers’ Association Manuscript Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation, Arizona State
University, Tempe, Arizona; Stockmen’s Grazing Committee, “Suggestions for an Act,” 24 October 1950,
Box 61, Folder 7, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Records, American Heritage Center, Laramie,
Wyoming; Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, Cow Country Cavalcade. For a fascinating discussion
on the valuing of domestic animals versus their wild counterparts, see Susan D. Jones Valuing Animals:
Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
73
The government programs regarding animal control are varied and too numerous to discuss in detail here.
Generally speaking, each state cooperated with the federal government’s division in charge of animal
control to trap, poison, and hunt “undesirable” animals (this division has changed names numerous time
since its inception in 1886 as the Bureau of Biological Survey in the United States Department of
Agriculture – the division is now called the Fish and Wildlife Service and is located in the Department of
the Interior). Each of the five states discussed here used a bounty system for big predators at one time or
another; some, like Arizona, did so well into the 1950s. And each state government, in cooperation with
the Livestock Commissions and Game Commissions, worked to utilize the newest technology in animal
eradication. For example, see my discussion of the compound 1080 in chapter 3. See Mortensen, In the
Cause, 71-77. And Arizona State Legislature, "Relating to Predatory Animals; Providing for a Reward for
the Destruction Thereof, and Prescribing Penalties Therefore," (1947).
95
the public, and when it became private property under the jurisdiction of private property
owners.
Many hunters believed that when they had a license in hand, it invested them with
the power to trail the object of the hunt wherever the hunt led. Unlike human beings,
deer, elk, and antelope do not acknowledge the private/public categorization of land. In
trying to escape a hunters’ scope, an animal could very well move across boundaries.
Hunters, in quest for their prize, followed – often taking on predatory characteristics and
paying no attention to land demarcations. There were instances of fence cutting, and
moments when hunters, in their zeal, forgot to shut gates and let cattle escape. There
were times when a wayward bullet killed a rancher’s favorite and/or most valuable bull.
Perhaps more importantly than the numbers of these occurrences, however, was ranchers’
obsession with sharing tales of these occurrences with one another because such sharing
reinforced a shared sense of threat and harm.
Ranchers wrote letters to one another and shared ideas in the pages of their
association publications for addressing the problem of invading, dim-witted hunters.
Placing large signs on ranches urging hunters to “ask permission” to hunt on the property,
was one strategy ranchers employed. Posting notices threatening legal prosecution of
“trespassers” was another. Some ranchers probably even really considered identifying
their cows as this 1959 image below jokingly suggests:
96
Figure 4 Image from Wyoming Stock Growers Association, 1959
The artist intended the image intended to depict humorously the level of intelligence of
the average hunter, but the image attempted to communicate with ranchers about a
commonality of experience to which they were all being subjected by the influx of the
recreational public.74 H.A. Porter, an Apache Creek, New Mexico, rancher, answering a
call in The New Mexico Stockman for stories about ranchers’ experiences with state
agents and hunters wrote two pages about Forest Service bureaucrats, but saved his real
vitriol for the “present day so called ‘sportsmen.’” He suggested that hunters could help
with the problem of herbivore competition if modern hunters were worth their salt.
Instead, according to Porter, “the majority of them [hunters] come into the country...well
heeled with liquor and ammunition, drive up and down the highways for three or four
days hoping to kill their buck in some ranchers wheat field – if unsuccessful in this they
drink their liquor and expend their ammunition on ranchers, turkeys, livestock, water
tanks...and depart. A far cry from the type of hunter we used to know who came after his
buck and got him.”75 Not all hunters were bad, according to ranchers’ stories, just the
74
Image drawn by Melvin Miller, 1959, Box 192, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Records, AHC,
Laramie.
75
Porter to NMCGA.
new, modern hunters.
97
These hunters incurred ranchers’ disdain because ranchers
believed they had no knowledge of the range, no etiquette, and no skill.
In the early 1950s, in another example of ranchers sharing with one another tales
of woe regarding their hunter conflicts, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association issued
a questionnaire to its members regarding the negative outcomes of the presence of game
on ranches. The hope behind this political action, according to the WSGA, was that the
numbers would help the Fish and Game Committee of the association to convince more
easily the Fish and Game Commission of Wyoming that ranchers were being materially
harmed by intruding and rude hunters.
The questions are illustrative.
Some are
indicative of too much game on ranches (such as the one that asks how much tonnage of
feed loss ranchers had experienced due to game). But the more usual questions (5 out of
7) dealt with the property losses of ranchers at the hands of “hunters or sportsmen.” How
many gates were left open by hunters the questionnaire demanded. How many head of
livestock were killed or damaged? How about human death and injuries? Other damages
the questioners wanted to know about included “mail boxes, fences, insulators,
windmills, etc.”76
There are, unfortunately, no results of the survey, but by the late 1950s, the
problems ranchers believed they were having with hunters had not subsided and the
WSGA had, in coordination with the Izaak Walton League, the Wyoming Game and Fish
Department, and the Farm Bureau, completed an educational movie intended to promote
amicable sportsman-landowner relations. The language used in the film was conciliatory
76
Unknown, "Questionnaire to Ranchers Concerning Game", Box 57, Folder 7, Wyoming Stockgrowers'
Association Records, AHC, Laramie.
98
and meant to help “outsiders” and “newcomers” learn the ways of the ranching West.
The film is told from the viewpoint of a rancher who describes his interactions with a
bank teller “in town” who had come west “because he likes the out-of-doors.” The
rancher decides to take “Joe,” the teller, fishing on the ranch, and as they approach the
land, they see a gate has been left open. The rancher/narrator explains to the viewer that
“this is kind of thing that causes a lot of folks to put up a No Trespassing sign. Those
cows of mine might have gotten into an alfalfa field and bloated. I can’t afford to have
my cows dying.” The rancher/narrator proceeds to take credit for the health of fish and
game in the state because he is conservationist in his land use. He then explains to poor,
naive Joe that only the “carelessness” of some irresponsible sportsmen was guilty for the
poor relationship between ranchers and sportsmen. The film suggests, in a language of
localism, that Wyoming, the “equality state,” could be the first western state to ensure
that those “who will be affected by a decision” over game management and game rules
would have “a hand in making that decision.” Only through communication among
sportsmen and ranchers, the film explains, could there be any hope of keeping the land of
Wyoming “a wonderful place to live” and any hope of sustaining the state’s “beauty and
the natural wealth.” In the course of the postwar years, the guardians of the grasslands
had become care-takers not just of the grass but of the grasslands’ wild animal
inhabitants as well (at least in their own imaginations).77
The contests among ranchers/cows, game, and hunters also served as examples
for many ranchers of the threatening postwar world in which they found themselves.
77
Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association, “Film,” Box 57, Folder 7, Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association
Records, AHC, Laramie.
99
Ranchers, then, used the hunter/game controversies as opportunities to come together and
politically promote their collective interests. For example, each of the state rancher
associations had Wildlife and/or Game Committees throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Only ranchers sat on these committees and the president of the association (which was
also always a rancher) appointed both the members and the chairs of the committee. The
work of the committees ranged from keeping tabs on legislative developments, to
drafting policy statements on behalf of the associations, to communicating with the press
on issues of importance to the committee.78 Nearly every state and local association and
committee meeting, which hundreds of ranchers attended every year, had on their agenda
time to discuss wildlife and hunters. At the 1954 Montana Stockgrower Convention, one
rancher explained the state of affairs using the distinct language of localism to promote
unity among the ranchers in attendance. Art Nelson explained:
stockgrowers and land owners, of which I am proud to be one, living
close to Mother Nature, are accustomed to all of the varied changes of
nature, droughts, hard winters, grasshoppers, and what have you. It must
be remembered that antelope are grazed and hunted primarily on private
lands...are we going to turn the privately owned lands of the State into a
wild game preserve, or should we hold the increase to a minimum? The
Fish and Game Commission...[needs to be] represented by someone
interested in and respectful of land ownership and domesticated
livestock raising...it is only good common sense that the private land
owners are entitled to be considered as to the amount of game killed.79
Speaking before hundreds of ranchers, who had congregated to discuss the issue of
hunting, Nelson positioned himself with the collective group of ranchers, and then
juxtaposed ranchers with the naive and impractical decision-makers on the Game and
78
See, for example, Game and Fish Committee Records, 1948-1957, Box 57, Folder 3, Wyoming Stock
Growers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
79
Art Nelson, "Central Montana's View on Game Problem," The Montana Stockgrower, November 15,
1954, 12-13.
100
Fish Commission. Ranchers, like Nelson, dueled with state officials over claims to
expertise. Ranchers believed they knew the wildlife situations on the ranges best because
of their locally-based, direct experiences. In many ways, these same ranchers rejected
state officials’ claims to concern for long-term consequences and their claims to scientific
“expertise.”
Because ranchers could not meet individually with every potential hunter, nor
attend every meeting of the Game and Fish Commissions, ranchers relied on their
associations to organize collective discussions with sportsmen. In attempts to keep the
dialogue flowing, rancher representatives met with representatives from sportsmen’s
organizations such as the Izaak Walton League, state Wildlife Federations, and Game
Protective Associations. Sometimes these discussions could go quite smoothly, but at
times the discussions could get down right tense. Sportsmen’s special interest groups
shot angry words at ranchers only to have them ricochet in both public and private
correspondence. According to the official minutes of a 1951 meeting between the ACGA
and the Arizona Game Protective Association and the private correspondence between
Carlos Ronstadt (ACGA president) and Stuart Krentz, owner of the Krentz Ranch and
chair of the Game and Wildlife Committee, regarding the same meeting, the gathering of
“hunting conservationists” and ranchers was “very friendly.”80 The group had agreed
that the United Sates government should study the noxious plant and tree problem in
Arizona in order to increase feed grasses for both livestock and wild animals. They
agreed that when an overpopulation of wild animals existed, special consideration for
80
Stuart F. Krentz to Carlos Ronstadt, 26 May 1948, Box 4, Folder 8, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
101
immediate harvesting of that surplus should be made. They disagreed, however, on
whether or not bears should be placed on a state protected list. Ranchers might agree,
Krentz explained, if, and only if, there was a provision that allowed ranchers to kill a
“killer” bear if it could be proven the bear had harmed livestock. The two groups decided
to “consider” this and several other issues on which they could not come to agreement.
In spite of dissent on some issues, however, the two groups passed the following motion
unanimously:
Realizing that only through cooperative action can the problems of
conservation of range for present and future management of livestock and
wild game be solved, we, a committee composed of duly authorized
representatives of the Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association and the
Arizona Game Protective Association, hereby agree to work jointly toward
the solution of these mutual problems. We also resolve to submit
difference of opinion arising within our respective organizations to this
committee for adjustment.81
In just three short years, however, the accord represented in this motion would disappear.
Recall the Earl Van Deren elk shooting episode in 1951. In response to the shooting, Ben
Avery, a representative of the Arizona Game Protective Association (who had been the
chairman of the 1948 meeting), wrote a column in the Arizona Republic suggesting that
the shooting was a “well-planned move [by Arizona cattlegrowers] to wipe out nearly all
game in the state.” John Babbitt accused Avery of trying to stir up “a campaign of hate
and prejudice, sportsman against cattleman; cattleman against sportsman.”
Avery,
Babbitt claimed, was simply trying to “fan the flames of intolerance.” So much for
working jointly toward a solution for mutual problems.
81
Ibid.
As range spaces became
102
increasingly contested terrain, friction between sportsmen and ranchers increasingly
radiated angry heat.82
George Ellis, the manager of the Bell Ranch in east central New Mexico from
1947-1970, often felt the anger that many ranchers felt toward trespassing recreationists.
The Bell Ranch, because of its size, location, and well-known tradition, was a popular
place for hunters in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.83 The ranch had ample “crops” of quail,
antelope, and other game animals. Like many ranchers in these years, Ellis had to decide
how many hunters he would allow access to the private lands of the ranch, and this meant
interacting with game wardens as well as the hunters themselves.84 The 1949 antelope
season, saw the Bell welcoming 25 permitted hunters on its property. This number was
arrived at through careful negotiation between Ellis and the State Game Commission.
The land owner (Ralph Keeney) reserved five of the permits for personal friends
(reminiscent of the early-twentieth-century privatized game preserve mentality that Louis
Warren found in his study).85
The other permittees were all from “town.”
Three
permittees hailed from Santa Fe, four from Albuquerque, five from Tucumcari, two from
Springer, and the rest from other small towns. Ellis knew some, but certainly not all 20.
It was not, however, the 20 permitted hunters that concerned Ellis and inspired him to
inquire at the NMCGA office regarding the Association’s intent to publish notices to the
82
John G. Babbitt, "Cattle or Elk?," Arizona Republic, September 29, 1951.
The Bell ranch had a long history dating back to the Spanish conquest. It comprised over 130,000 acres
during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It was a prime area for antelope hunting. For more information on the
background of this ranch see Chapter 3.
84
Because of its size and central location for antelope migrations, the game warden coordinated with Ellis
to decide on numbers of licenses issued for the Bell Ranch area. See George Ellis to Ralph Keeney, 30
August 1949, George F. Ellis Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Center for Southwest Research, University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque.
85
Warren, Hunter’s Game, 71-103.
83
103
public of off-limits ranchlands. The notices set out clear boundaries across which nonpermitted hunters were not welcome. Any hunter who ignored the printed and posted
notices would be prosecuted according to the law. The notices were to be posted at any
gate Ellis sensed the interloping hunters might use and were to be published in several
regional publications. Ellis believed that such notices not just useful, but essential, and
he relied on the support of the larger body of ranchers in order to protect his range from
unwanted outsiders.
The existence of a concerted, collective effort on the part of the larger body of
ranchers to keep trespassers off their lands suggest the ways in which owner/operator
ranchers defined the modernization trends in the rural West through reactive claims to
property rights. Theirs was a world upon which “others” were trespassing in ways they
had not done previously. Ranchers across the intermountain West were quite aware of
the changes occurring around them.
That awareness became a kind of reactive
consciousness around which ranchers rallied in one another’s defense.
Ranchers’ intellectual reactions to the material changes occurring around them ran
the gamut. Some bemoaned the changes, some welcomed the changes, others tried their
best to avoid grappling with the changed environment (especially those older ranchers
who had some personal connection to “the old ways”), but almost all ranchers utilized
humor to assist them in the emotional and intellectual responses to the new contexts of
the Cold War West. In 1959, the editor and staff at Wyoming’s Cow Country published
several images they hoped would provide ranchers the space to laugh at their own new
104
predicaments. One of the images (see below) depicted a chuck wagon, similar to the one
that the Bell Ranch used for work in the 1940s.86
Figure 5 Image of chuck wagon from Wyoming Stock Growers Association
Cows sit around an antiquated chuck wagon enraptured with an image on a television
screen. As the image pokes fun at the frivolity of some of the modernization that was
occurring the 1950s and 1960s, it also suggests that all aspects of the ranch were affected
by the new contexts in which ranchers lived. Even the cows were being enveloped in the
modern world of ranching. And despite the fact that by 1959 few ranchers actually
owned chuckwagons (let alone electrified chuckwagons), ranchers used the historical
knowledge of a past age when most ranchers (whether owners or hands) would have
interacted with a wagon to create cultural affinity within their associations.
As the discussion in this chapter and the image above intimate, there were several
aspects of modernization. In addition to the changing social and land-use context of the
West, ranching itself was changing due to increased mechanization. The shifting of
ranch work from manual to mechanical and technological was both a material reality for
those ranchers who could afford it and a potential possibility for those ranchers who
86
Box 192, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Records, American Heritage Center, University of
Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
105
could not. In either situation, mechanization became one of the most important and
defining modern elements of the ranching business in the postwar decades.
The mechanization aspect of modernization was not new to the agricultural
business, of course. The invention of machinery to make farming easier in the United
States exploded in the nineteenth century with the creation of the John Deere plow. By
the late nineteenth century, genetically engineered seed and animal products were
becoming increasingly popular and accessible.
Still, many farmers resisted “book
farming” for some time. In the case of ranching, little mechanization was required on the
open range as cowboys on horseback drove their cattle across the vast public commons
toward the markets in the north. The coming of the railroad, while being incredibly
crucial to the workings of the open range cattle business, was also the only mechanized
implement in the trade.
By the 1920s, however, a powerful agricultural industrial
complex emerged which engaged farmers and ranchers in technological “innovation.”87
Supported by government funding through the United States Department of
Agriculture, an institutionally-driven system rose up around agricultural research and
development. Ever increasing “improvements” in the realm of farm and ranch machinery
as well as continual intensifying of the capitalist imperative to produce more and better
87
Much of the best history written on the topic of agricultural “development” focuses on the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Beginning in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century with the creation of the
United States Department of Agriculture, business and government increasingly colluded together to
promote “sound management” on farms – “sound management” generally meant increasing yields and
increasing profits with little regard for rural social health or for sustainable environmental practices. For
the best treatments of these developments see Allan Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the
Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the 19th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963); Christopher Clark,
The Roots of Western Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1990); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986); Paul Wallace Gates, The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860 (New York: Hold, Rinehart and
Winston, 1960); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989).
106
crops and livestock ensured that ranchers and farmers, by the World War II era, could not
afford to ignore cutting-edge agricultural technology.
Historians have long documented the ways in which new technology in
agriculture revolutionized yields while simultaneously undermining the common farmers’
ability to compete.88 By the postwar years, thanks to wartime innovations, more and
more sophisticated technology and increasing modernization in the form of breeding
practices, synthetic and manufactured fertilizers, herbicides (such as 2,4 D), and
pesticides (such as DDT), and automation had become available for ranchers. This
modernization created the need for intense capital, something to which many ranchers did
not have access. The cycle was a vicious one. In order to remain competitive, ranchers
needed technology to increase their productivity. To get the technology, ranchers needed
capital, a resource they often had to borrow. Just as they implemented one form of
modernization, another option would present itself, and the cycle would continue.89
Farmers had been experimenting with “scientific” farming with regard to growing
plants since at least the late eighteenth century. As early as the 1760s, farmers, in what
would become the American South, began to experiment with additives to the soil in the
forms of fertilizers made from any number of ingredients including Plaster of Paris
88
With the rise in demand for agricultural commodities with the coming of World War I, the federal
government increasingly supported research and development for “capitalist” development of agriculture.
For the best sources on this phenomena and the ways in which technology affected farmers’ business, the
land’s ability to produce, and the social relations within rural America see Daniel, Breaking the Land; Hurt,
American Agriculture: A Brief History; Jellison, Entitled to Power; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm;
Robert C. Williams, Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin' Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and Its Impact
on America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
89
At times, this could be a rational economic systems. When cattle prices remained high and interest rates
and prices on goods remained low, ranchers could make a profit. In those years when cattle prices dipped
(due to droughts for example), ranchers who were in debt could find their economic positions become even
more precarious.
107
(gypsum), bat guano, and marl (the latter became particularly important in the early
nineteenth century), but the major technological “innovations” in monoculture agriculture
arose from the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Agricultural historians, such
as Douglas Hurt, Mary Neth, Sarah Elbert, Joan Jensen, and Gilbert Fite, have examined
the ways in which “the larger structure of agriculture strongly affected...family
farming.”90 USDA-supported and industrially-inspired technological changes in farming
changed farmers’ relationships not only with the market, but also with family members
and with the land.91
Rural women have experienced most intensely the mixed outcomes of technology
acquisition. While little work has been done on ranch women specifically, we know a
good deal about the effects of technology on farm women in the Midwestern and
Northwestern regions of the country. Scholars have shown that, in some cases. the
90
Sarah Elbert, "Amber Waves of Gain: Women's Work in New York Farm Families," in 'To Toil the
Livelong Day': America's Women at Work, 1790-1980, ed. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1987, 280.
91
Judith Fabry and Deborah Fitzgerald both suggest that agricultural technology does more than make like
“easier” on the farm or ranch. Indeed, the decision to adopt technology is often based on whether or not the
piece of technology will increase agricultural outputs and decrease inputs. As Fabry argues, postwar World
War II ranchers and farmers in America began to adopt not just single pieces of technology (e.g. a single
tractor), but rather began to adopt systems of technology. So on many ranches tractors and electricity were
joined by pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, hormones, and genetically engineered grass feed in order to
promote (economic and crop) growth in the ranching/farming industry. See Judith Fabry, "Agricultural
Science and Technology in the West," in The Rural West since World War II, ed. R. Douglas Hurt
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Deborah Fitzgerald, "Beyond Tractors: The History of
Technology in American Agriculture," Technology and Culture, No. 32 (January 1991). Fitzgerald has
also argued that the industrial imperative for agriculture arose from an agricultural leadership that emerged
in the 1920s. These leaders were influenced greatly by “agricultural economics” – a burgeoning field in the
nation’s universities in the early twentieth century – and by the “industrial logic” that propelled changes in
American manufacturing beginning in earnest in the 1880s. See Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a
Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). For
other, more general discussions (that rarely include information specific to intermountain West range cattle
ranches) see Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers' Frontier, 1865-1900 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1966); R. Douglas Hurt, Agricultural Technology in the Twentieth Century (Manhattan: Sunflower
University Press, 1991); Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History; Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: MidAtlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850.
108
adoption of technology could help make ordinary tasks, like laundry, infinitely easier. In
other cases, mechanization overtook spheres that had traditionally given women power.92
In dairy operations, for example, mechanized milking technology of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries removed the milking tasks from the female domain, thus
undercutting women’s authority.93 Additionally, the decision of what kind of technology
to buy divided many a ranch family, just as it had farm families in the corn, cotton, and
wheat belts. A ranch family often prioritized a tractor or a new well (in the Southwest)
over a washing machine or telephone. Indeed, by 1960, 50% of ranches reported having
washing machines, a technology that was mostly in the female domain of ranch labor,
whereas 80% reported having electricity, and 80% reported having tractors and/or ranch
trucks – both of which were technologies that benefited the broader ranch operation.94
In the open range days, ranchers had had little reason to mechanize. Railroad
improvements throughout the West had been perhaps the most important technological
change of which ranchers took advantage. They had little need to purchase the early
versions of tractors and cars because on the one hand, they rarely had to grow feed and on
the other they used horses and rails to get their beef to market (due to a lack of roads).
Beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating with the 1934 passage of
the Taylor Grazing Act, however, the open range spaces increasingly closed and “free”
92
Corlann Gee Bush, "'He Isn't Half So Cranky as He Used to Be': Agricultural Mechanization,
Comparable Worth, and the Changing Farm Family," in 'To Toil the Livelong Day': American's Women at
Work, 1780-1980, eds. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987);
Jellison, Entitled to Power and Neth, Preserving the Family Farm.
93
See McMurry, Transforming Rural Life. Women often received goods and currency in the course of
trading their lactic wares. When dairying became mechanized and capitalized, women lost the power they
had once exercised in their oversight of dairying as well as important elements of financial independence.
94
This, of course, relates to the issue of which labor was most valued on ranches. For a lengthier
discussion of this, see Chapter 3. Box 183, Folder 8 Wyoming Stock Growers Association Papers,
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
109
grass disappeared. By the 1930s, ranchers realized that the political and ecological
environment would no longer allow them to remain simple capitalistically-oriented
pastoralists; rather they would have to attempt to become agriculturalists – steeped in a
complex system of mechanization.
In The Culture of Wilderness, Frieda Knobloch
credits a colonialist, patriarchal state (in the form of the USDA) as responsible for the
burgeoning mechanization of western range spaces. Using the methodologies of scholars
such as Michel Foucault and Hayden White, Knobloch seeks to find and chronicle the
techniques used by an agricultural elite from 1862-1945, to transform the American
West’s landscapes. The “experts,” in Knobloch’s story, are colonizers bent on turning
nature into a culture which mimicked the dominant culture of the United States (namely a
culture that was dominated by white, male, upper class actors). Capitalist agriculture was
the means to the ends in creating this nature-turned-culture culture. In the end, the lands
of the West, according to wishes of those in power, would be domesticated (meaning
planted), homogenous (meaning growing mono-culture crops and animals), and
controlled (meaning scientifically-managed).95 Knobloch seems to be quite accurate and
insightful with regard to the ideological orientation of officials in the USDA, but she pays
little attention to the receptiveness of western stockgrowers.
The ever increasing
demands of “industrial agriculture,” forced many ranchers by the post World War II
decades to consider investing in agricultural technology in order to remain competitive in
the livestock industry.
95
Knobloch, 2-15.
110
J.D. Craighead and his wife Leonora confronted difficult decisions about
mechanization throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Like ranchers all over the
intermountain West, the Craigheads enjoyed the boom of the 1940s. By 1939, thanks
largely to government relief programs and a slight change in the weather, cattle ranchers
in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, and Montana had survived the droughty
1920s and 1930s. Their ranches had become only slightly larger in acreage size and the
numbers of ranchers remained fairly constant.96 When World War II began, range cattle
ranchers in the intermountain West were ready and willing to reap the profits of a
wartime economy. And, according to the price of cattle, which soared by 1943, they did
so. Just as ranchers were getting used to the good times, however, the drought of 1950
hit.
All over the intermountain West, 1950 had been an unusually dry year.
In
southeastern Colorado, it was one of the driest years on record and thus hit J.D.
Craighead’s Craigland Ranch in La Junta particularly hard.
Craighead was aging and he could not decide whether or not the dry year was an
omen telling him to sell the ranch and get out of the business altogether or whether it was
just one more rough spot. Craighead had seen some awfully dry years; the worst for his
land had come in 1934. His land lay in the shortgrass country of the southern Great
Plains and he had many of the same experiences during the dust bowl that such epic
histories as Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl and Paul Bonnifield’s Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt and
96
From 1938-1945, the increases in size of ranches and decrease in numbers of ranchers was greater than
any other time in US history, but they were not all that profoundly significant. In 1940, the average ranch
contained 3559 acres of deeded land whereas in 1945, the average ranch contained 3667. The farm
population, throughout the postwar decades, continued its twentieth-century decline – but that decline was
slow and for those in ranch country often seemed imperceptible. See Hurt, American Agriculture and Hurt,
American Agriculture: A Brief History, Schlebecker, 185.
97
Depression chronicle.
111
In many letters to friends and family, Craighead recalled the dust
storms, dying cattle, low prices and the desperation that had existed nearly constantly for
17 years on the Craighead Ranch (1921-1938). In 1943, Craighead wrote to a friend in
Kansas about those long years:
From early in 1921 until 1928 we simply slowly starved. Cattle went
down, crops failed, taxes piled up, the irrigation company got into
financial difficulties by reason of farmers being unable to pay
assessments until the whole situation seems hopeless. 1927 was a
good crop year, prices were better, 1928 even better and 1929 was
fine. Everybody thought they were going to get on feet again, when
blooie, everything blew up. Cattle went down to one third their 1929
price, people abandoned their homesteads, businesses closed up and
we all got deeper and deeper in debt. Then about 1933 crops got good
and we thought again our section and people would get on better.
Then the droughts [of the mid 1930s] struck.98
The long periods of little or no rain meant dry pastures and minimal green grass for cattle
to graze. In fact, Craighead had witnessed the cyclic droughts come again and again, but
always he had stayed. He supposed the main reason he did so was because he knew
97
See Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1979); Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. For other excellent histories
of the Great Plains during the 1930s, see James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and
Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); R. Douglas Hurt, The Dust Bowl:
An Agricultural and Social History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981); John R. Wunder and Frances W. Kaye,
ed., Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience (Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1999).
98
Craighead to Metz. Generally speaking, ranchers weathered the bad times of the Great Depression by
relying increasingly on domestic subsistence production, on outwork (especially of wives), on selling
and/or holding onto their livestock depending on market conditions, and on the federal government
(including increasingly cheap credit sources like the Production Credit Associations as well as the beef
buying program). For the best treatments of American farm life in the 1930s see Deborah Fink, "Sidelines
and Moral Capital: Women on Nebraska Farms in the 1930s," in Women and Farming: Changing Roles,
Changing Structures, ed. Wava G. Haney (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988); Mary W.M. Hargreaves,
"Land Use Planning in Response to Drought: The Great Plains Experience of the Thirties," Agricultural
History 50 (October 1976); Hurt, The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History; Jacquline Jones,
"Tore up and a Movin': Perspectives on the Work of Black and Poor White Women in the Rural South,
1865-1940," in Women and Farming: Changing Roles, Changing Structures, ed. Wava G. Haney (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1988); Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s.
112
“nothing else” and in 1950, he decided to stay yet again and ride out the dust storms one
more time.
Part of the reason Craighead decided to “stay in the business” was that, by 1950,
Colorado cattle had reached an all-time high of $25.10 cwt.99 For Craighead, this price
meant that his herd of 239 head of registered Hereford cattle (including bulls, cows,
heifers and calves) was worth over $60,000. By way of comparison, the same herd only
ten years earlier would have been worth no more than $20,000. In 1934, the same
number of head would have been worth only $5000. In 1950, as J.D. Craighead began to
undergo another drought, he had just experienced one of the best times in the history of
the beef industry to be rancher.
Still, when that drought hit, Craighead did not feel certain he could keep his cows
alive. He wrote to family members that his pastures were “as dead as winter” but
thankfully, the dry grass was keeping the cows in good condition temporarily. Craighead
knew, however, that the cows would “eat it all up before winter” and after that he would
not “know what [to]...do” with the herd.100 He knew he would need more feed, but
claimed that feed prices were exorbitant. Ranchers all over the intermountain West had
to utilize supplemental feed. Those in areas that had difficult winters (such as the plains
states) almost always had to feed in the colder months while those in the southwestern
states often had to feed during extended droughts or during the driest months before rains
99
CWT refers to the price a cow will bring. It means, per hundredweight – which means that by 1950,
every 100 pounds on a cow would bring $25.10. “Official Estimates: Colorado Marketing Year Average
Prices,” United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Denver,
Colorado.
100
JD Craighead to Family Members, 8 August 1950, Papers of Jacob D. Craighead, Box 1, Folder 4, The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
113
arrived to green the grass. Most ranchers purchased feed, but many also grew their own.
Deciding how much feed to grow and how much to buy were often market-based
decisions, but they could also be dependent on technology.
By 1950, thanks to increasing technology, riding out the dust storms meant
something new for ranchers like Craighead. Structural and technological changes in the
West and in ranching existed to help Craighead weather the postwar dust storms, but this
technology was the kind that required Craighead to increase his dependence on the
governmental technocracy (including lines of credit) that had arisen in agriculture in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Craighead grew much needed feed crops
(especially alfalfa) on 127 acres of irrigated land. This irrigation did not exist before the
1930s and was a direct result of increased investment in reclamation that had occurred all
over the intermountain West in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The
Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 signaled the age of water conservation in the West,
but it was the increased spending of the federal government on reclamation projects
during the New Deal that provided ranchers a safety net.101
When drought hit in the
postwar years, there often was more stored water nearby which ranchers and farmers
could use not only to water their cattle but also to grow their feed crops. With the
increase in available irrigation and the rise in soil conservation science, ranchers
101
Water was an essential component for all ranchers in the arid West. For background on reclamation in
the West see Donald J. Pisani, To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Donald J. Pisani, Water and American
Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its
Disappearing Water (New York: Viking, 1986); John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State,
Culture and Rebellion in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Donald Worster,
Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Publishers,
1985.
114
increasingly sought to either grow feed crops (like alfalfa) or they sought to reseed the
range.
By 1950, Craighead had begun to experiment with range reseeding and had
planted Crested Wheatgrass on some of his land. He had also planted a ten-acre irrigated
field in Kentucky 31 Fescue. With the latter, Craighead became the first in Colorado to
plant Kentucky Fescue. His fellow ranchers understood that his decision to plant a
species that had not been used on Colorado ranges represented something of a risk. This
willingness to assume risk was something that all ranchers in the postwar West had to
consider. Moreover, it represented one instance of many in which ranchers had to rely on
the bureaucratic technocracy of American agriculture for expertise and advice. The use
of new technology could, depending on how it was approached, get a rancher branded as
either pioneering or reckless.
While farmers and ranchers accepted modernization during the postwar years
more readily than farmers had accepted “book farming” in the mid and late nineteenth
centuries, ranchers did not receive technology unquestionably, and only those ranchers
who maintained an informed skepticism and adopted technology selectively and
successfully could boast the label of “progressive pioneer.”102 The author of an article
about Craighead in his local paper, referred to J.D. as a “pioneer” in agriculture.
Part of
the label of pioneer connoted that Craighead had survived and, at times, prospered in the
cattle business. In this situation, largely because Kentucky Fescue grew so successfully
on the shortgrass prairie, Craighead’s assumption of risk was respected and lauded
102
Unknown, "J.D. Craighead Pioneered Valley Hereford Industry," Arkansas Valley Journal, January 17,
1952.
115
because it signaled his relative success as a businessman. The dominant ranch culture
celebrated a rancher’s willingness to assume risk when and if the risk-taking rancher
incorporated modernization with “common sense,” frugality, and success.
By the 1950s, then, ranchers’ were managing cows’ bodies through scientific and
increasingly technological agricultural means.
For ranchers this management meant
being up-to-speed on the latest technologies.
It meant deciding whether or not to
continue using horses to do ranch work or to switch to fossil fuel implements like trucks,
cars, and tractors. It meant considering purchasing new-fangled mechanisms for doing
ordinary ranch tasks like chutes for vaccinations, artificial inseminations for breeding,
windmills for pumping water from underground aquifers to the stock tanks above ground,
and/or branding tables for branding.
Scientifically-based management meant many
things, but in the minds of ranchers, that kind of management required that they
increasingly needed to come together to learn about the new methods and that they came
to rely ever more extensively on conversations within their associations to make sense of
the science and technology.
In June of 1955, Ralph Miracle, the secretary of the Montana Stockgrowers’
Association, took on the issue of modernization directly in his address at the annual
convention. The nearly 5000 members in the association he believed were a unique body
as there was not a “more resourceful or more determined group of individuals in any
other industry in the country.” Miracle believed that “the seventy-one years of [the]
association’s history reflects this strength.”103
103
He also asserted, however, that the
Ralph Miracle, "Your Secretary Reports to the Convention," The Montana Stockgrower, June 15, 1955.
116
necessity of the group was greater than ever considering the “many things” that affected
“the cow business” in the middle of the twentieth century. Shortly after the convention,
The Montana Stockgrower published Miracle’s report and just underneath it they printed
this image:104
Figure 6 Modernization cartoon from The Montana Stockgrower, 1955
Whereas the first half of the image, “As It Was,” shows a lone cowboy doing his labor in
an unfenced and technologically “unsophisticated” space (much like the Stockgrower’s
cover the previous June), the second half, “As It Is,” shows several cowboys gathered
together in a corral using modern technological tools to complete the task at hand. One
can see electric power assisting with the branding. A telephone pole to the right tellingly
hints at the connectedness of this particular ranch to the broader world. The truck parked
nearby suggests that the rancher and/or his cowboys utilized fossil fuels to conduct ranch
labor as well as to communicate with others beyond the confines of the corral. The
image also hints at a labor regime that was more than simply an individualistic enterprise
and that the industry required the use of new kinds of power.
104
Cartoon by Ben Burnett, The Montana Stockgrower, June 15, 1955, 18-19.
117
The shared labor, the increased mechanization, and the apparent modernization of
ranches were prevalent themes in the lives of most range cattle ranchers by the postwar
decades.
Whether or not they could afford to make their operations “fancy” was
irrelevant. The impetus to try was always present. And while the image suggests a
collective history, it also hints at a shared present – one that was infinitely more
complicated than the bygone days of an undifferentiated past. The image and Miracle’s
address both suggest that ranching, with all of its new, concomitant complications, was
better conducted in solidarity, and based on the numbers of ranchers who wrote to their
association publications, attended quarterly meetings and annual conventions, and
participated on committees and in committee meetings, ranchers believed that Miracle
was right.
Thousands of ranchers served (without remuneration) on committees for the local,
state, and even national cattlegrowers’ associations to explore the possibilities and the
pit-falls of modernization and mechanization of the industry. Each state had differing
priorities.
In the Southwest, the seeding of clouds to produce more rain had an
importance that it did not have in the mountainous regions of Wyoming or Colorado.105
In the northern Great Plains states, research on the best ways to control Brucellosis took
more precedence than in the Southwest. But no matter the priority of research, ranchers
could all agree that research on the best modes of modernization and mechanization
should be a priority of rancher associations. George Ellis was particularly involved with
105
See for example George Ellis’ efforts in the Western Research Association in the early 1950s on cloud
seeding, Box 3, Folder 14, George F. Ellis Papers, Center for Southwest Research, UNM, Albuquerque.
See also Unknown, “Quay County Rancher Offers $100 an Inch for Artificial Rain,” The New Mexico
Stockman, December, 1947, 88.
118
the research side of association life and not only served on NMCGA research and
development committees but also chaired the Research Committee of the American
National Cattlemen’s Association from 1957-59. Some of the committee’s priorities in
those years included helping ranchers to create an administrative system for the poisons
they were using for parasite control, “intensified study of the control of mesquite and
other noxious plants by chemical means, further efforts to develop more productive
varieties of range grasses and to improve methods of seeding,” and a “continued study of
the use of antibiotics and growth stimulating hormones under range conditions.”106
Hundreds of letters in Ellis’ personal papers reveal the regional (and even national)
conversation in which ranchers engaged as they not only tried to make sense of new
science but also tried to share knowledge with one another.
In addition to serving on committees and listening to reports on research at
conventions, the pages of the association publications are filled with articles and letters
relating to “new” technology and its potential usefulness. Ranchers wrote across miles
and miles of ranch country to aid their fellow ranchers in the difficult decision-making
processes of modernization. In 1951, for example, numerous letters arrived in Abbie
Keith’s mailbox regarding whether or not it was worthwhile to invest in branding tables
very much like the one depicted above. Mrs. Ott Dixon of Buckeye, Arizona, Georgia
Baker of Young, Arizona, and Frank Krentz of Douglas, Arizona were just a few of the
ranchers who wrote to claim that a branding table was a worthwhile investment. All of
the letter writers responded to a call in the ACGA newsletter from a fellow rancher
106
List in Research Committee Correspondence Folder, Box 2, Folder 11, George F. Ellis Papers, Center
for Southwest Research, UNM, Albuquerque.
119
looking for information about ranchers’ experiences with the new technology. Krentz
reminisced that “the old way was – we were in the dirt, the calf was in the dirt, dust was
flying and everybody was worn out long before the end of the day.”107 Mrs. Dixon
explained that she and her husband had used a calf branding table for a number of years
and had let neighbors borrow it to see if they liked it. They did. “We just wouldn’t be
without one,” the experienced ranchwoman exclaimed.108
Georgia Baker not only
advocated for the adoption of a branding table, but explained that she and her husband
had “bought” into modernization by getting “the whole works.” They had purchased “a
squeeze chute, Howe Scale (a mechanized scale), a sprayer to keep the bugs off the cattle,
and a Jeep which puts the burro to shame.”109 The letters illustrate not only an intense
engagement with mechanization on the part of the ranchers, but are also part of a broader
social discourse that served to create points of commonality around which ranchers could
gather. The appearance of the public call for knowledge from an anonymous rancher in
the newsletter and the subsequent private responses from knowledgeable ranchers serve
as examples of the ways in which ranchers shared knowledge of material experiences and
in turn created ideological conventions.
Certainly ranchers’ decisions about which technological “advancements” to
utilize on their ranches could make or break a rancher financially, especially because all
of the technology was connected to a larger market economy in which ranchers were
bound tightly.
107
Tractors, electricity, automobiles, household appliances, pesticides,
Frank Krentz, "Neighborly Gossip," Arizona Cattlelog December, 1951, 56.
Mrs. Ott Dixon, "Neighborly Gossip," Arizona Cattlelog December, 1951, 56.
109
Georgia Baker, "Neighborly Gossip," Arizona Cattlelog December, 1951, 56.
108
120
herbicides, grass seed, water “improvements” (such as the drilling of wells), and the latest
disease vaccines, were just some of the technological developments that were
increasingly available for ranchers’ use and were quite costly. This was why, in early
1950, Craighead wrote to the Wyatt Manufacturing Company in Salina, Kansas, to
inquire about a piece of equipment that he thought might be beneficial to his operation.
Craighead explained to the sales representative that he had met a fellow rancher at the
Denver Stockshow who thought that “the Jayhawk hydraulic loader was now made
attachable to Ford Ferguson or Ford tractors.”110 Craighead owned two Ford tractors
(which he had purchased in the lucrative years of the mid and late 1940s) and since he
grew hay as supplemental feed for his Purebred Herefords, he knew that if he could get a
hydraulic loader for a new hay crane, his labor and that of his employees would be
greatly simplified (and perhaps reduced, lessening the need for expensive ranch labor).
Craighead explained to the machine dealer that his was a mid-sized ranch, that “had to
pay for itself” and he could not afford the equipment if its cost was astronomical. In the
end, the equipment was too expensive to be justified and Craighead decided to forego its
purchase, but his decision was surely not an easy one as the efficient growing of
supplemental feed would have been especially urgent in a year of little range growth,
which, of course, the droughty 1950 was. The hydraulic loader is an example of the type
of technology that, if bought outright or paid off quickly, could help ranchers increase
their productivity. And despite the fact that Craighead did not purchase the loader, its
110
J.D. Craighead to Wyatt Mfg. Co., 10 February 1950, Papers of Jacob D. Craighead, Box 5, Folder 8,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
121
existence forced Craighead and other ranchers like him to make a decision about their use
of mechanized technology.
As the Craighead story illustrates, not all ranchers invested in every available
machine, but the majority did modernize in some way. The purchase of technology and
the adoption of modern ranching techniques (including vaccination, re-seeding, and so
on) surged and dipped according to cattle prices throughout the postwar decades.
According to surveys conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture, by
1960, ranchers were spending approximately twice the amount on machinery costs as
they had in the 1930s. The expenditures incrementally increased throughout the postwar
decades and indicate a consistent growth in the numbers of ranchers who were adopting
(at least limitedly) ranch machinery.111 While not all ranchers modernized every aspect
of their operations, they all had to decide whether or not they wanted to or could afford to
purchase some elements of modernity.
Modernity and mechanization had profound
implications for ranchers’ profit-margins and indebtedness.112 More importantly for our
story about the economic culture of the range cattle industry, modernity and the
knowledge required to understand it, brought ranchers together in commonality.
Although some ranchers chose to reject modernity and many bemoaned the passing of the
old days, ranchers also embraced many of the “new ways.”
Either way, they
communicated with one another about which decision was best.
111
Gray, Ranch Economics, 187.
Interestingly, labor costs continued to increase for ranchers across the West. This increase largely was
due to the fact that the cost of labor astronomically increased during the postwar years. Southwest cattle
ranches saw an increase in expenditures for labor of 110% from 1940-1963 while Northern ranches
experienced an increase of over 400%. See Gray, Ranch Economics, 192.
112
122
In the postwar decades, ranchers bought and sold land, cattle, feed, and water just
as they had since the ranching enterprise began in the late nineteenth century. By the
mid-twentieth century, however, operating a cattle ranch in the intermountain West
became more complicated than the simple transformation of grass to flesh. In these
decades, ranchers found themselves embroiled in a modern and modernizing historical
context. They increasingly encountered outsiders interloping on range spaces. They had
to consider the presence of the federal government in a way they had not had to do
previous to 1935, the year the Taylor Grazing Act went into effect. They witnessed
intense economic and geographic trends which brought newcomers, hunters, tourists, and
new, more urban residents to their rural spaces. In addition to all of that, ranchers had
access to innumerable technological “developments” that, industry and science assured
them, would increase their production of cows and benefit them economically.
As ranchers experienced these aspects of modernization, they celebrated the
historical roots of their industry. In some ways, ranchers dealt with modernization not
only by paying attention to the technological and regulatory milieu of ranching in order to
remain economically solvent, but also by creating a culture of memory that enabled them
to maintain ideological connections to the pre-modern world of open range ranching. As
we have seen in this chapter, modernization, while being complicated and never creating
complete homogeneity within the ranching community, did provide space for ranchers to
come together in their groups to create commonality with one another through a sharing
of cow talk. In Chapter 2, we shall see that existing alongside these conversations and
cultural productions regarding modernization were ranchers’ memories of a bygone day
123
when theirs was (at least mythically) a less complicated world. It is to this world of
memory and myth to which we now turn.
124
CHAPTER 2
BRANDING THE PAST: COLLECTIVE HISTORY AS COHESIVE AGENT
“…You’re dealing with an industry where people have to believe in what they’re doing to get it
done, and that’s just as true of ranching as it is in getting history down properly.”
~ Ralph Miracle, 1972
“...everything seems to indicate that the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the
present.”
~ Maurice Halbwachs, 1925
By the mid-twentieth century, range cattle ranchers in Arizona, Montana, New
Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming faced a changed and changing United States West. The
Great Depression, the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act, and World War II had altered
the economic, ecological, and political terrain for range ranching. As ranchers responded
to these changing times, they attempted both literally and figuratively to remember their
industry.1 From the late 1930s through the Cold War years, ranchers used memorymaking as one of the tools for constructing a cultural edifice in which they housed their
claims to legitimacy. Ranchers’ memory productions included as much amnesia as
remembrance, and it was through this incomplete rendering of the past that ranchers
1
Epigraphs are from Ralph Miracle Interview, OH Transcript 13, Box 1, Folder 1, Montana Historical
Society, Helena, Montana, 24 and Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992). As I explained in the last chapter, when I referred to “ranchers” in Chapter 1, I
meant the term quite generally as it applied to modernization. Ranch hands as well as owner/operator
ranchers, large ranchers and small, all felt the effects of modernization acutely. The decision about which
forms of modernized mechanization to bring into the ranch, affected a less general group of ranchers,
namely the owner/operators. From this point forward in this dissertation, unless I note otherwise, when I
use the term “ranchers” I am referring to owner/operator ranch culture. I do not make a distinction among
ranchers of color unless I am explicit about it, because dominant ranch culture appears to have been more
class stratified than race stratified. An example would be Carlos Ronstadt, president of ACGA in the late
1940s. Ronstadt was of Mexican lineage and owned a large ranch in southern Arizona. When he was
elected to his position, there was little discussion about his ethnicity, but rather the election focused on his
classed success. The inclusion of ranchers of color in the memory productions is more complicated and is
something with which I grapple later in this chapter. Still, it must be noted at the outset that most of the
productions were written and/or remembered by Anglo authors and referred to the historical experiences of
Anglo (and sometimes Mexican American in the case of New Mexico and Arizona) ranchers.
125
sought to configure their industry’s collective history in such a way that it promoted an
appearance of cultural unity during a time of profound change.
The creation of a collective past, which rested on a particular set of memories,
enabled ranchers to claim a common identity grounded in a partially mythic and highly
hubristic past. Ranchers tied this past with the present, and in so doing suggested that
theirs was an economic undertaking that had a long, prestigious history.
By self-
consciously creating a particular version of their industry’s history, ranchers did not just
remember memories; they remade them in order to use them to gain political, economic,
and cultural power in the present.2 Drawing on their history, postwar ranchers celebrated
an economic and cultural persistence which they used to naturalize their claims to power
in the present.3 It is this connection among memory, history, and collective power that
historian Patrick Hutton discusses in his book History as an Art of Memory. Hutton, in
examining the writings of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, explains that history can be
crafted into memory by a group of people and then used to promote the aims of that
group. So it was for range cattle ranchers in the mid and late twentieth century. In
almost every instance, their public and private remembrances served as justifications for
their group’s cultural and economic perseverance and claims to legitimacy.
2
It is important to note that it is not my intention, in this chapter, to find the “truth” of the stories that
ranchers told in their memory productions. While that would be a fascinating study, I am less interested in
ascertaining truth and falsity and more interested in thinking about which stories ranchers told and how
those stories helped ranchers’ remember their industry. In this chapter, it is not my intention to reclaim
“the real past” from some fictionalized past that I think exists in the ranchers’ memory productions. What
“really” happened in ranching history is not what I’m interested in here. Rather I am interested in how
ranchers mobilized a certain kind of past to create a collective identity in the present. For an interesting
discussion on history, memory, and heritage, and the intersections of the three see Lowenthal, The Heritage
Crusade.
3
For a wonderful discussion on the intersections of memory and amnesia see Kammen, Mystic Chords of
Memory.
126
The memories on which ranchers relied to make such claims appeared in multiple
forms including association histories, pioneer histories, written autobiographies of
members, artifact collections, and oral histories.4
Ranchers created some of these
memory productions for widespread public distribution; others appeared in the pages of
association publications intended only for the eyes of the membership. Still others were
donated by ranchers, their families, and the cattlegrowers associations to archives in
repositories across the nation remaining semi-private as they awaited the curious eyes of
historically-minded patrons.
In short, these collections of memories tell us two things about rancher cultural
identity in the post World War II intermountain West. First, they reveal that a particular
class of ranchers was in control of creating the memories. This group of owner/operator
ranchers tended to privilege the memories of those who were privileged in the past. In
Chapter 1, we saw this group creating a discourse of threat and harm (located in their
fears of the modernizing West) in order to create a cultural belief in their own
victimization. With regard to their memory production, these same ranchers created a
4
Ranchers and their associations began chronicling ranch history in the intermountain West even earlier
than 1945. Many ranchers and cowboys wrote their memoirs in the 1920s and 1930s as the Old West
appeared to be slipping further and further away. The postwar decades witnessed more of the same as
ranchers turned to the past to draw inspiration from the tradition that informed their identities as cattle
ranchers. For examples of the early memory productions see Maxwell Struthers Burt, The Diary of a Dude
Wrangler (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1924), Agnes Morley Cleveland, No Life for a Lady (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941), David Sievert Lavender, One Man's West (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1943), Mary Kidder Rak, A Cowman's Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1934), Charles M. Russell, Good Medicine: Memories of the Real West (Garden City, NY:
Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1930). In this partial list, I have included autobiographical
accounts of life on ranches in the five states under consideration here. The list would expand exponentially
if one included histories and biographies of ranches and ranchers in other western states, especially Texas.
For two examples of this latter kind of memory production, see Ellsworth Collings, The 101 Ranch
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937), James Greer, Early in the Saddle (Dallas: Dealey and
Lowe, 1936).
127
collective history that celebrated the very privilege they feared they might lose in a
changed and changing world. Second, ranchers’ memories reveal that owner/operators
(those who controlled the means of production for the assembly of these memories) still
clung to a certain privileged position in society in which they hoped others might come to
believe. Ranchers not only sought to record their individual and collective memories for
their own consumption and use, they sought also to broadcast those memories to a public
audience. In sharing their memories with the non-ranching public at large, ranchers
staked a claim to and attempted to convince the broader public of their rightful economic
and cultural place in the intermountain West. Those who do not have some sense of selfimportance do not generally expect to have their history publicly honored in any
particular way, but through the production of stories, which ranchers sought to sell to the
non-ranching public and which offered a particular depiction of their industry’s past, this
group of agriculturalists sought to influence both the present and the future.
In 1983, for example, the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association financed the
writing of the association’s “official” history. The NMCGA intended the history to be
consumed both by ranchers and by the population of New Mexico more broadly. In the
introduction, one of the former presidents of the association explained their motivation:
As you read these pages, I trust that you will keep in mind that the
Association members of today are, like the old time membership,
making history. The [world] in which we operate is different and more
complex than in past decades, and the roles we play today are probably
more demanding, but the direction is clear: we must continue to
dedicate ourselves to the preservation of our industry and our way of
life. (emphasis in original)5
5
Philip Bidegain, “Forward,” in Robert K. Mortensen, In the Cause of Progress: A History of the New
Mexico Cattle Growers' Association (Albuquerque: New Mexico Stockman, 1983).
128
The historical consciousness obvious in this excerpt stems from a certain privileged
orientation to the world but also hints at an industry in flux. The turn toward the past
allowed ranchers to remember former glory in order to reify it in the present. To prove
their importance to the “progress” of their individual states and to the nation-state more
broadly, ranchers buttressed their existence in a new era by asserting a heroic past. In
creating their memories, ranchers sought to honor particular versions of their past in order
to inspire veneration from both ranchers and non-ranchers in the present. Historian
David Wrobel believes that pioneer reminiscences of the old west were a “testimony to
their sense of declining status rather than to their established power,” but I argue that the
memories mid-twentieth-century ranchers created were a display of both a sense of
declining status as well as a testimony to their established power.
They believed
themselves to be a powerful collective presence in the New West of the twentieth
century, but they also sensed that their power might be dwindling. To curb the latter
phenomenon, they sought to remember their collective power and to memorialize
consciously a particular version of their history. In short, ranchers drew power and
prestige from their various memorial works in order to stake a claim to legitimacy in the
postwar.
In this chapter I will explore the ways in which ranchers capitalized on print,
aural, and spatial mediums to create, disseminate, and consume their collective history.
These memory productions, whether museum collections, autobiographies, plays, oral
histories, or association chronicles, focused almost always on the dominant aspects of the
daily lives of range cattle ranchers. First, the memories center the non-human world and
129
ranchers’ reliance and dependence on that world. The ecology of their ranches and the
surrounding world appear most often as both friend and foe in rancher memories serving
to unite them in common experience.
Secondly, the collective histories suggest a
continual struggle to subdue and “reclaim” that ecology through labor.
In rancher
memories, there is an ever-present nostalgia for the work culture as it existed before the
modernization of the postwar era, but there exists also a celebration of their present-day
labor identities. Third and lastly, the memory productions gloss over social tensions
among classes, genders, and races – choosing instead to emphasize a past replete with
social harmony.
In these memories, the range cattle business was not founded on
violence and conflict among the varied claimants of the West’s grazing lands (whether
American
Indians,
other
Anglo
ranchers,
homesteaders,
or
Mexican/Basque
sheepherders), and women’s roles in the culture were never problematically subordinate.
Rather, in the memorial stories, range ranching arrived on the heels of providence and
women and people of color remained rightfully ancillary to the main plot of the story,
which highlighted seminal, Anglo, male visionaries engaged in virtuous, but difficult.
entrepreneurship.
Range cattle ranchers, in the postwar era, would have understood each of these
three themes because they encountered them on a daily basis in their postwar lives. In
relying on collective history to talk about their uncertain present, ranchers were able not
only to connect their industry to a long history of livestock raising in the intermountain
West, they also were able to try and make sense of their common present. Using the past,
as they imagined it to be, ranchers were able to argue, as Arizona rancher J.L. Finley did
130
in 1949, that “cattle ranching operations provide a basic background that is responsible to
a great extent...for the General Economic and Social Welfare...” of the region.6 In his
address to other ranchers, Finley argued that because the “industry” had been a stabilizing
factor in the development of the West, it should continue well into the future. At a
moment when land and resources in the West were coming under increasing contestation,
at a moment when mechanization threatened to change completely the contours of ranch
production, and at a moment when rural life seemed likely to crumble, ranchers
reminisced with nostalgia for an era they shrouded with myth and imbued with great
import for the future.
The first characteristic that nearly all rancher memory productions feature is the
primacy of land and, more generally, non-human nature. Private property landholdings
and the use of the range for cattle ranching as well as the struggle ranchers had in
bringing that property under productive use all served as connective devices in ranchers’
memories, and we will discuss all that more in a moment. It was the range itself,
however, unfettered and unused, that existed as one of the most important characters in
rancher remembrances. The stories cattle ranchers told one another about their collective
past inevitably began with a memory of nature’s resource richness, inherent beauty, and
kindly benevolence. For example, in 1955, the Yavapai Cowbelles, in Yavapai County,
Arizona, chose a poem by ranch woman Sharlot Hall for the front piece of their collection
of rancher histories entitled Echoes of the Past. The poem reads:
6
J.L. Finley, "What the Cattle Business Means to Cochise County," 10 October 1949, Box 6, Folder 10,
ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
131
Land of the hills, land of the Yavapai!
Enchanted Land of pines, wind and sun,
My star of hope shines nightly in your sky,
And all your beauty and my dreams are one.7
With few exceptions, ranchers would have recognized the truth in the last stanza of the
poem; that their dreams (for continual profit and cultural permanence) depended on the
land. Hall’s suggestion that the beauty of the land fused with her dreams is a common
refrain in ranchers’ memories. Despite the fact that ranchers attempted to alter that land
to fit their productive needs, their businesses, and their way of life, began with the
ecology of “pines, wind and sun” on their ranches. The Cowbelles’ use of this poem to
begin their collection of the histories of “pioneer” ranchers indicates the hegemony that
the land, in its “natural” state, held in ranch culture. As an actor in their daily lives, the
land figures prominently in most all rancher reminiscences, but it also exists as an
aesthetic, an unchanging back-drop full of artistic beauty, which ranchers appreciated (as
one does a piece of art) when they were not busy with the cows.
The Yavapai Cowbelles were not the only ones to use a landscape aesthetic in
their memories.
Bob Sharp, the foreman of the ORO ranch in northern Arizona,
consistently refers in his memory to the beauty of the land that comprised the Baca Float.
Echoing the sentiments of Sharlot Hall and the Yavapai Cowbelles, Sharp explained, “I
loved that land. It was beautiful and productive and it had given me the greatest chapter
of creative living of my life.”8 Such an aesthetic served to unify ranchers culturally
7
Learah Cooper Morgan, ed., Echoes of the Past: Tales of Old Yavapai (Prescott, Arizona: The Yavapai
Cow Belles of Arizona, 1955). It is also worth noting that Hall was also a recognized literary figure in
Arizona and was the first official historian of the state.
8
Robert Sharp, Big Outfit: Ranching on the Baca Float (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1974),
153.
132
through a timeless (and sometimes romantic) attachment to the land. In the Preface to the
Arizona National Ranch Histories of Living Pioneer Stockman, Betty Accomazzo, a
Cowbelle and ranchwoman, pointed out that the volume included “both men and women
who still have a quiet, almost reverence appreciation of the beauties of nature as found in
the desert and mountains, in a calf or a colt or a kitten, in a star-studded midnight sky or
an Easter lily that opens up on Easter morning.”9
Spike Van Cleve, a rancher in
Wyoming and Montana, considered himself and all the ranchers in his region “lucky”
because they lived in what he figured was “the prettiest country God every made.” In
much of this romantic attachment to non-human nature lurks an amnesiac forgetting of
the harshness of the land and of the hard times ranchers often experienced at the hands of
“the prettiest country God ever made.”
While ranchers sometimes recounted their
negative experiences with the land, they tended to begin and end their reminiscences with
a kind of romantic depiction.
Even the 1954 Wyoming Stock Growers Association’s second “official” history
begins with an evocation of timeless “nature.” Maurice Frink was hired by the WSGA in
the early to write the second history of the association, Cow Country Cavalcade: Eighty
Years of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. The account began with a romantic
depiction of the landscape in which Wyoming ranchers conducted their business.10
9
Betty Accomazzo, ed., Arizona National Ranch Histories of Living Pioneer Stockman, Volume VI
(Phoenix, AZ: Arizona National, 1984).
10
The first, written by Agnes Wright Spring, was published in 1942 and was given as a souvenir brochure
at the Seventieth Anniversary Convention in 1942. See Agnes Wright Spring, 70 Years Cow Country: A
Panoramic History of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association Interwoven with Data Relative to the Cattle
Industry in Wyoming (Cheyenne: Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association, 1943). The associations of four of
the five states being discussed here wrote at least one “official” history. Arizona is the lone state that never
has, but personal ranch histories and the Arizona National Ranch Histories of Living Pioneer Stockman
133
Wyoming “was a land of lifting hills, of fragrant sagebrush flats and white peaks shining
in the sun, a land of little rivers flowing through great plains of grass – grass whose lifegiving power lived on even under the snows of winter – a wild, free land.”11 Even as
time moved on and cattle and sheep used the sagebrush flats of short grass country or the
desert lands of the Southwest over and over, ranchers and their memorialists tended to
assert a peculiar staying power of nature.
In spite of change over time, the land remained powerful. Frink explained, “the
trail herds are gone, the cattle wars are over, the open range is no more, but it’s still cow
country – and though even the cows are different, it’s a land of peace and promise. It will
be that as long as the rains come and the grass grows.”12 Certainly one could read this
quote as hyperbole consistent with the genre of celebratory history, and perhaps that is
what it is. Still, it matters that Frink, urged on by the Historical Committee of the
WSGA, centered the land, because it was one of the main characters in the ranching
drama to which all ranchers had some interaction and about which every rancher claimed
some knowledge.
The idea that the land could rejuvenate itself also provided a
justification for wanton and unregulated use of that land. Indeed, ranchers would use this
idea of “mother nature’s” resilience to argue against regulatory oversight of their grazing
regimens.
series often wove the history of the ACGA throughout. See John Rolfe Burroughs, Guardian of the
Grasslands (Cheyenne: Pioneer Printing and Stationary Co., 1971), Richard Goff, Century in the Saddle
(Denver: Colorado Cattlemen's Centennial Commission, 1967), Mortensen, Vivian A. Paladin, Montana
Stockgrower, Montana Stockgrowers Association 1884-1984: A Century of Service to Montana's Cattle
Industry (Helena, Montana: Montana Stockgrowers Association, ca. 1984).
11
Maurice Frink, Cow Country Cavalcade: Eighty Years of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association
(Denver, Colorado: The Old West Publishing Company, 1954).
12
Ibid., 209.
134
In the late 1940s, for example, the WSGA and NMCGA both urged the return of
federal grazing lands to the state governments. This early versions of the “Sagebrush
Rebellion” was a direct reaction against the increasing control of government agencies
over public lands grazing.13 The demand for an end to federal ownership was one of the
more extreme positions taken by western ranchers. As they announced that demand
(suspecting all along they would never accomplish their goal), they also clamored for a
cessation of reductions in allotted grazing on Forest Service lands. The two-front attack
on federal control was an economically motivated political move to gain benefits in the
present, but in justifying their positions, ranchers and association officers used the past.
In defending ranchers’ stance on the grazing question, for example, NMCGA
president George Godfrey argued “anyone who states that the Federal Domain is in worse
condition than it was 20 years ago under open range conditions does not know what he is
talking about.”14 In the article, Godfrey admitted that overgrazing has and can occur, but
that through “sound management” (i.e. diligent labor on the part of the rancher) and the
heartiness of the land, the range had improved and could continue to do so. Positioning
himself and other ranchers as the true experts because of their history of land use,
Godfrey asserted that “the grazing lands of the West were being put to profitable use
before the establishment of the National Forests or other federal land management
bureaus.”15 That was to say, in short, ranchers did not need new experts to help them
understand the land which they had long nurtured and prodded into production. Similarly
13
Cawley.
Godfrey.
15
George Amos Godfrey, “New Mexico Rancher Urges Sale of Federal Grazing Lands to Users,”
Unknown Newspaper, ca 1947, Box 4, Folder 4, George Amos Godfrey Papers, Rio Grande Historical
Collections, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.
14
135
to Godfrey, Oda Mason, president of the WSGA, explained in a statement urging Forest
Service officials to cease their unfair and “unjustified” management of the forest
resources, “The mountains, rivers and snow and grass in our vicinity are Acts of God and
will go on forever as they always have.”16 Mason’s statement not so subtly implies that
regulation of such enduring, infinite, and divine resources not only would be unnecessary
but futile.
Under the leadership of men like Godfrey and Mason, the collective associations
of ranchers wrote their congressional representatives urging them to introduce and pass
legislation returning federal lands to state (and eventually private) ownership, they passed
resolutions advising a reconsideration of “drastic reductions in the forest permits,” and
they prodded Congress to investigate the grave policies being implemented by the Forest
Service.
The legislation never happened, but the investigation did (in 1946,
Congressman Frank Barrett held hearings throughout the western states to uncover
bureaucratic abuses of livestock growers), and it led to the Forest Service’s creation of
advisory boards, patterned after the Grazing Service’s advisory boards, to hear rancher
complaints and serve as facilitative bodies to better communication among Forest Service
officials, ranchers, and the broader public. This policy outcome partially satisfied the
ranchers and the controversy faded, only to raise its head in the late 1970s. What is
significant about the controversy is the ways in which ranchers used a discourse of
16
Burroughs, 305.
136
expertise grounded in memories of historic, effective, and righteous land use to affect
very real policy shifts within the federal government.17
The use of the land as durable and infinite proved to be an enduring component of
rancher memory discourse.
Twenty years after releasing Frink’s 1954 history, the
WSGA commissioned yet another “official” association history that utilized non-human
nature in much the same way as Frink, Godfrey, and Mason had done. According to
minutes from the Historical Committee, which had been formed officially in 1941, the
book, first and foremost, needed to “1) be sympathetic and complimentary of our
industry, 2) reflect a true economic picture of our industry, 3) improve the general image
of the cowman...” and speak to ranchers. Highlighting the righteousness of the use of
grass for grazing, Wyoming’s principle “natural resource” in the minds of ranchers,
seemed to John Rolfe Burroughs, the author of the history, the best way to accomplish
the task the WSGA set before him. Burroughs thus began his story, published by the
WSGA in 1973, with the Wyoming landscape and used the grass of the Great Plains as
the central non-human character in the great historical drama of early cattle ranching. On
the front-piece Burroughs placed a quote from Carl Sandburg, “I Am The Grass; Let Me
Work.”18 The decision of Burroughs and the Historical Committee of the WSGA to give
17
See also, Minutes of Wyoming Stock Growers Association Forest Advisory Committee, 1947-1951, Box
56, Folder 1, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of
Wyoming, Laramie.
18
Burroughs. It is interesting and important to note that the excerpt is from Sandburg’s poem “Grass”
which is an ode to war. The full poem reads:
“Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
137
grass a privileged position in their identity-narrative centered on their belief in the
primacy of the land and the importance of grass in the lives of all ranchers. Burroughs
and the WSGA grounded the history in elements upon which all ranchers relied and with
which all ranchers interacted. Through the use of grass and land, the author and the
association immediately created the potential for ranchers to feel camaraderie with one
another because they all relied on both elements no matter what their positions were in
the industry.
The initial chapter in Guardians of the Grasslands history also intimates that
ranchers’ nostalgia for the way ranching had been in the cattle baron era of the open
range days (1860-1900) existed uneasily with their belief that conservation and
stewardship were crucial for the continued health of the industry.
They often
acknowledged the abuse and overuse of the range in the open range days and asserted
their understanding of the limitations of the range.
And through their memory
productions they asserted their supreme qualifications as stewards of that range.19
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.” (1918)
The original verse suggests that grass has a rejuvenating and healing ability, indeed an ability to cover over
the atrocity of war (dead bodies) and to decompose the carnage caused by military battles. There is no way
to know if Burroughs used the line metaphorically. Certainly ranchers sometimes referred to their work
tasks as battles in a larger war to “civilize” and subdue wanton nature. And, perhaps even more
significantly, ranchers tended to want to conceal certain elements of their past.
19
The notion that ranchers and their collective associations had protected the range was not unique to
Montana and Wyoming, for similar language and interpretations see Dick Goff, “Guardian of the Grass
Country,” Cattle Guard, May 1957, 11-17.
138
This assertion of “guardianship” over the natural resources of the range became
especially pronounced in the 1940s and continues through to the present day in much
rancher discourse. Burroughs immediately incorporated the “conservationist” ethic in his
first chapter by quoting WSGA president Lloyd Taggert. Taggert, in his annual address
at the WSGA convention, explained that “it is apparent that we must find methods of
getting the greatest possible good out of limited ranges...we should watch with keenest
interest the development of various grasses and the possibility of using them on some of
poorer ranges.”20
Taggert’s ability even to recognize that some ranges were poorer than others
stemmed from his own historical position, because, by the 1950s, ranchers were wellinformed about range carrying capacities and the potential for overuse.
Ranchers
generally learned this information from federal and state government officials who had
long been engaged in soil and range management and conservation (which began in the
19teens and picked up much momentum in the 1930s due to the prolonged droughts of
that decade). Range conservation efforts grew out of the rise of the science of ecology
and out of a commitment to grassland science by such researchers as Frederic Clements
20
Burroughs, Guardian of the Grasslands, 8. The “greatest good for the greatest number” was a
cornerstone of progressive environmental ideology at the turn of the twentieth century and, conservation, as
a public policy began with such progressives as Teddy Roosevelt and his main environmental advisor
Gifford Pinchot. In short, conservation meant, not limited use to protect non-human nature for its own
sake, but an anthropocentrist, utilitarian use of and managed protection for natural resources so that future
generations of humans could benefit. For discussions of conservation, see Hays, Gospel of Efficiency and
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
139
and Arthur Tansley in the 1910s and 1920s. Much of the need for conservation grew out
of the long history of range over-use beginning in the days of the cattle barons.21
In the thirty years after the end of the Civil War, ranchers drove millions of head
of cattle from Texas to Kansas trampling native grassland ecosystems and completely
altering the microenvironments over which they passed.
By the mid 1950s, when
Taggert told ranchers to embrace, at least on some level, conservation, he was drawing on
three decades of research accessible to ranchers through the United States Department of
Agriculture’s land grant institutions and, after 1914, the USDA’s Extension Service.
Despite Taggert’s nod toward the idea that moderation and conservation was
needed in order to keep the land at its most productive, nostalgia for the “good old days”
is ever-present in Burroughs’ narrative.
To conclude the chapter, he utilizes an
autobiography of an “old-time” cowboy to remember the grass in the open-range days.
Burroughs quotes Otho Dunham who recalled a time when “the wild hay was heavy and
tall, usually over the stirrups. The wild red top looked like grain waving in the breeze.
Wild flowers grew everywhere every color in the rainbow and with the cattle grazing,
and mountains all around, it made a picture man never forgets.”22 Memories of the
capacity of the range to grow “heavy and tall” wild hay, which grew higher than an
equestrian’s stirrups, served as proof for ranchers of the benevolence and constancy of
21
For discussions about the rise of grassland ecology refer to Frederic Clements, Plant Succession: An
Analysis of the Development of Vegetation (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916);
Robert McIntosh, "Ecology since 1900," in Issues and Ideas in America, eds. Benjamin Taylor and
Thurman White (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of
Ecology (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the
Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981);
Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1977). For discussions about the numbers of cattle driven in the open range days see Igler, Industrial
Cowboys; Skaggs, The Cattle Trailing Industry; Sparks, Cattle in the Cold Desert.
22
Burroughs, Guardian of the Grasslands, 9.
140
the land. While there existed an obvious need for ranchers to “guard” the range, the
range itself was an able and resilient provider. In these memories, ranchers longed for
the days when the grass was tall and the risk of running out of it was short.
The idea of the range as a provider is critical to rancher memories. According to
their landscape ideology, range grasses are healthiest when they are being grazed. Thus
ranchers never discuss conservation without discussing “proper” use – which was, in
short, grazing. The range, according to the mentality in ranchers’ reminiscences, was
always strongest when it was being used by graziers for grazing. In Guardian of the
Grasslands, for example, Burroughs explains that “for hundreds of years the grass
worked for the buffalo, the Indian being the ultimate beneficiaries...[and] when the
Indians and the Buffalo were done for, the cattlemen and the cattle took over.”23 In
rancher memories, human cultures and grazing cultures changed, but the grass endured.
Spike Van Cleve explained to his readers that “grass is our crop, and we convert it to beef
or mutton, just as for thousands of years it was converted into wild meat for the
Indians.”24 Van Cleve’s point, like that of so many ranch life memorialists, is that despite
some ranchers’ inadvertent overuse of the range, the land and the grass seemed always to
recover when graziers used it properly.
In the mid-twentieth-century rancher memories, however, it was not just the
perpetuity of landscape that was crucial, but also the historic use of that land to grow
cattle that appears as a critical connective device. The memory narratives almost always
23
Ibid. See also Walt Coburn, Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1968).
24
Spike Van Cleve, 40 Years' Gatherin's (Kansas City: The Lowell Press, 1977), xv.
141
discuss the “old” ways of ranching and, despite the modernization of the industry, assert
that mid-twentieth-century ranchers simply are engaging in traditional land usage on
historic ranch land. Take for example, a speech given in 1965 by Wyoming rancher, Jim
Fletcher, to commemorate the beginnings of livestock associations in the West. He
explained, “We meet here tonight to focus our attention on three subjects: Man, and
specifically...his connection with one vocation, the livestock industry; with a certain kind
of animal, the cow; and, of course, the inevitable third part of this triumvirate. That is the
land – including its own trinity of air, soil and water.”25 The rancher continued to explain
the changes in the livestock industry, but he concluded by quoting the words of Thomas
Sturgis, one of the most powerful of the Wyoming cattle barons in the 1880s, who told
the first meeting of the American National Cattlemen’s convention in 1884 that the
cowman would instigate “his own reforms, as he always done, taking the forward step
which natural changes dictate and require.” Sturgis “predicted” that “the ranchman may
yet...be his own successor, the heir of the grazing dominion he was the first to subdue.”26
Fletcher did not just quote Sturgis, but went on to link Sturgis’ generation with his
own. Fletcher explained, “The words of Tom Sturgis and their great prophecy serve as a
stirring reminder for those of us today, who are his spiritual as well as physical
25
Jim Fletcher, "Speech," ca. 1965, Box 58, Folder 6, Wyoming Stock Growers' Association Papers,
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming
26
Ibid. Sturgis’ verbiage is typical of the Protestant, patriarchal drive to “subdue” the “virgin” land of the
West that was so prominent throughout the settlement era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For
some of the most interesting studies on this see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as
Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1975); Annette Kolodny, The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 16301860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The
Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003); Slotkin, The Fatal Environment; Smith,
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
142
successors on the range...who know the rightness of their cause, who are grimly
determined to succeed and who with the characteristic independence of spirit and
individual ingenuity that characterized [the cattle barons], shall ever prevail.”27
Fletcher’s address did not argue that ranching had never changed, but instead suggests
that the spirit, work tasks, and goals of ranchers had remained consistent for over a
century.
Ranch reminiscences, like these, argued that while the broad contours of
ranching may have changed over time, ranchers had been and still were in the cow
business. Ranchers, therefore, still needed to exert labor on and mastery over both
bovines and the range.
These memory productions utilized a language about the
constancy of the range, the cyclic nature of life on a ranch, and the continual presence of
the land, grass, and cattle in the lives of range cattle folk to create continuity between the
antiquated industry and the modern one.28
Con Warren, the grandson of Conrad Kohrs, one of Montana’s most famous
nineteenth-century cattle barons, was aware acutely of this continuity. From the 1930s
through the 1960s, Con took over management and ownership of the historic GrantKohrs ranch but the historic roots of the ranch were never far from Con’s mind. The
Grant-Kohrs ranch had small beginnings in the 1860s, but soon grew into an enormous
operation. Conrad Kohrs, a Danish immigrant, got his start in livestock through the
grocery and butcher business. He bought the ranch property from Grant in 1865 and with
27
Ibid.
See also Wyoming Stock Growers Association, 7 June 1944, "Report of the Proceedings n the Occasion
of the Presentation and Acceptance of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association Historical Records to the
University of Wyoming at Jackson, Wyoming" Box 42, Folder 7, Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association
Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming; Goff, Century in the
Saddle, 2-3.
28
143
considerable help from his business partner and half brother, Johnny Bielenberg, Kohrs
developed one of the largest cattle operations in the West. Like Californians Henry
Miller and Charles Lux, whom David Igler describes in his book Industrial Cowboys:
Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, Montanans Kohrs and
Bielenberg used their individual talents to make a formidable team and build an
economic empire. Kohrs was a bold entrepreneur who traveled extensively arranging the
financial and business side of the ranch, while Bielenberg managed the day-to-day
operation. Theirs was a lucrative partnership that thrived for over 50 years, until Con's
death in 1920 and Bielenberg’s in 1923.29
As one of the first members and founders of the Montana Stock Growers
Association, Conrad Kohrs’s success as an individual rancher was tied directly with his
participation in the creation of rancher collectivity. During his 50 years in the ranching
business, Kohrs had become one of the most powerful men in Montana, he built a
magnificent house, and married a strong-willed, German woman named Augusta who,
over time, became the matriarch of the family. Conrad and Augusta bore two children,
one of whom was to become the mother of Conrad Warren.
The Kohrs’ family legacy as team-players and individual success stories and the
memory of Conrad Kohrs’ success as a landowner and cattleman followed Con Warren
throughout his life. As the son of Conrad and Augusta Kohrs’ daughter, Katherine
Kohrs, and a Helena physician, Robert O. Y. Warren, Con grew up in the state’s capital
of Helena, a good long horseback ride from the Deer Lodge valley. Despite the hard trek
29
Igler, Industrial Cowboys; Douglas C. McChristian, Ranchers to Rangers: An Administrative History of
Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site (Rocky Mountain Cluster: National Park Service, 1977).
144
over the Continental Divide between Helena and Deer Lodge, he made the journey on a
regular basis as a young boy. He knew his heart longed to make cattle ranching his way
of life, but as he left Montana to attend the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1927, he
must have wondered whether or not he would ever follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.
After three years at UVA, Con decided that in spite of a flair for writing, he
wanted to return to the Deer Lodge valley and work for his grandfather’s corporation.30
For two years, Con worked on the ranch and in 1932, he began an eight-year stint as the
manager of the operation. In 1940, he decided to apply for a $100,000 loan to buy the
ranch outright. As manager of the Kohrs ranch, Con had begun raising a registered herd
of Hereford cattle. By 1947, Con had hosted his first purebred sale on the ranch,
profiting over $60,000 and establishing himself as impressive of a cowman as his
grandfather had been. Con Warren also would follow in his grandfather’s footstep in
becoming president of the MSGA. When Con attended MSGA events in the 1940s,
1950s and 1960s, therefore, it was not just as Con Warren, owner and operator of the
Warren Ranch in Deer Lodge, it was also as the ancestor of Conrad Kohrs and Johnny
Bielenberg. His own memories suggest this historical connection. In a reminiscence he
recalled, “It seems to me now that I lived out [my early days in Helena] with only one
thought in my mind and that was to get back to the ranch for a day, or a week, or a
summer. There I found most of the things that were dear to my heart. The love and
kindness of my grandparents...the feel of the land itself with the cattle and horses grazing,
the river and creeks...[the land’s] vastness that fell away into the smokey distance and the
30
The Conrad Kohrs Company Ranch was part of the Conrad Kohrs Company which had been run by
family members, including Con’s stepfather Frank Bogart, since Conrad Kohrs’ death in 1920.
31
seasonal activities that made it work.”
145
Con’s memory keys in on the most consistent
elements of most all rancher memories. He remembers the connection to the land and
gives the indication that he was well-aware of the perpetuity present on the ranch. Ranch
and family labor enabled that continuation and Con seems to hope to hold onto the
“vastness” of the land for his own fulfillment.
Like Con’s celebration of the cyclic nature of ranching over time (from the
nineteenth to the twentieth centuries) as well as his profound sense of place, other rancher
memory productions also contain references to a cyclic connection with and dependence
upon the range. Most importantly in the memories, land exists as the critical linkage
between modern cattle folk and their cattle baron predecessors. Spring and fall roundups, brandings, droughts, heavy rains and snows, insect plagues, and the changing quality
of grass on the range were all recurring events that ranchers believed were at once
timeless and enduring. In 1948, Lucille Anderson, wrote a reminiscence of her life on the
Crescent Ranch for the Arizona Cattlegrowers’ Association’s official publication, the
Arizona Cattlelog. She explained to the rancher readers of the magazine that she and her
husband had sold the ranch and were very sorry to leave the “way of life” of ranching. In
remembering the cyclic qualities of ranch life she wrote, “I had several bouts with
Mother Nature. I thought her unnecessarily rough in showing me the plain, unvarnished
facts of ranch life.” But, she assured her readers, “the remembering is not painful but
rather fun......early morning, branding fire...high river, drought, grassy hills, buying bulls,
watching clouds, night sounds, crawling things, weaning calves, fence repair,
31
Con Warren, "Reminiscence,” Box 13, Folder 14, Conrad K. Warren Papers, Grant-Kohrs National
Historic Site, Deer Lodge, Montana.
146
saddlin’up.” The phases of ranching, dependent especially on the cycles of non-human
nature stood out for this retiring rancher as critical elements of ranch culture. Lest
neighbor ranchers worry about the selling of the ranch to “strangers,” Anderson assured
them that “[while] people say to us, ‘it won’t be the same without the Andersons...the old
landmark gone...[ I say] nothing stays the same and as for the old landmark – it won’t
budge an inch.”32
For Anderson, like Con Warren, natural cycles and enduring
landscapes connected ranchers with one another and with the more distant past.
Just as in Anderson’s reminiscence, many rancher memory productions
characterized the land of the range and “mother nature” as common foes for the range
cattle rancher. Rancher Wallis Huidekoper noted in the “The Story of the Range” in the
1951 Montana Stockgrower, that “Mother Nature at odd times carries a wallop.” This
“wallop” served to unite ranchers through memories of “tough times.” Cyclic “natural”
events functioned as reminders to ranchers that as rugged as they might have been, now
and again they found they had to set aside their individualism and band together in
associations in order to survive the natural challenges they experienced.
The blizzard of 1886 was one such quintessential natural challenge. One of the
worst blizzards to hit the Great Plains in living memory (including in American Indian
accounts), it decimated the open range cattle industry.33 Ranchers lost anywhere from
32
Mrs. John (Lucille) Anderson, "The Anderson Story," Arizona Cattlelog, October 1948. In 1991,
Anderson self-published another memory production. Anderson had arrived on the Crescent Ranch, near
Hayden, Arizona, as a young bride who had never lived on a cattle ranch before. The book, based on her
diaries and memories, chronicles her induction into the ranch “way of life.” See Lucille S. Anderson,
Bridle-Wise (Phoenix: Lucille S. Anderson, 1991), x. See also Robert Sharp, Big Outfit: Ranching on the
Baca Float (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1974), 1-5.
33
Many historians and ranchers believed it was that event that began the decline of the cattle baron era.
See, for example, Coburn, Mavericks; Ray H. Mattison, "The Hard Winter and the Range Cattle Business,"
34
60-100 percent of their herds and no one, it would seem, was spared.
147
In ranchers’
memories, that winter serves as a crucial flashpoint. It not only represents one of those
tragic moments that every good story needs, it also represents a moment when ranchers
came together to help one another. The stories about the winter of 1886/87, however,
also always carried with them moralizing overtones. Only the best cattlemen, those smart
enough not to overstock the range and savvy enough to reduce their herd sizes, recovered
enough to continue in the business. Whenever a rough winter arrived in Wyoming,
Colorado, and Montana, ranchers summoned the cultural memories about 1886 to
compare their fate (and their fortitude) to that of their predecessors.
In 1949, Great Plains ranchers experienced another blizzard which they believed
to be as bad as the big one of 1886. Because the blizzard of 1949 was still fresh in the
minds of Wyomingites, it received its own chapter in Frink’s 1952 history. The title of
the chapter, “Another Winter They Won’t Forget” is telling. Because of the cultural
dominance of the 1886 blizzard in the memories of ranchers throughout the West, Frink
did not need to tell which winter they would not forget. Everyone knew. Frink ended the
chapter by saying “for the people of Wyoming cow country, 1949 was truly a winter they
won’t forget and don’t like to remember.” Despite the fact that the people of Wyoming
cow country may have wanted to forget the blizzards, they used them as memories to
create commonality through experience.
in Cowboys and Cattlemen: A Roundup from Montana: The Magazine of Western History, ed. Michael S.
Kennedy (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1964).
34
This included Conrad Kohrs. Kohrs suffered less than most because of his access to the Deer Lodge
Valley which experienced a more mild winter. Still, the Grant-Kohrs Ranch suffered tremendous losses.
148
Unlike the blizzard of 1886, which had destroyed most small ranchers, ranchers
experienced and remembered the blizzard of 1949 differently. The 1949 storm became
remembered by ranchers as an event they all survived (rather than one that put most of
them out of business), and they survived largely through luck, pluck, and assistance from
family, neighbors, and the state and federal governments.
Frink explained that the
WSGA “became the focal point of the rescue work.” Russell Thorp, executive secretary
of the WSGA, and Fred Warren, a Wyoming rancher, convinced Governor A.G. Crane to
create a State Emergency Relief Board which coordinated such efforts as “Operation
Haylift,” a relief effort which dropped thousands of tons of hay on the ranges of
Wyoming for the starving and stranded cattle. According to Frink’s account, only heroic
actions occurred. There are few accounts of mistakes, accidents, or ineptitude in his
rendition, and throughout the chapter, despite the assistance ranchers’ received, Frink
depicts them as responsible individuals in charge of digging themselves out of the drifts.
For example, he explains that “the ranchers who received supplies paid for these
themselves. Public agencies broke the roads open and even, in some instances, provided
the means of transportation and delivery of food, medicines and live stock feed, but the
actual supplies were bought and paid for by persons receiving them.”35
The individual fortitude present in Frink’s narrative was also present in Rena
Lawrence’s diary written at the time of the blizzard. Lawrence, a ranchwoman on a
family ranch located 20 miles north of Laramie, also emphasizes both communal aspects
of survival as well as the individual work both she and her husband Bill expended in
35
Frink, Cow Country Cavalcade, 196.
149
saving the ranch from the seemingly never-ending snow. In the excerpt which follows, A
refers to her daughter Amy, Billy (or B) is Rena’s husband and Amy’s father. Jack is a
rancher whose ranch bordered the Lawrence ranch. McGillis owned a pasture near the
Lawrence ranch, which the Lawrences were leasing for feed when the blizzard hit. The
diary is worth quoting at length because of what it reveals regarding the communal nature
of survival of the drought as well as the luck involved in weathering the storm.
Importantly, much of the relief came from the passage of time, and while Rena suggests
the importance of neighborly and town assistance, there is no discussion of the larger
institutional help that figures so prominently in Frink’s version of the episode. I have
italicized the portions that are most interesting with regard to the Lawrence ranch’s
survival strategy, the underlined portions are in the original:
Dec. 27 – Tried to get to Mom’s -- stuck on hill – Mom has flu – snow cold – windy....
Dec 28 – mom some better – practically snowed in – Billy rides to Jack’s
Dec. 30 – Friday – Billy rode. Took dinner and shared it with Folks. Fair
Jan 1, 1949 – Went to Hunt’s for annual party – played poker – visited – fun.
Jan. 2 – Sunday – Big storm starting at noon – 40 mi. wind and snow – very cold – all nit
– B barely makes it home with truck [1929 Model A] from Jack’s – phone out.
Jan 3 – Terrible blizzard all day and all nite – zero – sifts in everywhere – B couldn’t feed
even here – puts bulls, horses in barn.
Jan. 4 – tues. No let up – Blizzard all day and nite again – zero – cleared up a bit in p.m.,
B finds calves scattered – open stack – chickens in bad way – grain room filled [with
sifting snow] – 8 ft drifts sheds and fence -- across road
Jan. 5 – Wed calm at last – very cold –B finds strayed calves nearly gone – B rides to
Jack’s -- almost impossible – thru fields – California snow plow rotary open road around
hill – took lunch to boys – they took 23 hours to Baths [about 4 miles]
Jan. 6 – Thurs Billy rides to Jacks – digs out grain room, garage and chicken house –
Kirk rides up – he cattle at airport – he goes horseback [about 10 miles – alone – very
cold – very cold.
Jan. 8 – Sat Fair -=- cold – wind towards evening – B rides to Jac’s – still tough – phone
out.
Jan 9 – sun Blizzard again -- from east. Not quite so sever as last. Very cold. Tough on
Billy. Earl freezes face.
Jan 10 – Mon. Storm let up – turned warmer about noon.
150
Jan 11 – Tues. – Folks here – first time since Christmas – nice visit – fair cold
Jan 12 – Bun hare stops by – fair
Jan 13 – Thurs. Doris takes Earl to doctor – face frozen – bad.
Jan 14 – to town – stuck in snow at Bamfort’s Hill – Bob Knadler and Dad help me out –
hurried shopping – Roads drifting bad in valley. Fair – wind.
Jan 15 – Sat. New Storm – snow, wind, zero – A couldn’t come – roads drifted – tough
ride for B.
Jan 16 – Eddie Fritzen [with CA Co. and plow] -- brings groceries -- some wind, cold,
fair.
Jan 17 – river overflowing – freezing – getting bad – cloudy very cold
Jan 18 – C.O.C [California Oil Co] opens road – big storm goes around us –some snow –
cold
Jan 22 – Sat. – Amy out in p.m. – stayed for supper – cold and fair
Jan 24 – Amy out for nite – very cold – fair
Jan 27 – Folks engine out [this was the Kohler system that supplied electricity]
Jan. 28 – Friday – 35 below – listened to game – Colo Aggies -- Wyo – wow!! [note
UofW bball team beat CSU aggies]
Feb 2 – Wed. Kirk helped B bring cows home from McGills – cold – clear.
Feb 3 – Folks got engine started at last – [water and lights restored]
Feb 6 – Sun. – Blew and drifted terribly all day.
Feb 7 – Clear – Blowing and drifting badly. B couldn’t feed till p.m.
Feb. 8 – Still blowing and drifting badly. B couldn’t feed till p.m.
Feb 12 – Saturday – Neighbors here waiting for snow plow. Large convoy following it. –
B stalls truck in Mandel land – bringing out grain. B and I work 2 hours to get it out.
Clear, snow in eve. – very cold
Feb 13 – A starts to town – has to turn back. Cal. Opens Mandel Lane – Harry and
Doris to dr. frozen feet – Fair, very cold and windy.
Feb 14 – Mon. A goes in with convoy and Judy Le Vasser [water commissioner] here for
lunch and dynamite water holes.—Jim May brings week’s mail. Wyo. Beats U. State 4436. Bitter cold wind.
Feb 16 – Wednesday – B and I to town at last – about six weeks – warmer – thawed a bit.
Too windy to feed in a.m.
Feb 18 – Friday – Yeoman [ guy who owned a heavy equipment business and cleared out
the drifts for several ranches with a ‘Cat’] here to clear stacks and yard – here for lunch.
Thawing – pleasant.”
The excerpt illustrates not necessarily institutional support in surviving the blizzard, but
rather emphasizes individual effort, the benefits of a great deal of luck, and cooperation
with neighbors and family. And Rena’s diary makes it clear that, ultimately, every
rancher was dependent on the “thawing.” In 2003, Amy, Rena’s daughter, who still
151
owned the Lawrence ranch, drew on her own memories of the blizzard, but rather than
remembering the day-to-day accidents, mistakes, and close calls that pepper Rena’s diary,
Amy’s memory, supported by hindsight, celebrates the blizzard as an episode of
resilience that bound ranchers together in remembrance:
It was serious, for this was the beginning of the infamous
blizzard that devastated much of the West leaving in its wake
ranges littered with dead livestock; roads blocked by abandoned
vehicles; trains buried in snowdrifts; a human toll of deaths and
injuries from frostbite and exhaustion and broken dreams. Cattle
actually died standing up as the wind blew the snow under their
hair where it melted, then froze, encasing them in an icy death.
This was not just one blizzard, but a series of storms, one right
after the other that swept the Plains and kept the people reeling
from one catastrophe to another. It was well into spring before
things began to get back to normal the cost counted. There are
countless stories of hardship and suffering and courage during
this rough time.36
Amy’s reminiscence makes it clear that courage accompanied the suffering and hardship
in dealing with natural disasters. Ultimately for Amy, the thaw was not what stood out,
but rather the fortitude mid-twentieth-century Great Plains ranchers employed to
persevere in spite of “Mother Nature’s” wallop.
For Amy, unlike for Rena, skill accompanied that fortitude. In Amy’s memories,
like rancher memories about the cattle barons, it was not just luck which allowed the
intrepid rancher to survive hard times.
Rather, it was also their experience and
knowledge of the business and of the land. Amy remembered her father survived many
hours in the biting cold and rescued many cows from a death by freezing because, “as an
36
Unknown, "Wyoming Memories: Blizzard of 1949," Annals of Wyoming: The Wyoming History Journal
76, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 34-35. Note: the excerpt from Rena’s diary was reprinted in the Annals of
Wyoming as part of their story on the 1949 blizzard. Amy Lawrence has her mother’s diary in her
possession.
152
experienced Wyoming cowboy, he had a set of extra-wide stirrups for this kind of
weather.”37 Bill’s experience and knowledge allowed him to endure the blizzard and
persist in his livelihood. Similarly, in Amy’s memory, Rena and Amy helped the family
survive thanks to their skilled preparedness. Amy explained, “Since the snow plowed
road was close to our house and I was able to talk to the folks on the party line when
there was a break in the storms, I would load up on groceries and whatever else the folks
needed, and bring them out…however, the grocery situation was never critical because
mother, trained by years of Wyoming winters, always had a full pantry. I still do, and
have probably enough food on hand to survive several blizzards.” As we see in Rena’s
diary, rather than emphasizing her own preparedness or Amy’s assistance, Rena notes the
arrival of a town resident, Eddie Fritzen, with groceries.
Ultimately Amy’s reminiscence, celebrates the fortitude of Wyoming ranchers
more than the luck and/or assistance they had. Amy finished her memory by saying, “On
February 18, mother wrote that is was ‘Thawing and Pleasant.’ The ‘Blizzard of ‘49’
was over. Although our family and most of our cattle survived the blizzard dad never
fully recovered his health from those terrible rides across country.
Some of our
neighbors suffered several cattle losses, many had frostbite...But like most of the other
ranchers on the Laramie Plains, we all dug out, rebuilt and waited for green grass.”38 In
ending her reminiscence, she exercises the amnesia present in so many rancher memories
by making their “rebuilding” seem at once collectively shared but individually achieved.
In not reiterating the assistance all had received from the federal, state, and town relief
37
38
Ibid., 33.
Ibid.
153
efforts, Amy suggests that survival came out of some kind of “grim determination to
succeed and prevail.”39 Like accounts from “old-time” cowboys about the richness of the
range, and the constant presence of the land in rancher memory productions, stories about
cruel “mother nature” provided ranchers with romantic memories of survival which they
utilized to create their collective past and, subsequently, their present cultural identity
grounded in an ethos that celebrated bravery and individuality.
Because the challenges presented by “mother nature” required labor responses by
ranchers, their labor as cattle ranchers joined landscape as important cultural bonds in
their memory productions. The existence and timelessness of the land were critical to the
memory narratives ranchers told to one another and to the broader public, but it was also
cattle ranchers’ use of that land which bound them together as a cultural group. They all
had, at least in their imaginative representations of the past, experienced the land in the
same way because they were all engaged in the growing of cows. The shared and
theoretically timeless business aim of growing cows connected nineteenth-century
ranchers with ranchers in the post World War II era. Work with cows undergirded the
overall cattle business and that labor, while being increasingly modern, also was
remarkably traditional. Richard Goff, in writing the history of the Colorado Cattlemen’s
Association, captured this sentiment when he explained to the CCA membership:
even today, the cow-calf operator follows pretty much the same
basic patterns of herd management as his forebears [referring to
Biblical, Spanish, and “cattle king” herdsmen]...it is interesting
to look back over the past century and study the types of men
that were attracted to the early cattle business...they came from a
39
I borrow this phrasing from Thomas Sturgis, as quoted in Jim Fletcher, and discussed earlier in this
chapter.
154
variety of backgrounds. Some failed and some prospered. But
the successful ones invariably had, or quickly developed, a deep
understanding of bovine nature and the peculiar economics of the
industry...but in looking back over the past century, it is
surprising how small the basic changes [in growing cows]
actually are.40
According to Goff, the goal of ranch labor, to grow healthy and fat cattle, had not
changed substantially in the eighty years separating the open-range cattle barons and the
mid-twentieth-century ranchers. Using this reasoning, ranchers in the postwar years
marshaled an argument from (bovine) nature. In naturalizing their existence, ranchers
were able to make the argument that theirs was an identity closely liked to the heroic
cattlemen of the bygone era because they conducted essentially the same kinds of labor
within the same kinds of nature. Success required only an understanding of and control
over cows and “nature.”41 Ranch woman Betty Accomazzo explained that ranchers in
their eighties could still do “physical work that would make many a young man cry” and
suggested the perpetuity of cow work when she explained that:
some...[still]...sigh with relief when the last animal is
loaded...after the roundup and his mate calls the last cowhand to
her dinner table for grub. It’s her way of thanking the neighbors
for a job well done until the next roundup, and there will be
another roundup, you can rest assured.42 (emphasis in original)
For Accomazzo, as for most ranch memorialists, men and women shared in continual
(and gendered) ranch labor that assuredly would continue just as it always had. Despite
the vast changes that had occurred since the late-nineteenth century, ranchers bridged the
40
Goff, Century, 2-3.
It is important to note that despite this aspect of ranchers’ collective memory (of having labor in common
with the cattle baron era), as we saw in the last chapter the modernization of ranching also served to unite
ranchers in current experience. We will return to this issue in chapter 4.
42
Accomazzo, “Preface,” Pioneer Ranch Histories, iii.
41
155
chasm between the modern and the traditional industry by creating continuity between
past, present, and future through their memory productions.
At the center of this labor continuity was, of course, the cow, and ranchers and
their associations capitalized on the cow as the historic link drawing ranchers together in
commonality. In the nineteenth century, intermountain West ranchers ran primarily
longhorn cattle from Texas. By the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, ranchers had replaced that
breed with, mostly, Hereford cattle.
Some Angus, Aberdeen, Brahman, and hybrid
breeds (like the combination of Angus and Herefords, known as Black Baldies) also were
popular in the postwar decades, but generally speaking, the Hereford reigned as supreme
in these years as the longhorns had in the nineteenth century.
Ranchers and their
association personnel used this drastic shift in breeds to celebrate “progress” while
simultaneously creating a sense of continuity. Consider the images below.
Figure 7 Cows in Convention Culture Left to Right: Cover of Cow Country announcing 1950 WSGA
Convention; Front cover of NMCGA 1950 Convention Program; Back cover of NMCGA 1950
Convention Program
156
In 1950, both the NMCGA and WSGA used pictures of Herefords and longhorns in their
convention information.
The NMCGA convention program featured an impressive
Hereford bull on the front and a drawing of a longhorn gazing into the falling night to
symbolize the current business of raising meaty animals but also to elicit in convention
attendees memories of their collective connections to the historic industry. Likewise,
Cow Country, in announcing the WSGA’s 1950 convention, depicted the changes in the
industry by showing a lone man riding the open range trailing a longhorn while the 1950
rancher, a curiously young looking (and less masculine?) caricature, nails the convention
announcement on a fence that corrals an athletic-looking Hereford bull. The use of the
same kinds of imagery in two states hundreds of miles from one another indicates a
regional ranch culture based on reminiscences of similar histories. Interestingly, in the
promotional literature non-native cattle species tied the two drastically different
bioregions together. The trailing of longhorns across vast spaces in the West and the
progressive changes in the breeding of “better” beef species (namely Herefords) allowed
ranchers to come together spatially, ecologically, and temporally. This kind of visual text
utilization allowed association personnel to urge their ranch audience to “read” similar
significances onto the cattle industry (past and present).
The connection between the past and present did not exist only in association
propaganda, however.
Individual ranchers also celebrated their longevity in and
connection to the historic industry. In the late 1940s, ranchers submitted stories about
their intergenerational ranches to the Arizona Cattlelog. In 1949, for example, Mrs.
Harry Hooker wrote to the Cattlelog about the longevity of the Sierra Bonita Ranch 30
157
miles north of Willcox, Arizona, in the upper Sulphur Springs Valley. She explained that
“as far as we know, this is the oldest ranch in the State that has been continuously
operated and handed down through the family to the fifth generation.”43
Her article
details not only the ways in which Harry Hooker (the original owner of the ranch)
conducted his cattle business, but explains the changes that had occurred since 1935
when the ranch management was taken over by Harry’s grandson, Harry the second.
Like most of the memory productions of range cattle ranchers in the mid-twentieth
century, this article focuses on the difference between the industry in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. By the mid-twentieth century, the Hooker ranch was but a fraction of
its former size because in Harry Hooker’s days “all the land was open range” and a
person could control an “immense amount of range if he owned the water thereon.”
Through this strategy, Hooker had “acquired and used several thousand acres of land and
ran 20 to 30 thousand head.”44 By the time Mrs. Hooker was writing in 1952, the ranch
had only 2000 head. Still, the mid-twentieth-century Hooker spread was connected to the
historic ranch through landscape and labor.
After celebrating the grand business and labor success of cattle-baron Harry
Hooker, the first, Mrs. Hooker turned toward celebrating the present, yet selective
modernization that Harry the second had brought to the ranch. New tanks for grain
storage, five deep well turbines pumped water for an “expensive...[but] absolutely
dependable” water supply. Protein mixed with regular feed assured cattle (purebred
43
Mrs. Harry Hooker, "Five Generations of Hookers: On the Sierra Bonita Ranch," Arizona Cattlelog,
December 1949.
44
Ibid.
158
Herefords, naturally) would fatten reliably and quickly. And Mrs. Hooker goes on to
explain that “this ranch is unique...in that it comprises three distinct and
separate...operations...raising the cattle on the range, farming the feed to fatten them, and
finishing the cattle for the market.” She suggests that the growing of healthy and fat
cattle for the market, while being undertaken in some new modern ways, was also quite
similar to the way Harry the first had ranched because the ranch occupied some of the
same land and still relied on the range for raising calves and for farming feed. Thus,
despite changes and modernization, human use of the land for a particular kind of labor,
namely cattle ranching, united nineteenth-century and twentieth-century ranching.
Like many of ranch memory productions, Hooker’s story harkens back to the days
of the open range when a few wealthy men controlled vast amounts of acreage and ran
enormous herds.45 Hooker celebrates a cattle culture that was at once antiquated and
modern. In recalling the success of Harry the first, Hooker allowed the era of open range
ranching and the “great men” of ranching history (the barons), to dominate at least
partially her ranch’s history. Most historians agree that great damage was done to the
grasslands during the cattle bonanza, but that damage appears irregularly in the
reminiscences of ranchers. They prefer instead to celebrate the fortitude, stamina, and
determination of the early “pioneer” ranchers who had a “special brand of courage” to
face the “dangers, hardships and privations that were a natural part of every day life” in
the nineteenth century. This heroic representation served several purposes. As a legacy
45
For other examples see Abbie Keith, "A Real Cowman," Arizona Cattlelog January, 1947. See also a
story that was written about by a Wyoming rancher about his historic northern ranch and which appeared
not just in Cow Country, but also in the Arizona Cattlelog. C.H. Tepoel, "Early Day Cow-Punching on
Northern Ranges," Arizona Cattlelog February, 1952.
159
of success, they sensed that that there was power in foregrounding the cattle baron as the
forebear of their cultural and economic identities.
Cowboys and Indians had great
cultural capital in 1950s America, witness the resurgence in the popularity and
consumption of western novels, in western television series, and in the western genre of
Hollywood movies.46 Drawing on this popular devotion to the history of the West as a
land of strong, principled men doing romantic work potentially could improve the image
of modern ranching and could be useful politically.
In 1945, for example, the United States Senate Committee on Public Lands and
Surveys held hearings across the intermountain West to discuss the conflicts between
ranchers and forest service officials. Many ranchers testified at these hearings and in
their political pleadings, they mobilized a discourse drawing on their memorial
connection to the nineteenth-century industry. In testifying at the hearings in Grand
Junction, Colorado, Aubrey Huston, a rancher from Saratoga, Wyoming, offered this:
46
Ranchers’ memories interestingly parallel the memories captured in westerns on postwar television. It is
in these series that perhaps America’s increasing fascination with the “wild” West can best be seen. Some
of the most enduring western television series in United States cinematic history were filmed during these
decades. The Lone Ranger television series, for example, began in 1949 and ran through 1957. Bonanza,
The Virginian, and The Cisco Kid also had #1 ratings at various times through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
The latter three chronicled ranching in particular. Both The Virginian and The Cisco Kid chronicled the
lives of ranch hands and so, like the memory productions of postwar ranchers, glorified the life of the
nineteenth-century cowboy. The Virginian was based loosely on Owen Wister’s famous novel of the same
name, while The Cisco Kid told the story of a Mexican ranch hand’s adventures in the rough and tumble
Southwest. Bonanza, while also being set in the nineteenth century, focused more on the life of a family
living on a large ranch in the late nineteenth century. In any of these, those Americans who could afford
television could watch the lives with which postwar ranchers believed they were connected directly through
the continuation of labor with their ranch environments (especially their enduring work with cows). See
John Hawkins, Bonanza, (Hollywood, CA: National Broadcasting Company, 1959-1973), The Virginian,
prod. Charles Marquis Warren (Hollywood, CA: National Broadcasting Company, 1962-1971), Buckley
Agnell, The Cisco Kid (Hollywood, CA: National Broadcasting Company, 1950-1956). Westerns also had
great popularity on the big screen. For a mere sampling of the endless western movies see High Noon, dir.
Fred Zinnemann (Hollywood, CA: Lions Gate, 1952), How the West Was Won, dir. John Ford (Hollywood,
CA: MGM, 1962), Shane, dir. George Stevens (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1952).
160
My name is Aubrey Huston, I am on a forest committee. I reside
on my ranch on Cow Creek. As president of Black-Hall Stock
Association, I have been asked by the members of our
association to come here and state my case, as an example, due
to the fact our season has been late, and we are also far behind
with our work and the shortage of labor. Otherwise the majority
of our members would be here to defend their own rights. I have
lived on Cow Creek all my life. My father moved with my
grandparents to this creek in 1879, coming there to make a
livelihood by ranching and cattle raising. Through these years
the cattle were grazed on mountain country in the summer, and
were moved to the creek for winter feeding; this still being our
practice. Now, I learn in a few minutes by reading a letter that I
am put out of the livestock business, as I am to take a 62-percent
cut on my forest permit. These cuts are unjustifiable, as the
cattle come off of the forest in better condition than when I
started operating my ranch...in 1929.47 (my emphasis)
Huston exemplifies the ways in which ranches drew on their belief about their righteous
longevity in their political activities.
The hearings resulted in a decline in permit
decreases as well as the eventual creation of grievance boards within the Forest Service.
Huston’s discussion of his ranch’s history may not have moved the political powers to
action, but it is significant that Huston believed the best way to introduce his conflict with
a federal agency was to appeal to the Senators’ sense of tradition.
Huston drew on the cultural capital of the cattle baron era in his testimony, but the
power of ranching’s nineteenth-century past within the larger society was never so
obvious as it was in the creation of Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site (GKNHS). The
sale of the Grant-Kohrs/Warren Ranch to the National Park Service (NPS), in 1972,
began a process of artistic rendering to capitalize on the public’s ardor with the cattle
baron era almost immediately. Rather than incorporating all 100 years of ranching
47
"Administration and Use of Public Lands," in Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, United States
Senate (Casper: United States Senate, 1945), 5723
161
history, which existed on the location, the vast majority of the interpretation of the spatial
memory site is about the cattle baron, Grant-Kohrs/Bielenberg years. Understanding that
the American public would want to remember a specific moment in time as they visited
the NPS site, administrators decided to cut the 100 years of continuous ranching history
in half and focus the interpretation of the site on the “glory days” of the Grant-Kohrs era.
Like Mrs. Hooker and many other ranchers in the late 1950s in Montana, Arizona,
Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, Con Warren had an intimate linkage with the
cattle baron era because his family and his land connected directly with that glorified era.
Con was at least dimly aware of this history, but it was his wife, Nellie, who really
understood the import of the Kohrs/Warren place in the history of the cattle industry.
She, however, believed that all 100 years were important to the story of ranching. She
understandably was proud of the work that she, Con, and their two children conducted on
a ranch that spatially represented 100 years of nearly continuous cattle operations. In
1960, the National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings informed the Warrens that their
ranch was eligible for Registered National Historic Landmark status. As the years went
on, Nellie became ever more convinced that ranchers and the public-at-large would
benefit immensely from the preservation of the Grant-Kohrs/Warren Ranch. In the late
1960s, Con began to talk with the National Park Service about the possibility of selling
the ranch to the NPS with the hope that it could be transformed into an interpretive
historic site. The negotiations to do so were long and arduous, but in 1972 the deal went
through when Congress enabled the NPS to purchase and create the GKNHS.48
48
McChristian, Ranchers to Rangers.
162
Nellie had hoped for a more inclusive depiction of ranching which is why it is
ironic that an important part of the NPS decision to focus on the Conrad Kohrs years of
the ranch’s history was Nellie’s doing. She insisted that the Warrens donate the ranch’s
vast artifact resources, and thanks to this donation, the NPS was able to refurbish
completely the nineteenth-century ranch house and display many of the tools used in the
early days of cattle ranching in the Deer Lodge Valley. Because Nellie made available a
material record for the nineteenth century, the days of the mid-twentieth-century Warren
ranch are mentioned rarely if at all at the GKNHS. There are brief mentions of Con
Warren and his work with his purebred cattle and horses.
The site mentions his
veterinarian prowess, and hints at his labor on the ranch, but for the most part the spatial
memory site that is GKNHS has forgotten the Warren era.49
This forgetting is important because it was the historical consciousness of Con
and Nellie which originally inspired them to keep all of the nineteenth-century artifacts
that precipitated the NPS’s decision to foreground the nineteenth and not the twentieth
centuries. And, as it turned out, the Warrens keeping of nineteenth-century equipment
was not anomalous. Ranchers had been keeping historic artifacts for years. Russell
Thorp, the long-time Executive Secretary of the WSGA, noted this practice as early as
1945, when, on his visits to members’ ranches, he would find endless amounts of
material memorabilia piled in the attics, basements, and barns of ranchers. Nearly 30
years before Con and Nellie sold their ranch to the NPS and donated their historic
artifacts, Russell Thorp decided to begin the modern memorialization of the WSGA and
49
Nellie is completely absent from this spatial record.
163
ranch life by asking ranchers to donate historic ranch equipment to the State of
Wyoming.
At the dedication ceremony, Thorp explained the boxes he was dedicating to the
state contained historic range relics such as old branding irons, hand-made saddles, spurs,
bridles, chuck wagon equipment, dutch ovens, and other “ranch paraphernalia.” In his
speech, Thorp was careful to point out, however, that these items were not just “trash”
but rather were living memories that told the story of the cattle business. That story was
one of “glamour and romance, of tragedy and heartbreak, of hard work and splendid
accomplishment.”50 It also may have been that ranchers kept such tools to recycle and
use on the ranch. The moment ranchers dedicated the relics to the WSGA, however, they
committed themselves to the larger project of preserving and displaying the tools of their
work culture. This exhibition of open range cattle ranching allowed Wyoming ranchers
to represent materially a particular version of their past. Tools worn by time and hard
work gave the visual impression, to the gazing public, of ranchers progressing through
time and space while remaining connected to a living past.51
The objects that both the Warrens and Thorp donated to public institutional
agencies (the State of Wyoming and the National Park Service) certainly served to freeze
time for some who gazed upon them. Historian Susan Crane explains that the “fixing of
50
Russell Thorp, "Presentation of Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association -- Russell Thorp Historical
Collection to the State of Wyoming," 22 May 1945, Box 213, Folder 11, Wyoming Stockgrowers
Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
51
For interesting discussions on the importance of collecting historic objects in the making of collective
identity see Susan Crane, editor, Museums and Memory, (Stanford: Stanford University Press);
Susan Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Flora E.S.
Kaplan, ed., Museums and the Making of Ourselves: The Role of Objects in National Identity (London:
Leicester University Press, 1994).
164
memory” through the storage of artifacts, “constitutes an apparent permanence of the
recollected.”52
In some ways her theory holds true for ranch culture in the West.
Through the collection and display of tools from the glory of the early days of cattle
ranching, time could be captured and stopped. In addition to the stoppage of time,
however, the display of such artifacts in ranching country also symbolized cultural
continuity grounded in work customs. The material presence of an old branding iron, for
example, brought to mind the cyclic process of branding which ranchers had been
undertaking since the earliest days of range cattle ranching and continued to do in the
mid-twentieth century. An old branding iron, used since the nineteenth century on its
home ranch, was not just a rusting, decaying piece of metal. Rather the iron represented
for ranchers a materialized memory of cyclic, and continuing, work. The collection and
display of such tools gave ranching a permanency of living continuity and served to unite
ranchers behind a collective memory of over 100 years of branding seasons – which
enabled them to maintain both a romantic attachment to the popular era of the open range
while still asserting their contemporary presence in and importance to the West.53
According to Thorp, the cyclic nature of ranch work, exemplified through the
artifacts, symbolized, “a satisfactory way of living, gained through a continual struggle to
preserve the right to enjoy the freedom so cherished by every rugged individualist.”54
While the relics were presented to the State of Wyoming from the collectivity of ranchers
through the WSGA, they were remnants of individuals. Through the donation of these
52
Crane, 3.
Thanks to Reeve Huston for the phrase “permanence of living continuity” and for helping me to clarify
my thoughts on this.
54
Thorp, “Presentation.”
53
165
kinds of tools, the WSGA could display romantic vestiges of the past which told the story
of rugged individualism punctured only occasionally by the communal experiences of
ranchers congregating together in their associations.
Most of ranchers’ memory
productions celebrated an ideology of individualism, which subtly coexisted with a
notion of the collective culture of range cattle ranching. Branding irons serve as a
particularly good example. The irons were the personal property of individual ranchers.
Registered with the brand inspection agencies in each state, brands connote private
property and rights of individual ownership, but ranchers often brought individual brands
together to give the appearance of a cohesive culture and powerful group of propertyowners.
The Cowbelles, the women’s “auxiliary” of the cattlegrowers’ associations, were
particularly adept at utilizing brands in memory productions to attempt to create cohesion
between ranchers. Throughout the postwar decades, Cowbelles from each of the five
states produced brand materials in order to unify further ranching’s history. For example
when the T-Bone Cowbelles from Carbon, Stillwater, and Sweet counties in Montana,
published their Brand Book in 1962, they explained that brands were much more than
marks on a cow’s body. “In a country such as ours with its ranches in the valleys,
grazing in the foothills and the high green summer feed in the mountains, brands have a
special significance. To some, their iron has brought wealth and distinction, other have
found happiness with modest outfits...to others their brand is like a heritage they hold
dear.”55 For ranchers, brand books brought individual brands together side-by-side and
55
T-Bone Cowbelles, “1962 Brand Book,” Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
166
served as visual testimony that ranchers were not “in the business” by themselves, but
operated their ranches in relationship with hundreds, sometimes, thousands of other
ranchers.
Additionally, brands and their graphic depiction in brand books not only
symbolized labor in a particular work culture they also reminded ranchers of the past.
The T-Bone Cowbelles continued, “To the old-timer thumbing through a brand book, it
brings memories that represent a story each in itself. Some are stories of success, some
of failure and hopes that failed to come through. It may have meant a big time with the
next brand owner...stories of drought, hail, insect pests, winter hazards or something else
to test the strength of man’s endurance.”56
In addition to designating the physical
property of cattle, the brands also encompassed the mental property of rancher memory.
The Cowbelles explained that the they believed brands signified “a land and a life we all
like” and it was their “hope” that their expression in the brand books might bring
ranchers “pleasant memories and useful service.”57 In introducing their collection of
brands, this local group of Montana Cowbelles utilized the phraseology so prominent in
ranchers’ dominant discourse. In the brand book introduction, it is the land which
grounds the “life” all ranchers “like,” and ranchers become united through historical
challenges, successes, failures, and continued hopes -- many of which resulted from nonhuman nature’s testing of “man’s” endurance.
56
57
Ibid.
Ibid.
167
In showing a textual representation of the collective group of ranchers, the brand
books, published by local livestock associations and county Cowbelle chapters
throughout the postwar years, also signified the social world of ranchers.58
Figure 8 1957 Brand Book, Phillips County Livestock Association
The brand books listed ranchers of all classes (including ranchers who ran ranches of all
sizes and cattle folk who no longer owned cattle, but who kept their brands registered), of
both genders, and of all races. The authors organized the books according to symbols in
the brand, rather than by owners’ last name, size of the ranch, or some other arbitrary
designation. The result is that brands become a kind of trade language. Ranchers knew
just how to read a brand and knew to look, in the book above for example, for a heart
58
It is important to note that the evidence I have been able to gather indicates that all of the state Cowbelle
organizations in four of the five states utilized brands in some way in the creation of their cultural
productions (including memory productions). New Mexico, the one state for which Cowbelle evidence is
sparsest probably used brands as well, but I have no evidence of that. See Colorado Cowbelle activities in
the 1960s as chronicled in the Chapter Reports, Box 2, Colorado Cowbelle Records, Denver Public Library,
Denver, Colorado and Brand Book Reproduction, Wyoming Cowbelles, 1962, Box 183, Wyoming Stock
Growers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
59
brand in the heart section.
exclusive.
168
In this way, brand books are inclusive and, simultaneously,
They excluded any outsiders who did not know the culturally specific
language of the brand. Like so many of the memories of ranchers regarding the social
world of the range, however, brand books also masked many historical tensions that
existed within the ranchers’ historical world. The inert drawings of brands in the books
do not even hint at the conflicts between large land-owners and small operators, conflicts
between owners and their employees, conflicts among American Indian, Mexican
American, and Anglo ranchers. Those conflicts, despite the amnesia surrounding them in
dominant ranch memories, were ever-present in the “glory days” of the open-range as
surely as they were present in the postwar decades.60 Still, the majority of the memory
productions remain silent, giving the impression that where conflict existed it quickly
was muted by the righteous actions of Anglo cattlegrowers.61 Selective interpretation of
the past as well as amnesia in the present became forms of agency in rancher memory
productions; they were used by the mostly Anglo memorialists to create commonality
among postwar ranchers.
59
Phillips County Livestock Association, “Brand Book Phillips County, State of Montana,” (Phillips
County Livestock Association, Montana, 1957).
60
We know that the glory days were rife with conflicts between large and small ranchers as well as
between native peoples and Anglo imperialists thanks more to historians than to rancher memories. For the
latter see Igler, Industrial Cowboys. For one of the best analyses of the former with regard to the Johnson
County War of 1892, see Daniel Belgrad, "'Power's Larger Meaning': The Johnson County War as Political
Violence in an Environmental Context," Western Historical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer 2002). Belgrad
argues that the Johnson County War was fought largely between two groups (large cattle barons and
smaller ranchers/homesteaders) due to environmental circumstances that created the differentiated
ecological strategies of the two groups. Belgrad argues that these environmental interactions must be
understood as having very real political and violent outcomes within the social world of the range. See also
Richard Maxwell Brown, "Violence," in The Oxford History of the American West, eds. Carol A. O'Connor
Clyde A. Milner II, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 369, 399, and
402-403.
61
For a representative example of this see Wallis Huidekoper, "The Story of the Range," The Montana
Stockgrower, January 1951.
169
The selective memory within rancher memories regarding their social world
unmistakably manifested itself at the 1959 the Montana Stock Growers Association’s
Diamond Jubilee celebration.
The four-day celebration not only included amnesiac
remembrances of historical social relations, it also encompassed the memories of
modernization and labor/environment which were so central to ranchers’ collective
memory.
Consider the following image which appeared on the 1959 cover of the
Montana Stockgrower announcing the Jubilee:
Figure 9 Cover from the 1959 Diamond Jubilee edition of The Montana Stockgrower.
The image spatially blends the old and the new just as the postwar memory productions
did more generally. Take, for example, the truck in the lower right hand corner of the
170
image. The truck, surrounded by airplanes and cowboys on horseback, is speeding
toward Miles City, the location of the convention. With a horse in the bed, animal power
is conjoined with mechanical transportation – the horse, while outmoded, still needs to be
present in order to signify the connection of the old ranching tools with the new. To the
left, cowboys engage in an “old-fashioned” cattle drive – droving their bovine charges
toward the convention over conspicuously rich grasslands. Cattle and cowboys dominate
the image because, even in 1959, the collective culture of range cattle ranchers depended
on labor with cattle just as it had in 1884. In the distance shines the host city, and its
urbanity is striking when contrasted with the rurality of the cattle ranchers’ environment
of grass and cattle. By blending the old and new through the use of space, the artistic
image shows both the pastness of rancher history as well as its presence. And this was
precisely the goal of convention planners as they organized the 1959 MSGA annual
convention.
This was to be no ordinary convention. The MSGA intended the “Diamond
Jubilee” to be not only a meeting of ranchers but a cultural memory production in and of
itself. In addition to the usual committee meetings on present-day issues with the United
States federal government, the problems of cattle disease, markets and taxes, and general
“cow business,” the convention also sponsored an hour and a half “historical parade,” an
“old-fashioned” round-up, historical pageants, “Old-time and Cowboy Horse Racing,”
and an “Indian Program.” Even the town of Miles City decorated its storefronts and
businesses in late nineteenth-century garb. Organizers of the Jubilee, like the artist of the
cartoon on the cover of the Stockgrower, utilized space to create a political geography of
171
memory. The spatial reenactments of the past, on modern MSGA members’ bodies, in
the fairgrounds, and on the faces of the modern urban buildings, served to commemorate
publicly the historical power of ranching culture.62 In addition, by gathering in such great
numbers (there were over 3000 people in attendance), the MSGA members reinforced
that they maintained a powerful presence in modern-day Montana.
During the convention, women and men wore historical costumes based on
nineteenth-century garments, and, as they mingled on the streets in front of a newly
constructed hanging scaffold and old-time western wooden facades, they enacted bodily
and spatially their connection to the glory days of the open range. A central event during
the convention was the performance of an “accurate historical drama” to be staged every
night of the convention. This play, written by professor of Speech at Montana State
University, Bert Hansen, chronicles the history of the MSGA. Cow Country to Cattle
Capital serves as the ultimate memory production because it encapsulates particularized
memories of landscape and environment, ranch labor, and social relations in ranch
country.
Both male and female ranchers, young and old, participated in the historical
pageant by playing the roles, helping with the staging and in being eager audience
members. The pageant was not presented just one evening during the convention but was
reenacted over and over – each night, MSGA members had the opportunity to visually,
aurally, and spatially witness the history of their organization. In participating in and
witnessing this memory production, ranchers could remember that it was through the
62
Pat Gudmundson, "Miles City Turns Clock Back 75 Years," Great Falls Tribune, May 17, 1959.
172
individualistic hard work, endurance, and cooperation of extraordinary men, that cattle
ranching morphed from the baron-dominated enterprise of the nineteenth century to the
family-centered operation of the early and mid-twentieth century. The play discusses
negative relationships between Anglos and Native Americans, the slaughtering of the
buffalo, and the intense over-grazing that led to several ecological disasters in the latenineteenth century, but each memory is spun in such a manner as to make cattlemen seem
unapproachable and heroic. This selective interpretation is where the MSGA’s amnesia
entered into the processes of their remembering. But before we get to that, let us head to
the Miles City Ball Park. It is 8 pm on May 22, 1959, and as we arrive we take note of
the full house. Hundreds of people, some dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, some
not, have arrived to see the “Spectacular – Historical Pageant.” The audience, consisting
of ranchers, their children, and the townspeople of Miles City, quiets as the curtain opens
and the production begins.
The play opens with a prologue which celebrates the demise of both the Native
Americans and the buffalo because eradication of both opened the way for cattle to roam
“the unfenced, rich, flowing grass ranges of the plains of Montana Territory.” The play
continues by erasing any memory of discord among early ranchers as they gathered
together to form the MSGA. The narrator reads an excerpt from the Yellowstone Journal
of April 1885 which explained that “whatever may have been the main element in
promoting this condition of affairs [the creation of the MSGA] we will not discuss. The
fact remains the same: that Montana Stockgrowers can and do ‘hew the line’ and pull all
63
together.”
173
Many in the audience probably knew that the wealthiest of Montana cattle
barons had begun the MSGA in order to police poorer cattlemen who rustled unbranded
cattle and added the animals to their own herds. The organization, then, began precisely
because of class conflict, a “fact” that ranchers in the audience of the Miles City Ball
Park were not reminded of as they listened to the heroic origins of their collectivity.
The play intimates that ranchers’ commonality of purpose was possible because
of the existence of common racial and moral enemies. The play assumes that these
enemies were not the same type of “people” as the modern ranchers who gazed upon the
theatrical performance. Rather, the enemies were morally and racially “other,” and were
namely, the American Indian tribes who originally inhabited the territory and “dirty
rustlers” who stole “legitimate” cowmen’s bovine property. The play assumes those
consuming the memory produced in the play would more than likely relate to
“legitimate” cowmen and would knowingly begrudge anyone who stole rightfully-owned
private property. There was, of course, absolutely no mention of Anglo stealing of
American Indian lands.
In Scene II Part I, Hansen depicts several prominent (i.e.
wealthy) cattlemen, including Theodore Roosevelt and Granville Stuart, coming together
in the first MSGA committees to discuss the problems facing cattlemen. They decide to
address “the Indian problem” first. One particularly hot-headed cowman, Milliron, is
outraged at the horse and cattle stealing in which the “Indians” are engaging and he
suggests that “when they [the Indians] are caught they should be lynched.”64 Another
63
Bert Hansen, Cow Country to Cattle Capital: An accurate historical drama, being the story of The
Montana Stockgrowers Association, (Miles City, Montana: 1959), 18 in Vertical File “Montana
Stockgrowers Association” Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
64
Ibid., 20.
174
cattleman, named Brewster, interrupts the more violent Milliron and offering analysis
that seems more historically connected to 1959 than to 1885, explains that:
for generations the Indians lived on the buffalo that roamed this
area...now within a matter of a few years that we have been here in
the cattle business, the buffalo have been completely run out of the
country...the Indian has no money to buy cattle to raise on his own
reservation. It seems to me that he has no choice but to kill our
cattle in order to get the necessary food by which he can exist.65
Ultimately, cooler heads prevail and the meeting participants decide to allow their
congressman to ask Congress for larger appropriations for the Indians so that they could
buy their own cattle and could then stop “harassing” the white cattlegrowers. Agreeing
to this, the cowmen also agree that they will not let their cattle graze on reservation land,
particularly since they had “plenty of good land without going on the reservation.”66 In
this scene, American Indians exist partially as objects of history, as their ultimate fate is
decided by the white men. The American Indians are not without agency, however, but
that agency comes only through nefarious activities that those cattle owners in the
audience would have found reprehensible.
Both in their objectification and
criminalization, the Indians are voiceless and await the decisions of the more powerful
actors, the wealthy Anglo cattlemen. Temporally, the Indians in Hansen’s play never
morph into anything but dependent and desperate cattle thieves. They are much like the
Indians in the “Indian Program” which 150 Indians performed during the convention.
65
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 21-23. This easy “solution” to the “Indian problem” is not historically accurate. Anglo cattlemen
continued to attempt to finagle their way onto Indian land well into the twentieth century. Owners of large
operations especially, not only attempted to buy tracts of Indian land, they also added to their own already
large landholdings by leasing native peoples’ land for pittances. For a further discussion of the ongoing
conflicts between Anglo cattlemen and American Indian ranchers see Iverson, When Indians Became
Cowboys, White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, and White, The Roots of Dependency:
Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos.
66
175
Dancing traditional dances in traditional garments the Indian performers, like the artifacts
in the Wyoming archives and at the GKNHS, appeared timeless and unchanging – a
people rendered static by the hegemonic memory productions of Anglo cattle ranchers.67
In Scene III, titled “Vigilantes vs. The Cattle Rustlers and Horse Thieves,” the
MSGA assists ranchers in taking care of Anglo cattle rustlers. Whereas the memory of
their dealings with the American Indians in Scene II is curiously and ahistorically nonviolent, Scene III depicts ranchers’ proud embrace of the memories of vigilante violence
on the “frontier.” As the scene opens, the official representative of the MSGA, Detective
Billy Smith, has discovered a rustler’s settlement near the Missouri River. He has alerted
the vigilantes and the seven of them are paying a visit to the rustler. As they arrive, they
realize that the rustler is no where to be found but a “breed Indian woman” who cooks for
the rustler is present. The men decide that they will question the woman about what she
knows even if it means giving “her a tough going over.”68 As the interrogation begins,
Detective Smith announces he has to leave. He hates to do so “just when the fun is about
67
This static appearance is just one example of the “amnesia” that was reified during the convention.
Several American Indian surnames appear on MSGA membership lists during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
as they do on membership lists for Arizona, New Mexico, and to a lesser extent Wyoming. Despite this as
well as their long association with cattle ranching, American Indian contributions to the range cattle
industry are absent almost always in rancher memory productions. This silence is somewhat consistent for
Mexican American ranchers as well – although the inclusion of the Spanish heritage of cattle ranching is
present in some memory productions. Part of the hegemonic rendering of American Indians as being
frozen in time may be a result of the prevailing cultural assumption in the United States in the 1950s and
1960s of the noble savage, which of course began its dominance in Anglo culture in the late-nineteenth
century, shortly after the end of the Indian wars. For an example of cattle ranching’s origin in the Iberian
world see the discussion in Burroughs, Guardian of the Grasslands. For discussions of the noble savage
trope that existed in various forms throughout the late-nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries see Robert
F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), Deloria, Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S.
Indian Policy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).
68
Hansen, Cow Country to Cattle Capital, 27. For examples of Navajo membership in the Arizona Cattle
Growers Association see Alvin C. Tso to Abbie Keith, 26 October 1956, Box 5, Folder 9, ACGA
Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe. See Big Horn County Livestock Association, “Big Horn County
Brand Book,” Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
176
to get under way” but he must in order to maintain the illusion that the MSGA and its
representatives are “lawful.” Once the Detective has left, the vigilantes are left to take
the law into their own hands.
The vigilantes begin questioning the American Indian woman who speaks in
broken English. She decides that she will tell what she knows because she “no likes” the
rustler or her job and simply wants to return to the reservation. Just as she finishes telling
what she knows (which is very little), the rustler returns. The vigilante leader turns to the
woman and says to her “What have you got to say about this fellow woman?” The rustler
threatens the woman saying, “You keep your mouth shut, woman; or I’ll kill you!” The
leader, ever gallant, replies to the rustler, “When we get through with you fella, you’re
not going to be in shape to kill anyone. You go ahead and talk woman, this fellow isn’t
going to kill you...”69
After admitting that he has stolen some cattle, the rustler accuses the
cattlemen/vigilantes of stealing grass from the government land. This is the only moment
in the memory production which hints at class conflict between ranchers and the only
time when the cowboy rustler seems to have something of substance to say, but the
vigilante leader meets this accusation with calm and asks the others what they should do
with the rustler. Unanimously they respond that he should be hung. The rustler demands
a trial and the lead vigilante replies smugly, “you’re having a trial now, by the
Vigilantes.” They deftly hang the rustler from the cross bar over the corral gate. Then
comes the difficult decision of what to do with the American Indian woman and her son
69
Ibid., 29-30.
177
(who also has been working for the rustler). Referencing the mythical western hero,
Hansen has the vigilantes decide not to hang either of them. The lead vigilante explains
to his more hot-headed counterparts that it appeared that the young Indian boy had simply
been a cowhand for the rustler and asserted that “vigilantes only hang rustlers, not
innocent kids” as though the former was acceptable and the latter never happened. The
woman proved to be more difficult since the vigilantes were concerned that “she might
get it in her head to go to Miles City and get drunk and spill the whole works.” But the
leader dismisses this concern reasoning that “no one would believe a half breed anyway.”
They return the woman and boy to the reservation, return the stolen cattle to the range so
that they could be reclaimed by their rightful owners and, as the scene closes, they ride
off into the sunset while the rustler is “left alone hanging in the breeze.”70
Figure 10: Photo Great Falls Daily Tribune, Sunday, May 31, 1959. This photo appeared as part of a
large photo essay on the MSGA convention. “Free” press like this presented the ranchers’
performance of their collective history to a non-rancher public and must have contributed to public
perceptions of the MSGA as a unified, powerful group
The “historical” events depicted in Hansen’s memory production highlight the amnesic
interpretation of events that most memory productions of rancher culture included when
it came to social relations with other human beings. While the variety of people that
70
Ibid., 32-33.
178
existed within the cattlemen’s culture of the late nineteenth century is present, it is only
the cattlemen themselves who appear as rational, well-intentioned actors.
Tension in these memories is ever-present.
Clearly the world of the early
cattlemen was multi-racial, gendered, and violent. Despite the diversity evident in this
memory production, however, the primary actors are a specific class of Anglo cattlemen
whose “legitimate” cattle operations entitle them to decide whether or not to enact
extralegal “justice” on the countless “others” who pepper the story. It is the Anglo men
who have an unquestioned right to blur the line between lawfulness and unlawfulness.
The play fully justified the further dispossession of cowboys, Indians, and women, who
did not own land or cattle. Those who were entitled most to possess the land and cattle
were those who already possessed the land and cattle.
The memory production,
performed for an audience comprised of members who would have valued ownership as a
key element in the propagation of civilization, simply reinforced the legitimacy of male
rancher (and through their patriarchal attachment to “their” men, ranchwomen’s) claims
to the land and the destiny of all “others.”
Just as in the scene described above, the MSGA and its members assume the
higher moral ground throughout the entire play. Memories of heroic masculinity that was
at once tough and tender triumphed and promoted the interpretive stance that members of
the MSGA engaged only in righteous violence, if they engaged in violence at all. The
memories represented and reenacted during the “historical pageant” put male, Anglo,
property owners at the center of the narrative while it relegated people of color and
women to the periphery. As it did this, it suggested, however subtly, that not only was
179
this the only “accurate” way of telling the story, but that it was honorable and right that
male cattle owners should lord over the land and all the “others” associated with it
(including women, people of color, and cattle). The story allowed members of the
MSGA to celebrate the highlights of 75 years of organizational history by leaving out the
interpretative possibilities that the violence perpetrated by cattlemen on “others” was
unnecessary and/or immoral. According to the memories included in Cow Country to
Cattle Capital, relations among Anglo cattlemen and Indians – of both genders – were
peaceful, albeit paternally so. Women of color needed “saving” as surely as Anglo
women did. According to the hegemonic memories of ranchers, Anglo cattlemen, in
heroic fashion, could and did overlook the possibilities of degeneracy that seemed to lurk
in women of color (e.g. the tendency of Indian women to go “get drunk”). The portrayal
of this decision to overlook Indian women’s degeneracy, allowed Hansen, the actors, and
the audience to imagine that the righteous marauders were capable of showing great
mercy.
Certainly the allusion to possible sexual violence and the decision of the
vigilantes to forego such violence further concretized the gallantry of those early-day
ranchers.
While the Anglo women’s involvement in taking Montana from cow country to
cattle capital is uncomplicated in this memory production (quite simply they were there)
Anglo women of the cattle-owning class fare better in most other memory productions of
ranchers.
Partly that was because by the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Anglo women
ranchers often authored the productions and partly that was because by the postwar
decades cattlewomen had begun to claim, if not large portions of cattle ranching’s past, a
180
fairly impressive amount of its presence. By 1959, the cattlewomen’s auxiliary, the
Cowbelles, had been in existence for nearly twenty years. Cattlewomen had begun to be
involved increasingly in the organizational culture of the associations (e.g. they worked
the registration table at the convention and did much of the behind-the-scenes labor to
organize the Diamond Jubilee), and they were responsible for the collation of many
memory productions. In making their presence in the modern industry seem particularly
crucial and through creating of oral history projects, and gathering and writing stories
about pioneer ranch families in each of the five states, Anglo ranchwomen resisted the
complete marginalization of their contributions to ranching’s collective past. Thus while
most of the social world in cattle ranching’s history appeared overwhelmingly masculine,
ranchwomen continued to insist on asserting their own relationships to that history.
In 1953, for example, the Yavapai Cowbelles decided that they would gather
pioneer ranch histories for a radio show in Prescott, Arizona. The ultimate result of this
labor was a two-volume memory production published by the Cowbelles in 1955. The
stories contained within Echoes of the Past are full of illustrative examples of the
gendered conversations occurring between cattlemen and cattlewomen in the postwar
decades through the process of remembering. In a chapter entitled “Sense and Sentiment
of Cowmen,” Learah Cooper Morgan, the editor of the collection, wrote about the
sentimentality of cowmen for one another and for their animals. Morgan explains that
“The admirers of cattlemen and cowboys like to feel that they are men of both sense and
sentiment...I myself have ridden the range enough to realize full well that when cattlemen
and cowboys – and cowgals – hit the brushy trails for fourteen or sixteen or even longer
181
hours in times of seasonal work or during an emergency, it is the command of the heart
rather than of the head which gives them the strength to go that last mile.”71 In this
memory production, as in many of the collective memory stories told by female ranchers,
the lines between the masculine and the feminine blurs. The way that Morgan configures
the memory of cowmen and cowboys combines hard-nosed, “rational” businessmen and
masculine cowboys who are driven by their hearts with a cowgal who engages in the
masculine labor of riding the range. Many of the female authors capitalize on the
memories of female pioneer ranchers to portray Anglo women as hearty participants in
ranching’s past. These women are more than helpmates, they are vital presences in the
making of Anglo ranchers’ collective past.72
Rarely do ranchwomen depict Anglo women as being only civilizing influences in
a harsh frontier world. In women’s memories, the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters
of the cattlemen were as tough as their male counterparts. In telling the story of Nellie
Ritter, through her reminiscences, Morgan describes a woman who, after her husband’s
death, had to “assume full responsibility for the conduct of her ranch. With the help of
her son Curtis, twenty-three, and a hired ranch hand, she took to the saddle in earnest, as
she had often done during short periods of seasonal work during her husband’s lifetime”
71
Learah Cooper Morgan, “Sense and Sentiments of Cowmen,” Echoes of the Past: Tales of Old Yavapai,
107.
72
Ibid. In the book, half of the stories are of pioneer women. It is important to note that hired hand
women, while being rare (especially on the open-range) did exist and their stories are generally absent in
the memory productions. So whereas cowboys (who were hired hands employed by owner-operator
ranchers) appear in the memories in important roles, memory chroniclers almost always overlook or
underemphasize female employees. Thus, the collective history of range cattle ranching is written by the
“winners” whether male or female. We will discuss the producerist identities of women connected to
owning class further in Chapters 3 and 5.
73
(emphasis mine).
182
It is telling that in this reminiscence, like so many about “old-time”
ranchwomen, the woman assumes leadership. She is most decidedly not the helpmate of
men, but rather is being helped by them. Additionally, her assumption of responsibility
on the ranch was not an exceptional event. She had “often” done so. Ritter was not a
feminine flower unprepared for ranch work, but she was also not unfeminine. Indeed, as
Morgan explains:
it was in her favor that...she had the confidence of a good
horsewoman and a woman competent with firearms. She shot
equally well with guns ranging through the 30-30 rifle, the shot gun
and the 22. And, although her target was usually a predatory
coyote...or a rattlesnake...making his threatening challenge...upon
one of the flower-bordered walks of her ranch yard, she felt
competent to defend her home and her business interests.74
The depiction of women who combined “flower-bordered” walks and firearm prowess,
who cooked for the ranch hands, and joined them on the round-ups appeared throughout
Anglo rancher memory productions in the postwar years. Memory productions such as
these placed Anglo women at the center of ranchers’ identity-narrative and thus served to
connect further Anglo ranching culture. The “business” of ranching, easily considered a
purely masculine domain, became infused with the presence of Anglo cattlewomen
during the postwar decades. This infusion, coming after the “liberating” experience of
World War II but long before the second wave of feminism, helped to elevate women
from civilizing helpmates on the range to participants in the “business.”
Importantly, this elevation did not always happen when men were writing the
memories. Maurice Frink gives “The Cow-Belles” their own chapter in his history of the
73
74
Ibid.
Morgan, “Nellie Ritter: Arizona Mother of the Year”, Echoes of the Past, 83.
183
WSGA, and the narrative reminds the reader that despite the numerical superiority of
men, women too lived on the Great Plains in open-range days. The memory of Wyoming
women’s early suffrage was a source of pride in this memory production and he even
admits “the women matched the independence and the resourcefulness of their mates, and
made a record of their own to which it is impossible to do justice in one short chapter.”75
This statement, of course, leads one to wonder why he did not devote more than one
chapter to the “Women of Wyoming” and one gets the sense that he did not do so
because this “official” history of the WSGA, approved by the association’s Historical
Committee, was not to be a history of gender parity. The male members of the Historical
Committee of the WSGA and Frink himself were comfortable with rendering
ranchwomen as capable cooks who basically served as the “dinner bells of the West.”76
Women’s appearance in the rest of the history is peripheral to the masculine narrative and
despite ranchwomen’s efforts to create gender equality in rancher memories,
ranchwomen continued to struggle for full inclusion in the collective history of
ranching.77
That struggle continued well into the 1970s and even into the 1990s. Nellie
Warren is a prime example of the on-going silencing of women in ranching’s history
despite their attempt to remember the collective history of ranching. While Con, who
outlived Nellie by 13 years, has received most of the public credit for the decision to
approach the NPS about the ranch, it was Nellie who recognized the historical
75
Frink, 170.
Ibid. Frink uses this quote from an article about a “pioneer” ranchwoman named “Mrs. Fred Whitten.”
The article appeared in Cow Country in 1953.
77
In the next chapter, we will see how the valuing of masculinity and male work culture existed
prominently in rancher (both male and female) discussions about ranch work in the present.
76
184
significance of the ranch. Her children remember the centrality of Nellie to the decisionmaking. Conrad Kohrs Warren II remembered in 1993, “Whereas his [Con’s] signature
might appear on the dotted line and he’s getting credit for all of these things that
happened in the ensuing years, she [Nellie] was the power behind the throne.” He
continued:
...at the point where this thing began to move in the direction of being
a national historic resource, that was all her vision. He never had any
vision of that...the structure of the negotiations with the Park Service
was her planning, her research. She just pumped and prodded and
hassled him and hassled him and hassled him...and it’s working. The
people are coming, they’re seeing this whole thing. And they’re
playing out a drama that was all her vision and her planning and her
effort. She was the one that stayed up until 2 o’clock in the morning
sifting through photographs and...old documents...and it was a
monumental effort for her to do that.78
Warren, II and his sister Patricia Nell Warren remember the close relationship that Nellie
had with Con’s grandmother Augusta, and their memories provide a sense of a kind of
matriarchy on the Grant-Kohrs-Warren ranch. Patricia remembered that “pop was very
fond of reminding us kids that she [Augusta – Patricia’s great-grandmother] was a full
partner in the ranch...when the men were gone, she ran things.” In her oral history,
Patricia particularly was adamant that her mother had been competent and that the
women, the “other 50%” of the ranching industry, had to be “remembered” at GKNHS.
She explained, “Great have a Conrad Warren office but you’ve got to have a Nellie F.
Warren thing over here that balances [the story] equally...that really shows the [whole]
picture...There’s something about this ranch that inspired and fostered independent
78
Patricia Nell Warren and Conrad Kohrs Warren II, Interview by Christine Ford, 7-10 June 1993,
transcript, Oral History Collection, Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site, Deer Lodge, Montana.
women.”
79
185
That suggestion went unheeded. Today, when visitors gaze into the stable at
GKNHS, they see a recreated Con’s office complete with typewriter, pictures of his
favorite bulls, and various reading materials (including the Montana Stockgrower).
There is no Nellie F. Warren section and Augusta is mentioned only briefly on the
historic house tour as the domestic queen (most decidedly not “a full partner”) of the
Grant-Kohrs ranch. Visitors to GKNHS must discover the story of the mid to latetwentieth-century ranch for themselves, and they must go elsewhere to discover the
contributions of women to the ranching world. And so the forgetting coexists with the
remembering in the spatial memory at GKNHS.
While some rancher memory productions (especially women’s own memory
productions) include women’s presence in the industry, the patriarchally-constructed
history is painfully evident in much of the memorabilia.
This patriarchal amnesia
contributed substantially to the masculinization of the industry in both the present and the
past. In spite of ranch women’s “monumental” efforts, their position in the industry and
their place in its collective history was and has continued to be marginalized.
This marginalization, however, is just below the surface, and tensions among
ranchers – whether gendered, raced, or classed – do not assume center stage in ranchers’
dominant memories. Memory appeared in many forms during these years, but whether
they were Burt Hansen’s play, the spatial memory of GKNHS, the artifact collections of
the WSGA, the official histories of the associations, or personal rancher reminiscences all
served to create the appearance of cultural cohesion through memory. In the midst of the
79
Ibid. Patricia Nell Warren has become a well-known author. Her most famous piece of fiction is The
Front Runner (New York: Morrow, 1974).
186
day-to-day tensions of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, which I will discuss in the ensuing
chapters, ranchers tried to smooth over the tensions of the past via their collective
memory.
In conclusion, ranching’s past was not undifferentiated and uncomplicated, but
ranchers’ memories make it appear as such. To smooth over potential gendered, racial,
and classed tensions, ranchers (usually of the owner/operator class) created memories
which rested on the notion that ranching was at once historic and current – both past and
present. T.S. Eliot once wrote, “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the
pastness of the past, but of its presence...This historical sense...is a sense of the timeless
as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together.”80 As
ranchers created the memory of their industry’s history, they blended a laudation of the
industry’s early beginnings with an embrace of modernization. They connected their
current ranch labors on an enduring landscape with the labors of their heroic
predecessors, and they attempted to ignore the ever-present tensions of race, class, and
gender. In doing so, they created an identity that was not just past but present as well.
This identity and sense of collectivity supported ranchers as they went about their daily
lives and their political activities. Ultimately, remembering and forgetting, provided a
cultural platform on which ranchers could rest their political planks.
Memory helped to constitute ranchers’ collective identity but collective memories
grounded in the hey day of early ranching described a world quite different from the one
80
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: London, Methuen & Co. Ltd.,
1920).
187
that range cattle ranchers were experiencing in mid twentieth century. New technology,
new gender relations, and new relations with “outsiders” (tourists, federal government
etc.) meant that ranchers could not depend solely on their common heritage. Rather they
had to build cultural cohesion in the present and they did so through the experiences of
their every day lives. It is to the contours of those daily lives to which we now turn.
188
CHAPTER 3
COW WORK:
THE SOCIAL WORLD OF PRODUCTION ON RANGE CATTLE RANCHES
“Cow Work means all of the work that must be done at a certain time of the year.”
~ George F. Ellis, New Mexico rancher, 1973
“Yet the very vulnerability under certain circumstances of traditional forms of production points to
the importance of processes through which those forms are reproduced...”
~Harriet Friedmann, 1978
In 1963, Oda Mason explained patiently to a reporter from The New Yorker, that
ranching was a way of life. Stopping to gaze at some of his purebred Herefords, the
aging rancher reportedly said, “Look at those Herefords. I know each and every one by
name...there are more cattle than people in Wyoming. I like cattle better than people.
Cattle don’t talk and they don’t need a watch to eat by. I forget the names of people all
the time, but I never forget the name of a Hereford. I’ve been outdoors most of my life
except to eat and sleep.”1 Mason’s quote captures perfectly the hegemonic love of cows
that ranchers culturally promoted to one another and to the public at large. At the same
time, Mason subtly alludes to the labor he undertook to enable the existence of those
cows he loved so much. The notion that most ranchers held of themselves as laborers
engaged in an outdoor productive enterprise centered on the health and reproduction of
bovine bodies was a critical component in their dominant culture, and it was yet another
1
Epigraphs are from George Ellis, Bell Ranch as I Knew It, (Kansas City: The Lowell Press, 1973), 82-83
and Harriet Friedmann, “World Market, State, and the Family Farm: Social Bases of Household
Production in the Era of Wage Labor” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978); 555.
Burroughs, 301. Quote from article in The New Yorker, November 16, 1963.
189
arena in which ranchers enacted and promoted a set of practices to advance an impression
of commonality within the ranching community while erasing the appearance of division.
We learned in the last two chapters how celebratory memories of the nineteenthcentury open range industry coexisted uneasily with the changing world of modernity in
the dominant ranch culture of the postwar years. Underlying all of that was the single
most important unifying element in ranch culture – labor.
In this chapter we will
examine that the broad contours of that labor and will investigate the ways in which the
everyday lived experiences with cows dictated the rhythms of life for range ranchers. As
George Ellis explains in the epitaph above, cow work was simply that: work with cows
that occurred in certain times of the year. Cow work encompassed different tasks and
different goals, but in its essence, it pursued the growing and reproducing of cattle. Cow
work could include the quest to put meat on the bones of those animals destined for
slaughter and/or sale, and it could include the goal of reproducing a better heifer or bull
for future breeding. In either case the components were the same. Cows needed to eat,
preferably rich grasses. They needed to have ample water, and they needed to be
protected from the diseases that consistently threatened both their lives and their ability to
grow.
The components of growing cows dictated the everyday lives of everyone
engaged in labor on a range ranch and demanded different tasks. To ensure cattle ate
well, ranchers needed to fight noxious weeds and ensure grass growth; they had to
irrigate crop fields (if they grew feed crops), move cattle from one pasture to another, fix
fence to keep cattle in the correct feeding area, guard against bloat, and supplement the
190
bovine diet with minerals (such as salt). To ensure cattle had adequate water, ranchers
had to dig irrigation ditches, install and maintain windmills to pump water (especially in
the Southwest), fix water tanks, and break up the ice that formed on water sources in the
winter (mainly in the colder climates). To keep their cattle disease free, ranchers had to
vaccinate the animals, watch bovine bodies for signs of illness, and treat those cattle who
became infected with any of the hundreds of diseases. On most postwar intermountain
West ranches, male and/or female owner/operators, their family members, neighbors,
and, in certain situations (and at certain times of the year), hired wage labor conducted
these tasks. The successful completion of these duties would ensure the continuance of
the ranch.
Of course, there were other jobs that needed to be performed in order to keep the
commodity producing unit of the ranch running. The success and continuance of the
ranch also depended on labor not directly connected with the cow such as the domestic
labor of cooking meals, doing laundry, keeping business records, and maintaining
machinery.
These domestic tasks were no less important to the ranch operation.
Interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, however, the domestic arena of labor on the
ranch was often accorded secondary status in dominant ranch culture. Ranchwomen,
those most often in charge of the domestic realm, recognized their own importance to the
operation, but their domestic (as opposed to their cow work) contributions rarely were
praised in the public cultural productions of ranch life.
Despite the privileging of cow work, all of the labor on the ranch was critical to
the reproduction of the ranch itself, and it was the owner/operator class who most
191
benefited from the successful reproduction of the ranch on a season-to-season and yearto-year basis. Owner/operators benefited monetarily, of course, but ranchers’ quest for
profit was not their only motivation. In pursuing the ranching business, ranchers also
craved a particular lifestyle. They described their labor not just as a quest for monetary
wealth, but also as a replication of a culture. The labor on a range ranch led both to the
production of cows and, just as importantly, to the reproduction of a rural social world.
Ranchers, who owned the ranch (both male and female ranchers), had much invested in
the propagation of that social and economic world and, therefore, they labored to
maintain and recreate the form of production described above. Because they benefited
from the continuation of traditional forms of commodity production that centered around
cows, grazing, and seasonal cycles, ranchers often worried about upsetting the relations
of production that supported the unique form of production on a family-owned cattle
ranch, and they worked diligently to maintain the social world of production as it
benefited them.
Every year, when the cows reproduced on a range cattle ranch, put on weight in
fairly “traditional” ways (through ingesting grass), and headed to market, the form of
production on a ranch was reproduced and continued. That reproduction and continuance
did not just happen; it was produced by owner/operator ranchers through the maintenance
of labor roles and social relations. In her study about household-based wheat production
in the early-twentieth century, agricultural sociologist Harriett Friedmann defines an
important relationship between the forms of production and reproduction of those forms.
She suggests that in order for those engaged in commercial household commodity
192
production (which family ranchers most certainly were) to continue in their enterprises,
they had to replicate their style of production from one year to the next, and, indeed, from
one generation to the next. Friedmann explains that families who owned wheat farms
sought to reproduce their methods in order to remain viable. Friedmann explains that
“reproduction [was] the process through which a form of...production [lasted] more than
a season.”2
By “form of production” Friedmann simply means “the minimal unit of
productive organization.”3 This description is different from the Marxian definition of
“mode of production” because the form of production can encompass several different
modes and still maintain its overall form. This idea fits perfectly with the experiences of
family range ranchers in the intermountain West. The “minimal unit(s) of productive
organization” a range cattle ranch needed to have was the presence of cows, the
availability of grass/feed, a source of water, ranch labor (whether family or waged) to
monitor and promote the health of the herds, and domestic labor to feed, clothe, and
shelter the ranch family. In order for production to continue so that owner/operators
could maintain their positions as household-based commodity capitalists, they had to
make sure that they maintained, at a minimum, a traditional form of producing cows.
This preservation of tradition meant not only adopting technology (modes of production),
it also meant maintaining appropriate and useful relations of production on the ranches.
This does not mean that those social relations never changed with the changing
2
Harriett Friedmann, "World Market, State, and the Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production
in the Era of Wage Labor," Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978), 555.
3
Ibid., 552.
193
techniques/technologies adopted by ranchers. Ranchers often discussed the ways in
which technology decreased their need for waged labor and, concomitantly, that a
decrease in skilled ranch labor propelled the shift to mechanization. Still, the relations of
production on range ranches could never change completely or the household/family
based ranch, and thus owners’ subsistence system and cultural world, would cease to
exist.
Ranchers’ economic success or failure as well as their cultural identity as ranchers
depended on their ability to produce cows. Ensuring competitive survival in the family
ranching business depended upon owners’ ability to maintain the form of producing cows
through grazing. Labor relations propelled that form. What Friedmann has suggested for
wheat in the early twentieth century, therefore, was true for range ranchers in the midtwentieth century, “social relations at the level of production” were “bound up” with, and
constitutive of, the “dynamics of production.”4
With all of the possible technical changes in cattle ranching in the postwar years,
the dynamics of production in ranching were vulnerable to drastic change. In these times
of vulnerability, the reproduction of cows by way of traditional methods never was
assured and so ranchers, especially those in positions to benefit most from the
maintenance of traditional cattle growing (the owner/operators), worked culturally to
promote, value, and reproduce the social dynamics of production. Owner/operators spent
a great deal of labor reproducing the material relationships of production as well as the
4
Ibid., 548.
194
symbolic world of labor in spite of the changing postwar context in which they found
themselves.
The owner/operator class went about maintaining the material and symbolic world
of labor by doing three things. First, they engaged in and celebrated their own ranch
labor with and for their cows.
Secondly, they continually reproduced a particular
structure of the social world of production on their ranches by monetarily favoring labor
of cowhands over other labor that was just as essential. Thirdly, they promoted a certain
“character” of waged labor in the social world of production by asserting ideas about
what constituted “good” help. Most essentially ranchers’ insisted on the indispensability
of the masculinized realm of work with the cows. In the minds of male owner/operators
(and many female owner/operators), this labor took material and symbolic precedence
over all other labor; it did so because cultural celebration and material support of
masculinized cow work ensured the maintenance of the form of production which gave
owner/operators continued economic and cultural power.
The supremacy of cow work never was assured because other labor, that was
crucial to the success of the ranch but that was not directly related to cow work (including
women’s “domestic” work and the non-cow labor of hired wage laborers), vied for
economic and cultural valuation within ranching’s social world of production. At various
times, women related to the owner/operators, or women who owned their own ranches
outright, resisted the hegemony of male, cow work by asserting the importance of their
“domestic” work to the success of the ranch. Similarly, hired hands asserted claims to
5
rightful wages and bonuses.
195
This is not to say that owner/operator ranchwomen were
united with the “common” ranch hand.
Indeed, because of the resistance of the
“subordinate” workers on range ranches, ranchwomen often joined male owner/operators
in their attempt to maintain hegemonic control over the social world of production by
culturally celebrating and promoting the “important” labor on a cow ranch – namely, the
work with cows. Still, the hegemonic valuing of masculine, outdoor, cow work, and the
hegemonic devaluing of “secondary” work often came under contestation.
This chapter examines the uneasy labor relationships of range ranching. We will
look at who the “hired hands” tended to be, how labor was gendered, and how different
kinds of labor was monetarily and culturally valued (and devalued). The labor most
valued was that directly connected to the growing of cows. Through this valuation,
ranchers (male and female) and even, at times, hired hands subsumed what might have
been a contentious social world under a mirage of cultural unity reflected through an
incessant veneration of cow work. The growing of cows, and the cultural celebration of
that labor were, therefore, two of the main practices owner/operator ranchers performed
in order to create a sense and an image of cohesion within their group. Owner/operator
ranchers reproduced an entire social world so that they could continue to produce their
cows and their (economic and cultural) lives.
5
My seeming exclusion or under-emphasis of race requires explanation. In the sources themselves, the
question of race seems subsumed under an assumption of whiteness (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of this
with regard to the Cowbelles). This is not to say that the dominant class of ranchers did not have racialized
ideologies, they certainly did, and I will discuss that somewhat in the remainder of this chapter. But class
and gender seemed to trump race in the everyday ideological ordering of ranchers’ worlds.
196
To understand the reproduced form of production on range ranches, we must first
understand the broad contours of the work cycle on range ranches. One of the best
sources we have for understanding the shape of labor on a postwar range cattle ranch is
the 1973 publication called Bell Ranch as I Knew It by Bell Ranch manager, George
Ellis.
By the time Ellis took over as manager of the ranch, in 1947, it had been
subdivided and parceled out among several different owners. He managed the 130,000
acre parcel and developed it into one of the most prestigious ranches in the intermountain
West. Ellis chronicled his time as manager on the Bell from 1947-1960 in the book, and
he focused almost entirely on what he referred to as “The Year’s Work.” We can use
Bell Ranch as I Knew It as a window into the social world of production on postwar
ranches because, although the Bell was a particularly large ranch, other, smaller ranches
appear to have experienced a similar seasonal work culture that varied in scope but not
necessarily in content.6
George Ellis explained that “work on the Bell was pretty well systematized and
we usually did about the same things at the same time each year.”7 No matter where
range cattle ranchers lived, how many head they ran, or how many acres they owned
and/or leased, their lives revolved around cyclic, seasonal events.8
6
This cyclic
It is also important to point out that while Ellis managed the Bell ranch for its absentee owners, he also
owned his own cows and leased land from a neighbor for grazing. Thus Ellis was both an owner and an
operator.
7
Ellis, Bell Ranch, 81.
8
“Head” refers to the number of cattle. So a herd of 100 head means there are 100 animals in that herd.
Many range cattle ranches utilized not only deeded property (private property owned by the rancher and/or
business corporation) but also leased land from the federal or state governments. The Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) in the Department of Interior (after 1947) controlled the most leased grazing land in
the West. But the United States Forest Service (USFS) in the Department of Agriculture, and each
individual state also had vast amounts of acreage that was leased to ranchers. This leasing was relatively
new in the immediate postwar decades and created much friction between ranchers and government
197
seasonality lent range ranching a particular form of production that suggested continuity
(both short-term/annual continuity and long-term/generational continuity). Ellis did not
just rely on seasonal commonality to publicize the continuity of cattle ranching on the
Bell, he also connected the Bell Ranch of the post World War II era with the nineteenthcentury world of the cattle barons and, in doing so, reified the stability and tradition of
ranching. Ellis gives the bygone days of open range ranching a prominent role in his
story. The introductory sections of the book pay particular attention to the Spanish
conquest and Mexican eras, when the Bell had been one of the largest land grants in the
region. The grant, given to Pablo Montoya from the Mexican government, consisted of
land that varied topographically and included canyons, plateaus, and prairies. The land
had ample water, a rarity in the arid region of eastern New Mexico, and was covered with
rich grasses.9 In chronicling the longevity of land use on the Bell, George’s recollections
representatives. For good discussions of this see Hirt, Conspiracy of Optimism; Merrill, Public Lands;
David Remley, Bell Ranch: Cattle Ranching in the Southwest, 1824-1947 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico, 1993); and Rowley, U.S. Forest Service.
9
George also discusses Apache and Comanche utilization of the region, but reserves most of his “history”
for the use of the land for the growing of cows based on grazing. For hundreds of years, before the arrival
of the Spanish and Anglos, natives had left their marks on the land in the places they used most often, in
canyons where they hid and hunted and near watering holes where they lived, or found respite and rest
during long journeys. The land which encompassed the Bell, then, has a long and rich history including
these years of Apache and Comanche occupation. Following Spanish invasion and occupation, the land
became two Mexican land grants, the Baca Location No. 2 and the Pablo Montoya Grant of 1824. After the
United States war with Mexico in 1846-1847, the Pablo Montoya heirs applied for confirmation of their
grant. As with so many Spanish land grant disputes, it was an Anglo, John S. Watts, who acted as the legal
“representative for” the Montoyas in the confirmation process. Watts took a large part of the grant as his
legal fee and later acquired the adjoining Baca Location No. 2. Watts later sold this property to Wilson
Waddingham. By 1885, Waddingham was running large herds of cattle on the range in the way of the
“cattle kings” of that day. Waddingham overused the range and by 1893, overstocking and grazing of stock
from other ranches combined with drought to leave the range in terrible shape. Due to financial hardship
and mismanagement, Waddingham had to sell the ranch which he did, in 1898, to E.G. Stoddard, president
of the New Haven Bank, who had decided to found the Red River Valley Company in order to buy the Bell
Ranch. From then until 1946 this company, headed first by Stoddard and after 1923, by Julius G. Day,
survived the ups and downs of the cattle markets of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, Bell Ranch manager
Charles O’Donel retired, but stayed on as vice president of the Red River Valley Company. In January,
1933, Albert K. Mitchell took over the management of the Bell and ran it until the Red River Valley
198
assert the premise that the process of production on the land had been reproduced by its
inhabitants for hundreds of years. After writing about the traditional forms of cattle
production on the Bell, George, devotes the rest of his book to a discussion of the
creation of cattle on the ranch in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. He suggests that the
patterns of production on the Bell did not vary drastically from the patterns of earlier
years. In particular, the work on the Bell was “pretty well systematized” because it had
to be, and Ellis and his waged laborers tried their best to correspond to the cyclic
requirements of ranching.10
Winter was the quietest time of the year around the ranches of Arizona, Montana,
Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico.
Ranchers in the winter months (usually
December through February for the Southwest and October to March in the northern
states) often needed to feed cattle in order to keep their weight up and to seek out cattle
watering locales in order to break ice. Beyond this, ranchers attended to labor in the
winter that they had neglected during the busy spring, summer, and fall. Repairing fence
and ranch equipment composed the outdoor activities around the ranch in the cold
months. Balancing books, catching up on correspondence, and generally taking stock of
the business occurred year-round for ranch owners and managers, but managers and
owners privileged these activities in winter months. This “indoor” work often fell to
Company sold it in 1947. This sale broke the Bell Ranch into seven smaller ranches. Mrs. Harriet E.
Keeney bought the headquarters unit consisting of 130,855 acres and acquired the rights to the Bell brand.
It was Harriet Keeney and her husband Ralph D. Keeney, who hired George Ellis to manage the Old
Headquarters Unit of the Bell Ranch. Because the Keeney’s maintained rights to the Bell brand, the unit
Ellis managed continued to be referred to as the Bell Ranch. For an excellent history of the Bell from the
nineteenth-century through 1947 see David Remley, Bell Ranch: Cattle Ranching in the Southwest, 18241947 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1993).
10
Ellis, Bell Ranch, 81.
199
ranchwomen. While southwestern ranches experienced more mild winters, ranchers in
Arizona and New Mexico too used the colder months as “down time.” Ellis explains
that “November and December were quieter months as far as cow work was concerned –
and a good thing too. They are both full of holidays and everybody is always wanting
off.”11
After the quieter winter months, labor on a range cattle ranch accelerated in the
spring. For Ellis on the Bell “It all began March 1 when the new calves started coming.”
During the spring months, owners, who could afford to, hired seasonal hands to help with
the round-up and branding activities. These seasonal workers remained on the ranch
through early fall and the larger operations kept a few hands on year-around. Monitoring
the calving and making sure that heifers did not need any assistance took up most of the
labor until late spring/early summer when branding and breeding season began in full
swing. Ranchers herded cattle together, administered vaccines, branded new calves, and
inspected older cattle to determine their overall health and to ascertain how well they had
survived the winter. During this time, ranchers put the bulls with the cows to breed until
the latter part of summer.
It was during the spring and summer months when women in the owner/operator
class were most likely to “help out” with the cow work. The labor of ranchwomen was
varied, interminable, and very often unremunerated, but they still had well-formed labor
identities. Part of ranchwomen’s labor identities centered on the importance of their
domestic labor for such ranch rituals as roundups and brandings. The women, often with
11
Ibid.,83.
200
the help of one or two female employees, did the laundry, served meals, and made sure
the cowhands had all the coffee they could drink before they began their work. The
women’s work, however, extended beyond these domestic tasks.
Mattie Ellis, for
example, often did the books for the Bell Ranch – and was especially knowledgeable
about the registered herd of Hereford cattle. She was the person in charge of welcoming
the myriad guests who arrived monthly at the Bell. She rode the range often with her
husband George and the crew and knew the contours of the ranch topography as well as
anyone. She raised a garden, cooked for guests, raised two children, and still found time
to write about her experiences as a ranch woman, at least partially because the Bell hired
other women to assist Mattie in the domestic labor.12
Mattie’s “usual” work could be classified as the reproductive work characterized
by Feminist Marxist scholars.
According to these feminist scholars, historical,
“traditional” labor studies, the “productive” have devalued, dismissed, and/or completely
ignored the “reproductive” (and female) sphere of labor in favor of the productive (and
male) sphere of labor.13 Not only was women’s productive labor (i.e. waged, public
12
Mattie Ellis was a prolific writer. Part of the reason for this was the fact that she lived on one of the most
successful ranches in the intermountain West. As a result, she and George could afford to have hired help
to assist both indoors and outdoors. For discussions of her life as a ranch woman, see Mattie Ellis, Bell
Ranch: Peoples and Places (Clarendon, TX: Clarendon Press, 1963); My Dishpan and Other Items
(Clarendon, TX: Clarendon Press, 1963); Bell Ranch Recollections (Clarendon, TX: Clarendon Press,
1965).
13
In the 1970s and 1980s, these feminists increasingly began to demand that scholars reclaim women’s
contributions to the economic workings of societies. For the best overviews and examples of
Marxist/Feminist theorizing and revisioning of labor history see Ava Baron, "Gender and Labor History,"
in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 1-47; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in
the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More work for
Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic
Books, 1983); Susan Johnson, " ‘a Memory Sweet to Soldiers’": The Significance of Gender," in A New
Significance: Re-Visioning the History of the American West, ed. II Clyde Milner (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia
201
work) essential to the functioning of capitalist patriarchy, so too was women’s
reproductive labor (i.e. unwaged, private work). Some of these scholars even went so far
as to claim that “women’s work,” the work society-at-large has tended to devalue most,
was actually more critical to human survival than waged work.
Whereas feminist
scholars have shown the ways in which the latter reinforced and made possible the
former, they still maintain a dichotomous relationship between the two spheres of labor.
I would like to suggest, however, that female range ranchers (and perhaps women in
other rural settings), believed productive labor was in essence reproductive and vice
versa.
While male ranchers rarely acknowledged the importance of domestic labor,
female ranchers had a difficult time seeing the two as separate.14 Female ranchers
believed their domestic labor (what labor theorists have traditionally defined as
“reproductive” labor) to be critical to the production of the cattle. That is not to claim
that ranchwomen did not recognize that there existed two gendered realms of work on
range cattle ranches. Domestic labor was gendered profoundly and separated from the
outdoor work with cows. Male owner/operators rarely if ever did the cooking or the
laundry. Still, the creation of a commodity in a capitalist, household economy (which
most ranches were) depended, literally, on reproduction. Ranchwomen’s domestic (or
reproductive) labor connected intimately with the growing of cows. Sure brewing coffee
may not seem to be connected with bovine bloat or the eradication of intrusive weeds, but
University Press, 1988); Susan Strasser, Never done: A History of American Housework (New York: Henry
Holt, 2000). For discussions on traditional patriarchy vs. modern male dominance, see Linda Gordon and
Allen Hunter, "Not All Male Dominance Is Patriarchal," Radical History Review 71, Spring (1998).
14
It is also important to note that male ranchers, while rarely discussing washing machines or coffeemaking, valued female cow labor. We will see evidence of this later in the chapter.
202
keeping the male owner/operators and the hired hands physically able to complete those
tasks contributed directly to the healthy growth of cows and to the continuation of the
family business. While ranchwomen culturally valued the outdoor, cow work more (as
did male ranchers), ranchwomen did not believe cow work to be “productive” and
domestic work “reproductive.” In ranchwomen’s theorization, the two could not be
separated.
Anyone who owned a range cow or who had interest in the ownership of the cow,
hoped for its rapid and healthy growth. For a majority of ranchers, the hope that their
herd would reproduce more animals co-existed at all times with the hope of increasing
the girth of the cattle. Ranchers’ main goal then was to produce (grow) a herd of cows,
and, either through natural birth or through purchase, to reproduce that herd, and then to
reproduce that very form of production the next year. For ranchers, production was
literally coupled with reproduction and ranchwomen saw the connection clearly.
Despite a focus on what has been traditionally defined by scholars as “domestic or
reproductive” labor, then, ranchwomen themselves did not seem to see a separation
between their reproductive labor, which occurred indoors, and the production of cows
out-of-doors. For these women, the ranch’s environs and their labor in those environs
encompassed both the range, the grass, the cows, as well as the ranch house, the garden,
and the yard. The following excerpt from Stella (Mrs. Cort) Carter’s 1952 letter to the
Cattlelog exemplifies the ways in which these women celebrated their multi-tasking
which required them to balance difficult, outdoor labor with their more “domestic” tasks.
She wrote:
203
you know Cow Gals, how it goes on a ranch…if through the day a
horse gets into the fence, you think nothing of it – just go lift him out.
BUT BE SHURE TO FIX THE FENCE…Maybe when you get back to
the house you find a hay truck suspended over your rock wall! You
help jack the thing up…then pull the truck out with the tractor. …you
turn to survey the damage to your favorite corner in the garden. A tree
skinned; some shrubbery crushed…flowers smashed and trampled –
why is it some men never watch what they’re walking on?…Well, you
tackle the mess with pruning shears, ax and pitchfork dampening the
ground with tears…15
Throughout the postwar decades, ranchwomen constantly wrote articles and columns
similar to Stella Carter’s feisty rendition. Whether or not the stories are elaborated (or
“true” in the positivist sense) is not as important as the fact that women viewed
themselves as participating in a variety of activities. Indeed vast documentation of
women’s direct involvement with cattle drives, stray round-ups, gardens, cattle diseases,
and range issues filled the pages of the writings and depicts a group of women willing to
extend their work identities beyond the home to the wider economic world of the ranch.
So while ranchwomen often bemoaned being spread too thin and overworked,
they viewed both spheres of labor as crucial to the broader work culture of range cattle
ranching.16 Take, for example, Marion Moore, the owner/operator of the CM Ranch (a
Dude and cattle ranch) in Dubois, Wyoming. By May, 1945, with the “dude season” just
around the corner, and with more reservations than they had had since the beginning of
the war, Marion wrote a letter to Walter Nye, the secretary of the Dude Ranchers’
Association (DRS). Her labor situation for the season was dismal. She had no cook, no
15
Stella (Mrs. Cort) Carter, “Neighborly Gossip,” Arizona Cattlelog, January 1952, 42-43.
From here forward, I will refer to women who were not hired hands (those who did not work formally for
wages) as “ranchwomen.” because that is largely how they referred to themselves. They also sometimes
referred to themselves as “cowgirls” and their class position created a distinct disparity between themselves
and the hired female laborers.
16
204
“cabin” help, and things seemed only to be getting worse. Marion wrote to inform
Walter:
To add to our difficulties, our one man, Tommy, fell over a
two by four fence and broke a bit of his neck! and is flat on
his back for a month. Fortunately, he is a state school boy
[mentally challenged] and so they are caring for him...yours
truly is now the second milker, along with everything
else...[there is] still no cook...I did have a letter from Mrs.
Hazel Wallace in Laurel saying she would like the job...am
keeping my fingers crossed or would if they weren’t too sore
from the milking job....17
The seasonal scurrying that went into finding cooks, cattle hands, horse wranglers,
guides, and domestic help for the ranch cabins meant that the search for labor particularly
on a range cattle dude ranch was intense. As Marion’s letter attests, the shortage of labor
often fell hardest on the backs (and in the hands) of women. In addition to their regular
work, women often had to pick up the slack that occurred when “help” was hard to find.
Her correspondence to other ranch wives and to Walter throughout the spring of 1945
palpate with a sense of overwork and good-humored desperation. In writing about spring
labor, Marion exclaimed:
Something should be done about it [the amount of work I
have to do]. Some efficiency expert should step into our
midst and show us how to organize [and still have time for
leisure]...no, I just don’t know how to organize under this
term ‘leisure.’ To tell you the truth I can’t ever recall having
met it face to face...there is the garden plot patiently waiting
for someone to crawl up and down its endless rows, the rakes
are waiting for eager hands to grasp them for the ranch
grounds clean up job...and horses are just dying to be
rounded up and brought down off the mountain (what I
17
Marion Moore to Walter Nye, 18 May 1945, Box 3, Folder 1, Dude Ranchers’ Association Papers,
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
205
wouldn’t give for just one bunch that wouldn’t play hide-andseek with me in the woods)...18
Her pleas for help were grounded in a sense that labor must be completed in order to
reproduce the form of production necessary to keep the ranch operating. Her entreaty
often fell on deaf ears because there simply was not enough labor to go around.
Additionally, ranchers tended to view women’s labor as more flexible than men’s labor.
Dominant ranch culture expected women to step into outdoor cow work whenever
necessary because labor gendered male had priority over (or at least took the same
precedence as) labor gendered female. For Marion in the spring of 1945, the shortage of
help and the harshness of the spring weather meant that by mid-May she had barely
“gotten the garden in” and fully expected “the seeds” would “do little more than shiver in
their skins, these frosty nights” because she had been so busy attending to cow work.
Despite having gotten the “garden in,” she felt overworked, and still had all of the
milking to do. As a result, she pleaded with Walter, “if you can, send a man to the CM,
we would love you harder than ever – especially me, on account of the cows.”19
Ranchwomen considered their presence on the ranch as “helpmates” to their cattle
men important, but in their private correspondence with one another, they asserted their
own identities as individual laborers, who worried about the cows and refused to be
subordinates in the ranch work culture.20
18
As Marci Rodman, a Wyoming rancher,
Marion Moore to Walter Nye, 12 March 1945, Box 3, Folder 1, Dude Ranchers’ Association Papers.
Ibid.
20
What historian Nancy Grey Osterud has found true for nineteenth-century women in the Nanticoke
Valley in upstate New York, seems to hold true for 1950s Arizona Cowbelles as well, namely that “women
strove to create mutuality in their marriages…and reciprocity in their performance of labor.” See Nancy
Grey Osterud, “She Helped Me Hay It as Good as Man,” in Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds.,
“To Toil the Livelong Day: America’s Women at Work, 1780-1980 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
19
206
explained to a friend and fellow female rancher, “I live two lives......one a housewife and
loving wife and one a business gal.
Takes time.”21
Marci, Marion, and other
ranchwomen, while rarely being compensated for their labor, asserted its importance
nonetheless, and what is interesting about the women’s discussions of their labor are the
ways in which women of the owner/operator class generally perceived its importance.22
Ranchwomen believed their labor to be vital to the overall success of the ranch and the
industry as a whole. Rarely do these ranchwomen depict themselves as performing only
menial domestic tasks that have limited value.23 Rather, most ranchwomen recognized
their work culture as existing within the home as well as extending beyond the walls of
1987), 91. Dee Garceau’s work reveals that Wyoming ranchwomen in the early decades of the twentieth
century associated ranchwomen’s labor identity with their senses of “group partnership” but also were
aware of their individual contribution to the ranch’s success. Postwar ranchwomen illustrate this same pull
between individualism and communalism, but seem to emphasize their individual triumphs. By the 1950s,
ranchwomen were continuing what Garceau finds as trends amongst 1910s and 1920s Wyoming women,
namely that ranchwomen, who write about their work culture, took great pride in being able to work either
inside or outside. They also seem to covet the communal sense of accomplishment that came with what
Garceau calls the masculine, individualistic work associated with “cowcamp.” The most important
difference between the mid-twentieth-century ranchwomen’s labor identities and that of earlier Wyoming
ranchwomen seems to be the ways in which the postwar women mobilized that identity to create
community between individual ranches. The public projects of 1950s (a topic discussed more in Chapter 6)
ranchwomen seem distinct from Garceau’s early-twentieth-century ranchwomen. See Garceau, The
Important Things, 89-111.
21
Marci Rodman, 30 December 1948, Box 1, Folder 10, Dude Ranchers' Association Records, American
Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
22
There are exceptions to this. Some ranchwomen loathed life on the ranch and the dread with which they
met each day is palpable in their discussions of the monotonous daily occurrences. Take for example, Rosa
Ronquillo Rhodes who, with her husband William Robert Rhodes, owned the Diamond R Ranch near
Redington, Arizona. Her diary entries for the postwar period often discuss the acute loneliness she felt as
her husband “went to work as usual” and her children went about their lives. In particular, “women’s
work” held no glory for her. Her diaries intimate a sense of an ordinariness of daily life that was nearly
suffocating. See Rosa Ronquillo Rhodes, Rhodes Diaries, 1864-1982, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson,
Arizona.
23
In Chapter 6, I will discuss the consumer imperative for rural women on ranches in the West in more
depth. For general discussions of the 1940s and 1950s gendered ideal of women as domestic beings who
did little in the way of real productive labor see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American
Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More,
and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound. For an excellent anthology on women’s resistance to this
imperative see Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver.
207
the ranch house. They located their labor identities in a broad ethos of production and
believed themselves to be producers of goods and services essential to the cattle industry.
This “Jill of all Trades” mentality pervaded the women’s writing about their work
culture. Many if not most ranchwomen prided themselves on their abilities to bake a
cake and fix a water pump. Still, as Teresa Jordan has pointed out, “men were expected”
to do outdoor labor, while women were “allowed” to, and ranchwomen lived under
intense hegemonic ideas about the “proper” role of women in the postwar years. Women,
these ideas held, were to be consumers, wives, and mothers if they were to be anything at
all. While ranchwomen labored under these strict gender expectations, however, they
also subverted them at critical junctures. In this subversion of the dominant gender
paradigm, ranchwomen never abandoned their commitment to identifying and being
identified simultaneously as “true women” and “real ranchers.” In her discussion of
ranchwomen’s labor, Arizona rancher Jo Jeffers explains that “Because she is sure of her
innate womanliness, [the ranch woman] is not afraid to do a man’s chores when she has
to. She doesn’t mind getting dust in her eyes, mouth and nose, having the wind knot her
hair or wading in manure up to her ankles when necessary.”24
Jeffers and other
ranchwomen believed that their individual identities as women were durable enough to
withstand the possibility that masculinized work tasks would undo their femininity.
Women’s participation in the social world of production, then, while being crucial, also
24
Ibid.
208
was tenuous and constantly under contestation. They willingly risked traditional labor
divisions in order to reproduce the form of production of their families’ businesses.25
The domestic labor tasks in which all ranchwomen had to engage were, of course,
critical to the success of the ranch business, and ranchwomen acknowledged that fact, but
rarely centered those tasks in their public productions. In most of the public sources,
ranchwomen associate themselves with the cow-centered aspects of ranch life. Spring
was the one of the times of the year when labor with the cows took precedence over other
kinds of labor. It was the time when the heifers and cows were calving, and, for those
ranchers who did so, it was the time of the year when herds moved from the winter range
to the summer pastures (usually at higher elevations). Ranchwomen incorporated the
cyclic, seasonal temporality of ranching into their own identity productions, thereby
helping to reproduce the hegemony of the “cow” as being central to ranch life. For
example, the T-Bone CowBelle newsletter in April, 1963, contained the following poem
announcing the arrival of spring and the seasonal reproductive work. The author wrote:
Spring is here!
Calving is about done.
Let’s go to the CowBelle meeting
And have a lot of fun.26
25
For general surveys of rural women’s work from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth
century, see Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1992); Joan Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (New
York: The Feminist Press, 1981); Paula Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and TownBuilders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986); Mary Neth
Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest,
1900-1940 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). For a general survey of women’s work
see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
26
Unknown, "T-Bone News," Box 4, Folder 13, Montana Cowbelles Records, Montana Historical Society,
Helena, Montana, 1.
209
No where in any of the public (and in few of the private) sources of ranchwomen is there
mention of a temporal ordering of domestic labor. For any ranchwoman, the above poem
would suggest that “the end of calving” meant not just new and different work with cows,
but a slackening of the cooking required by the branding and round-up activities.
Importantly, however, the author of the poem never mentions explicitly that slackening of
domestic labor in the poem.
Ranchwomen’s “chores” would increase again in the fall but first, spring morphed
into summer and brought with it the grazing season during which ranchers rode among
the cattle. Summer months required due diligence on the part of the hired hands and the
owners with regard to cattle’s well-being on the range. Like all seasons on the ranch,
summer always brought surprises so that while the cyclic nature of ranch labor often
meant repetition – doing “the same things at the same time each year” -- there were also
always new challenges to be overcome on an almost daily basis. As George Ellis wrote,
“August and September were spent riding among the cattle. If you see cattle often
enough, there is always something that needs tending to.”27 Eulalia Bourne, a female
rancher who owned and operated her own operation, echoed George’s comment, but put
a feminine spin on it. She wrote, “If you ride the range every day, you neglect your
housework and other duties. If you don’t ride, some cattle will go blind with pinkeye or
otherwise be fouled.”28 Eulalia had no Mattie or Marion to take care of the other
reproductive tasks while she rode the range, and so her sense of having something to tend
27
28
Ibid., 81.
Eulalia Bourne, Woman in Levis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967), 10.
210
to among the cows differed significantly from George’s: for no where does George
mention neglecting his “housework,” because he had none to do.
For those women, who lived on the ranch and were the wives of ranch hands,
spring, summer, and even fall were just as tense as for the owner/operator women, but for
different reasons. For ranch hand wives, spring, summer, and fall were the loneliest
times of the year because it was these months when the “hands” were gone for long
periods of time. Buying and selling of calves, heifers, and steers occurred during these
months, and required much labor. In order to ready the cows for market, ranchers and
hired hands would “cut” whichever animals were going to be sold out of the larger roundup (or herd). Concern about getting the cattle weighed at the heaviest weight marked
much of the work. For example, assuring that the calves did not lose too much weight
between being separated, weighed, and delivered to the buyer meant ranchers and hands
had to decide the exact moment to separate the steers or heifer calves away from their
mothers. Because timing was crucial and the handling of the cattle vital to getting the
best price possible for each animal, the labor crew, whether composed only of family
members or of 2 hired workers or 30, engaged in labor that required great “cow sense,
skill and commitment” to the growing of cows. It also required that the hands to be gone
from the home ranch for days, weeks, and, sometimes, months at a time.
Most ranch hands were male, but some had spouses and families which they
brought with them to the ranch. In looking for work, male laborers often explained their
own qualifications as cowboys and ended their letters of enquiry by assuring the
employer that their wives and/or daughters were good cooks and could keep house.
211
Sometimes, then, the owner/operator family hired a cowhand’s family for reproductive
labor, but often the wives of the hands were responsible solely for their own households.
Whether these women were doing work for their own families or for the owner/operator
families (or both), the work was tediously domestic. Language barriers and class bias
served often to separate culturally the families of the owner/operators and their
employees. The wife and/or daughters of male hired hands remained on the ranch with
little recourse to leave, and they understandably often grew disgruntled with life on the
ranch. These women’s work was mundane and routine, and their “men folk” often left
for long periods of time, leaving them alone. Josefina Badilla, whose husband labored on
cattle ranches across southern Arizona in the 1940s, explained her experience on the
ranch as “lonely” and “depressing” largely because she was left at home doing tedious
domestic labor, while her husband rode the range, and visited other ranchers and
cowboys on neighboring ranches. Josefina explained:
I told my husband I don’t want to be here on this ranch all by myself
because a ranch...is a very hard thing, very depressing because...you
see the woman stays on the ranch all day...we women are just at the
ranch...[I would just] make dinner for my husband when he came
home, wash and iron my clothes and all of his...I would just pass the
day all alone...[because] people lived very far away...29
29
Josefina Badilla, Oral History, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Arizona. Translation: “Le dije a mi
esposo no – yo no quiero estar aquí en este rancho sola porque un rancho, mira, es una cosa muy dura,
muy triste, no? Porque por ejemplo mira, una, la mujer se queda en el rancho todo el día. El hombre se
levanta temprano, se desayuna, se asilla su caballo y se va...Y nosotros las mujeres no mas en el
rancho...no mas hacer la comida para mis esposo cuando venia, lavar, planchar mi ropa y toda del, no
mas pasaba el día sola y es muy triste, es muy duro...En el rancho muy solo. La gente muy lejos, lejos, así
que no es, para mi no era nada bonito...” My thanks to Maritza de la Trinidad for help in listening to the
oral history and helping me with aspects I couldn’t hear and/or understand and for helping me with writing
the Spanish and English transcripts.
212
As Josefina’s memory indicates, ranch labor hierarchy relegated the wives of male
employees on ranches to work that was “typically” gendered. Interestingly, I have found
no evidence of a non-owner/operator woman celebrating cow work.
As Josefina
eloquently explained, the men, even those who were underpaid and underappreciated, got
to partake in the exciting work and sociability of the cowboys. Their mobility and
changing work routine stirred the monotony of daily life on a ranch and reinforced their
manliness. Both male ranch hands and male owner/operators, conversely, expected the
hired hands’ “women folk” to be immobile, isolated, and content in drudgery.
As the foregoing illustrates, growing cattle affected the labor of every person on a
cattle ranch, but the labor regime differed depending on each person’s place in the social
world of production on a ranch, and the cyclic nature of range cattle ranching, tied to
natural seasons and to the cycles of cattle birth, growth, and death, meant that much of
the labor and knowledge required of cowfolk changed little. Despite modernizing trends
during the immediate postwar years, ranches continued to utilize traditional methods in
much ranch work. For example, while trucks became more and more important on
postwar ranches, ranchers still used horses for gathering cattle and riding ranges that had
bad roads.
They still branded with hot irons rather than using electric branding
apparatuses and so the ancient art of branding continued in the much the same way it
always had. Ranch work, therefore, while modernizing and mechanizing substantially
during these years still could require extensive knowledge of the ranch landscape as well
as skills with a rope, a horse, a branding iron, and with the cattle themselves.
213
Nevertheless, ranching was changing and this shift contributed to conflict among
ranchers and the hired hands, and the two groups often viewed the social world of
production very differently in the postwar decades. Take, for example, the decision of
George Ellis to modernize the Bell Ranch’s chuck wagon in 1957. Chuckwagons were
crucial components in ranch work on some of the larger mid-twentieth-century ranches,
but the technological changes of the mid-twentieth century rendered this horse-powered
transportation system obsolete. In his memoir of the Bell, Ellis wrote an entire chapter
on the “Chuck wagon Routine” both because he sensed that the chuckwagon would
occupy a lasting place in ranch lore, and because he knew that as a ranch implement, the
chuckwagon would soon be replaced by fossil-fuel burning vehicles.
In 1957, Ellis retired the Bell chuck wagon and replaced it with a mechanized
“wagon.”30 Mattie Ellis, George’s wife, recognized that a modernized and mechanized
chuckwagon symbolized the passing of an era. In order to capture and preserve the
historicity of the old wagon, Mattie snapped the a picture of the Bell Ranch chuckwagon
in 1956, during one of her photographic forays. She captioned the image which showed
several ranch hands getting the wagon ready to hit the range thus:
Loading the old Bell chuck wagon at Headquarters for the
summer branding work in 1956. This was one of the last trips
out for the old wagon, since this item of range equipment was
motorized the following year.31
30
The chuck wagon also implicitly symbolizes the disparities that existed between ranches in the mid-20th
century. Few ranches were large enough to require the use of such a wagon by the mid-20th century. With
over 100,000 acres to roam during branding season, the Bell was one of those large ranches.
31
Ellis, Bell Ranch As I Knew It, 64.
214
Mattie, who helped to pack the wagon for its forays to the range, explained, “the historic
old wagon...was refurbished and presented to the Museum of New Mexico, where it has
since then [1957] been on display.”32
Part of the reason behind the mechanizing of the wagon was that George knew, by
the early 1950s, that the wagon was outdated technologically. He explained that one of
the reasons for replacing the old wagon was that “after a time the old horse-drawn wagon
had worn out, and so had the horses that pulled it.” To mechanize, Ellis built a kitchen
on a four-wheel-drive Army truck which contained butane cook stove, butane lights,
running water from a tank at the rear, and sleeping quarters for the cook. The horses had
worn out, but Ellis had other reasons for modernizing and mechanizing the wagon.
Indeed Ellis’ mechanization of the Bell chuckwagon did not occur simply because of
obsolete or worn equipment, but also was connected, in Ellis’ opinion, to the changing
(and lessening) skills of laborers. He explained that the skills of cowhands diminished in
the postwar years and by the late 1950s it had become exceedingly difficult “to find a
cook who could drive four horses.”33
Jack Brenner, former president of the MSGA and owner of the Lazy E-4 ranch,
echoed the owner/operator sentiment of George. Brenner remembered the 1920s and
1930s as easier times. In those decades, he and his family had been able to raise a cow
for $8/head versus the $85 it took to grow a cow in 1976. In the pre-World War II years,
Brenner believed it had been much easier to find “good,” “skilled” labor. As the postwar
decades wore on, Brenner remembered, mechanization forced a change from horse32
33
Ibid.
Ellis, Bell Ranch, 89.
215
driven ranch operations to complicated mechanized outfits that simply added “labor and
expense” to traditional ranch tasks, but that shift had been necessary because skilled
cowhands simply did not exist anymore on the range. When asked why he stopped using
temporary labor, Brenner recalled “[We] just ran out of them [workers]. Just couldn’t get
them anymore...[the] old boys kind of wore out...and by golly [the new ones] don’t know
anything.”34 And if not knowing anything generally about a ranch was not bad enough,
there was the ignorance of laborers when it came to upkeep and proper operation of the
machinery. Brenner exclaimed, “good lord the machinery! You’ve got $15,000 here,
$20,000 there and you’ve got to have darn good men that know how to take care of that
machinery.”35 Trusting hired hands with the modes of production that cost thousands of
dollars, when it was not necessary to do so for the production of cows, did not seem
worth it to Brenner.
He did the work himself and then called a mechanic when
something went wrong. Still, he admitted that “[if I had my druthers I’d settle for old
system because] I was raised a horse man. And I did all my work with horses and I never
did learn the mechanical part of it too well. I’ve got to depend on somebody else.”36
Brenner admitted that sadly the days of the horse and of a certain “independence” for
owner/operators were long gone and ranchers relied increasingly on new industrial modes
of production to maintain their production units.
The decision by owner/operators about whether or not to modernize was based, at
least partially, on availability of capital, but it also depended on whether or not the
34
Safford, 23.
Ibid., 27.
36
Ibid.
35
216
owner/operator believed the modernization would benefit the business, lead to heightened
production, and require as little risk as possible. As the stories of George Ellis and Jack
Brenner illustrate, the decision about and extent to which owner/operators modernized
both affected and were affected by the social relationships of production in range country.
A lack of skilled horsemen could necessitate creating a truck wagon instead of operating
a chuckwagon. A lack of available manual labor to stack hay could necessitate the
buying (even on credit) of a new hay stacker which in turn could mean not needing nearly
as many laborers during haying season. A mechanized chute could mean needing only a
couple of hands instead of half a dozen. Purchasing any of this technology could relieve
some labor pressure, but it also almost invariably meant that the owner/operator had to
become involved in the credit system and knowledge base required to invest in and
maintain that technology.
For the latter reason, ranchers tended to mechanize and
modernize slowly in the postwar years, because they feared that getting too far in debt or
becoming too “fancy” could erode their traditional ranch operations.
Shorty Wallins, a ranch laborer whose main skill was breaking cow horses, would
have disagreed with Ellis and Brenner vehemently over the root of the problem with labor
on ranches in the postwar years. Shorty was a prolific writer and amateur cowboy
illustrator, who in the 1940s and 1950s, was an aging cowhand who roamed the
intermountain West looking for work.
He wrote regularly to Frank M. King, the
associate editor for the Western Livestock Journal, and considered King, a former
cowhand like himself, a friend, and fellow “old-timer.” In his letters, Shorty confided to
King his extreme frustration with life as a cowhand on the mid-twentieth-century range.
217
In the “Hunger Moon” of 1949 (which would have been the seasonally low time for
hiring help on ranches), Shorty wrote to King from Billings, Montana, where he was in
between jobs. He explained to King:
..They [ranchers] are hirin less and less of us seasoned hands
getting so a top hand can’t get a job no more. Them half lost
ranchers want these gear farmers that’ll milk cows, [and] jump
on a tractor...Its all addin up to so much dung [so that] ranchers
are a cross between barb wire, tractors and hog lots. Yeah they
call therselves ranchers [but] them ranchers now days don’t
know what a saddle blanket is made for. There is a few decent
ranchers but the majority are half baked imbeciles who come out
of nutte colleges an tractor factories. Frank I wonder where all
them old timers are that I used to know?... I say I stand here on
the sidewalk on a street alone no one to talk to. I’m alone…37
Shorty’s frustration with both “modern” ranchers and with the job market is palpable. A
few months after he penned the letter above, Shorty was writing King again. He had
relocated several hundred miles to Dillon, Montana, was still looking for a job, and was
getting considerably more agitated. His lament to King is worth quoting at length:
Well I’m in Dillon again in a shack cookin eggs. Lookin for a
job again. Things are not so good no more to many people. The
big [guys ride] rigs trucks jeeps tractors and bulldozers an all that
stinkin inferno. Them would be monkeyward cattlemen as they
ride around there [their] cattle in trucks. They are loose in there
ego an substitute the jeep for the saddle horse. They are a
helpless lot of tramps that don’t have saddle horses. Enough
don’t want to be bothered to rope horses they would rather let the
bulls an cows do the best they can. They run there cow heifers,
yearlings in chutes an squeeze the life out of them till all the
insides bust loose. They don’t know what a rope or rope horse
looks like. Then they turn the bulls out of the yearling heifers an
calving times they have to wet nurse em all do to the squeezing
in chutes. The calves die the hiefers die bulls to early on the
heifers and then they turn out there bull they’ll ride over the hill
37
Frank M. King, Longhorn Trail Drivers: Being a True Story of the Cattle Drives of Long Ago (Los
Angeles: Haynes Corporation, 1940).
218
in a truck or car to see if they see some cows…they don’t have
horses, wouldn’t ride no how...Then comes time the calves
should all be calved out. Ok. The cowman pulls his rotten hair
out by the roots…he sees a cowboy in town, this cowboy is me.
I’m looking for a ridin job but I have to miss 10 days eating at a
time and sleep on the street an scratch shit with the chicken.
That’s me but this all happens in most parts of the range
country...Here is the joke frank…these monkeyward cattlemen
don’t know nothing but fences and trucks…they won’t buy
saddle horses wont buy em don’t want em around [cause] they
eat grass don’t need riders wont hire em. Let us starve in town.
he cant run cattle with a car. He’s got to have riders saddle
horses rope horses ride the range scatter them bulls to the cows
and don’t leave em all summer with a few cows and let the rest
go without bulls....Of course these rotten cattlemen wont own up
to their ignorance. I’m still huntin a ridin job...38
The three variant depictions of ranch labor (Shorty’s suggestion that ranchers were
“monkeyward” ranchers who did not know how to ranch and George Ellis’ and Jack
Brenner’s suggestions that “good” and properly skilled ranch hands were increasingly
scarce) indicate a classed and even generational tension among owner/operators and
ranch hands. The three, engaged intimately in the ranching business, had very different
opinions on what the problems were surrounding labor in the industry, but, and this is
crucial, they all agreed that the end goal, the main point of labor, was to grow cattle (note
Shorty’s bemoaning of cows being without bulls for too long of a time). Whether a
rancher decided to mechanize because it was more efficient or because labor was short,
and whether or not that decision was erroneous (as in Shorty’s opinion) all three men
agreed that ranchers needed to be certain that the herds (and the business) reproduce year
after year, generation after generation.
38
Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, May 1950, Box 1, Shorty Wallins Folder, Papers of Frank M. King,
The Huntington Library, San Marino California.
219
Shorty’s letters also indicate that classed tensions existed on the range. These
tensions are evident as well in quantitative fact. Monetary payment disparities among
ranch laborers indicate a distinct class hierarchy on range ranches and reveal one area in
which divisions among “ranch folk” certainly existed. In 1950, for example, the foreman
on the Bell Ranch, Bill Yaqui Tatom, earned the most money of all Bell employees (aside
from George Ellis) at $135/month plus room and board. His job was to oversee general
operations of the cattle crew and to communicate with the manager (George) as issues
arose with regard to cattle health. The bunk house cook, the one who cooked for the
cowboy crew, earned the second most at $115/month. A cowboy earned between $85
and $80/month (plus room and board) while the sole female employee, Emily Esquibel,
the cook for the Ellis’ at the main house, earned the least, $75/month. George himself, as
the manager of the ranch, earned approximately $350/month. And Mattie’s never-ending
work went unremunerated.39
The minimum wage law in the United States initially excluded agricultural
laborers, but a comparison of wages paid ranch workers with the minimum wages for
other industries is illustrative in that it shows that a wage hierarchy existed that straddled
the “official” minimum wage. The minimum wage in 1951 was $0.50/hour.40 If one
calculates a 10-hour day for the hired hands, with one day off/week (sometimes more
depending on the season and the informality which existed on some ranches ) then the
1951 figures indicate that the Bell Ranch paid the highest paid employee (excluding
39
Bell Ranch List of employees. Box 2. Folder 26. George F. Ellis Papers, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
40
See figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found at
http://www.house.gov/sabo/value.htm (current as of March 15, 2004).
220
George) $0.52/hour while the lowest paid employee earned $0.28/hour. While these
figures make it appear that the Bell sometimes paid its employees 10 cents below
minimum wage, on average, the employees also received room and board stipends which
averaged about $2.00/day. Thus if we add 20 cents more per hour to the “wages” then
the Bell, at times, paid 20 cents over minimum wage.
The Bell may have been unusual in paying above minimum wage because of its
size and success. Certainly other operations did not pay that much, though some may
have paid more. Comparisons with another ranch in New Mexico, George Godfrey’s
operation twenty five miles south of Animas, show that wages there were consistent with
wages on the Bell. In October, 1951, Godfrey paid his most permanent hand, John
Dallies, $150/month and day laborers earned an average of $5/day which averages to
about $0.50/hour. In Montana in the early 1950s, the wage picture was much the same.
On Con Warren’s ranch in Deer Lodge, Montana, in 1955, for example, employees
averaged just over $0.50/hour.41 Shorty Wallins explained that while he was on a ranch
in Wyoming he was paid, “200.00 a moon” and he received “a 100.00 bonus” if he would
“tough her out 3 moons.” Shorty gloried in this salary, and he was thrilled to report that
“wages have never been so high and men are scarce now.”42 It might come as a surprise
that wages seemed so consistent throughout the region, but Jack Brenner suggested in his
41
George Amos Godfrey, 1951 Expense Book. Box 2, Folder 10. George Godfrey Papers, Rio Grande
Historical Collection, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico. Warren Hereford Ranch
Employer’s Tax and Information Return for Agricultural Employees. Box 15, Folder 4, Conrad K. Warren
Collection, Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site, Deer Lodge, Montana. By 1967, the wages at the Bell had
increased significantly. In 1967, a cowboy earned as much as $275/month (or $1.05/hour) while the cook
was earning $200/month and George himself received $500/month. On the Warren Hereford Ranch in
1961, wages had increased similarly so that cowboys were earning approximately $12.50/day (or
$1.25/hour).
42
Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, ca. 1950.
221
1976 oral history that there existed a kind of moral economy among owner/operators with
regard to wage rates. Brenner explained that ranchers tended to not “play one rancher off
against another” on wages. He said, “there was never any formal agreement or anything
like that but everybody knew about what wages would be and that was it.”43 Here the
owner/operator class is clearly, albeit informally, allied against the workers. Of course if
the wages owner/operators paid were fair, this alliance was not contemptible.
The
decision not to buck the wage system, however, could result in paying workers unfair
wages. The “insider knowledge” to which Brenner refers also perpetuated the unspoken
premise that owner/operators should be (or should at least appear to be) united in
economy and ideology.
It might come as some surprise to learn that the labor of female employees does
not appear to have been particularly undervalued. Approximately 2 out of 10 laborers on
larger ranches were women and generally women ranch laborers were married to one of
the other ranch hands. As mentioned previously, the hired female employees tended to
work in domestic labor. They often cleaned the main ranch house and the bunk houses
and/or cooked for the crew or the manager and/or the owners’ family. Periodically, a
female ranch hand worked with the cattle. No matter the kind of labor they conducted,
however, female waged laborers tended to be paid similarly to the male employees.
Again, the Bell can serve as an example. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s,
Mattie and George “occasionally” hired Carlos Blea’s wife Cecilia to help with general
domestic duties especially the cleaning of the main ranch house before visitors arrived.
43
Brenner Oral History, 25.
222
Carlos was the Fence Foreman and was one of the highest paid employees at the Bell. He
earned $0.80/hour while Cecilia earned $0.70/hour for her work. Seferina Estrada, the
main housekeeper for the Ellis’, earned as much as Carlos Blea, $200/month, and Lana
Turner, the wife of the ranch foreman, who cooked for the crew, also earned $200/month.
Because female workers did not engage in “cow work” per se, it should come as no
surprise that they did not make as much money as men engaged in outdoor cow work. It
is interesting, however, that owner/operators did recognize, at least partially, the
importance women’s domestic labor had in continuing the form of production on the
ranch.
So while gender seemed to not have affected the monetary payments of waged
workers on range ranches, a very real distinction in wages appears to have been, however
unconsciously, based on race. Of Ellis’ hired hands from 1951-1967, just over half had
Spanish surnames and at any given point earned nearly $100 less per month than their
Anglo counterparts. In 1951, George Godfrey employed seven Anglo workers who
earned an average of $165/month and eight Hispanic workers who earned an average of
$88/month.44 On the Bell and other southwestern ranches, it would seem, whiteness
colored the wage system of labor. Gender characterized these wages of whiteness as
44
Ibid. I have chosen to exclude both George Godfrey’s son’s labor because it appears to have been quite
sporadic. I also excluded labor expenses paid to JA Brittain and WH Brittain for hauling, welding and
windmilling work because I could not ascertain whether or not these men earned $120 per day or per month
or how the remuneration was calculated and I did not want the obscure numbers to influence inaccurately
the calculations.
223
well, but not in the way we might expect. In ranch business records, women of color do
not appear to have earned substantially less than Anglo women.45
Owner/operators ostensibly paid ranch hands for the type of work they did. Each
employee had a “craft-like” skill that fit into the larger systematized routine on the ranch.
Within this systemization of labor, however, lay an unspoken cultural assumption about
which work was most important. “Common” laborers, who were not as skilled with
cattle or horses, generally received the least amount of pay even though their work might
be critically important to the functioning of the ranch. For example, many common
laborers completed work that seemed too easy to give to a more experienced or skillful
cowboy. Common laborers would fix water pumps, change the oil in the truck, or
perhaps mend a fence.
These jobs were crucial, but still often went undervalued
monetarily.46
45
For an excellent discussion of the nineteenth century phenomenon of wages of whiteness in the United
States northeast, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness : Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). For wages of whiteness in a southwestern agricultural industry
(cotton) see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). In Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, a large
proportion of waged labor tended to be comprised of Mexican and Mexican American workers. The
tendency of the labor force to be comprised of people of color in the Southwest did not exist as noticeably
in the northern states of Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming. While many American Indians continued to
work for wages on cattle ranches in Montana and Wyoming, sources indicate that a majority of employees
in these states were Anglos. See Conrad Warren, Warren Hereford Ranch Receipt Books and Tax
Information, Box 15, Folder 4, Conrad K. Warren Papers, Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site, Deer Lodge,
Montana. Despite the fact that ranch records indicate that a majority of ranch laborers had Anglicized
names, other sources indicate that ranchers in Montana and Wyoming, especially during and just after
World War II hoped to rely extensively on Mexican and Japanese American labor. For example, in 1942,
the Montana Stockgrowers’ Association conducted a Labor Questionnaire in order to “get together some
actual facts” about their “work problems.” Included in the questions was #11 “Would you be able to use
Japanese evacuee or Mexican labor on your ranch?” If so “Seasonal Only or Year Around.” See Labor
Questionnaire, The Montana Stockgrower, October 1942, 4. No responses to the Questionnaire appear to
have survived.
46
As was hinted at by Jo Jeffers and Eulalia Bourne, these tasks were not always undertaken by males.
Female laborers as well as the wives and daughters of owners/managers completed the “common labor” of
maintenance.
224
Many laborers, then, did non-cow work on range ranches. They worked on the
maintenance crew and often arrived to do piecemeal work such as “windmilling” and
welding.47 Female employees, while making up a smaller proportion of overall hired
labor, conducted crucial work on range cattle ranches despite the fact that they did not
“ride the range.” Dominant ranch culture, however largely ignored these other forms of
essential labor.
The cultural productions of ranchers most celebrated instead, the
“traditional” labor of the cowhand. Owner/operators reproduced a culture that valued
and reified the importance of the direct, productive work with cows because that was the
work that seemed to most immediately pay off (in terms of profit) and because it was the
labor that enabled the permanence of owner/operators as a special, unique rural
community. As the traditional form of producing cows became increasingly vulnerable
due to changing land regimes, changing technology, and changing markets,
owner/operators sought to reproduce, culturally as much as economically, the traditional
form of production (growing cows from grazed grass). They did so in order to protect
their positions of power and remain economically and culturally viable.48
While not all of the employees on a ranch were cowhands, who worked directly
with the cattle, to read the cultural productions of ranchers, one would never know that.
Take for example the story of the “female cowboy” that made headlines in the Arizona
Cattle Growers’ Association publication, The Arizona Cattlelog, in 1946. The article,
47
George Amos Godfrey, 1951 Ranch Expense Book, Box 2, Folder 10, George Amos Godfrey Papers,
Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.
48
In this situation, the creation of a dominant culture and of the sense of “unique community” repressed
different kinds of experiences and views of ranch life. This claim to a special kind of community, I argue
throughout this dissertation, was then used by the association members and certain ranchers as political
rhetoric to give the image of unity and power.
225
written by Lillian Riggs, owner of the Faraway Ranch in southeastern Arizona,
reminisced about Lillian’s decision to hire a woman cowhand in the early 1940s. The
decision to write the piece and to publish it is interesting because the story does not
necessarily bemoan the fall of traditional womanhood, but instead celebrates the cow
work that the young woman was able to learn and do well.
In 1943 when Riggs hired a young woman from Chicago named Clover Kline.
Clover had written a letter of inquiry to the Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association office
looking for ranch work. She explained in the letter that she “wished to make ranching”
her life.
Lillian worried about Clover’s gender, her work experience, her urban
upbringing, and her intentions. As Lillian wrote in the article, “if this girl were merely
looking for a vacation on the ranch in the guise of asking for a job, we wanted none of
her...she would be expected to make a hand with the cattle work.” Because it was 1943
and labor was “hard to obtain and good help had been an impossibility” due to the war,
Lillian and her husband Ed decided to give Clover a chance. Clover ended up making an
excellent “hand” both “in the round-ups and in the branding corrals,” and she succeeded
in the cowboy craft by asking “intelligent questions” and figuring out “things for
herself.”49 These kinds of stories about female cow hands are rare in the archives
because owner/operators usually slated female employees for domestic labor if for no
other reason than their gender, and when a woman “cowboyed” it made an interesting
story. It is, however, more than just an interesting story. When the story left Lillian’s
memory and appeared in print in a ranchers’ collective periodical, it began to perform
49
Lillian Riggs, "Chicago Girl Spreads a Loop," Arizona Cattlelog, September 1946.
226
important cultural work in that it celebrates cow work – even for women. There are no
stories, in any of the publications, celebrating a young ranchwoman learning how to do
laundry.
Clover learned to do “cow work” and she was unusual because she was a woman
cow “boy.”
Cow work, with the rare female exception, was male work.
Thus in
centering cow work and leaving other kinds of labor on the periphery, owner/operators
(both male and female) rendered women’s domestic (or non-cow) work invisible. Even
those articles that make a gesture toward the non-cow labor of ranchwomen (namely
cooking, cleaning, and child care) have at their center the growing of cows. Women, in
these stories, were good cow folk too.50
As we might expect male ranchers propagated the idea that cow work was the
only kind of labor that really mattered on a ranch, but ranchwomen too reified cow work
as the most important work to be done. Jo Jeffers serves as a perfect example. She
explained that the wives and daughters of owner/operators “may put on a pair of Levis,
go with her husband to doctor a sick cow, repair a windmill, mend a fence, put out feed
or chop ice. She may don an apron and stay in the kitchen over a hot wood cookstove all
day, preparing a meal for thirty men…she may or may not like to ride horses, but she
50
For this type of discussion by ranchwomen see also Mary Kidder Rak, "A Kitchenful of Men," Arizona
Cattlelog, January, 1947, 12-15; Herbert P. White, "Typically Efficient Ranch Woman, Who Wins in Face
of Wartime Barriers," The New Mexico Stockman, December, 1943, 20-21. In some of their personal
correspondence, ranchwomen bemoan the male-centeredness of ranch culture, but more often than not the
cultural privileging of cow work appears in private papers as well. For the former see letters to/from Abbie
Keith, Boxes 1-3, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe. For the latter see Virginia (Last name
unknown) to Myrna Agee, 12 July 1948, Box 183, Folder 3, Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association Papers,
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. In this letter, Virginia explains to
Myrna, the secretary of the WSGA, that she is submitting for ranchwomen a recipe for a cake. This cake,
however, was tied directly to cow work. As Virginia explained, “We’re all busy lining up cooks or cooking
ourselves and preparing for haying. The recipe I’m sending is for a large cake for haying.”
227
knows a thing or two about a cow and that is what is important on a cow ranch.”51
Apparently, knowing how to prepare a meal for thirty men was not what was “important”
on a cow ranch. Rather knowing “a thing or two about a cow” was what mattered in the
labor regime of range cattle ranching.
Like Jeffers, ranchwomen, while often asserting their own, unique gendered
contributions to ranch life, also bought into the notion that the cow, and all labor
associated with its well-being was the singularly most important aspect of their lives as
ranchwomen.
The Montana Cowbelles, for example, labeled their columns in The
Montana Stockgrower, “She Stuff,” which every rancher would know referred to all the
feminine aspects of cattle raising (including milk production and calving). Additionally,
ranchwomen created cultural products that positioned themselves as partners with men
who made the ranch work. For example, in 1963, a T-Bone Cowbelle from Montana
submitted an article to the local newsletter. In it she wrote,
Really who is this man [the ranch husband]? Someone said he is an
overall executive with his home his office; a scientist using fertilizer
attachments; a purchasing agent in an old Stetson hat; a personnel
director with grease under his fingernails; a dietitian with a passion for
alfalfa, aminos, and antibiotics...and a manager battling the cost-price
squeeze. He is not much for droughts, hail, weeds, grasshoppers,
viruses...washing dishes or helping with the house work. He is usually
found in fields...riding, driving, branding, wading in irrigation furrows,
directing, repairing, checking on many things...We wives help him, care
for and feed him...yes, ma’am he’s quite a guy. He’s my husband and I
can put up with him – that is, most of the time.
Women ranchers, then, when they appear as laborers in the dominant cultural productions
of ranchers appear not solely as domestic laborers, but certainly as subordinate partners in
51
Jeffers, Ranch Wife, 68.
228
the central task of growing cows. In January, 1946, Rancher Dan Fain submitted a story
about his Arizona ranch family to the Arizona Cattlelog. The entire five page piece
chronicles “four generations of Fains” mentioning the women of the Fains only twice.
When Dan refers to the Fain women, he describes not the tedious and essential labor of
child-bearing, child-rearing, and domestic upkeep, but instead asserts that “Norman’s [his
son’s] whole family works on the round-ups – his wife ‘Johnnie’ and their two daughters,
Donna and Sue as well as Bill, and they are all top cow hands.”52 In the world of
ranching, domestic labor, like in all economic enterprises, assured the success of the
ranch, but the vernacular of ranch culture rendered that kind of labor invisible,
substituting discussions of it with discussions of “cow work” and referring to all “good”
laborers as “top cow hands.” This hegemonic privileging of male, family labor makes it
appear that the main cogs in driving production on the Fain Ranch are the men, and in
some cases the women of the owner/operator family – hired hands are not even
mentioned. This sleight of hand is important because it serves to simplify the complex
social world of production. It neglects to mention the various kinds of labor necessary on
a ranch and in avoiding complexity it avoids the potential tensions inherent in such a
complicated system. In short, it reproduces the male-defined valuing of the form of
52
Dan Fain, "Four Generations of Fains," Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1946, 16. For other examples of this
see C.E. Hellbusch, "Field Day at White Mountain Hereford Ranch," Arizona Cattlelog, September, 1947,
3-5. It is interesting to note that even in articles about “hired hands” this honoring of cow work (in both
genders) is prevalent. In an article about a Mexican-America foreman on the X9 ranch in Arizona, Abbie
Keith explained that Frank Figueroa was a “first class cowman” and that he “has three sons and one
daughter, and they all ride and rope, break horses and round up cattle just as their dad [does] in much he
same country.” See Abbie Keith, “Cowboy Corner: Frank Figueroa,” Arizona Cattlelog, April, 1952, 3839. Another cultural production that celebrated cow work the vast majority of the time were the covers of
the association periodicals. In many cases, ranchers submitted photographs to be printed as the cover. In
my survey of the publications, I found no cases of domestic labor being depicted (the exceptions are the
occasional pictures of cooked steak). See below for a more in-depth discussion of this.
229
production of cow work over all other kinds of productive and reproductive labor.
Certainly, owner/operators received economic power from working with cows and this is
an important reason for cow work’s dominance in ranch sources.
Ranchers’
representation and honoring of that labor in their cultural productions, however, meant
for the owner/operator class not just economic achievement, but also social triumph.53
The romanticism swirling around this cultural valuation of cow work was evident
particularly in the kinds of images on ranchers’ and association stationary, the images
published in ranchers’ collective publications, and the photographs kept in ranchers’
papers. Almost without exception the visual record is of ranchers engaged in work with
cows, horses, and the non-human world of the ranch out of doors. Whether it was the
covers of association periodicals like those shown in Figure 11, or the images on
association stationary like those in Figure 12, or the icons on personal rancher stationary
like those in Figure 13, cows and cow work were the visual representation on which
ranchers relied to depict their dominant culture.
Take for example, the following images found on the covers of the association
periodicals:
53
I have benefited from a number of works in thinking through the ways in which the controlling classes
create cultural and social standing and power through valuation of particular kinds of labor. See Kathleen
Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial
Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Steve Johnstone “Virtuous Toil,
Vicious Work: Xenophon on Aristocratic Style,” Classical Philology (1994), Volume 89, no. 3: 219-40;
Tessie P. Liu, The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western
France, 1750-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
230
Figure 11: Representative association publication covers (top) and ranchers’ personal photos
(middle and bottom) celebrating cow work.
The above covers and photos illustrate the kinds of photos ranchers valued and the kinds
of covers which appeared throughout the postwar years. Ranchers’ cultural iconography
served to privilege cows and humans’ (particularly male) labor with them in both public
and private sources. In Montana, the newly born calf is protected by whoever it is riding
the horse (symbolized by the hanging stirrup). In New Mexico, cattlemen, sitting on the
range accompanied by a horse, suggest cow work about to be undertaken or recently
completed, and in Wyoming the two former images are brought together through a
231
glamorous and romantic depiction of a lone, male, rancher rescuing a calf on horseback
from the harshness of another Wyoming winter. Association staff, and in particular the
editor-in-chief, chose the images, but they were almost always drawn from photos
submitted by individual ranchers (like those at the bottom). When humans were not
present in the pictures on the covers, there almost certainly was a cow or horse present
and there were plenty of personal ranch photos depicting only the ranch’s cattle.54
The same was true of association stationary, shown in Figure 12 below:
Figure 12: Association Stationary. Left to Right clockwise: ACGA stationary, 1946; NMCGA
stationary, 1947; Cochise-Graham Cattle Growers Association, 1952; WSGA stationary, 1949
54
Top left to right: Cover of The New Mexico Stockman, October, 1946; Cover The Montana Stockman,
March, 1955; Cover of Cow Country, February, 1951. The picture at the middle left is “the Rulan Jacobson
children.” Submitted by the Jacobson family, the photo appeared in Cow Country, in 1958, Box 190,
Folder 3, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming,
Laramie. The picture in the middle right is of a group of ranchers vaccinating (or branding) a calf. Not the
young boy holding what appears to be a rifle to the right. The intergenerational education young boys
received in the ways of masculinist cow work is evident particularly in this photo from the Browning
Collection, PAC 97-61, Montana Historical Society. The photo on the bottom shows branding on the John
David ranch in Montana. Again not the masculine work culture that the photo celebrates. John David
Ranch Collection, PAC 76-45.20, Montana Historical Society. For more personal ranch photos see
“Unidentified rancher checking his cow for disease,” Box 190, Folder 3, Wyoming Stockgrowers
Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; Wyoming rancher
roping at the stockyards, Box 191, Folder 13, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association Papers, American
Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; George F. Ellis Papers, Center for Southwest Research,
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
232
Like the covers of association publications and the personal photos of ranchers, the
letterhead of the state and even local cattlegrowers’ associations favored images of the
masculinized realm of ranch work.55
The stationary represents an important and
immediate medium through which ranchers consumed ranch culture. It was on this paper
that ranchers received news vital to their cultural and economic lives and the hegemony
of cow work (and the centering of the cow itself) on stationary matters because it was a
critical way in which the maculinized, outdoor work in ranch culture subtly remained
prominent. The hegemony of cows allowed a singular image of ranch life to remain
dominant.
The same iconographical hegemony existed in the personal papers of ranchers.
Figure 13: Examples of individual rancher stationary
In all of the above examples, ranchers used both cow work (men atop horseback) and/or
cows themselves as the emblems to represent the ranch business. In the Kendrick Cattle
55
Left to right and Clockwise: Arizona Cattle Growers Association stationary, Box 5, Folder 1, ACGA
Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe; Cochise-Graham Cattle Growers Association stationary, Ibid.;
Wyoming Stockgrowers Association stationary, Box 191, Folder 13, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association
Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
233
Company stationary, the simple listing of brands and the ranch’s range also connotes the
labor undertaken by the Kendrick family (note that Manville’s wife Diana is the company
secretary-treasurer).56
In using neutral and uncomplicated images of cow work, ranchers could literally
see the commonalities they had with one another. All ranchers grew cows and had to do
so in roughly the same ways if they were to remain family-based, ranch operators. Both
the complicated nature of ranching and the sometimes tense social world of production of
the household-based commodity economy of range ranching could be superseded by the
cow, and work with and for the cow. Other forms of labor, whether the indoor, domestic
labor of women or the tedious maintenance of the ranch infrastructure (like the fixing of
fence) conducted by hired hands could have connoted to ranchers gendered and classed
(and in some ways raced) divisions within their work world. The centering of cows,
however, allowed all labor to become subsumed under one, primary, and unifying goal –
the growing of bovine products. Whether it was the picture of a herd of cows, the image
of a lone cowboy rescuing a calf, or the subtle listing of a rancher’s range and brands, the
iconographical valuing of cows and cow work served as a kind of cultural glue uniting
owner/operator ranchers.
Owner/operators, then, privileged productive work with the cow over other kinds
of ranch labor in their cultural productions because in centering the growing of cows,
they were reproducing the single economic and cultural reason for their existence. As
56
Eaton’s Ranch letterhead and Kendrick Cattle Company letterhead, Box 191, Folder 13, Wyoming
Stockgrowers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; Sierra
Bonita Ranch letterhead, Box 5, Folder 1, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
234
historian Tessie Liu has suggested, for the heads of agricultural, simple commodity
producing, households, “success” often meant “holding open one’s own options while
shutting down those of others.” The male-defined, hegemonically-valued labor of cow
work did not shut down necessarily the options of women on the ranch, they still had to
conduct cow work when needed, but it culturally did circumscribe an articulation of the
importance of any kind of labor that was not masculinized cow work.57
Owner/operators also reified the importance of “cow work” when they created a
socially-constructed, hegemonic definition of a “good” worker.
Owner/operators
considered experience in working with cattle and with being a part of a cattle operation
the most important qualifications when hiring laborers. In January, 1956, Peter Von
Brockdorff wrote to long-time executive secretary of the Arizona Cattle Growers’
Association, Abbie Keith, to inquire about coming west to work on a cattle ranch. The
young Peter, a college student who was attending the State University of New York
Agricultural and Technical Institute at Dehli, New York explained to “Mrs. Keith,”
“…Having always been interested in horses and cattle and other fields in Agriculture, I
would like to go west and work on a ranch with the intention of living there if to my
liking. I hope that through your Association you might help me, and perhaps give me the
name of a rancher who may give me a job during the coming summer months. My father
owns a dairy farm where I work, but I would like to try cattle ranching.” Keith’s reply
indicates ranchers’ tendency to hire “western” men and women who had experience in
the industry. She wrote “ Dear Peter: If by the middle of May you still think you would
57
Liu, Weaver’s Knot, 246-247.
235
like to come out to Arizona and work on a Cattle Ranch, write us again and we will put
your name in our News Letter. However, there is no assurance that anyone would hire
you and it would seem much more practical for you to work nearer home than spend so
much money on transportation. Very seldom do cattlemen hire inexperienced help.”58
Most ranchers, who hired help, would have agreed with Keith. Ranchers required
experience and cow skills because they believed both to be crucial in the smooth running
of any range cattle operation. Because of the Bell’s famed status throughout range
country, George Ellis received countless pleas for employment from workers with little
or no cattle experience. In 1950, Mrs. Keeney, the owner of the Bell, sent a young
student from Cornell University to George looking for a position. Donald Ford explained
to George that “I have taken a course in beef cattle, but I have had no real practical
experience with them.”59 George replied, “I am afraid that we do not have a place open.
Our crew is full and we expect no changes in the near future…I appreciate fully your
desire to learn something of the cattle business and wish we were in a position to help.
However, we can not take on extra men…[and] when we do need a man we need a
thoroughly experienced cowboy.”60
Larry Common believed himself to be just the kind of experienced cowboy that
George looked for in his hired hands. Writing to the Bell in 1956 from Santa Barbara,
California, Common explained that he had “approximately 23 years experience handling
58
Abbie Keith to Peter VonBrackdorff, 6 January 1956, Box 6, Folder 1, ACGA Manuscript Collection,
Arizona Historical Foundation, ASU, Tempe.
59
Donald Ford to George Ellis, 4 April 1950, Box 2, Folder 25, George F. Ellis Papers, Center for
Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
60
George Ellis to Donald Ford, 10 April 1950, Box 2, Folder 25, George F. Ellis Papers, UNM,
Albuquerque.
236
light horses, Hereford commercial cattle and general ranch work.” He owned his own
saddle, bedding, and pickup. His wife too, would bring skills to the ranch as she was a
“good ranch cook” with solid understanding of how to cook for a crew.
The availability of labor for cattle ranchers tended to ebb and flow with the
highest level of scarcity coming during and at the end of World War II and continuing
through the late 1940s.
By the 1950s, labor scarcity seemed to ease somewhat.
Throughout the war and into the immediate postwar years, however, ranchers across the
intermountain West, relied on the Agricultural Extension Service to try to find labor for
their ranches.
According to an article in the April 1946 edition of The Montana
Stockgrower, in areas experiencing labor shortages, the extension service attempted to
make labor more available. The USDA required ranchers to “list their needs at their
county extension office” and extension “labor placement” officials would try to make
possible the rapid and efficient distribution of labor from areas having a surplus to
localities where shortages existed. The article described succinctly the labor a rancher
would be assigned most likely for the spring operations as “Mexicans.” The availability
of Mexican labor stemmed directly from the emergency wartime act enacted in 1943 to
import Mexican nationals to help with the agricultural labor shortage. The United States
federal government eventually would extend this emergency act into the more wellknown Bracero program in 1947. Through programs like these, the federal government
continued to make its presence felt in the labor market of range cattle ranches. Cindy
Hahamovich and other agricultural historians have documented the increase in state
intervention in agricultural labor concerns in the 1930s and 1940s.
Part of that
237
intervention arose from the increased state power resulting from New Deal federalist
programs and wartime measures to deal with labor shortages.61 While intermountain
West cattle ranchers appear to have utilized state programs somewhat in their labor
dealings, they seem to have done this less than farmers in the South, mid-West, Atlantic
Coast, and far West, who grew vegetables, fruit, cotton, and tobacco.
Ranchers’
underutilization of the federally-sponsored labor programs may have been a result of the
federal government’s focus on getting labor onto “farms” and not onto “ranches.”
Instead of relying solely on government help, owner/operators recruited labor
through a kind of social networking wherein ranchers and their associations served as
informal labor agents. One of the primary strategies in this informal social network was
word of mouth. Owner/operators, who traveled to association meetings, cattle sales, or
other “cattle business” activities, shared information about the social world of production
and in these circles the owner/operator class further solidified its power to define “good”
labor. When Willie Apodaca wrote to George Ellis informing him that he wanted to take
care “of the place that you [George] lease from Joe Garcia,” George responded by
explaining that he “had already made a deal with Juan Gonzales to look after the place.”
George had “heard” that Willie had a “steady job with Tony Sanchez.”62 References
from one ranch to another helped laborers land jobs and communication between
61
See Hahamovitch, Fruits of Their Labor. There is some debate about whether or not there really was a
labor shortage especially in the years just after WWII ended. Despite what “official” statistics might tell us,
ranchers themselves believed they were hurting for labor and especially labor that was willing to stick
around and, in the bosses estimation, do “good” work. There was at the very least a hegemonic belief
within ranch culture that labor was scarce from about 1943 to at least 1946. See also Hurt, American
Agriculture.
62
Willie Apodaca to George Ellis, 26 March 1950, Box 2, Folder 25, George F. Ellis Papers, UNM,
Albuquerque.
238
owner/operators assured not only the sharing of the labor pool, but also owner/operators’
maintenance of control over the hiring of workers. In controlling the wage labor system
(both recruitment, supervision, and payment of workers), owner/operators could be sure
they controlled the form production took on their ranches.63
Those laborers who could used a second strategy in the informal social network:
they wrote letters to individual ranchers looking for work. If they could, these workers
used the social networking among ranches to their advantage. Banie Smith wrote to
George Ellis in 1949 looking for a promotion of sorts. He explained that while he liked
the “management [at the Pitchfork Ranch] fine and always the work,” he wanted to
“better” himself and “secure a place” where he could have a line camp or a house in
which to live. In short, Smith was “seeking a change.” He was ready to get married and
believed himself ready for a promotion. As if to prove to George his experience, skill,
and reliability, he explained that he had been with the Swenson Land and Cattle
Company in Texas for several years before the war and then, after serving his country, he
went to work for the Pitchfork Ranch. Hamp Collette, who was working at the Bell at the
time, was a friend of Smith’s and Smith offered Collette as a personal reference,
explaining that Collette “knows me and what I can do.” In addition to knowing one of
Smith’s colleagues, George also would have known the Swenson and Pitchfork
operations as they were both large and well-respected ranches in the Southwest. Clearly
dropping these names impressed George. He replied to Smith that there was no real
opportunity for such advancement on the Bell at that time, but that he thought perhaps the
63
In theory, this word of mouth “system” could also make it easy to black list certain “troublesome”
employees, although I found no direct evidence of this practice.
239
Waggoner Estate, the Bell “neighbors to the north,” might have a position. If that did not
work, George suggested Smith try Tom Accord, the manager for the T 4 Cattle Company
in Montoya, New Mexico. He promised Smith that “if I see either one of them I will be
glad to tell them about you.”64 Clearly, Smith had all the markings of a “good” employee
– deference, experience, and connections.
Not all cowboys who wrote for jobs had success in securing one or even in getting
their names passed on to other ranches. Such was the trouble with social networking
from a worker’s perspective. This was the case for Lloyd Roberts who, in 1949, wrote to
George Ellis for a job. He wrote, in July, from Duncan, Oklahoma, and explained that “I
would like to get me a steady job in that part of the country because there is no work
around here.” The timing was bad, but George thought he might have something in
October when the Bell started the fall round-up. Ellis had a full crew when Roberts
wrote to him largely because he had placed an ad in the New Mexico Stockman and the
Clovis News Journal advertising a position on the Bell earlier in the summer. The
position filled quickly since people who wrote only a few weeks after the advertisement
had their hopes dashed by George who informed them that “the position had been filled
before” he received their letters.65
Like Ellis, ranchers utilized the local newspapers to advertise for help, but
owner/operators also used the association offices to advertise their labor needs and
laborers tapped into that social network either through reading the association magazines
64
Banie Smith to George Ellis, 19 July 1949 and George Ellis to Banie Smith, 29 July 1949, Box 3, Folder
25, George F. Ellis Papers, UNM, Albuquerque.
65
See letters to George Ellis, Box 3 Folder 26, George F. Ellis Papers, UNM, Albuquerque. See also
Clovis News Journal, May 1949, and Stockman, May, 1949.
240
or visiting the association offices and inquiring with the executive secretaries. The
associations and the secretaries served as the intermediaries between owner/operators and
employees who were in the market for a job. Larry Common, the laborer who had
written to George Ellis about his need for employment and his abilities as a cow hand in
1951 benefited from these networks.
After asserting his qualifications, Common
explained to George that he had worked all over the West, including on ranches in
California, Nevada, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona. There is no indication in the
records as to whether or not Common and his wife were successful in securing
employment at the Bell, but not long after Common wrote to George Ellis, he sent
another, very similar letter to Wayne Thornburg who ran a ranch just outside Phoenix,
Arizona. Thornburg then sent the letter onto Abbie Keith, the executive secretary of the
Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association, explaining that he did not have space on his midsized operation to hire the husband and wife duo but that he “liked the tone” of
Common’s letter.
He especially liked the experience of Larry and of “the wife’s
willingness to hold up her end.” Thornburg urged Keith to help the couple find work on
another member’s ranch because the Commons’ “attitude sounded more like 25-50 years
ago than today.”66 Because Keith was the executive secretary of the ACGA and not a
professional head-hunter or labor agent, this plea to Keith to marshal the resources of her
network of ranchers, while perhaps occurring in the “official” realm of the association,
actually represents the maintenance of rather informal labor recruitment and
66
See letters Larry Common to Wayne Thornburg, ca 1951, Box 5, Folder 9, ACGA Manuscript
Collection, ASU, Tempe; Wayne Thornburg to Abbie Keith, ca 1951, Box 5, Folder 9, Ibid.; Larry
Common to George Ellis, ca 1951, Box 2, Folder 25, George F. Ellis Papers, Center for Southwest
Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
recommendation practices.
241
It also serves as a good example of the power
owner/operators had in defining who was “deserving” of help in landing a good job.
Like Thornburg, ranchers often wrote to one another and to their association
offices lamenting their problems with the labor supply and hoping for assistance from
either the secretary of the association or other ranchers in finding “good” help. While all
cattle ranchers seemed to experience the World War II labor shortage, dude ranchers
(those who ran working cattle ranches but also took in paying guests) felt the crunch
particularly harshly and relied on their association’s executive secretary for help.67
Charlie Moore, like his wife Marion, felt acutely the absence of labor for the ranch in the
1940s. By late May, 1945, the CM had more people booked than they had had in 1944
and things were looking up for the dude business and cattle prices were at an all time
high necessitating that the CM find not only good “cabin help” but also experienced
cowhands. In neither area was labor forthcoming. As Charlie explained to Walter Nye,
in late May, “...the Swede wrangler you mentioned still has not appeared. As our
situation looks now we still need a cook and a wrangler and a ranch hand.”68 Not any
wrangler, cook, or ranch hand would do. In fact, like all owner/operators, Charlie wanted
67
I chose to utilize sources from only those dude ranches in Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado,
and Wyoming which also were working cattle ranches. Some dude ranches kept only horses (which they
used to take “dudes” on guided pack trips into the “wilderness). Dude ranches have been common in the
intermountain West since at least the 1920s. There were a few in the late-nineteenth century when the
movement of Easterners to the “healthful” West began in earnest, but they increasingly became popular in
the 1920s. For guests, the decade of “prosperity” offered the chance to vacation in the West and learn
something of the mythic qualities of cattle ranching. For ranchers themselves, dude ranching offered an
opportunity to bring in needed capital when the cattle market was dismal. During the 1930s, visitation
slackened but those dude ranches that survived the Depression, witnessed a renaissance in the popularity of
dude ranches in the 1940s and 1950s as Americans took to touring their country – and especially the natural
wonders of the West. There are relatively few secondary sources on dude ranches. For one of the best see
Athearn.
68
Charlie Moore to Walter Nye, 20 May 1945, Box 3, Folder 1, Dude Ranchers’ Association Papers,
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
242
to hire only a particular kind of laborer. He preferred one who was humble and obliging
and not particularly prone to persistent advocacy for his/her own well-being or rights as a
worker. As Charlie lamented to Walter Nye, not only was labor scarce in 1945, the really
“great trouble these days is that all help want to know is how much they are going to get.
They are indifferent about sending references and being interested in doing a good job.”69
As Charlie’s letter suggests, when labor was scarce, ranch hands had a sense of
power that threatened the dominance of the employer, and this made the owner/operators
nervous. In looking for lucrative employment during times of labor scarcity, laborers
ably affected the work culture on ranches because they could afford to be discriminating
about the outfit for which they chose to work. Throughout the intermountain West,
ranchers continued to need skilled workers, whether maintenance workers, cowboys, or
cooks, in order to maintain their ranches and positions of social privilege, but throughout
postwar decades they realized that skilled, “loyal” employees could not be found,
retained, or replaced easily. In particular, as agricultural production began to take a back
seat to manufacturing and residents increasingly abandoned rural spaces for urban lives,
and as skilled ranch labor became increasingly scarce, workers’ ability and willingness to
demand adequate pay and good conditions increased.
Shorty Wallins serves as a case in point. Shorty always was getting perturbed at
his bosses and leaving the endless “outfits” for which he worked because he disapproved
of the way they did business. In spite of his job-hunting frustrations, it appears that he
never went more than a couple of months without employment. In 1948, Shorty wrote
69
Ibid.
243
Frank King to update him on his work situation. He explained, “I guess my Journals [the
Western Livestock Journal] are still goin to the ZX [a ranch in Oregon]. I’ll probly get a
lousy job again some time then I’ll send for change of address…The foreman on the Hunt
outfit on tongue river near miles city wanted me back out on the wagon. I rode for him 3
years ago when he first come up but the foreman is a little too kranky and the grub is too
weak. I’ll wait till they improve better.” In this excerpt, Shorty illustrates some of the
reasons a ranch hand might decide to turn down a job and/or leave a place of
employment. A few months later, in spite of his reservations, Shorty had returned to the
ZX. He gave no reason for his return, but was clearly unhappy with his decision. While
he does not chronicle any mistreatment by the “kranky” foreman, he does cite
environmental working conditions and occupational safety as two of his primary
concerns. He wrote, “Well I’m back on the old ZX again don’t know if I’ll stay the wind
is blowing worse than ever here. I learn that a feller from texas an old hand that come
here with me last winter got killed here this last summer by 2 mules. The ZX is noted for
its bad mules and bronks. Many a man has died by her mules. Ive got mules in my string
here. I had a line camp ridin job up in Montana. Should have stayed. But you savvy me
always on the drift.” Not only did Shorty seize agency in deciding where he would work,
he also noted his own tendency to “drift.” Shorty, most probably, was not one of those
“loyal” and “docile” workers for which the owner/operators longed.70
70
Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, 10 Planting Corn Moon 1948, and Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, 6
Snow Moon 1948, Box 1, Shorty Wallins Folder, Papers of Frank M. King, The Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
244
Ranch worker labor grievances never formalized in any kind of formal labor
unions as they would for migratory farm workers under the leadership of Cesar Chavez in
the 1960s, but ranch employees’ resistance and demands constantly pulsed on every
ranch, often to the dismay of the hiring owner/operator.71 Aside from the rare Shorty
Wallins, we have little direct evidence of ranch hands’ labor consciousness, but some of
their demands and increasing “obstinacy” can be gleaned from the sources of the
owner/operators. In 1947, F.H. Sinclair, owner/operator of a large ranch in Sheridan,
Wyoming, wrote a heated letter to Frank M. King. Within the three pages of political
diatribe, Sinclair provided a small window into the fears the owner/operator class held
toward disloyal or organized laborers. He explained to King:
I worked on the range years ago for $30 a month. I take it that
you did too --- maybe for less money – as you were ahead of my
time. I tried to give a days work for a days wage – I was loyal to
my boss and if any one would have me around telling me that he
was ‘exploiting me’ I’d have probably busted a singletree over
his ears. I never envied any man his success or prosperity. I
have always made a decent living – but have never accumulated
71
Owner/operator farmers had been coming together for their own class interests since at least the latenineteenth century, but agrarian workers did not begin to organize for themselves in really formal ways
until the 1930s. Despite this early organization, the critical mass of agrarian worker protest really came in
the California fruit industry in the 1960s thanks, at least in part, to the tireless efforts of Cesar Chavez and
Dolores Huerta. For the former see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the
Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Robert McMath, Populist
Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers' Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1975). For information on the latter, see Craig Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker
Movement in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Patrick H. Mooney, ed., Farmers'
and Farm Workers' Movements: Social Protest in American Agriculture (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1995); Charles Dillard Thompson, ed., The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and
Advocacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Of course there were moments of agrarian worker
protest long before the postwar era, including the worker organizing of the 1930s. For an excellent
discussion of agrarian workers political consciousness in the South in the early-twentieth century, see
Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1990). For an encyclopedic listing of farmer organizations (both
worker and owner/operator groups) see Lowell K. Dyson, Farmers' Organizations (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1986).
245
much – but that is no one’s fault but my own...these slimey slugs
who are always stirring up dis-satisfaction in underhanded ways
should be pulled out of their holes. The sunlight won’t hurt ‘em
a damned bit...72
The letter is not only interesting for what it says about this one owner/operator’s political
beliefs regarding labor relations, it also is interesting for the ways in which it suggests
that relations between the owner/operator class and the “other” workers on the ranch may
not have been as rosy as they appeared in the public sources of the ranch “community.”
Sinclair even asked King not to print any part of his letter lest it look like he was airing
the dirty laundry of ranchers. Sinclair explained, “As I don’t hanker to have my name in
print – I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from publishing any part of this long letter...”
The irony here is that Sinclair had been publishing his political views in rancher
association periodicals under the pseudonym of Neckyoke Jones for over five years.73
The private papers of ranchers offer other myriad examples of tensions in the
social world of production throughout the period. In 1952, in Lubbock, Texas, Bill
Keeney, who ran the various western business interests of his mother Harriet Keeney
(owner of the Bell Ranch), received a letter from Frutoso Blea demanding his bonus.
Blea explained to Keeney that “I want to know why I am not entitled to my bonus. The
rest of them all got theirs except me. I got a lay off in August because I hurt my arm. I
couldn’t work much...but I worked from January to the last of July.”74 Clearly, Blea (and
most other ranch employees) did not have “company” health benefits or sick leave of any
72
F.H. Sinclair to Frank M. King, 11 November 1947, Box 3, Folder 1947 n-z, Papers of Frank M. King,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
73
Ibid. I discuss the Neckyoke Jones columns at length in Chapter 6.
74
Frutoso Blea to William Keeney, 31 January 1952, Box 3, Folder 1, George F. Ellis Papers, UNM,
Albuquerque.
246
kind. But when George Ellis and Bill Keeney explained why Blea would not receive his
bonus, they mentioned nothing about the absence of occupational safety nets. Instead,
they placed the blame solely at the feet of Frutoso Blea. Bill told George to do what he
wanted about the “letter from Frutoso” but Bill did not “feel” that they owed Blea a
bonus because he never “was too good anyhow.” George responded by saying:
I had a similar letter from him [Frutoso] earlier which I
ignored...I let him go because I did not think his work nor his
attitude were satisfactory and can not see why he is entitled to a
bonus. I have always felt that the bonuses were to encourage
men to do good work and stay with us. I do not think they are
something an employee should ask for...if I see him and he
asks me about it I will try to explain it to him...75
Clearly George Ellis, well-known as a benevolent employer throughout southwestern
ranch country, had very specific ideas about the ways in which laborers should conduct
themselves. Like Sinclair, Ellis found laborers’ claims of entitlement to any kind of
compensation for the work they completed unpalatable.
Ellis, Sinclair, Moore,
Thornberg, and countless other ranchers worked within the informal social network and
favored workers who acted with subservience and deference to their “superiors.”
Owner/operators tended culturally to celebrate these kinds of employees because they did
not cause “trouble” (meaning they put power in the hands of their superiors and acted the
role of subordinate), promoted the successful reproduction of family ranching’s form of
production, and enabled the appearance of rancher cohesion and unity to remain
unblemished.
75
George Ellis to William Keeney, 19 February 1952, ibid.
247
Remunerating and promoting particular “characteristics” in their laborers were
two ways that owner/operators reproduced the form of production on range ranches.
Culturally celebrating cow work and making it seem to be only kind of labor really
needed on a ranch was a third. Still a fourth way in which ranchers reified the form of
production that best supported the maintenance of their power was to blur the divide
between employees and employers. The cohesion and unity owner/operators sought was
buttressed further by their own identities as laborers and by their belief that laborers
(especially skilled laborers) could make or break the overall success of an individual
ranch and the industry as a whole.
A 1954 letter from Harry Day, owner of the Lazy B ranch near Lordsburg, New
Mexico, serves as an example of this labor inclusiveness. Day wrote to Abbie Keith, the
secretary of the Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association, as he often did, to update her on
how things were progressing on his high grade Hereford ranch.76 Day had been battling
cockleburs. Day’s battle to eradicate this particular invasive “pest” relied heavily on the
modern technological weaponry of herbicides – namely 2,4-D, a subject we will discuss
more in Chapter 4.77 The use of technology, however, did not absolve Day and his hired
76
Harry Day was the father of Sandra Day O’Conner and the Lazy B has recently been the subject of an
autobiography by O’Conner and her brother H. Alan Day. See Sandra Day O'Conner and H. Alan Day,
Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (New York: Random House, 2002).
77
This reliance on chemicals to control the bodies of plants, insects and even predatory animals increased
exponentially in American agriculture (including cattle ranching) following World War II, a topic we will
take more in Chapter 4. 2,4-D had been invented in 1946, and by the mid-1950s was being used
prevalently throughout the United States. By the 1960s, 2,4D was one of the major components of Agent
Orange (the compound used by the United States military to defoliate thousands of acres of Vietnamese
land). Today, 2,4-D remains one of the most commonly used herbicides in the endless global “war” against
weeds. Industry Task Force II on 2,4-d Research Data B-26 Cedar Point Villas Swansboro, NC 28584
www.24d.org (current as of November 12, 2003).
248
hands of conducting manual bodily labor against the weed. Day explained that after
loading 2,4-D into the jeep, spraying it on the plants, and waiting for the plants to die:
...there remained scattered plants all up and down the draws so we
pulled these by hand. I used all of my cow boys. We would spread
out, like making a drive to round-up cattle, and walk up the draws
pulling all of the cockleburs out of the ground, roots and all. My
cow boys are now all complaining about having xanthiumitis (sore
feet and an aching back) but we have nearly all the burs killed for
this year. (emphases mine)78
The hard soil of southwestern New Mexico and the painful prickliness of cockleburs
would certainly have made this particular ranch labor unpleasant at best. In addition, the
time taken away from other ranch work all for only one year of “control” must have
frustrated Day and the cowboys alike, but it was necessary in order to enable edible grass
to grow, and Day clearly believed himself to be engaged as fully in the labor as “his”
cowboys. He shared the work as well as the risk.79
Day’s letter goes on to illustrate the ways in which this labor experience could
serve to connect him to his fellow ranchers. He wrote that he was “wondering what
experiences other members have had with cockleburs.”80 After expending physical labor
on the invader plant and overseeing the labor of his wage labors, Day sat down to write
78
Day to Keith. Day, like many ranchers, had to grapple with “control” of noxious weeds on their private
lands, but they also had to worry about weeds on public lands. In 1952, the MSGA passed a resolution
asking Congress to appropriate funds for the control of noxious weeds on public lands. Again, ranchers’
ecological labor, and the problems encountered in the exercise of it, served as a unifying cultural element in
the larger body of ranchers. See “Resolutions Adopted by the 68th Annual Convention” The Montana
Stockgrower, June 15, 1952, 15.
79
Studies on the toxicity of 2,4-D in humans and animals are conflicting. A National Cancer Institute study
showed that 2,4-D has been found to be carcinogenic in dogs, but the official Environmental Protection
Agency position claims that 2,4-D has a “moderate to low acute toxicity.” http://www.24d.org/tox.html
(current as of November 12, 2003).
80
Ibid.
249
Keith the letter from which he hoped not merely to gain knowledge, but also to share his
labor identity and work with other ranchers in the social world of production.
As Day’s narrative suggests, the world of production on range cattle ranches was
composed of a critical structure that ensured the operation of the outfit. Day’s battle
against the cockleburs required the help of “good” workers. Had those hired hands not
been available, it is likely that Day would have called on his family members (including
his wife) for help. Whether hired hands or members of the family, Day’s ranch required
good workers in order to remain viable. These “good” workers needed to be basically
docile, loyal, and willing to work hard alongside of and at the command of the “boss”
(whether that boss was the husband/father or a non-related owner). Economic success
reproduced the maintenance of the owner/operators’ class identity, and that success
depended on reproducing the labor structure. The owner/operator class, both men and
women, labored industriously to sustain the social structure within the world of
production through informal social networking, and through the creation of a hegemonic
labor culture which valued cows and ownership above all else, because their entire
foundation of power rested on the reification of the production structure, even though at
times that structure limited their own life possibilities (especially in the case of
ranchwomen).
Male ranchers not only defined themselves as skilled cowboys, but also spoke of
their employees in terms which indicated an acknowledgment of the craft-like value
given to laborers’ work. In looking back at his time as manager on the Bell, Ellis recalled
that “we had many top-notch men with us.” He remembered Mark Wood, who ran the
250
Bell wagon for 23 years; Ralph Bonds, who “was a cowboy if ever there was one”; Bill
Yaqui Taton, who was “the best horseman of them all”; and Juan Maldanado who came
to the Bell off and on from 1917 to 1969 and who was “a top cowboy.” According to
Ellis, Joe Salas, the cook of the wagon and the bunkhouse, “had the interests of the ranch
at heart,” and Ellis feared that “when Joe leaves, the place will never be the same.” Ellis’
affection was not reserved only for male ranch hands. He recalled the many women who
worked as cooks at the ranch headquarters and, in particular, Seferina Estrada, who was
“almost a member of the family.” After George and Mattie retired, George had an
accident and remembered that “she came and helped...take care of me.” The presence of
workers who felt like “members” of the family was critical to the owner/operators’ own
identities as “ranchers.” They did not and indeed could not imagine themselves to be
powerful overlords dictating the lives of their employees. Rather, in order to reify the
myth of the yeoman family farm, owner/operators clearly differentiated themselves from
the employees while, at the same time, asserting the intimacy that existed between owner
and worker. In some ways, then, the social world of production in range ranching rested
on a cultural value of cow work that had at its root a gendered, paternalistic ideology.
In the dominant depictions of the ranching social world of production, the
workers were part of the ranch family, and the head of the owner ranch family was just
one of the workers who happened to own the mode of production (and who nine times
out of ten was the male, head of household and thus the paternal figure).
King
Smallhouse, a rancher in Redington, Arizona, offers another example of this hegemonic
construction on the part of owner/operator culture. In 1948, he wrote an article for The
251
Arizona Cattlelog paternalistically entitled “Our Ranch Families.” In it, Smallhouse
states that all ranchers recognized “the value of labor” but that sometimes they lost “track
of one of the most important factors” that contributed “to the success of our business.”
That factor was loyal and skilled employees. The article chronicles the “three and four”
generations of employees that lived and worked on the Car Link Ranch. Smallhouse
sings the praises of his employees and their children, explaining that 14 year-old David
Valdez, the son of one of the cowboys, was already a “fine cowboy.” In referring to “our
ranch families,” Smallhouse asserted his belief in the righteousness of his (and other male
owner/operators) paternalistic power over hired hands.
Smallhouse encouraged the workers to become complicit in maintaining the
fiction of economic kinship, when he urged young David to send in a story about a
round-up in which the boy had participated. David, perhaps not surprisingly, utilized
language unlike Smallhouse’s paternalistic discourse. The teen-aged cowboy explained
that he, “Mr. Smallhouse[,]... Pancho[,]...Father” Lito, and Tweat, rounded up about 90
head of cattle. The story is full of stubborn cows, rearing horses, and cowboys who know
just what to do (David included). A sense of pride emanates from the story, and it is clear
that David believes himself to be a kind of apprentice learning the culture of cow work
from his father and the other cowboys. For King Smallhouse, David represented all that
was good in a “solid” worker. He worked long hours, utilized his skills well, and most
likely did not get paid nearly enough. Notice, however, that for David, “Mr. Smallhouse”
was most definitively not “Father.” He refers to Smallhouse with the hierarchical prefix
252
of “Mr.” and separates “Mr.” from his biological father, and no where in the story is
Smallhouse performing the kind of labor for which David holds so much respect.
Hired hands, then, in subtle ways resisted the imposition of paternalism. Like
David, Shorty Wallins most likely would not have defined himself as being a member of
the owner/operator family and would have not wanted to be considered part of the ranch
families for which he worked as he disdained most of them. He referred to many of them
as “sick” and frowned on the fact that the wives and children of owner/operators were
generally housebound with the children incapable of doing any work on the ranch. He
explained his annoyance with “these modern monkeyward cattlemen” because “the kids
can only ride a broom in the kitchen.”
The paternal, familial affection of which
owner/operators often spoke most probably went unshared by a goodly number of the
hired hands.81
81
Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, May 1950. This is not to say that workers did not have hopes about
owning their own ranches some day. For example, when Shorty came into some inheritance money from
his brother, he was disappointed at not having enough to buy a ranch. He also discussed heading to South
America where he believed land to be cheaper than in the American West. In addition to having aspirations
to buy their own ranches, some hired hands would not have minded being a part of the owner’s family,
through marriage. For example, an old cowhand penned the following poem which appeared in Frank
King’s newsletter Hoofs and Horns.
“Is Cowboys Heroes II”
Sometimes when youre rasslin’ the doggies,
The steer comes out on the top,
Yuh can’t allus pull that hero stuff,
If the devil hisself was yore pop.
When I’m rollin hay out to the cattle,
N the weather is thirty below,
I wonder if a story-book hero,
Would pitch hay in the cold and snow.
But mebbe a hand don’t hafta
With old lady luck by his side,
He can marry the bosses daughter
N stay by the warm fire-side.
But bosses don’t allus have daughters,
They ain’t near enough to go round,
253
David Valdez’s article also depicts of the physicality and danger of ranch work
for a cow hand. David explains that the cowboys worked long hours (from 6 am to 9:30
pm) and by the time he arrived home, he was more than ready to go to bed. At one point
in the story, another cowboy’s horse gets tangled in a rope and David has to help get the
horse untangled so that the cowboy would not be bucked off. Ranch workers, like David
and the workers on Day’s ranch, put their physical health at risk while they were at work.
Regardless of their gender or their job, workers’ health was at risk everyday. Ranch
cooks, for example, labored over hot stoves all day. In the Southwest, they usually
worked in summer temperatures well over 100 degrees with no air conditioning. Other
tasks around the ranch headquarters that required intense physical exertion included
hauling water, tending the garden, feeding horses, milking dairy cows, and doing laundry
(often without a mechanized washing machine). Cowhands rode long days on horseback,
dealt with angry and strong cattle, and, as we heard from Harry Day, dealt with myriad
kinds of pesticides and herbicides.82
Shorty Wallins did not discuss pesticides much, but he did communicate about the
long hours he spent in the saddle, especially when owner/operators had trouble finding
Fer some of us blokes who ain’t heroes,
Them gals are hard to be found.”
See Box 1, Folder 8, Papers Frank M. King, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. And see
Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, 3 Plant Moon 1948, ibid.
82
Bodily exposure to a toxic chemical capable of killing the bodies of plants suggests one of the
environmental costs of modernization. Day may not have had information about the toxicity of certain
pesticides at the time, but certainly the mingling of human bodies and toxic chemicals brings up interesting
issues about environmental justice for agricultural workers. Hazardous working conditions were not
uncommon in range country. An examination of that aspect of labor is outside the scope of this
dissertation, but it would be an interesting topic for a future study. For some of the literature on
occupational health, generally centered in factory settings, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The
Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993),
Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job : From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
254
enough labor. In the late 1940s, Shorty wrote, “How Kola: Been a long time since I seen
your smoke sign.
I left Billings May 10 am working on a ranch near the crazy
Mountains. I am in the saddle 18 hours a day and longer – from 2 or 3 am robin time til
9:30 owl time. She’s rugged and she’s been plenty cold – windy and snow blow…the
ranchers can’t get no help now short-handed work long days.”83 Shorty’s discussion
about the environmental conditions that led to occupational hazards encompasses a more
general concern with worker health on ranches that was at once a constant worry and
rarely spoken about. Agricultural accidents, although seldom discussed by ranchers,
happened all the time. Sometimes, a cowhand’s work even resulted in death as was the
case in 1957 on the Bell Ranch when Buster Taylor died while branding cattle. George
included the story in Bell Ranch as I Knew It because the death was “the greatest tragedy
that had ever occurred there.”84 In July, 1957, George wrote to Mrs. Keeney and her
husband Ralph to tell them of the accident, but it took him some time to write the letter
because he had “never had anything hurt quite as bad as this.” He continued, “I could not
have thought more of Buster if he had been a member of the family. He was one of the
finest people I have ever known and we had come to depend on him in so many ways.”85
Buster, Yaqui, and another cowboy had been branding a few calves that had been missed
in the main work of branding that year. George explained the events to the Keeneys as
they had been described to him:
Buster roped one [calf] and started to drag him out to the fire.
His horse must have got excited [because] he whirled and
83
Shorty Wallins to Frank M. King, ca. 1950.
Ellis, Bell Ranch as I Knew It, 74.
85
George Ellis to Colonel and Mrs. Keeney, 15 July 1957, Box 3, Folder 2, George F. Ellis Papers.
84
255
wrapped the rope around Buster. Before he could throw that off
the horse...wrapped the rope around again. Buster was then
jerked off with the rope around him and the horse kicked him in
the head. I feel sure he was killed instantly although Yaqui and
Mattie worked on him for almost two hours until the Doctor got
here. Doctor Hoover says he could not have saved him if he had
been there when it happened.
George had been out of town when the accident occurred and so had gone straight to tell
Buster’s wife of the tragedy. The consolation for George came through the fact that
“thanks to the Ranch his wife is fairly well taken care of by insurance. She gets $2000.00
cash from a life policy and she will get $35.00 per week for 540 weeks from the
workmen’s compensation policy we carry.”86 In Buster’s case an occupational safety net
did exist, but that does not erase the fact that thousands of ranch laborers across the
intermountain West put their bodily health at risk everyday when they went to work.
Ironically, Ellis’ solution to the grief and fear created by the accident was to put everyone
to work again. He wrote:
Yaqui has taken the foreman’s job and we will go right ahead.
Every one
has felt so badly that I thought we needed to get real
busy so there would be no time to think about it. So we have been
busy. There is a new Federal regulation that requires that every
ranch in the state test its cattle for Bang’s Disease so we have spent
the last week doing that...and it is a big relief to know we have a
clean bill of health.
George believed that through tending the bodily health of cattle, the workers at the Bell
(himself and Mattie included) could perhaps heal and achieve a “clean bill of health” for
themselves.
86
Ibid. The Bell apparently carried unemployment insurance for their long-term employees. In spite of
this private social safety net, however, the amount would have still left Buster’s wife quite destitute.
256
The way in which George included himself as one of the laborers and the laborers
as “almost one of the family” was not unusual in the mentality of the owner/operators.
Rarely did an owner/operator discuss the work of the ranch as belonging only to someone
other than themselves. Owner/operators referred to the ranch work as “our work” and in
their discourse, they included themselves as laborers. The labor and the identity of
laborer belonged not just to hired hands but to the owners of the mode of production as
well.
For their part, the owner/operators believed themselves to be part and parcel of
the workforce. They promoted the image of themselves as benevolent bosses but also
skilled common laborers. In order to make possible a labor narrative which created an
aura of cohesive culture, owner/operator ranchers needed not only to maintain their class
positions as bosses but also as workers. They told themselves and each other that their
laborers (the good ones) were “like members of the family” so that the class tensions
which existed could be ignored, and so that the social world of production of cattle
ranching could serve as a crucial unifying element for the larger group culture. If all men
were “cowboys” dedicated to the “interests of the ranch,” and all women were good
cooks, and willing participants in ranch labor, then the tensions present in a social world
of production predicated on division, could disappear, at least on the surface.
This is not to say that owner/operators did not engage in very real labor. As we
have seen, owner/operator women and men worked hard at their assigned labor tasks and
the labor in which all workers engaged was demanding and, at times, dangerous. The
bodily health of ranch laborers (both waged labor and owner/operator) was at stake
257
everyday as they turned their attention to the responsibilities at hand. In this chapter, we
investigated what those duties included and we learned the ways in which dominant
ranch culture valued cow work above all other labor in the social world of production.
Ranchers’ cultural and economic valuation of cow work existed, at least partially, due to
the necessity of growing cows. If cows were not raised and raised well, the ranch could
well cease to exist. If the ranch ceased to exist, then the owner/operator class would lose
a “way of life” and the basis of their cultural identities as ranchers. In the next chapter,
we will turn our attention to more specific areas of cow work and we will learn the ways
in which experiences with and discussions about those areas of ranch labor further
created a cultural affinity within ranching circles. The laborers discussed here, no matter
their position in the hierarchy and no matter their job titles, created the bodies of cattle
from ecological resources for sale and breeding. The common experiences with the nonhuman world involved in cow work served as a unifying point around which ranchers
rallied. It is to the world of ranchers’ ecological economy to which we now turn.
258
CHAPTER 4
CORRALLING THE HERD: THE ECOLOGICAL ECONOMY OF RANGE CATTLE
RANCHERS
“ ‘With the good comes the bad,’ that’s what they say
It’s a truth that outweighs all the lies
And it’s a fact that for every birth on some warm Spring day
Somewhere, all alone, something dies.”
~ Virginia Bennett, Arizona rancher, 1997
“There’s a mark across the malpais
Where alfalfa’s sudden green
Is alive with whiteface cattle –
Finest herds you’ve ever seen!
Where the level watered acres
Show what love and labor mean.”
~ John Frohlicher, 7 Lazy T Ranch, Camp Verde Arizona, 1946
In the spring of 1946, Mrs. Walter Meyer, of Florence, Arizona, took time from
her busy schedule to pen a note to Abbie Keith, executive secretary of the ACGA,
regarding Keith’s solicitation of comments from ranchers about whether or not the United
States Bureau of Entomology should introduce an Australian species of beetle to destroy
the Prickly Pear (Cactoblastis Cactorum) in Arizona. Meyer’s letter resulted from a
conversation she had started around the dinner table after a day’s work moving cattle and
working with colts. The conversation involved several voices from the complicated
social world of production on the Meyer ranch. Mrs. Meyer had cooked the meal that
inspired the group to come together after the hard day’s labor. She and her family were
accompanied by the Haydons, some neighbors who lived not far away and “Mrs. Lottie
Haydon’s cowboy,” Jesus Encinas. When all had gathered around the feast she had
prepared, Mrs. Meyer brought up the topic of the beetle. Walter, Mrs. Meyer’s husband,
weighed in by saying that he thought Prickly Pear and Cholla were two of the “best aids
259
to erosion control” ranchers had. Jesus Encinas agreed and, using the voice of wise
experience, explained, “There would be many an old cow die in this country in dry years
if we didn’t have the Prickly Pear and Cholla.”1 Not only did the discussion in the
Meyer’s kitchen echo many of the sentiments of the ranchers who wrote to Keith to
contribute to the collective conversation about beetles, it also captured the diverse labor
world and work culture on intermountain West ranches. Perhaps most importantly, the
conversation suggests that that diverse world of production, the complicated system of
labor present on range ranches in the postwar years, could be evened out through cow
talk. As they pondered an issue relevant to all at the table, namely human control of the
ecological world, the non-human world of the ranch bound them together in
commonality. All would be affected by the bugs’ introduction. Both the Meyer’s and the
Haydon’s ranches would be affected, but so too would Jesus Encinas’ labor on the ranch.
This particular group believed that if the federal government interfered with the ecology
of their ranches, more cows might die during the cyclic drought years, and all of their
livelihoods would be a risk from such a turn of events.
Keith devoted sections in three issues of the Cattlelog to the beetle conversation,
because she had so much interest in the topic from ranchers all over the state. The
opinions were as varied as the sizes of ranches in Arizona. Generally, however, ranchers,
7 out of 10, came out against the importation of such a “bug.” As one rancher from Skull
Valley explained, he had seen “them” try the “bugs down in Texas and they still have
1
Epigraphs from Linda Hasselstrom, editor, Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the
West, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 212 and John Frohlicher, Arizona Cattlelog, January,
1946. Mrs. Walter Meyer, “Prickly Pear vs. Australian Beetle,” Arizona Cattlelog, May, 1946, 31.
260
both the cactus and the bugs. We better let well enough alone.” Generally speaking, the
2
letters reveal an astute understanding of the ecology of the desert plant’s role on the
ranchers’ operations. Not only was Prickly Pear decent feed for cattle (especially the
fruit); it also provided shelter for forage grasses, and protected against erosion. Its unique
adaptation to the Sonoran Desert meant that it was one of the few plants that consistently
withstood the droughts that ravaged the bioregion every few years. When the rains failed
to come, the cactus provided many a cow with feed in locales where other feed
(especially grasses) was not available.3
Central to all of the letters, was ranchers’
obsession with one goal – the growing of their cattle.
As they attempted to grow cattle, ranchers had to recognize themselves as part of
a much bigger world. The efforts of the federal government agricultural bureaus to
“scientifically” order “nature” to benefit homo sapiens, through such measures as
importing Australian insects, greatly influenced ranchers’ actions and ideas. Ranchers,
however, were not only involved in a world of federal and state bureaucrats (as the letters
about the Australian beetle indicate). Range ranchers, male and female owner/operators
as well as hired hands, also were involved intimately in a non-human world composed of
beetles and prickly pears, cows and grass, rain and soil.
The ecology of this non-human world forced ranchers to form particular kinds of
expectations, understandings, and relationships among other human beings and the nonhuman world. Historian Linda Nash has suggested that environmental historians need to
think more creatively and analytically about human beings as organisms in their
2
3
S.A. Raney, "Prickly Pear Vs. Australian Beetle," Arizona Cattlelog March, 1946, 10.
Mrs. Y.S. Olea, "Prickly Pear Vs. Australian Beetle," Arizona Cattlelog March, 1946, 8.
261
environments. As she and historian Tim Ingold have both argued, historians need to
move away from the idea that when humans engage in ecological activities they confront
only the external world in a removed, disinterested way. Instead, these historians argue,
it is “through practical engagement with the world, not disembodied contemplation,” that
humans come to develop their plans. This re-conceptualization of humans’ ecological
relations can help us understand what was happening culturally with range cattle ranchers
in the immediate postwar decades. Ranchers were not operating outside of non-human
nature, rather they were working within it in a variety of ways in order to fatten their
cattle, pad their pocketbooks, and define their dominant culture.4 They contemplated the
non-human world of their ranches in relation to their economic livelihoods, had direct,
physical involvement with that non-human world, and then came to inscribe cultural
meaning onto those material and intellectual experiences. The Prickly Pear, far more
than any federal bureaucrat, dictated what ranchers believed they knew and valued about
the ecology and economy of their ranches.
Consider ranching from a rancher’s point of view (as opposed to an urban
academic’s or “environmentalist’s” point of view) and it quickly becomes apparent that
the economic and ecological were not far from one another in ranchers’ daily lives.
Growing a healthy cow was many a rancher’s main passion. Day after day, ranchers had
to consider the ways in which their work with cows could be transformed into marketable
produce. The marketing of cows could mean turning a profit, but for any rancher, in any
4
See Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Latour, Pandora’s Hope; Nash, “The Agency of
Nature...”, 67-69. Thanks to Doug Weiner for turning me onto these ideas and works. See also Weiner,
“Presidential Address.”
5
given year, that success could also mean just breaking even.
262
In working with cows,
ranchers had to be intuitively connected with her/his surroundings. In the postwar years,
domesticated bovines had become part of the “natural” order of range country. Whether
this is a fact to be bemoaned or celebrated, is up for debate, but it is still a fact.
Domesticated ungulates consumed grass, drank water, trampled soil, and emitted feces all
day long. As I used to say when I was younger – “all cows ever do is eat, drink, and go
phooey.” And in doing so they affected microenvironments in which they lived. This
eating and processing of grass to flesh was all ranchers wanted cattle to do. In order to
make sure cattle could fulfill those simple expectations, ranchers attempted to control the
ecological world in which they and the cattle lived.
In the postwar years, however, ranchers’ economic enterprise required them to
have knowledge of a new kind of range ecology– one that came to blend the industrial
and the natural in intricate ways. In this chapter, I shall argue that economic imperatives
drove ranchers’ labor, but that a larger non-human system, that can best be termed
“ecological,” also constrained ranchers’ labor.
The economic and ecological fused,
sometimes seamlessly, together creating an economy based in ecological labor with
bovines.
The common cause of altering ranch ecologies to fit their economic
expectations engendered cultural cow talk and resultantly brought ranchers together
across ecological and economic divides.
I use the terms “ecology” and “economy” deliberately and creatively here. First
and foremost, both words come from the Greek word oikos, meaning home. Ranchers, as
5
A subject considered more extensively in Chapter 5.
263
they labored on their range ranches, believed themselves to be laboring on and
promulgating the existence of their home-lands. The word economy, while sharing
ecology’s root word oikos, is also derived from oikonomia meaning ‘household
management.’ As ranchers sought to understand their home-ranches’ ecology, they also
sought to manage the ecology of their homelands in order to maintain their economic
(and ultimately their cultural) way of life.6
In addition to having interesting etymological commonalities, however, the two
words’ definitional power existed in the everyday lives of cattle ranchers. Ecology is
concerned with “the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical
surroundings.”7 For ranchers, the organisms of the ranch – cows, grass, insects, wildlife,
and even other human beings – all related and immediately affected the economic wellbeing of the ranch. I use the term economy to mean “a careful management of resources”
and here is where the two terms came together in ranchers’ everyday lives. Ranchers not
only had to relate with and understand other organisms on the ranch, they also believed
they had to manage carefully those surroundings. Day after day, ranchers attempted to
understand the ways in which ecological relationships would affect the health and growth
of their cows, and, ultimately, the bottom lines of their businesses. The labor of ranchers,
therefore, was both economical and ecological, because it had to be. As Richard White
explains in his seminal article, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a
Living?,” it is time we begin to think about the ways in which people’s labor connects
6
Donald Worster, in Nature’s Economy, has suggested that there historically has been an interesting
connection etymologically between the two words as ecology, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
denoted the science meant to understand “nature’s economy.”
7
Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com/ (current as of July, 12, 2005).
264
them with the non-human environment. For ranchers, both labor and economy were
profoundly ecological.
In struggling to manage their home ranches and in having to manage carefully
their resources, ranchers attempted to understand and interact with the ecology of their
ranches. It was through an intricate mingling of economy and ecology that ranchers
came to inhabit an unusual inter-industrial world in the postwar decades – a world caught
between a new industrial regime and the oldest workings of the non-human environment.
In this world, ranchers had to balance their desire to capitalize on economic opportunities
with the ecological constraints they encountered every day -- a process visible clearly in
the debate over the Australian beetle. They experienced this balancing act through their
labor. Thus when I refer to “ecological labor” I mean the labor ranchers expended in
order to maintain a balance between ecological “production” and economic “stability.”
This was not an easy project and they often failed at it. I do not believe, however, that
the successes and failures were what mattered in creating collective identity within the
range cattle business. What was most important for creating a consistent identity as cattle
ranchers was the discourse they produced about their experiences with ecological labor.
Ranchers molded their experiences into a discourse which in turn provided a body of
knowledge which they shared with one another. In the sharing, ranchers produced the
foundation for an assertion of collective power. This collective identity, a common
culture grounded in an industrializing ecology, resulted in ranchers’ coming together in
their associations in order to help themselves, and their industry, remain economically
solvent, ecologically possible, and culturally vibrant.
265
In range ranchers’ collective discussions about their ecological economy, perhaps
no topic took center stage more than grass. In ranchers’ ecological culture, grass was the
hero-figure.8 Rather than something to fight against, grass represented all that was good.
Because of the essentiality of grass to the successful growth of cattle, ranchers focused a
large part of their labor on the cultivation of this natural resource. Con Warren, in his
address to the Montana Stockgrowers’ Association convention of 1951, explained to his
fellow ranchers what they all knew, that “Grass is [our] principle crop. Without it all life
would disappear from the face of the earth. Grass stabilizes our agricultural economy by
using cattle and sheep to harvest it.”9 When Warren refers to “all life,” he is perhaps
overstating his case a bit, but in speaking to a ranch audience he knew that both the lives
of their non-human bovines and their way of life as ranchers would disappear without
grass. Cultivation of grass was, therefore, crucial to cattle ranching and the maintenance
of cattle culture. Ranchers spent a great deal of time and energy working with and
thinking about grass.
The grass resources of the intermountain West vary depending on the bio-region
in which one finds oneself, and the biodiversity and variation among the five states
considered here is too vast to describe in any specific detail. Still an overview about
grassland ecology is essential for understanding the ecological world in which
intermountain West ranchers lived and worked.
8
Grass occupied such a venerated
There is much evidence of ranchers’ respect for and dependence on range grasses, but perhaps none is as
poignant as the Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association’s decision to incorporate Carl Sandburg’s quote, “I
am the Grass; Let me Work” on the front piece of their “official” association history in 1971. See Chapter
2 and Burroughs.
9
C.K. Warren, "Convention Address of President C.K. Warren," The Montana Stockgrower June, 1951.
266
position in ranch culture because of its dialectical relationship with cattle. Grass is, of
course, critical for cattle growth, but it is also only digestible by certain herbivores.
Human beings, for example, cannot digest grass and thus grass appeared to ranchers to be
destined for grazing.
The hundreds of species of grasses in the intermountain West do not just
transform cattle’s bodies into tender loins of beef for human consumption. Grasses are
also crucial to local ecosystems because they stabilize soil through dense root systems
and help defend top soil against erosion. Part of the reason for the terrible erosion
experienced in the Great Plains during the 1930s resulted from the fact that wheat farmers
had plowed up and destroyed the native grass web of roots, loosening the top soil. When
the climate dried and the wind storms arrived, the soil blew away.
Like all plants, grass is able to create its own food using minerals, water, and
sunlight. Across the intermountain West, grasslands comprised of annuals and perennials
vary depending on rainfall, elevation, and soil quality. In the higher elevations, species
of grasses change with every foot of rise. They change from a north-facing slope to a
south-facing one and from season to season. No matter where they are located, however,
annual and perennial grasses become more and less palatable to cattle depending on the
time of year. In years of abnormal precipitation, the palatability and availability of grass
varies radically and unpredictably.
The Great Plains comprises four grassland types and are dominated by four
species of grass in the central and southern parts: Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii),
Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), Red switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), and
Indiangrass (Sorghastrm nutans).
10
267
In the northern portions of the region the dominant
grass is Porcupine grass (Stipa spartea). In central and western Arizona, the portion left
off of this map, grasses prominent in the Sonoran Desertscrub and Semi-Desert
Grasslands biomes are most prevalent. These include mostly three-awns for the Sonoran
Desertscrub, and side-oats grama (Bouteloua), various species of lovegrass (Eragrostris),
and Big Galleta (Hilaria rigida) for the Semi-Desert Grasslands.11
Range ranchers depended heavily on these range grasses because they believed, as
Wyoming rancher E.G. Hayward explained in 1951, that “ordinarily no weight” was
gained by cattle during the feeding months of winter (when range forage was either
lessened in the Southwest or absent in the colder climes). According to Hayward, “the
real growth of meat producing animals is made during the months when grazing is to be
had.”12 Having palatable feed for their cattle was the foremost priority for ranchers in
their ecological economy and, ideally, that feed would come in the form of range grass
supplemented by other kinds of feed (including cottonseed cake and alfalfa hay). As
mentioned above, range grasses depended on decent soil, water, and adequate seeding,
and all of those could exist “naturally” without human labor or involvement. But when
time was of the essence, when a rancher was depending on the quick and “adequate”
growth of a cow in order to ensure her/his economic well-being, s/he hoped to hurry
10
D.G. Milchunas W.K. Lauenroth, J.L. Dodd, R.H. Hart, R.K. Heitschmidt, and L.R. Rittenhouse,
"Effects of Grazing on Ecosystems of the Great Plains," in Ecological Implications of Livestock Herbivory
in the West, eds. William A. Laycock, Martin Vavra, Rex D. Pieper (Denver, CO: Society for Range
Management, 1994), 74.
11
Diana Hadley, Scott Mills, and Richard V.N. Ahlstrom, El Rio Bonito: An Ethnoecological Study of the
Bonita Creek Watershed, Southeastern Arizona (Phoenix, AZ: Arizona State Office of the Bureau of Land
Management, 1993), 27.
12
E.G. Hayward, "The Livestock Industry, Harvester of Nation's Greatest Crop --- Grass," Cow Country
February, 1951, 13.
268
along the process of growth wherever and however possible. Because of this temporal
pressure, ranchers attempted to intervene in the growth of the grass. By the postwar
years no longer were ranchers, in their own minds, simply the guardians of the
grasslands, passively watching the grass grow and then protecting it (by using it); rather,
by the 1940s and 1950s, ranchers came to believe themselves to be the developers of the
grass, prodding it along by any means necessary.13
Let’s consider the geography of the range from the viewpoint of a rancher.
Whereas a modern visitor to range country may see wide-open sweeping vistas worth
preserving for their aesthetic values or desolate nothingness just waiting to be
“developed” into something better, a rancher who looked at these same areas saw not
empty space but rather crowded ecological communities that could make or break her/his
business. As a rancher gazed across the postwar grasslands – be they in mountainous
Montana, arid Arizona, or short-grassed Colorado – s/he saw both possibilities and
threats. Take for example, a photograph published in Wyoming’s Cow Country in 1956.
The photographs and accompanying captions which read “Sagebrush control with
burning” and “Mechanical removal of Sagebrush” indicated a pasture where grass had
been crowded out by encroaching brushy sagebrush.14
13
For examples of this mindset see Burroughs and E.G. Hayward, "The Livestock Industry, Harvester of
Nation's Greatest Crop --- Grass," Cow Country February, 1951.
14
Cow Country, February, 1956, 14.
269
Figure 14 Sagebrush removal demonstration photos, Cow Country
To a non-rancher eye, these photos may depict a desolated plot of land where something
once grew, but grew no more. That would be, in some respects, correct. The something
that once grew was sagebrush. To a rancher’s eye, however, the photograph would have
represented success. Generally, cattle could not consume sagebrush and when ranchers
viewed landscapes full of the plant, they saw not fragrant, silvery green bushes, but rather
competitors for space and rivals against their cows.
Cow Country explained to inquiring ranchers that sagebrush could be eradicated
in any number of ways, including bulldozing and burning. In the photos above, ranchers
saw not sagebrush that had been “destroyed” (with all of the negative connotations of
such a verb), but rather a “noxious” shrub that had been “controlled” through the
ingenious and hard ecological labor of the rancher. Furthermore, where one person might
view this particular landscape as “devastated,” a rancher might well view the same
landscape as ripe with possibilities.
The absence of sagebrush, ranchers believed,
allowed more grass forage to grow. More grass meant bigger cows. Bigger cows meant
more money. More money meant more cows, and so the cycle continued. Through the
use of technology to enhance ecological “management,” ranchers replicated also the form
of production of cows on their ranches.
270
Sagebrush was not the only plant under attack by grass-oriented ranchers. In the
Southwest, all species of Junipers (including Alligator Juniper, One-Seed Juniper, and
Utah Juniper) faced attempted “eradication” at the hands of ranchers. Plants, such as
Larkspur, which might be lurking just beneath the nutritious stems of forage grasses
epitomized another example of “enemy” species.15 Ranchers in the postwar years (and
even earlier, but with increased ferocity post World War II) used available technological
means to eradicate such noxious plants. Those means often took the form of intense
warfare against any invading species that threatened the health of palatable grass.16
Harry Day, the owner/operator of the Lazy B ranch in southern Arizona, was one
rancher who went to great lengths to ensure the adequate growth of grass on his ranch.
We heard from him in Chapter 3 regarding his identity as a laborer engaged in
eradicating cockleburs from his water draws. His letter, informing Keith of his late
summer fight against xanthium also illustrates well the ways in which the industrial
blurred with the natural on a postwar intermountain West ranch.17 He explained:
15
H.P. Alley, "Weed Poisoning and Eradication," Cow Country March 15, 1960, 18; Harold Alley,
"Larkspur Control on Stock Ranges," Cow Country May 15, 1960, 7; W.M. Beveridge, "Juniper Control,"
Arizona Cattlelog March, 1952, 52-56.
16
It is important to note that ranchers were not concerned overly with a species’ nativity to their particular
bioregion. If a grass species proved highly palatable in both its live and dry form, then ranchers liked it.
Crested wheatgrass (Agropyron desertorum) is one example of this. Imported from Russia in the earlytwentieth century, the hearty bunch grass is drought resistant, resists overgrazing, is quite palatable yearround, and makes excellent forage hay when harvested. The USDA and the Soil Conservation Service
began planting Crested Wheatgrass in great quantities in the 1930s to restore feed on ranges ravaged by
drought. The enormous “success” of the imported grass led ranchers to adopt it as a beloved replacement
for less hardy grasses. See for example “New and Cultivated Grasses: Various Types of Cultivated Grasses
are Becoming More Important to Cattlemen,” Cow Country, December, 1950, 6 and 18.
17
Xanthium is the genus name for a group of plants commonly known as “cockleburs.” There are many
species that occur throughout the United States and while they are native to North America, botanists have
classified them as “invasive.” USDA, NRCS. 2002. The PLANTS Database, Version 3.5
(http://plants.usda.gov). National Plant Data Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70874-4490 USA; (current as of
November 12, 2003).
271
A number of years ago these cockleburs started invading our best
flood water draws. They kept increasing, year after year until finally
we had great thickets of them where they shade out and crowd out all
the grass and I fear that if something is not done to control them,
they will finally ‘take over’ all of our best flood water draws.18
Cockleburs were inedible for cattle and, worse yet, they were crowding out good grass
needed to insure the “proper” weight gain for cattle feeding on the range. Day was at a
loss about the invasion, but he understood well the amount of ecological labor he and his
cowboys would have to expend in order to help the edible grasses recover so that his
cattle could feed more productively. Day wrote, “...in order to get rid of this pest the
seeds must germinate each year and then be killed before they make another seed crop.”19
Staying on top of such a task would not be simple or easy to accomplish. In fact, Day
explained, he “had been told that the seed of xanthium would stay in the ground for at
least three years,” making the seeds difficult to find and even harder to eradicate. He
gained that information from agricultural extension agents who, in the twentieth-century
intermountain West, continually offered workshops on ecology and on new technological
approaches to range management.
Day’s letter to Keith indicated his profound
understanding of the intersections between ecology and economy on his ranch. He
continued:
I acquired a power sprayer that works on the power-take-off of the
Jeep and we have been spraying the thickets with 24D spray, with
very good results. Apparently we got almost 100% kill. Last year I
hired a plane to spray them but I think we got a larger percent kill
with the Jeep spray, but it involved much more work and we used a
great deal more 24D, which is quite expensive. (emphasis mine)20
18
Harry A. Day to Abbie Keith, Letter, 1 September 1, 1954, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
19
272
Day’s explanation of the ecological labor he undertook in order to keep the grass growing
and his cattle healthy provides a vivid description of how humans occupied a distinct
niche in the ecological economy as they fought against a plethora of “noxious” weeds in
the hope of saving the organisms of grass and cattle.
Day’s battle to eradicate this particular invasive “pest” relied heavily on products
of agricultural industry – namely 2,4-D.21
Agricultural (including cattle ranching)
reliance on chemicals to control plants, insects, and even predatory animals increased
exponentially following World War II.22 It would be a mistake, however, to assume that
the use of chemicals supplanted the necessity of ecological labor on the part of Day and
his hired hands. Day explained that after loading the poison into the jeep, spraying it on
the plants, and waiting for the plants to die, he and his hired hands had to remove
manually the weeds.23 The manual labor may not have been desirable, but Day suggests
21
2,4-D had been invented in 1946, and by the mid-1950s was being used prevalently throughout the
United States. By the 1960s, 2,4D was one of the major components of Agent Orange (the compound used
by the United States military to defoliate thousands of acres of Vietnamese land). Today, 2,4-D remains
one of the most commonly used herbicides in the endless global “war” against weeds. Industry Task Force
II on 2,4-d Research Data B-26 Cedar Point Villas Swansboro, NC 28584 www.24d.org (current as of
November 12, 2003).
22
Through this example, we can see not only the amount of ecological labor but also the lack of control
ranchers experienced on an everyday basis. We can also see the ambiguousness with which Day utilized
herbicides if we read the above passages carefully. He benefited from the relatively new science of
ecology by understanding how the plant reproduced and he believed he benefited from the use of 2,4-D, but
only through one form of application (via jeep) and not through another (via plane). Even after utilizing the
ranch’s cash resources on 2,4-D, Day ultimate had to resort to using manual labor to complete the job.
Thus, ranchers’ relationship with “science” and “technology” in their “control” of their rangeland often was
fraught with misgivings because of the ways in which technological improvements were not always
reliable, required dependence on resources outside the ranch, and ultimately increased the cost of doing
business. For an interesting discussion of the history of “weeds” in the United States as well as a
discussion of the ways in which the United States Department of Agriculture historically has chosen to
approach eradication, see Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness.
23
Day to Keith. Day, like many ranchers, had to grapple with “control” of noxious weeds on their private
lands, but they also had to worry about weeds on public lands. In 1952, the MSGA passed a resolution
asking Congress to appropriate funds for the control of noxious weeds on public lands. Again, ranchers’
ecological labor, and the problems encountered in the exercise of it, served as a unifying cultural element in
273
he and his cowboys had to do whatever was necessary in order to enable edible grass to
grow.24
Day’s labor with the cockleburs says a good deal about his assumptions about the
purpose of the non-human world. What is more important about this anecdote, however,
is the fact that Day thought it noteworthy enough to communicate with other ranchers
about his experience. A year later, Day was writing to Keith again hoping to share
information with New Mexico and Arizona ranchers. This time, he was interested in the
cloud seeding efforts being undertaken by the federal government in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. Day explained that he had been keeping rain records throughout the period
and was interested to learn that he “had measured above average rainfall” for the two
years (1951-1952) when the cloud seeding program occurred in his region. Since then,
he had been following the scientific monitoring of rainfall in the Southwest through the
work of Dr. Workman at the New Mexico School of Mines and suggested to Keith that
fellow southwestern ranchers might find Workman’s work both “informative and
interesting.” He suggested she try to get Workman to speak at “one of the Ariz. Cattle
Growers’ meetings.” Day believed the issue of rainfall to be essential to the ecological
economy of southwestern ranching because green grass “can not stay that way long
without more moisture” and it was “hard for a cow to raise much of a calf on dry grass.
the larger body of ranchers. See “Resolutions Adopted by the 68th Annual Convention” The Montana
Stockgrower, June 15, 1952, 15.
24
Studies on the toxicity of 2,4-D in humans and animals are conflicting. A National Cancer Institute study
showed that 2,4-D has been found to be carcinogenic in dogs, but the official Environmental Protection
Agency position claims that 2,4-D has a “moderate to low acute toxicity.” http://www.24d.org/tox.html
(current as of November 12, 2003).
274
A cow needs green feed...to raise a good calf and there is nothing else that will quite take
the place of it.”25
In his material experiences, Day sought to alter the ecology of his ranch to benefit
his economy.
Through those material experiences, however, Day also hoped to
contribute to the broader ranch culture. In his written discourse, Day aimed to share
information with other members of the ACGA about his efforts toward re-creating the
ecology of his ranch, just as he hoped to enter into community with other ranchers in case
he too might benefit from their ecological economic experiences.
Because xanthium is an invasive species, its successful invasion of the water
draws indicates that these spaces on the Lazy B may have been overgrazed, thus opening
the way for xanthium to invade. Day never suggests to Keith that the presence of
xanthium indicated an “overgrazed” space, however.
Despite Day’s silence on the
concept of overgrazing, it was a well-known one amongst ranchers by the 1950s. The
increased emphasis of federal government agencies on range conservation (which began
in earnest during the New Deal) affected the ways ranchers’ thought about and
approached range management, but ranchers continued to rely on their own practical
experience with ecological labor to guide their ranching decisions. In 1954, for example,
Douglas Cumming of Nogales, Arizona, wrote to Abbie Keith to suggest that the best
strategy for guarding against overgrazing was to utilize “native cattle” – cattle that had
been “born and raised on your own ranch” – because “the native cattle stay fatter, calve
earlier and don’t pile up down in the flat places, overgrazing there while letting the rough
25
Harry Day to Abbie Keith, 17 April 1955, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
country go to waste.”
275
He explained that through the practical experience with the
ecology on his ranch, he had decided that Brahman cattle were better than Herefords, at
least in the dry southwest. He wrote, “The feed is gone on the lower end of our outfit
right now [due to drought], but there are Brahmas on it in good killing shape...I’m still
not ready to go all out for Brahmas...but by golly they are good range cattle.”26 For
Cumming and other ranchers, the first goal was to avoid overgrazing of range grasses, but
when that failed the next goal was to find a way to maintain cattle’s bodily health on poor
range.
To do so, they needed not only to engage in labor but to also apply ecological
knowledge to that labor. Combining “expert” scientific concepts (such as overgrazing)
with their own knowledge, ranchers, like Cumming, attempted to create a variety of labor
strategies to “conserve” the grasses on the range so that they could be used more
productively by cattle. These same ranchers in turn used opportunities of collective
knowledge-creation to share and perfect their range management strategies, as they did in
1957 in the Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. There, under the watchful eye of
ranchers and government officials, a five-year grazing demonstration project proved “the
value of moderate grazing.”27 The experiment, conducted through the combined efforts
of ranchers and forest officials on both private and public land, showed that cattle who
grazed moderately on the range gained more usable weight (meaning the amount of beef
produced on the body of the cow) when they grazed moderately than when they grazed
26
Douglas Cumming to Abbie Keith, 19 February 1954, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
Unknown, "Five-Year Demonstration Proves Value of Moderate Grazing," Cattle Guard October, 1957,
12.
27
276
lightly. The ranchers and officials did not experiment with heavy grazing because all
participants feared that heavy grazing “would result in damage to the range and low cattle
gains.”28 The article is, of course, important in and of itself as it indicates the cooperation
of ranchers and the federal government (with ranchers benefiting immensely from
government largesse). Important too, however, was the accompaniment to the story’s
copy of pictures of ranchers traveling to the range to “experience” the results of the
experiment. The Cattle Guard was sure to include pictures from the day at Art Sloan’s
ranch when ranchers gathered “eagerly” to see which was the most economical stocking
rate for the range. As the ranchers gathered around figures of poundage and gazed at the
fattened cows, they engaged in cow talk – fusing ecological concerns with economic ones
and finding commonality in the process.29
Government-facilitated knowledge-creation propelled cow talk among ranchers in
the above example as surely as did the Cattle Guard’s communication. Both helped to
create ranchers’ cooperative ecological world. Ranchers, of course, fashioned their own
collective culture, but government agencies, especially agricultural specialists employed
by land grant institutions, the Agricultural Extension Service, the Soil Conservation
Service, and public lands agencies (such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land
Management/Grazing Service) also promoted rancher collectivity. Funding for each of
these agencies increased in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and ranchers benefited
immensely from the tax-supported research and development of the government. The
28
29
Ibid.
Ibid., 13.
277
collective culture of ranchers, a group of private entrepreneurs, therefore, owed a
significant amount of its existence to public institutions.30
All across the intermountain West, federal agents attended and, at times,
organized meetings of ranchers to discuss and witness “developments” in the ecological
economy. In 1952, ranchers were treated to a full “field day” in the Bighorn Mountains
of Wyoming.
Those who attended the field day witnessed the results of various
experiments conducted by Forest Service, Wyoming Natural Resource Board, and
University of Wyoming agricultural experiment station personnel on grazing, sagebrush
control, and grass seeding. Agronomists and animal husbandmen shared with ranchers
their conclusions regarding their “conservation” efforts on two national forest locales.
The two locales had come under “soil treatments” and “management” that included
“sagebrush bulldozed off, bulldozed and lightly disced...grasses seeded 15 pounds to the
acre with a mixture of [the legumes] broadleaf trefoil, alsike clover, and sevelra alfalfa.
The scientists planted Russian wildrye grass, intermediate wheatgrass, Primar slender
wheatgrass, Manchar bromegrass, and timothy” (it should be noted that the only one of
these species native to the Wyoming range is the Primar slender wheatgrass).31 Range
scientists explained to the gathered ranchers that research proved those pastures grazed
“moderately” showed both the least amount of damage to forage and the best weight
growth of the cattle.
30
For a good overall history of the United States Agricultural Extension Service see Wayne David
Rasmussen, Taking the University to the People: Seventy-Five Years of Cooperative Extension (Ames:
Iowa State University Press, 1989). See also Hirt, Conspiracy of Optimism; Worster, Dust Bowl; and Hurt,
Agricultural Technology in the Twentieth Century.
31
Unknown, "Mountain Meadow Grazing Results Told at Field Day," Cow Country October, 1952, 32.
278
Learning about ecological strategies for range management was not the only
purpose of the field day. Ranchers also took time out from their “education” to admire
the results of their own ecological labor. They gazed upon one another’s cattle and
proudly showed off their own economic/ecological products – namely purebred and
commercial Hereford cattle. The field trip itself brought participating ranchers together,
but for those ranchers who could not make the demonstration, the demonstration did not
end with the setting of the sun. Instead, the pages of the ranchers’ collective publication,
Cow Country memorialized and celebrated both the experiment and the group solidarity it
promoted long after the event had commenced. The photos and accompanying text,
proclaimed to the rancher audience that ecological labor in the form of ecological
management reaped real economic benefits for ranchers. Importantly, however, the
article did not only convey messages about the economic and ecological. The text and
photography also told the audience that ranchers experienced the management of ranch
ecology together.
The article communicated cultural meaning to its readers by
suggesting that all ranchers could benefit from one another’s knowledge and experience,
and they should be open not only to the assistance government officials were ready and
willing to give, but also to one another’s management practices.
279
Figure 15 Grazing Experiment Demonstration article and photographs, Cow Country, 1952
Note that picture number four is ecological labor in action. The rancher, on the left, is
accompanied by a University of Wyoming official and they are, according to the caption,
“examining the remains of sagebrush destroyed by burning at the Covey-Bagley-Dayton
ranch near Cokeville.”32 As the above stories, photos, and captions, represent, ranchers
had monthly, and in some cases weekly, opportunities to pick up their stockgrowers’
association publications or attend local meetings to engage in a discourse with other
ranchers and government employees on the topics of range re-seeding, grass
conservation, and effective grazing management.
Government officials submitted
articles with titles like “It Pays to Graze Correctly,” and “Range Condition Classes” by
Soil Conservation Service agents, and “Crested Wheatgrass Grazing Values” by
32
Ibid.
280
employees of the Division of Range Research in the United States Forest Service, to
stockgrower publications throughout the intermountain West on a regular basis.33
Ranchers themselves also wrote articles throughout the 1940s and 1950s, sharing
their ideas for and material experiences with range management. Wilma Turley wrote to
the Arizona Cattlelog in 1949 that she and her husband Fred had “increased the forage”
on their ranch in northern Arizona, “nearly 100 per cent” in the 20 years of their
ownership. She explained that when they acquired the ranch, their “first consideration
was to increase the forage on the range” so, “by rotation, deferred grazing, moderate
grazing, re-seeding and soil conservation practices” they achieved their goal.34 Turley’s
letter, not surprisingly, sounds eerily similar to the conclusions reached in Wyoming
regarding the best way to manage ecology in order to benefit economically.
In addition to the print culture that enabled rancher collectivity, ranchers also used
their ecological labor surrounding grazing, grass, and range productivity strategies to
create collectivity through meetings that both state and local livestock associations as
well as government agencies and other organizations like the American Society
sponsored. At these meetings, ranchers themselves often served as the “experts” and in
their talks explained how they utilized their own experiences and the suggestions of range
science to try and bring their pastures into better productivity. In 1953, Burton B.
Brewster, of the Quarter Circle U Ranch in the southeastern Montana, gave one such
33
B.W. Allred, "It Pays to Graze Correctly," The Montana Stockgrower, April 1952; Ben S. Slanger,
"Range Condition Classes," The Montana Stockgrower, November 15, 1952; E.J. Woolfolk, "Crested
Wheatgrass Grazing Values," The Montana Stockgrower, May 1951. See also F.A. Chisholm, "New and
Improved Cultivated Grasses," Cow Country; Unknown, "Howard Major's Deferred Grazing Pays-Off in
Rehabilitation of Valencia County Ranch," The New Mexico Stockman, January 10, 1955.
34
Wilma Turley, “Good Range Management...And Some of the Pay-Off,” Arizona Cattlelog, December,
1949, 24.
281
presentation at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Society of Range Management
in Albuquerque. In his talk entitled “My Personal Experiences in Ranching for Profit and
Conservation,” Brewster explained to hundreds of ranchers gathered to learn about range
management that he had learned of the benefits of crested wheatgrass firsthand and
believed that the “conservation practice that has been very successful for our ranch and in
most of Montana is the seeding of abandoned dry land field or barren flats to crested
wheatgrass...our fields of crested wheatgrass have produced many tons of hay that we
carry over for use in emergencies.”35 The Montana Stockgrower reprinted Brewster’s
speech so that those ranchers who could not attend the meeting could still benefit from
his ideas. Brewster’s speech represents an example of the ways in which ranchers came
together collectively to share and learn of strategies for promoting the health of grass in
order to further their goal of growing fat, profitable cows.
Brewster’s talk/article also echoed a common refrain amongst ranchers – the
optimism in the range’s ability to be “rehabilitated.”
Whether through human
manipulation or through “natural” processes, the range seemed always to bounce back.
In 1954, in the midst of a formidable drought, Harry Day reported to Abbie Keith that
“two months ago our range was in the worst condition it has ever been in. It was
completely grazed off and we did not have one green blade of grass. Now it is in the best
35
Brewster’s concept of “conservation” has roots in the conservation ethics of the Progressive Era, when
conservation meant to avoid wastefulness and inefficiency. Abandoned, dry land would have appeared to
this kind of conservationist to be a waste and by reseeding, Brewster believed he had brought “useless”
land back into grazing productivity – which for most ranchers was the highest, best, and only use befitting
the grasslands of the high plains and the arid West more generally. See Lyman Brewster, “My Personal
Experiences in Ranching for Profit and Conservation” The Montana Stockgrower, October 15, 1953, 38-40.
See also George Ellis, "Problems of Ranching on Privately Owned Land," in Armour and Company Tour
(Albuquerque, New Mexico: 1950).
282
condition it has been in for many years...It is amazing what a little rain will do to our
Southwest ranges and our native grasses are also amazing in their ability to come back so
quickly after several years of drought.”36
The natural hardiness of the range led many ranchers to believe that they engaged
in a war against the non-human world.
Insects, and, in particular, grasshoppers,
represented for ranchers the best example of the negative strength of mother nature.37 In
the postwar years, agricultural officials from various government agencies deluged
ranchers with instructions and suggestions about how best to control the “unwelcome
little green visitors” with precise bait mixtures comprised of modern insecticides like
chlordane, toxaphene, and others.38 Not only did extension agents’ detailed instructions
overwhelm some individual ranchers, they also were ineffective if undertaken in
isolation. If one rancher dutifully sprayed wet bait, at precisely the right time in the
grasshopper life cycle, but her/his neighbor did not, then a severe outbreak could still
occur. The ecology of the range, therefore, forced ranchers toward the expectation that
they would need to come together, not only through the local and state association
groups, but also through the assistance of top-down eradication programs sponsored by
the federal government.
Controlling insect infestations took considerable effort and required ranchers to
gather together locally to coordinate insect poisoning. In 1949, Lyman Brewster was
unable to attend to MSGA business because, as he explained to Ralph Miracle, “I have
36
Day to Keith.
Grasshoppers had long been a nemesis to agriculturalists on the Great Plains. For a narrative history see
John T. Schlebecker, "Grasshoppers in American Agricultural History," Agricultural History 27, no. 3
(July, 1953): 85-93.
38
Unknown, "'Hopper Control Program All Set to Go," Cow Country May 19, 1950.
37
283
been delayed considerably in starting the roundup because of the time I have had to spend
in organizing the grasshopper poisoning campaign.”39 In reading about and coming
together in their local areas to exert power over the insect realm of their ranches’
ecologies, ranchers experienced yet another labor intensive commonality with one
another.
Their attempt to manage insects also represents one of the most tangible ways in
which ranchers’ collective experiences on the range led them to lobby politically for
government munificence. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, at the urging of
stockmen, the state of Wyoming appointed a five-person board to study and implement
the state’s grasshopper control program. Four of the five board members appointed were
in the cattle business and well understood that Wyoming (and all range states) suffered
yearly infestations of grasshoppers. They also comprehended that some years were
worse than others. The trick to “controlling” the insects was to guess correctly what kind
of year it would be, and 1950 promised to be a hum-dinger. Because conditions in 1950
seemed ripe for a terrible “invasion” of the insects, the cattle rancher representatives on
“the ‘hopper board,” especially vice chairman J. Elmer Brock, wanted to take no chances
and so asked for the maximum amount they thought they could get for “Operation
Hopper” -- $1.5 million. They ended up receiving $750,000 for the 1950 fiscal year and,
despite the large sum, were certain that “the available funds were not sufficient to carry
on an all-out program against the threatened ‘hopper invasion of the state.”40 Note the
39
Lyman Brewster to Ralph Miracle, 13 June 1949, Box 1, Folder 8, Montana Brands Enforcement
Division Records, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
40
“’Hopper Control Program All Set To Go,” Cow Country. See also Unknown, "Operation Grasshopper,"
Cow Country March 30, 1950.
284
bellicose language ranchers used to explain their goal of ridding Wyoming of the yearly
“pest.” In speaking for the larger ranch community, these representatives demanded help
in controlling a renegade ecology so that they could maintain their industry’s economic
viability. The ecological economy of range ranching never was predictable. Prices rose
and fell, grasshoppers came and went, and the two were related directly.
Ranchers understood the risks involved in growing cattle on the range, and they
shared a common desire to minimize that risk in whatever ways were feasible
economically. In order to grapple with the risk they encountered everyday, ranchers took
specific ecological actions including replanting range grasses, choosing specific breeds of
cattle, relying on the hardiness of native grasses, spraying bait on grasshoppers and
poisoning their eggs, and demanding government help in managing all aspects of
ecological labor. Without exception, the ranchers employed ecological strategies in order
to increase the likelihood of economic success in the always unpredictable ecological
economy.
They then shared their knowledge and practices with one another, thus
creating commonality and collective identity grounded in material experience.
Despite the fact that ranchers took the opportunity afforded by range management
seminars and material experiences in the day-to-day business of range management to
unite as a cultural group, ranchers did not agree on all aspects of management. For
example, not all ranchers accepted wholeheartedly or unproblematically the ideology of
range conservation. Just as there was tension in the social world of ranch production, so
too was there disagreement and division over the best approaches to “scientific” methods
of ecological management. At times, ranchers promoted blatant strategies without taking
285
into consideration the larger ecological systems in which they worked. At other times,
ranchers believed conservation was crucial to their long-term survival. In February,
1954, Abbie Keith wrote a column lauding the efforts of scientists, in the fields of
atmospheric and cloud physics, to stimulate “additional precipitation” in dry regions.
This manipulation of nature by humans did not disturb Keith in the least. She summoned
Baconian sentiments when she claimed, “if it were sinful to improve upon nature, then
we have been a very wicked civilization because from the earliest history of the human
race, we have been fighting nature’s laws, improving on her ways to make the world a
better and easier place to live.” Keith also used highly utilitarian language when she
encouraged the scientists to do all they could to make the rain come. She rallied their
efforts by exclaiming, “nothing is impossible…we have been given all of nature’s
elements to use [by God] – they are our clay, our brain is the tool to chisel them into
beneficial use.”41 Keith exhibited little understanding about and little concern for the
nuances of the arid bioregion which she hoped to change completely with cloud seeding.
Keith demonstrated no concern for the negative consequences the scientists’ efforts may
have had on native flora and fauna of the Sonoran or Mojave deserts. Instead, Keith
seemed to embrace modernization (even as extreme modernization as seeding desert
clouds to force rain) uncritically.
Keith was, however, an unusual voice amongst the ranch writers as many more
expressed healthy skepticism about range management and conservation issues. Eulalia
Bourne, for example, grappled with complicated conservation issues every day as she
41
Abbie Keith, “Our Page,” Arizona Cattlelog February 1952, 73-74.
286
went about her ecological labor. Bourne often discussed the land in her autobiography,
Woman in Levis, and she sometimes makes essentialistic connections between her gender
and her “weakness for growing things” by explaining that “through the makeup of a
woman runs a soft streak that makes her a sucker for green leaves and bright posies.”42
This “weakness” however, clearly opened space for Bourne to promote ecologically
responsible use of the land. For example, in a chapter entitled “The Wide Open Spaces
Ain’t,” Bourne explains that “ranchers are of two minds about wildlife…most of us enjoy
the sight…of such harmless creatures as deer, rabbits and songbirds…as for the
carnivores, large and small, that seem to thrive in our far-off country, the general rule is
to kill on sight. And this presents a problem…[because] I have never, as far as I know,
lost an animal to coyotes…[therefore] I have told the trappers they cannot set traps on
any land that I control.”43 Bourne understands that ranchers generally were united in
their intellectual and material responses to wildlife, but she herself did not share the
culturally hegemonic valuation of herbivores and hatred of carnivores.
In August, 1956, Lillian Riggs, an Arizona native, member of the Cowbelles and
frequent contributor to Arizona Cattlelog, wrote to discuss the increasing destruction of
range land by the encroachment of “useless” brush like Utah and Alligator Juniper. In
the letter, she urges her readers to take political actions toward sounder range
management because, “…if a lot of us keep plugging away the Forest Service will come
alive to the fact that something must be done about the brush in the forests.”44
42
Bourne, Woman in Levis, 111.
Ibid., 160-161.
44
This is a particularly interesting quote as the relationship between livestock grazers and the United States
Forest Service was contentious from the inception of the grazing regulations of the Forest Service at the
43
287
Illustrating her hands-on approach to ranching she explains, “within the past four years or
so, I have had opportunity to see what fires can do in the way of providing water for the
streams, without damage to the forests.”
She stresses, however, the importance of
conservation management as she explains that “one thing we should always stress – not a
single one of us wants to see any real timber destroyed.”45
Association periodicals and rancher correspondence contain pages upon pages of
varied and diverse commentary on the cattle industry’s conflicting need to utilize and
manage the natural world, while maintaining senses of place rooted in “nature.” Through
the publication of these ecological discussions, ranchers shared knowledge and concern
for the conservation of range spaces. Whether or not they agreed with the sentiments
expressed, reading of others’ similar experiences with the ecological world of the ranch
enabled ranchers to share in a collective ecological and economic culture. By coming
together in meetings, writing letters to their stockgrower associations, and visiting with
one another at cattle sales, ranchers created a collective culture grounded in their labor
for a beneficial ecological economy.
While grass was essential for growing cows, ranchers also had to protect their
cattle from the potential damage done by a myriad of species of microbes and insects
which used cattle’s bodies for their own survival. Nearly every rancher in range control
sought control of the microbes and insects, however difficult and messy that control
turn-of-the-twentieth century and was becoming tenser in the 1950s. Most histories of the Forest Service
examine the bureaucratic perspective of the Service itself and ignore the perspective of the livestock
industry which comes across as being a particularly monolithic special-interest group. I hope to conduct
future research specifically on the perspective of ranchers regarding ecology, environmentalism, and the
federal government. For excellent histories of the United States Forest Service see Rowley. and Hirt, A
Conspiracy of Optimism.
45
Lillian Riggs, “Neighborly Gossip,” Arizona Cattlelog, August 1956, 37-38.
might be.
288
Controlling disease and maintaining cattle health required a substantial
quantity of physical labor and required a considerable amount of ranchers’ intellectual
time as well. Recall Harry Day and his cockleburs. He had explained to Abbie Keith
that xanthium was so obnoxious that it was “a pest” he classed “along with screw worms
and pink eye.”46 Day’s letter illustrates the ways in which ranchers’ obsessions with
regard to their cattle, combined concern for the promotion of health (in the case of range
management) as well as the avoidance of disease.
Cattle’s bodies are excellent hosts for a number of insects and microbial bodies –
among the most serious in the United States during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were
blackleg, anthrax, brucellosis (or Bang’s Disease), foot and mouth disease, leptospirosis,
and bovine tuberculosis. Other less serious ailments numbered in the hundreds. Screw
worms, pink eye, cattle grubs, and scabies numbered among the more common. In the
1940s and 1950s, ranchers turned to the science and technology available in the postwar
years to attempt control of insects and microbes but were rarely 100% successful. During
these decades, ranchers told copious amounts of stories about their vulnerability to bug
infestations. Being at the whim of this part of the ecological order not only frustrated
ranchers but could be expensive and frightening as well. Like the cockleburs on Day’s
ranch, insects, viruses, and bacteria refused to go away no matter how much effort
ranchers put toward their eradication. The existence of bugs and microbes in and around
their cattle’s bodies, however, provided one of the most important aspects of ranchers’
46
Day to Keith.
289
ecological labor and, like range management, helped herd ranchers into their
collectivities.
Take, for example, cattle grubs. Cattle grubs are the larvae of the heel fly and
occur in cattle when the fly deposits its eggs on the bodies of cows. The flies usually
deposit the eggs near the heel of the cow and once hatched, the larvae migrate to the
gullet where they feed on the cow’s feed and then move into the back of the cow where
they bore air holes in the hide in order to grow for 6-8 weeks before exiting the cow to
pupate. The larval and adult stages can damage cattle in a number of ways. Most
importantly for ranchers is the loss of weight, resulting from the wild efforts of the
animals trying to escape from the adult flies (this is known as gadding). The less a cow
weighs at sale time, the less money the rancher makes off that particular animal.
Ranchers fear further damage from the cattle running into fences and other objects
causing injury and sometimes death. Once on the back, the larvae produce running sores
that can sometimes result in secondary infection, and the holes in the skin lower the value
of the hide on the market.47
In essence, then, diseases and insects alike, comprised a part of the broader
ecology and economy of the ranch. They affected not only cattle’s bodies, but also the
bottom line of the ranch business. The effort to eradicate microbes absorbed much of
ranchers’ material labor and cultural concern. The processes of disease prevention and
eradication meant that ranchers needed to incorporate a good deal of expertise from other
47
This information was well-known by ranchers in the 1940s and 1950s. For an excellent overview of the
cattle grub’s economic effects, life cycle and present-day “control” of the grub see the University of
Florida’s entomology department’s publication on grubs at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/IG126 (current as of
November 17, 2003).
290
ranchers, county extension agents, and veterinarians and apply that knowledge in their
day-to-day interactions with their cattle. Ranchers expended multiple hours and applied
sophisticated knowledge in order to rid their cattle of grubs. This work serves as an
excellent example of the quantity and quality of ecological labor required to keep the
ecological economy functioning.
The key to ridding a cow of grubs is to discover the grubs right at the moment
when they are “about one inch long, one-third inch thick and a dark brownish-gray
color.” In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s experts believed the spraying of grubs was the
best method of eradicating the insects. This spraying, like all disease strategies, required
extensive rancher contact not only with their cattle but also with pesticides and veterinary
experts. J.P. Corkins, Assistant State Entomologist for Montana, in 1951, submitted an
article to The Montana Stockgrower in effect lecturing ranchers on the best way to spray
for cattle grubs. In order to save their cattle, Corkins admonished ranchers to “go in and
see your county agent...he can undoubtedly give you some very good ideas...while you
are in to see your county agent, pick up a copy of the Circular No. 222...read this...very
carefully before going ahead and if you follow the instructions to the letter, you can
control cattle grubs.” Claiming to base his expertise in “five years of practical experience
in Montana,” Corkins explained that it was “plainly possible” to control cattle grubs but
that Montana ranchers were using “ineffective” methods. While Corkins acknowledged
291
that “effective spraying...for cattle grub control is a laborious task at best,” he promised
that if cattle ranchers applied his expert advice, success was likely.48
That expert advice required ranchers to keep diligent watch over their cattle’s
bodies to spot grubs at just the right time. Once spotted, the rancher needed to mix the
spray and apply it to the cattle. Unlike some synthetic pesticides, the spray mixture for
grubs was an “organic” compound derived from rotenone-bearing plants.49 Veterinarians
believed rotenone powder, when mixed with water and common laundry detergent, was
the most effective treatment of grubs. After spraying the cattle, ranchers had to massage
the backs of cattle “with a dull garden hoe to make sure that all of the scabs [over the tops
of the grubs] are removed.”50 The article explains in great detail the kind of sprayer the
rancher needed to use, the type of spray mixture that was best, and the exact time of the
year that spraying should occur (which coincided with the ecological cycle of grubs
themselves). Understanding the life cycle of grubs, watching their cattle for signs of
ecological stress, and utilizing plants in order to off-set the potential damage caused by
the heel flies all represent different components of rancher ecological labor that went into
“controlling” ecology, through labor, to promote the economic health of the ranch.
48
J.P. Corkins, "Cattle Grub Control," The Montana Stockgrower, February 1951. See also J.N. Roney,
"Cattle Grub Control," Arizona Cattlelog, September 1949. In Roney’s article, he assures ranchers that
rotenone is compatible with DDT and thus may be used in combination with it if the ranchers are spraying
for both grubs and lice.
49
http://www.dfw.state.or.us/ODFWhtml/InfoCntrFish/DiamondLake/Rotenone.html. (current as of
November 17, 2003)
50
Ibid.
292
Figure 16 Spraying Demonstration on John Greer Ranch, 1948. This above scene is from the
Quarterly Meeting of the Board of Directors of the ACGA. Cattle ranchers often combined
association business with talks about ranch labor
Small, pesky diseases like cattle grubs, cancer eye, pink eye, and screw worms, as well as
the threat of more serious ailments like hoof and mouth disease and Bang’s disease
exerted a constant presence in the lives of cattle ranchers and often served to bring them
together behind collective goals (particularly the eradication of such diseases).51
In 1946-1950, a Foot and Mouth disease outbreak in Mexico caused most
livestock growers in the United States great concern and demonstrates an historic
moment during which ranchers united behind the common cause of disease protection
and eradication. The disease, while fatal in only 2% of cattle, is highly contagious and
attacks the soft tissues in cows’ mouths, hooves, teats, and udders. Cattle, which become
infected, tend to stop eating, and very often become lame and cannot move to food and/or
51
Some diseases affected different regions differently. For example, brucellosis was a chronic problem in
Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming while foot and mouth disease was more of a concern for southwestern
states because of the 1947 and 1950 outbreaks of the disease in Mexico. Cancer eye tended to be more of a
problem for ranchers of Herefords in states with high amounts of sunlight, because the white faces of the
cattle attracted the intense sun and made the disease more likely in sunnier states. I chose to discuss cattle
grubs because, like many insecticidal infections, grubs affected ranchers in the different bioregions very
similarly. For a brief but excellent discussion on disease in the cattle industry see Mortensen, In the Cause
of Progress.
293
water. The disease concerns cattle growers because of its effects on the healthy growth
of their bovine charges. The microbes that infect the cattle move quickly and are not
easily detectable until the animal becomes visibly ill.52
The outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in Mexico in the mid 1940s sent waves
of fear throughout the cattle community in the intermountain West. At highest risk were
those cattle ranchers in border states like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California.
States as far north as South Dakota and Montana, however, also feared the outbreak
because of the fluid movement of cattle in the international and intranational
marketplace. The issue of Foot and Mouth disease was more serious than the issue of
cattle grubs, scabies, or any number of other, more minor, cow ailments, and the cattle
community utilized the presence of the threat of this ecological malady to create unity
through association. They also circled their wagons and lobbied intensively for federal
government assistance.
The disease, discovered in Mexico sometime in the spring of 1946, came from
several Brazilian bulls which Mexican ranchers had imported and then shipped north.
The reports of the appearance of the disease in a herd about 450 miles south of the United
States in December of 1946, sent flurries of panic into the American cattle ranching
community, and it immediately began to act in its own economic self-interest against this
ecological threat. In February, 1947, for example, the NMCGA sent out 5000 letters to
non-members that sought to play on ranchers’ fear of an outbreak north of border (which
had yet to occur) and to coerce them into joining the association. The letter suggested
52
Dr. Manuel Chavarria, "Mexican National Committee for the Prevention of Hoof and Mouth Disease,"
Box 29, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
294
that the association needed to convince politicians and government representatives to take
immediate actions effectively to control Foot and Mouth.53
In order to convince the government to help in controlling the spread of the
disease, the associations needed to appear strong, reasoned NMCGA president George
Godfrey, and they could only look powerful when large numbers of dues paying ranchers
belonged to the group. Godfrey explained in the letter, “we must fight this threat with
every method and means at our disposal...it is impossible to overemphasize the
seriousness of this matter...to be effectively heard, however, our organization must be
strong and fully representative.”54 During the height of the outbreak, when cattle folk
across the intermountain West gathered together at annual conventions, in quarterly
committee meetings, at sales, fairs, and picnics they discussed informally Foot and
Mouth.55
In addition to the informal conversations that occurred around Foot and Mouth,
ranchers also took formal political steps to urge the federal and state governments to take
any action necessary to save their industry from the hazards of the disease. An angry
Abbie Keith responding to an unfriendly editorial in the Nogales Herald, explained that
in certain situations, even “individualistic” cattle ranchers needed to rely on government
53
William Dusenberry, "Foot and Mouth Disease in Mexico, 1946-1951," Agricultural History 29, no. 2
(April, 1955): 84; Unknown, "Foot and Mouth Situation," The Montana Stockgrower July, 1949, 8. For a
good discussion of the background on the zebu breed of cattle and its role in the Foot and Mouth outbreak
in the 1940s see Robert W. Wilcox, "Zebu's Elbows: Cattle Breeding and the Environment in Central
Brazil, 1890-1960," in Territories, Commodities and Knowledges: Latin American Environmental History
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Christian Brannstrom (London: Institute for the Study of the
Americas, 2004), 218-247.
54
George Godfrey to Mr. Gillworth, 1 February 1947, Box 6, Folder 2, George Amos Godfrey Papers, Rio
Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.
55
Dan C. McKinney to Congressman Ernest K. Bramblett, 28 January 1947, Box 29, Folder 2, ACGA
Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
295
regulations. She explained that “control of infectious and contagious diseases, both in
humans and livestock, has always been a function of government.”56 Sharing this belief,
ranchers gathered together to lobby their elected representatives, send representatives to
participate on committees appointed to grapple with the threat, and pass organizational
resolutions urging government protection.
That more formal political work bore fruit when the United States Congress
passed Public Law 8, Sec. 568 in February, 1947. The law gave the Secretary of
Agriculture full discretion to cooperate with Mexico in “carrying out operations or
measures to eradicate, suppress, or control, or to prevent or retard, foot-and-mouth
disease in Mexico where he [the Secretary of Agriculture] deems such action necessary to
protect the livestock and related industries of the United States.”57 This vague and broad
language heartened livestock producers who hoped Secretary Clinton Anderson would
not only help to eradicate the disease in Mexico (through slaughter of diseased animals
and the vaccination of uninfected herds), but that he would also approve measures to
keep Mexican cattle out of the United States. To achieve the latter goal, ranchers
promoted both a restriction on importations, a quarantine of Mexican cattle (meaning no
cattle would be allowed above a certain line arbitrarily agreed upon by both the United
States and Mexican governments), and the building of a fence along the entire 1,900 mile
Mexico-U.S. Border.
Some of the goals were met.
Using over $2 million of
appropriations, the United States sent machinery, vaccinations, and a “team” of
56
Abbie Keith to H.R. Sixk, 19 February 1947, Box 29, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
57
Public Law 8, U.S.C. § 568, (1947).
296
veterinarians to scour the Mexican countryside to educate Mexican ranchers about
“aftosa” (as the disease was known in Mexico), to vaccinate those herds uninfected, and
to slaughter those Mexican animals found infected with the disease. The Department of
Agriculture also appointed representatives to sit on a five-person commission to oversee
control efforts in Mexico, and both nations agreed on a quarantine zone out of which the
allowed no cattle to be traded or sold (the zone was far south in the Mexican states of
Tlaxcala, Vera Cruz, Puebla, and the Federal District).58 The building of the fence, to the
dismay of many ranchers, never happened.
Ranchers’ demand for the fence is a wonderfully illustrative example of their
collective desire to sacrifice ecological balance for the safety of their own economic
lifeways. Ranchers were worried, understandably, about the havoc Foot and Mouth’s
microbial virus could wreak in their herds, and they recognized that Mexican cattle could
be the source of that virus. They also knew, however, that domestic ungulates were not
the only animals at risk of infection; wild animals, such as javalina, could also catch the
virus. As one plea from the California Cattlemen’s Association explained, “no doubt by
this time many of the wild animals of that country [Mexico] are infected. The natural and
seasonal migration of animals minimizes the effectiveness of any quarantine. If, for
instance, the javalinas (Peccaries) of northern Mexico become diseased, it will be
physically impossible to prevent its crossing into this country.”59 The closing of the
border to trade, according to many ranchers, would simply not be enough as non-human
58
United States Department of Agriculture, "The Foot and Mouth Disease Situation in Mexico -- Map,
February 22, 1947," Box 29, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
59
McKinney to Bramblett.
297
nature would pay no attention to a non-barricaded, “closed” border. In this discussion,
ranchers clearly understood that the political boundary between the two nations ignored
ecological reality, but they apparently cared little about the environmental consequences
by shutting down native species traditional migratory routes.
The arbitrary
imaginativeness of the border became acutely real in the lives of border ranchers during
this controversy, and when forced to choose between the larger ecological well-being of
the border biogregions and their own economic bottom lines, ranchers chose the latter.60
The southwestern states were not the only ones to experience the threat of
epidemic livestock disease.
In the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, Brucellosis (or
Contagious Abortion) concerned ranchers in the northern plains as much as the Foot and
Mouth outbreak alarmed ranchers in the southwestern states. The Brucellosis obsession
existed most strongly in Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming because the bacteria tended
to favor hosts in higher altitudes, but like Foot and Mouth, Brucellosis, paid no attention
to state or even national boundaries and so affected ranchers throughout the
intermountain region. As we have discussed, ranchers attempted to convince themselves
and others that theirs was a united industry, but in fact, many paradoxes and divisions
existed within the ranch community.
Events in the ecological economy were no
exception, and the effort to fight Brucellosis unveils the kinds of tensions that could arise
among ranchers over regulatory issues.
60
See F.E. Mollin, Bulletin on Foot and Mouth to State and Local Associations, 7 March 1947, Box 29,
Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe. Ranchers were not the only ones call for the
construction of a fence. Officials in the Bureau of Animal Industry, too, supported the idea. See Bureau of
Animal Industry Agricultural Research Administration, Summary of Developments in the Mexican
Outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture,
January 28, 1947).
298
Ranchers tended to pride themselves on not wanting (or receiving) government
aid, but when times got rough, some ranchers demanded temporary help from
government.
Unlike the Foot and Mouth experience (which had generally been
controversy free within ranching circles), however, the government assistance in
Brucellosis eradication divided ranchers and served as a point of contention in range
country when in 1957, a group of ranchers in the southeastern part of Montana broke
from the MSGA and formed the Montana Cattlemen’s Association (MCA) to protest the
federal Brucellosis eradication program. The fissure came in protest of the MSGA’s
continued support of the state and federally-subsidized brucellosis vaccination program
which had paid for vaccines of Strain 19 from tax-payer coffers. The members of the
MCA, numbering near 1000 by 1960 (vs. nearly 6000 in MSGA), disliked both the
increased regulation that came with government involvement in the vaccination program
as well as the idea that tax payers were footing the bill for disease eradication on private
ranches.61
Despite the division that the issue of government-sponsored vaccination brought
to range country in the late 1950s, the existence of Brucellosis as a threat to ranchers’
cattle helped them herd together in their collective groups. Throughout the 1950s, there
the stockgrower association periodicals consistently included articles updating ranchers
on the new technological developments and the new policies regarding the eradication
efforts.62
61
Ranchers learned about brucellosis at their local cattlegrower association
Montana Cattlemen's Association, ca October, 1959," Press Release," Box 1, Folder 12, Montana
Cattlemen's Association Manuscript Collection, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
62
J.S. Jack Brenner, "Control and Eradication of Brucellosis in a Range State," The Montana Stockgrower
January 15, 1955, 30-32; G.H. Good, "Let's Control and Eradicate Brucellosis from Our Herds," Cow
299
meetings, at regional beef schools, at the Association of Range Management meetings,
and at their stockgrower conventions.
Montana state veterinarian, JW Safford, for
example, spoke on the topic of Brucellosis before crowds of up to 1000 ranchers at the
MSGA conventions of 1957, 1958, 1959.63
Brucellosis, Safford explained, could result in the abortion of 75% of a rancher’s
calf crop for any given year, in a herd infected with the bacteria that caused Brucellosis.
Even healthy cows, who had a history of normal births, could be carriers of the disease.
The fight against Brucellosis, therefore, required ranchers to draw blood from their
heifers and their bulls, and have it tested at an approved laboratory. If a herd tested
positive for the existence of the disease, ranchers had to destroy the cow and quarantine
the infected herd from which she came. They then had to clean up the area with
disinfectants and hope that calfhood vaccinations would keep the disease from spreading.
In 1951, 54 of 56 Montana counties agreed to participate in area testing in order to
become modified-certified-Brucellosis free.64 In the 1930s, before the vaccination came
into wide use on individual ranches, infection rates hovered around 23% of all cattle in
Montana. By 1951, herd infection was at about 4% and seven years after the beginning
Country April 15, 1956, 14; G.H. Good, "Brucellosis...First in a Series of Articles on Bang's Disease," Cow
Country December, 1950, 14; Unknown, "Statewide Brucellosis Certification Drive Launched," Cattle
Guard April, 1957, 26-27; Unknown, "New Federal Brucellosis Regulations Announced," Cow Country
October 15, 1956, 7.
63
See J.W. Safford, Speeches, Box 8, Folder 19, Montana Livestock Sanitary Board Records, Montana
Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
64
“Modified-certified Brucellosis free” basically meant that less than 1% of all herds in the county were
infected with the disease. The Cattle Sanitary Boards in each state hired veterinarians to do the testing of
the herds in each county and then granted the certificate to those counties achieving less than 1% infection.
This certification helped ranchers from the county in selling their cows, as they could claim that their
animals were relatively “safe” from possible infection.
300
of government-subsidized vaccinations, the incidence of the disease had decreased to
.5%.65
Understanding the science behind Brucellosis, watching their cattle for signs of
ecological stress, drawing blood from their herds, and giving their cows vaccines (or
being present as a veterinarian did that labor) all represented different components of
ranchers’ labor and knowledge that went into keeping their cattle healthy. The process of
guarding their herds from the disease required ranchers to have and share knowledge
about the “natural” behavior of the brucella bacteria, knowledge about government
regulations, and knowledge about how to interact with the ecology of disease in order to
deliver the best in veterinarian care.
It also required ranchers to pay for testing,
treatment, and vaccination in order to achieve eradication for their herds.
This
monitoring and treatment was, if not subsidized by the federal government, fairly
expensive. In addition to the economic expense of eradication efforts, however, was the
expense ranchers incurred if they lost control over the bacteria within their herds. When
that happened they had to slaughter the herd and could, therefore, experience costly
animal losses. In order to protect their economy, then, ranchers had to address the
ecological concern of Brucellosis and bovine disease more generally.
Vaccinations, medicinal cures, and eradication included expensive complicated
science which surrounded control of disease and ranch management. In general the
structure of disease control could have served to separate irreparably ranchers from one
another (especially dividing them into wealthy/large vs. poorer/small ranch camps) and
65
Ibid.
301
from the natural systems that existed on their ranches, but no matter how sophisticated or
expensive the technology got, ranchers still had to rely on their interactions with and their
understandings of the ecology of the disease on their ranches in order to guard against it.
No rancher, no matter how successful, was immune from disease infestations.
All ranchers, therefore, had to engage in the protection of cattle against the
myriad microbial threats, and their discussions of it with other ranchers, at their social
and political gatherings, and through their correspondence, served to unite these capitalist
actors in further commonality. They gained knowledge by talking with one another, by
supporting research in their associations through their dues payments, and by
unanimously passing resolutions which prioritized disease education and research. For
example, in 1950, ranchers at the MSGA’s annual convention unanimously passed
Resolution Number Four which supported the “control of diseases of Livestock and
animal disease research” more generally, and Resolution Number Six, which called
specifically for inspection of range cattle for Brucellosis (contagious abortion).66 Disease
and the threat of disease, therefore, often brought cattle ranchers together into association
– united around a common enemy and a shared threat. The threat of disease not only
dominated ranchers’ material experiences within the ecological economy, it also served
to unite them in the common cause of eradication. That common cause not only meant
66
Unknown, "1950 Convention Resolutions," The Montana Stockgrower, June 1950, 18. Concerns over
diseases and their control were prevalent throughout the 1940s and 1950s in all four states under
consideration here. In addition to the annual addressing of specific issues, even the guiding principles of
the associations indicated the primacy of disease in ranchers’ ecological economy. One of the Montana
Stockgrowers’ Association’s six guiding principles, for example, included the organizational goal of
leading “the fight against diseases in livestock within Montana.” See Paladin, Montana Stockgrower, 1013.
302
sharing information, but also advocating for governmental policies meant to “protect”
ranchers from microbial threats (as in the cases of Foot and Mouth and Brucellosis).
Wildlife control, like range and disease control, occupied a central place in
ranchers’ ecological economy and served as a basis for collectivity during the 1940s and
1950s if for no other reason than the fact that “control” was ever elusive for the ranchers.
From the late-nineteenth century through the postwar decades, a virtual war of
extermination had been waged against “natural” predators who threatened domesticated
animals. Livestock producers had collaborated with state and federal governments to
eradicate wolves, bears, mountain lions and, most prominently, coyotes. Other animals
threatened the cattle as well. Rodents, whose numbers reached into the millions, also
faced extermination because of their abilities to eat enormous amounts of grass. The
control of big game animals also seemed gravely important to ranchers in their quest to
fatten their cattle. Deer, elk, and especially antelope provided formidable competition for
the cattle on the range. Rodents and herbivorous ungulates fought cattle for the sparse
grass and thus endangered not just cattle’s bodies but ranchers’ livelihoods.67
Ranchers throughout the immediate postwar decade attempted to exert their labor
in the complex ecological world of predator/prey relations and often found that power
67
The government programs regarding animal control are varied and too numerous to discuss in detail here.
Generally speaking, each state cooperated with the federal government’s division in charge of animal
control to trap, poison and hunt “undesirable” animals (this division has changed names numerous time
since its inception in 1886 as the Bureau of Biological Survey in the United States Department of
Agriculture – the division is now called the Fish and Wildlife Service and is located in the Department of
the Interior). Each of the five states discussed here used a bounty system for big predators at one time or
another; some, like Arizona, well into the 1950s. And each state government, in cooperation with the
Livestock Commissions and Game Commissions, worked to utilize the newest technology in animal
eradication. For example, see my discussion of the compound 1080 above. See Mortensen, In the Cause,
71-77. See also Arizona State Legislature, “Relating to Predatory Animals; Providing for a reward for the
Destruction Thereof, and Prescribing Penalties Therefore,” 1947.
303
over non-human nature eluded them. In August of 1949, Elliott Barker, the New Mexico
State Game Warden, wrote to George Ellis on the Bell Ranch to inquire whether or not
their use of 1080 poison had “operated successfully” in “eliminating” coyotes.68 Ellis
responded that yes, indeed, 1080 “is without a doubt the most effective thing we have
ever had for this purpose.”69 But there was a hitch. Barker also prompted Ellis to
address whether or not there “was any damage done by the killing of other mammals,
such as, valuable fur bearers or of birds, particularly of the scaled quail.” Ellis’ response
is illuminating:
In regard to the quail I have never seen any sign of damage to them.
I did see quite a few dead buzzards and crows. We had only a fair
hatch of quail here but I think this is due almost entirely to almost
daily rains, many of them very hard, during the hatching season. I
see a good many single pairs of quail with no young...but I also see
many coveys of very young quail which must be late hatches...The
most remarkable effect of the coyote control has been on the
antelope. They have by far the best crop of young I have ever seen
here. I would say 50% better than last year. Incidentally we had no
bob tailed calves when we branded this year – the first time this ever
happened.70
For Ellis, the experiment with 1080 was more than justified because first and foremost, it
had nearly “eradicated” the coyote and thus saved the Bell Ranch’s cattle (tails and all).
Secondarily, Ellis’ cooperation with the state game warden in placing the poison all over
the Bell Ranch had enabled a more “desirable” species to proliferate and, thirdly, Ellis
believed the poison had not harmed any other wildlife. Just as ranchers would begin to
see a decrease in such species as the coyote, however, the numbers of rodents or ungulate
68
Elliott Barker to George F. Ellis, August 10, 1949, George F. Ellis Papers.
George F. Ellis to Elliott Barker, August 12, 1949, George F. Ellis Papers.
70
Ibid. Ellis’ keen observations of quail might seem odd at first glance, but every year he was particularly
interested in quail, because the owner of the ranch, Robert Keenan (an easterner from Connecticut),
enjoyed hunting quail very much and often wrote to Ellis inquiring about the year’s quail “crop.”
69
herbivores would skyrocket.
304
Ellis ended his letter to Barker by offering another
observation, “...we do have more rabbits already. Whether there is a connection or not I
do not know.” Jack rabbits in New Mexico had been an ongoing “problem” since at least
the 1920s and their numbers continued to mushroom due in large part to predator
“control.” Ellis shows an acute observation of the ecology of his ranch when he notes the
increase in the rabbit population. Many, if not most, ranchers shared Ellis’ attuned
understanding of the broader ecology of their ranches, but their decisions rarely
privileged the non-bovine creatures because such decisions might have, in the minds of
most ranchers, undermined their economic well-being.
Coyote control had similar effects in Arizona and Montana. Arizona rancher Jo
Jeffers was quite aware of the precariousness of range and wildlife management. In her
1964 autobiography, she suggested that, “the demolishing of coyotes by government
poisoners often leads to an overabundance of rabbits that are far more destructive to the
range than the coyotes. Still, coyotes must be controlled or they would overrun the
country, killing small calves and lambs when the rabbit supply diminishes.”71 Most
(though certainly not all) ranchers would have agreed with Jeffers’ assessment of the
conflicting outcomes of coyote control. At a state Fish and Game Commission meeting
in 1954, Art Nelson, a central Montana rancher, explained that “antelope and deer are
very much on the increase” and that there were “6 1/2 times more antelope in...1953 than
there were in 1949” (the year that 1080 came into widespread use on western ranges).72
71
Jo Jeffers, Ranch Wife (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1964), 242.
Art Nelson, "Central Montana's View on Game Problem," The Montana Stockgrower, November 15,
1954.
72
305
As Ellis, Jeffers, Nelson, and other ranchers knew and could testify, predators could not
be separated from other wildlife “problems” because they all were connected. If all the
coyotes and mountain lions were killed, the population of jack rabbits, deer, mice,
antelope and other big game increased – sometimes exponentially.
The labor required to try and exert “control” over wildlife, therefore, rarely was
successful. Rabbits took advantage of the absence of their predators and proliferated as
only rabbits can. Antelope and deer refused to keep their numbers to a level that, in the
minds of ranchers, would not interfere with cattle’s bodily use of grass and other forage.
Ellis explained with some annoyance that although most of the year had been coyote free
at the Bell, he had “recently” seen “two tracks and one coyote. Meaning, I think, that a
few are drifting back in.” Coyotes continued to move into spaces newly cleared of their
species despite the best efforts of ranchers’ ecological labor. And so ranchers continued
to come together on committees in their associations, at meetings with the state fish and
game commissions, and in local groups to discuss and lobby around the need to keep
wildlife at an optimum number. Ranchers’ collective activities around predator and
wildlife control included creating legislation around bounty programs, lobbying for the
use of new predator removal technologies (such as 1080), and working with the game
commissions to change hunting permit systems.73 To the ranchers’ dismay, the wildlife
just kept “drifting back in.”
73
Each state livestock association had standing committees on wildlife and predator issues throughout the
1940s and 50s. See Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association Papers, ASU; The Montana Stockgrower,
Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana; the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association Papers and
The New Mexico Stockman, Rio Grande Historical Collection, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces,
New Mexico; and the Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association Papers, American Heritage Center, Laramie,
Wyoming.
306
Despite hard work and ultimate failure, the ecological economy in which ranchers
labored had the effect of making ranchers feel as though they all engaged in a common
quest. Their labor with and on behalf of their cows and their bottom lines united ranchers
and inspired them to gather together in order to fight a common fight. Their “way of life”
was grounded in an ecological economy which inspired them to come together to create
meaning from which they could then build more formal political arsenals as ranchers.
To conclude let us return to the cover of The Montana Stockgrower. Throughout
the 1940s and 1950s, the MSGA utilized aspects of rancher ecological economy on its
cover. At various times, the Association’s branding iron, pictures of Hereford cattle, and
a cowboy with a horse sitting on the range graced the cover of the association’s “official”
publication. Each image communicated to its readers the importance and dominance of
both the economic and the ecological aspects inherent in the construction of ranching’s
particular kind of life.74
The cover for the June, 1956, issue is perhaps the best example of the symbolic
power of ecological economy to promote rancher collectivity.
74
This style of cover, with publication name, date and some sort of image regarding the cattle industry, was
used in all four states under consideration here.
307
Figure 17 Cover of The Montana Stockgrower, 1956
The center of the cover contains a picture of three ranchers engaged in the labor of
branding a calf in the middle of a lush grass pasture. The grass looks healthy and robust.
Hereford cattle stand grazing in the picturesque background. All “undesirable” animals,
from antelope to coyotes, conspicuously are absent. Clearly, these ranchers are busy
claiming economic proprietorship over the cow as they engage in the act of branding.
Importantly, the branding includes the ecological elements of fire, iron, and cattle flesh in
order to assert the economic status of the animal as being owned, grown, and sold/bred
by an individual rancher.75
Despite the symbolic meaning of individuality represented
by the brand, however, it is no accident that the MSGA also grouped many ranchers’
brands to serve as the unifying frame of the picture. The brands and the group of
ranchers engaged in the branding task suggest that ranchers were not individuals engaged
in a lone, industrialized enterprise. Rather the image, like so many of the cultural
75
A brand marks the cow as belonging to a particular ranch and to a particular work culture. Importantly,
branding was one of the few elements of ranch work that remained largely non-mechanized in these years
and so, in some ways, continued to be a highly “organic” aspect of the industry.
308
productions of ranchers in the mid-twentieth-century West, emphasizes the collective,
ecological nature of creating bovine bodies for economic profit.
The story of ranchers’ ecological economy is important because it shows the ways
in which the non-human environment can and did direct humans’ actions, thoughts, and
expectations. It also reveals the ways in which ranchers could be united through their
peculiar labor culture in the non-human ecological world. The environments of every
ranch allowed ranchers to profit monetarily, but those environments also enabled
ranchers to make a living, by making a life. Historian Richard White reminds us that for
many Americans in the early-twenty first century, it is easy to focus on work identities
and forget the importance non-human nature plays in that work. Intermountain cattle
ranchers, in the immediate postwar decades, not only help to illuminate the ways in
which labor can be informed by and created through non-human nature, they help us also
to understand how critical both can be to identity construction, the creation of unity, and
the assertion of political power.
In the ecological economy, with which we have been concerned here, the market
lurked just outside of our discussion. Those ranchers who could afford to utilize 1080 or
2,4-D in their quest to control the ecology of their home ranches engaged directly with a
larger, rather impersonal industrial marketplace. Ranchers also daily connected to a
capitalist market when they ultimately sold the products of their ecological economy. In
the postwar decades, the market for cattle cyclically contracted and expanded, but the
general trend was expansionary with cattle prices rising to new highs every few years.
Despite this expansion, the market and market relations still could serve to pit rancher
309
against rancher in an Economic Darwinian struggle. The market was not simply a
divisive element in ranchers’ lives in the postwar decades, however, because, as they did
through their collective memories, experiences with modernization, valuation of cow
work, and unity in ecological labor, ranchers utilized aspects of the market economy to
create a strange and surprising cohesion among one another. It is to these market
relations and the affinity they ultimately engendered to which we turn in Chapter 5.
310
CHAPTER 5
BEEF FUDGE: THE MARKET AS UNIFYING PRACTICE IN RANCH CULTURE
“These days it’s hard to distinguish between a boastful rugged individualist and a plain
damn fool.”
~ S.E. “Eck” Brown, President of the United Livestock Producers’ Association, 1953
The ecological economy surrounding range ranching in the postwar years brought
ranchers together culturally through material experiences. In attempting to produce cows
for the market, ranchers interacted with and sought to control the non-human world on
their ranches and then shared information about their interactions and the success or
failure of their control. As we discussed in the last chapter, the successful production of a
cow depended on a rancher’s knowledge of her/his range as well as the bodily health of
each animal. Selling and profiting from the production of cattle, however, required not
only successful growth of the cow, but decent market conditions and consumer demand
for beef as well.
The image below suggests the ways in which market conditions
constantly preyed on ranchers’ imaginations and took up cultural space within the
ranching community.
Figure 18 Overproduction cartoon, 1959
311
In 1959, the year of the MSGA’s Diamond Jubilee and the year The Montana
Stockgrower published the above cartoon, ranchers received fabulous prices for their
cattle and gleefully rejoiced in their good fortune.1
A few subtle signs suggested,
however, that a profound doubt underlay ranchers’ joy, and one of those signs was the
above image. The image and accompanying text depict ranchers excitedly reporting
“good grass,” “surplus feed,” and “good prices.” In the midst of their irrational glee, the
ranchers appear to be driving ever more cattle toward a cliff. The chasm at the bottom of
the cliff contains the bones of cattle who had died in 1916-1920, the 1930s, and 1952. A
reader cannot help but sense that the ranchers are about to run the animals right over the
edge. The one cowboy to the left, who sits precariously perched on his mount near the
edge of the abyss, seems to suggest that the ranchers themselves might follow their
bovine charges into the ravine.2 By 1959, ranchers had learned that the postwar market,
like markets in other times, was a fickle friend. The image in the July issue of the
Stockgrower captured the muted but very real fear of ranchers that their fickle friend
would again morph into a fearsome foe.
In general, the image suggests that ranchers engaged in a market that was, quite
literally, taking them for a ride. According to the text that accompanied the image,
however, ranchers were not helpless and the MSGA offered solutions for what ranchers
could “do” about the finicky market conditions. First, they could breed cows in balance
1
Epigraph from S.E. Brown Letter, Box 4, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript CollectionRanchers, by 1959,
were receiving as much as $31.00 cwt whereas in the 1956, prices had been, on average, $17.00 cwt. See
United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service Statistics, “Average
Prices Received By Farmers and Ranchers,” Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, and Colorado.
2
Unknown, "Words of Warning," The Montana Stockgrower July 1959, 11. The artist of this cartoon is
unknown.
312
with available plants on their range (through scientifically-based ecological labor no
doubt). Next, they could get their own finances in order rather than overspending and
increasing their debt. Most importantly, however, the advice explained, ranchers could
(and should) “keep close to others in the business who face the same future as you.”
“When trouble comes,” the column presaged, “you will all need help and there is strength
in numbers.”3 The image and its attendant copy reveal not only the skepticism with
which ranchers greeted the machinations of the “free enterprise” system but also the
strategies they used to overcome their worry about an unruly economy.
The above image also depicts ranchers employed in a particular moment of
production – that moment when they took the cattle to market. Indeed, marketing and
consumption of beef were woven as intricately into the overall production of cows as was
feeding, watering, and vaccinating bovine herds. Many scholars have separated the
spheres of consumption and production, but in recent historiography, authors such as
Dana Frank and Steven Lubar, have begun to suggest that historical actors did not always
consider the two spheres to be opposed. Frank argues that working class women in
Seattle viewed their power as consumers to be as essential for labor reform as their work
as producers.
As Lubar explains, “each person who participates in the design,
manufacture, sale, or use of an object brings meaning to it” and helps to construct it for
its role in the consumer market.4 This was certainly true for ranchers in the midtwentieth century, because the ecological economy did not stop once a cow was fully3
Ibid.
Steven Lubar, "Men/Women/Production/Consumption," in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and
Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). See also Dana
Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4
313
grown. Rather, the ecological economy, and ranchers’ relatedness to it, continued well
into the marketing and consumption phases. As the image above suggests, ranchers
could, if they chose, come together around issues of marketing just as they rallied around
their labor and historical identities as “cow folk.” Selling beef on the market, therefore,
became another space wherein ranchers were divided at least partially, but also were
profoundly unified.
In the mid-twentieth century, the realm of consumption came to have an
increasingly important role in helping ranchers bridge the chasm of market relations.
During these years, ranchwomen across the intermountain West took a new role in
marketing their ranches’ products and attempting to ease ranchers’ fears of a wild
marketplace. This new role included publicity campaigns in their local communities
which promoted both beef and the rural culture of ranching. In 1958, for example, the
Montana Cowbelles entered floats in parades across the state to convince their fellow
Montanans to buy more beef. The public messages represented in the floats indicate all
of the ways in which ranchers, under the guidance of the Cowbelle organization,
overcame the tension inherent in market relations.
Figure 19 Montana Cowbelle parade float, 1958
314
The float, “peopled” by actual ranchers from the surrounding community, carries a cow
being fed by a “stockgrower” and a family sitting down to a dinner of beef. The banner
suggests to the gazing public and ranchers that the sale of beef benefited not only those in
the cattle industry but the broader “local” economy as well. The Cowbelles’ message
inserted ranchwomen assertively into the conversations about prices for beef, supply and
demand, and the economy more generally.
Of course cultural assumptions of proper gender roles circumscribe the image
offered by the Montanans’ float. The parade float features prominently the Cowbelles’
role in “promoting beef,” which is physically separate (on a different sign, in a different
part of the float) from the (presumably) male stockgrower, who was raising beef. In their
public beef promotional activities, then, the Cowbelles occupied a liminal space between
the consuming housewives and “fathers” of the non-ranching public, and the production
of beef on ranches. This image reinforces the phenomena we examined in Chapter 3 of
both male and female ranchers promoting the hegemonic notion that the production of
cows was male. Just as labor and memory practices within the ranching industry rested
on gendered assumptions about propriety and value, so too did the Cowbelles’ efforts
promote gendered norms in the publicization of beef.
Despite this construction of ranching as male and beef promotion as female,
however, the marketing text of the float also shows the ways in which ranchwomen
believed consumption and production to be seamlessly linked in a continuum (even the
space of the float shows each element of the beef industry as flowing right into the next
with no physical or ideological separation). The float also demonstrates the ways in
315
which the Cowbelles used culture to assert their presence in issues of economic import.
The Cowbelles, in treading the fine line between consumption and production, brought
the two realms of beef creation together, rendering the gendered separation of the two
subtle and perhaps insignificant. In laboring to create demand for their beef products,
ranchwomen fashioned a space for ranchers to come together in order to rally around the
market issue of consumption and also created room for their own public visibility to
increase. Both male and female ranchers could agree that increasing demand for beef
could very well undermine the power of an unpredictable market to upset the solidity of
ranch culture. Increased consumption also could allow ranchwomen to increase their
participation in the wider industry in gender appropriate ways.
During the postwar years, ranchers throughout the intermountain West had deep
seated fears about and constantly obsessed over the irrationality of the capitalist
marketplace. We might assume that the market and its capitalist interactions would serve
to alienate ranchers from each other and divide ranchers from one another in fundamental
and irrevocable ways. As this chapter will show, however, ranchers never allowed the
market to divide them completely. Instead, through their associations, ranchers simply
folded discussions about the market into their wide-ranging cultural discourse of cow
talk. I argue in this chapter that ranchers did experience some alienation from each other
over market relations. Cattle theft weighed on the minds of most ranchers in range
country and the archives contain disturbing stories of violence and intrigue regarding
theft. In addition, ranchers did not all agree ideologically on issues of economic policy.
While ranchers were quite anxious about taxes and other financial issues, the economic
316
subject that captured their utmost attention and about which they held vastly different
views was the cost-price topic, especially the issue of what government price supports
would do to the functioning of the “free market.” I also argue in this chapter that as
much as ranchers experienced tension over market issues (including theft and economic
policy), ranchers also relied on market interactions and dialogue about “the cow
business” to create with one another a collective capitalist identity grounded in a Cold
War ideology which celebrated ranchers’ characteristics as loyal American entrepreneurs.
Ranchers buttressed their identities as laborers with a capitalist sentimentality that they
used to convince themselves that they had much to defend. In addition to utilizing a
romantic idea of capitalism to create collective identity, ranchers also benefited from the
efforts of the Cowbelles to promote consumption of their ranches’ products.
This
productive, feminized labor, while never allowing ranchers to overcome the volatility of
the market, did help to create a sense that all ranchers needed to succeed as a group and
continue as a cultural entity was increased demand for beef by the broader non-ranch
public. Centering their community’s image of unity in a ranch identity of production
further allowed Cowbelles to smooth the tensions inherent in an enterprise dependent on
the whims of a consuming American public and the variations of a capricious market.
In the postwar years, ranchers had three choices when marketing their cattle.
First, they could choose to avoid the long distance hauling of their cattle by selling
directly to buyers in “country markets,” meaning they could sell their livestock on local
ranches to buyers who came directly to the ranch. Secondly, ranchers could sell their
317
products at public auctions usually located in a regional town where buyers consisted of
local ranchers, feeders, and sometimes representatives of the packing industry. Thirdly,
ranchers could choose to ship their cattle to “terminal markets,” which were central sites,
often in metropolitan areas and near transportation hubs (like Chicago), that served as
assembly and trading places for agricultural commodities. In the 1950s and 1960s,
approximately, forty-three per cent of ranchers in the intermountain West sold at either
terminal markets or auctions.5 If they chose either of these methods, ranchers had to get
their cattle to markets which, for many, meant paying high prices for transportation. In
the 1950s and 1960s, the cost of getting a cow to market ranged between $2.15 and $5.56
per head. The farther a rancher was from a market space, the more expensive the process
could be. Competition for trucks and rail cars often pitted ranchers against one another as
well as against the companies who owned the trucking or railroad services.6
It is not inaccurate to claim, then, that, as capitalists, post World War II cattle
ranchers could have been quite alienated from one another due to the competitiveness of
5
James R. Gray, Ranch Economics (Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press, 1968), 453.
For trucking in the ranching industry see Gray, Ranch Economics. For an interesting discussion of the
business history of trucking in the United States more broadly see Marvin Schwartz, J.B. Hunt: The Long
Haul to Success (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992). By the 1950s, trucking had come to
largely replace railroad shipping for ranchers who could easily access roads (yet another way the ranching
industry benefited from highway construction). Some ranchers continued to ship via railroad, but no matter
which transportation ranchers utilized, the cost of getting cows to market was something every rancher had
to take into consideration in the production of cattle. For interesting discussions of the transformation from
rail to truck and the effect it had on the industry see Laurie Mercier, Julian Terrett Oral History, 1982, Oral
History 226, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana, Safford. Terrett remembered that after World
War II, trucking simply became faster and more efficient than using the rails. He explained that the switch
occurred “largely because the trucks give you such better service…there isn’t really much reason to put
your cattle on the truck at the ranch and then take them to Miles City and put them on the railroad and send
them to St. Paul where you can put them on the truck at the ranch at noon and by the next morning they’ll
be in St. Paul…[whereas] you put them on the railroad [and by] the next morning, they may not have even
left Miles City.” The faster a rancher could get a cow to market the better because during transit cattle
would lose weight if they were not continuously fed. Ranchers could not always guarantee that the
shippers would feed and care for the animals during travel. Additionally, feed for the journey could be
expensive. It behooved ranchers, then, to use the fastest transportation method available.
6
the market.
318
Since at least the late-nineteenth century, American ranchers had self-
identified as “rugged individualists” who made their own way in the business world of
cattle ranching. Their ability to survive in the rugged world of the out-of-doors, eke a
living from the land, and do so with limited assistance from either neighbors or
government agencies was a source of pride (ranchers never seemed to mind the
inaccuracy of such an imaginative past). Those ranchers who bucked the system the most
often became the biggest heroes in ranch culture. Frank M. King, associate editor for the
Western Livestock Journal and author of western ranching memory books, made his
living and his reputation through representing “old time cowpunchers” as mavericks.
Ranchers throughout the intermountain West in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s
sought all four of King’s publications, which he published in the period from the mid1930s through the mid-1940s.7 These ranchers hoped to purchase a sense of the “good
old honest days” when the waddies (or cowpunchers) had “a big range of freedom always
around” them.8 Many of King’s stories discussed cowboys who relied on their own
resolve and strength to do difficult work well. He entitled his column in the Journal
“Mavericks” in order to inspire in his readers a sense of being part of a culture that just
never quite conformed to the expectations of the broader world. King sold thousands of
books and was a part of a broader trade in cow-folklore that began in the late-nineteenth
7
Frank M. King, Wranglin' the Past: Being the Reminiscences of Frank M. King (Los Angeles: Haynes
Corporation, 1935); Longhorn Trail Drivers: Being a True Story of the Cattle Drives of Long Ago
(Pasadena: Trail's End Publishing Company, 1947); Pioneer Western Empire Builders: A True Story of the
Men and Women of Pioneer Days (Pasadena: Trail's End Publishing Company, 1946), Frank M. King,
Mavericks: The Salty Comments of an Old-Time Cowpuncher (Pasadena: Trail's End Publishing Company,
1947).
8
Claude Meacham to Frank M. King, 1938, Box 2, Folder Correspondence 1938, Papers of Frank M. King,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Within the entire King collection there are hundreds of
letters from cow folk across the intermountain West, Nevada, Oregon, and California and even some
straggling letters from cow punchers who lived east of the Mississippi River.
9
century and continues to the present day.
319
The passing of the open range inspired
nostalgia in many who had participated in the early cattle industry or had imaginative
connections to that era. This nostalgia, to which King’s productions contributed, almost
always emphasized the independence of cattle folk – especially the cowhands and small
ranchers who did what they could to make it in a competitive marketplace.
The increase in membership in the collective organizations of ranchers in the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, therefore, seems somewhat inconsistent with their cultural
identity as mavericks. This identity, however, encompassed also a notion of group
9
This explosion of cattle literature continued unabated into the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and was part of the
late-nineteenth-century creation of an American pioneer literature that David Wrobel discusses somewhat
in his book Promised Lands. See David Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation
of the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002). The folklore took both written and
pictorial form. Cowboy artists, like Charles M. Russell, and cowboy poets like N. Howard (Jack) Thorp,
wrote and painted scenes of the life of “old time” cowboys. Much of the literature was written by
professional writers and scholars who hoped to profit from the demand for frontier literature in the decades
following the official closing of the frontier in 1893. Authors like Ramon F. Adams, a violin teacher and
candy store owner, and Philip Ashton Rollins, a Princeton alumni and author of The Cowboy: His
Characteristics, His Equipment, and His Part in the Development of the West, published with eastern
presses and marketed their books toward an eastern audience increasingly enamored with the idea of a
mythic West. These authors often wrote their books as hobbies, but spent a good deal of time, money, and
energy researching their topic. Despite the supposed “objectivity” of these kinds of cowboy histories, they
are, nonetheless, meant to rescue the cowboy from historical obscurity and restore him to his rightful place
as courageous western “pioneer.” They reflect their authors’ imaginative connection to the cattle trade
during the open range days as much as they capture the stories of the cowpunchers themselves. Other
authors drew on their experiences as young men (sometimes very young – pre-adolescent) on ranches to
publish in the dime novel western genre of fiction that became increasingly popular in the 1910s, 1920s,
and 1930s, but these novelists also sometimes contributed to the gathering of historically accurate stories
about cowboy and ranch life and the cattle trade more generally. An example of this kind of novelistturned-biographical historian is Walt Coburn, who wrote the story of his grandfather’s ranch in Montana
after having had a very successful career as a novelist. See Walt Coburn, Mavericks (New York: The
Century Company, 1929); and Walt Coburn, Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C
Ranch (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968). The numbers of cowboy folklore publications
inhibits a complete listing. But for some examples of this genre of cultural production, see Ramon F.
Adams, Western Words: A Dictionary of the Range, Cow Camp and Trail (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1946); Walt Coburn, Mavericks (New York: The Century Company, 1929); Walt Coburn,
Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1968); John Culley, Cattle, Horses, & Men of the Western Range (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie press,
1940), Fred Lambert, Bygone Days of the Old West (Kansas City, MO: Burton Publishing Company, 1948);
Philip Ashton Rollins, The Cowboy: His Characteristics, His Equipment, and His Part in the Development
of the West (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1922); N. Howard (Jack) Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys
(Estancia, New Mexico: News Print Shop, 1908).
economic success based on individual enterprise.
320
Ranchers were, if nothing else,
capitalists. Their primary goal was to grow their cattle large enough and healthy enough
in order to sell them to prospective buyers for handsome profits.10 Selling cows was the
rancher’s primary raison d’etre, after all while ranching was, according to ranchers “a
way of life,” it was also a business. In some ways, interactions that occur in a capitalist
marketplace can be fundamentally alienating, and ranchers’ rugged individualist ideology
certainly left room for competitive fury. For ranchers, however, the act of marketing –
both the mental act of thinking about the market and the physical act of taking ones cows
to market – could be a profoundly unifying experience. In addition to labor, memory,
and modernization, ranchers also had in common their practice of marketing cows. And,
I would argue, they conducted that practice with more solidarity than division.
Before we get to the former, however we must first think about the ways in the
market intruded in ranchers’ lives to create tension. There are scores of ways in which
ranchers competed with one another over scarce commodities in a capitalist marketplace.
Reams of paper have been used to chronicle western agriculturalists’ struggle to gain
access to limited water and grass, but perhaps the best example of market tensions
specific to ranching is cattle theft.11 Across range country during the postwar years,
wandering cows and thieving neighbors caused a great deal of stress. During the postwar
10
See Chapters 3 and 4.
For the best discussions about the conflicts over water in the twentieth-century West see Donald J.
Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West,
1902-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars:
State, Culture and Rebellion in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Donald
Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon
Publishers, 1985). For discussions on conflicts over grass see Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meaning;
Rawley, Grazing; and Hirt, Conspiracy of Optimism.
11
321
years, each rancher kept a proverbial eye out for thieves and cattlegrower association
personnel devoted a great deal of labor toward preventing and prosecuting theft. Each
association, for example, had a standing Brand and Theft committee and also offered
bounties for any cow thief caught in the act.12 In addition to this, the market reports in
association publications could contain reports on current livestock theft investigations.
The numbers are impressive. For example, in 1964, the Montana Livestock Commission
inspected 26,000 cattle in the month of May, and had 85 investigations of theft. Of those
85 investigations, inspectors recovered 38 animals for their rightful owners and convicted
eight persons.
The high incidence of theft investigations (85 in a typical month) indicate that in
the context of postwar high livestock prices cows were a hot commodity. As a result,
ranchers feared constantly for the safety of their herds. The highways which brought
increased access to both markets and neighboring ranches also enabled thieves to load
several head in a truck and make a fast getaway. Ranchers shared stories of grand
larceny with one another and wondered at the new “modern” methods of rustling.13 From
1945-1965, the issue was so prominent, in fact, that individual ranchers chose to purchase
signs, like the one pictured below, warning trespassers that ranchers stood united against
theft.
12
Cattle theft was, actually, one of the primary reasons for the creation of the state cattlegrower
associations in the nineteenth century. For the early histories of the associations, refer to Burroughs,
Guardian of the Grasslands; Mortensen, In the Cause of Progress; Goff, Century in the Saddle; and
Paladin, Montana Stockgrower.
13
See for example, William Cheney, “Livestock Commission Report,” The Montana Stockgrower, June 15,
1955, 25.
322
Figure 20 Reward Sign for Cattle Theft, New Mexico, 1960
The reward, coupled with institutional support of the organization in monitoring theft
investigations, could ease ranchers’ minds somewhat.14 Membership in the NMCGA, at
least nominally, protected member ranchers from theft. When theft did occur, the thieves
often came from the “outside” and traveled from nearby urban centers to steal cows and
either butcher them immediately or sell them at market.15
Harry Hooker, from
southeastern Arizona, believed that most of the theft resulted from the fact that there was
a “serious lack of morals in the American people today.” And he believed, as did many
of those within the associations, that ranchers had to present a unified front in order to
accomplish their collective objective of protecting property. Hooker explained that “any
14
Sign Advertisement, The New Mexico Stockman, January, 1960, 61.
In 1955, the Montana Livestock Commission reported in The Montana Stockgrower that Jerry Stein, a
Helena “laborer,” and Keith Morley, a “state employee” allegedly killed and stole a calf from George
Diehl. Both of the other two cases under investigation that month involved urban residents. William
Cheney, “Livestock Commission Report,” The Montana Stockgrower, August 15, 1955.
15
323
reward put up should be put up by us all and should cover us all.” Only in this manner
could the insider ranch community be protected from immoral outsiders.16
Outsiders did not always comprise the thieving element in the intermountain
West, however. Because of the scarceness of fences in some areas of range country,
ranchers’ cows could wander away from home and get mixed up with other ranchers’
herds. Brands, as designations of ownership, coupled with ranchers’ local knowledge of
their neighbors’ operations, usually helped to clear up the confusion generated by such
roaming beeves, but now and then a dishonest rancher would simply alter the original
brand (or brand an unbranded calf anew) and incorporate the “lost” animal into her/his
herd. The new “owner” could then sell the animal as her/his own and capitalize in the era
of high prices. When the new owner sold the wandering and/or stolen animals at the
market, a third party, sometimes unwittingly, assumed possession of an animal that had
not been sold legitimately. The ambiguity of ownership such circumstances generated
could and often did create animosity among ranchers engaged in the murky world of
cattle marketing.
Tracing the mysteries of herd ownership fell to the state livestock commissions.
Generally, the commissions hired investigators, worked with local law enforcement, and
relied on their inspectors at local, state, and regional markets to keep track of the buying,
selling, and ownership of cows.
Like all human systems, however, this one was
imperfect. Much of the system relied on the informal networking of local Livestock
Commission inspectors, which in turn required not only cooperation with local law
16
Harry Hooker to Abbie Keith, 26 December 1951, Box 5, Folder 1, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
324
enforcement agencies, but also inspectors to listen to local gossip in order to reunite cows
with owners, and to prosecute rustlers where appropriate.
Montana brand inspector Leo Overfelt’s weekly log of April 25, 1958 gives
insight into the convoluted day-to-day search and rescue efforts required to keep cattle
moving legitimately through the process of production and marketing in range country. It
is his narration of one case, in particular, that helps illustrate the ways in which ranchers
could rob from one another. On April 25, 1958, Overfelt conducted a routine inspection
of Tony Conway’s ranch near Cut Bank, Montana.
While riding among the herd,
Overfelt discovered no less than four cows belonging to two different ranchers. Overfelt
was not worried about theft in this particular case as the mingling of cows “could be
expected as the fences...[were]...poor between these parties.” The “fences” to which
Overfelt referred, of course, were physical structures, but also could have referred
metaphorically to fences between the neighbors. Among these three ranches, relations
seemed peaceful and the herds mingled in seeming harmony.17
Overfelt’s job was not always so easy, however, as was the case the following day
when he followed up on a report of four stolen calves. The record indicates that Florence
Hofland purchased from John Hatch the four animals in question. When asked by
Overfelt to produce bills of sale (the proof of legitimate purchase in any cattle
transaction), Hofland was able to do so. She had bought the calves from John Hatch who
had bought them from William Show, Jr. And there was the rub. Apparently William
Show had not come into possession of the calves in a legitimate manner – in two weeks
17
Leo Overfelt, “District Report,” 25 April 1958, Montana Brands Enforcement Division Records, Box 1,
File 27, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
325
time, he would admit to stealing the calves during his criminal trial, but that is getting
ahead of the story. First, Overfelt had to figure out if Show had owned the mothers of the
calves in question. Hofland cooperated with Overfelt who was an agent of the state, but
was “quite surprised and offended” to think that William Show, Jr., her neighbor, might
be in trouble. Overfelt explained patiently to Hofland that catching the thief, whether
fellow rancher or interloping outsider, was his job, and that he had good reason to believe
that Show, whether a rancher or not, had stolen the calves he had sold to Hofland.18
Ultimately, over the course of a week, Overfelt discovered unclear ownership in 6
of the 12 ranches he visited. As Overfelt tracked the Show case over a few days, he came
across nearly another dozen cows in ranchers’ herds throughout the Cut Bank area that
were “estrays” – cows that had a brand not of the ranch on which they were found. In
any case when the owner of the herd in which a cow with another ranchers’ brand was
found could not produce a verifiable bill of sale, it was the job of the livestock inspector
to report to the original owner that the misplaced animal had been “found.” If indeed the
animal had been lost according to the owner of the brand, then the owner had one year to
reclaim the animal. The original owner could bring charges of rustling as could any of
the law enforcement agencies involved in tracing cattle ownership, but because proving
intent to steal could be impossible -- fences, after all, never were effective completely and
cows did drift -- ranchers often did not levy charges.
It turned out that Show was indeed a cattle rustler, as he admitted in court on May
6, 1958. Because much of Show’s illicit activity had involved ranchers’ near the Fort
18
Ibid.
326
Peck Indian Reservation, among cattle ranchers who were either Assiniboine and/or
Dakota Sioux or Anglo ranchers who just leased reservation lands, Show stood trial in
Tribal Court and received the maximum sentence (90 days in jail and $180 fine plus court
costs). The moral of the story for our purposes is that the quest for profit within the cattle
industry could and did lead ranchers to steal from one another. Theirs was not a perfectly
harmonious community.19
Another area of the market that also brought ranchers into disagreement was the
political economy of postwar America. In particular, ranchers could not agree on the
proper level of state involvement in a post New Deal economy. The dialogue in which
ranchers engaged over the role of government involvement in the economics of the
livestock industries after the end of World War II illustrates the ways in which market
ideology could render contention in range country.
Cattle ranchers’ interaction with government fiscal regulation has a long and
complicated history, but the type of federal government involvement in the modern
United States cattle economy first arrived in the 1930s and most strongly in the JonesConnelly Act of 1934. In this permutation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, cattle
became one of the “basic commodities” to be supported at parity (a price level set on the
highest selling price of any given commodity during a legislatively pre-determined time –
e.g. World War I). Officially, the cattlegrowers’ groups (like the American National
Livestock Association) opposed the inclusion of cattle in parity legislation because
19
There is no evidence to indicate that Show was a member of either of the tribes. And it is impossible to
tell if the other parties involved are Indian or Anglo. From their surnames, it would appear the ranchers
involved in the case were Anglos. Ibid.
327
production limits on cattle with no similar limits on other meat commodities like mutton
and/or poultry could cause Americans to turn to other kinds of meat for their dietary
needs. The opposition of cattle leadership was the main reason the federal government
had not included cattle in the original 1933 AAA legislation.20 By late 1933, however,
cattle ranchers recognized something had to be done. Facing the driest years on record in
all five states considered here and grappling with historically low prices (in 1933,
producers were receiving $4.14 per hundredweight, whereas fifteen years earlier, in 1918,
cattle prices averaged $14.50/per hundredweight), cattle ranchers feared their doom and
began to clamor for help.
Although ranchers longed for government assistance, they also dreaded the
regulation that might accompany such aid. Despite official opposition to government
“intrusion” in the industry, many cattlegrowers’ requested federal help even as they
hoped that help would come without regulatory hindrance on their businesses. They
lobbied for higher tariffs on beef, fats and hides, lower freight rates (meaning increased
regulation for railroads and other interstate shipping systems), low interest rates for feed,
land and cattle loans, and increased regulation of the marketing and packing of beef.21
20
The pork industry had been as reluctant to accept support and so hogs were not included in the original
AAA. See Wayne D. Rasmussen and Gladys L. Baker, Price-Support and Adjustment Programs from
1933 through 1978: A Short History (USDA: Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 424, 1978),
Schlebecker. By the time the AAA had been revamped (in 1938), it no longer included cattle as “basic”
commodities and so ranchers did not, from that time on, receive federal price supports.
21
F.E. Mollin, "Agricultural Adjustment Program as the Cattle Producers View It," The Producer
November, 1933. “Protective” legislation had been around long before the New Deal. Tariffs on cattle,
which had existed since the late-nineteenth century, became truly protective in 1921 when the Emergency
Tariff of 1921 imposed a 30 percent ad valorem tax on live cattle entering the United States. The following
year the tariff became more stringent – 33 percent on beeves under 1000 pounds and 43 percent on those
over 1000 pounds. See Schlebecker, Cattle Raising, 119-152 and Jimmy M. Skaggs, Prime Cut: Livestock
Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607-1983 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
1986), 134-140.
328
On some levels, ranchers received the kinds of support for which they hoped. In
1933, for example, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began buying beef from
ranchers to feed some 15 million people with few regulatory restrictions on cattle
producers’ activities. The inclusion of cattle in the Jones-Connelly Act in April of 1934
and the cattle purchasing programs begun under the Drought Relief Service in June of
that same year, did not require producers to enter into relief programs, but if ranchers
chose to sell their beef to the government, they were required to enter into agreements on
production limits. Low interest rate loans also appeared for ranchers and farmers. Such
institutions as the Commodity Credit Corporation, and local/state Production Credit
Associations issued these loans on whose loan boards local farmers and ranchers often
sat.22 A combination of all of these support services meant that in six months’ time, from
June 1934 to December 1934, the federal government had bought (and largely killed) 8
million head of cattle and provided $525 million in aid to ranchers.
By 1939, range ranching as an industry had made it through, thanks in large part
to the federal government assistance it had received, but like much of the Depression
recovery, World War II helped considerably by bringing soaring prices for ranchers.23
By 1943, the average price per hundredweight for cattle in the intermountain West was
$11.86, almost double what it had been in 1939.24 As a result of soaring prices, FDR and
22
J.D. Craighead is one example of a rancher who had a long side career in the loan business. Craighead,
as noted in Chapter 4, served as president of the La Junta Production Credit Association, for over a
generation.
23
Preliminary research in the Agricultural Census suggests that there was considerable turn-over in
property ownership during the 1930s and it would make an interesting study to discover the numbers. By
the 1940s many ranchers were new to the business, but many had survived the dirty 30s.
24
United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service Statistics for Wyoming,
Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.
329
Congress stepped in to regulate the economy through price controls. The moment that
the Office of Price Administration implemented price ceilings on beef, cattle ranchers
began to howl, thus beginning a debate within the ranching community about price
controls that continues to this day.25
The debate especially became heated in the early 1950s during a time of profound
stress for cattle producers. By 1950, the United States’ participation in the Korean War
had begun to cause concern in economic circles about the possibility of soaring prices
that, experience had shown, often followed war. The fear was justified at least where
cattle prices were concerned. In 1951, prices for cattle had soared to an all-time high of
$29.69 per hundredweight and by April, the Office of Price Stabilization had decided to
put a price ceiling on meat. The legislation enabling these ceilings expired in 1953 and,
according to economists and government officials at the time had been successful as
prices began to decline.26
The decline in prices in 1953 and then again in 1954, however, may or may not
have been a direct result of economic policies at the federal level. By 1952, cattle
ranchers across the intermountain West states were experiencing a drought the likes of
which had not occurred since the driest years of the dirty 1930s. Between 1953 and
25
The beef industry was not the only industry to fall under the price regulations of World War II. For
discussions on government intervention in the US economy during World War II see Gregory Michael
Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II’s Battle of the Potomac (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991); Paul A.C. Koistenen, The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical
Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1980); Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War Ii and
the American Atate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of
Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). For
excellent treatments of agriculture and its specific role in the war effort, as well as the gendered elements of
that role see Jellison, Entitled to Power, and Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the
Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
26
Schlebecker, 204-206.
330
1956, each state in the intermountain West experienced one of the driest periods on
record. Maps created by the National Climatic Data Center reveal the numbers for 1953,
1954 and 1956 (the height of the drought).27
27
For the year 1953 see http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/state-map-display.pl. For 1954 see
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/state-map-display.pl. And for 1956 see
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/state-map-display.pl (current as of September 15, 2004).
331
Figure 21 Drought in the mid-1950s
By 1956, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico each had experienced
one of the 37 driest years on record (the record began in 1895 and so included the great
droughts of the 1930s). For Arizona and New Mexico, 1956 was the driest on record and
for Colorado and Wyoming the year 1956 ranked in the top 11 driest years. For many
cattle ranchers, then, the early 1950s counted as an “emergency” era – a time when
government aid was needed sorely by many, desired by some, and feared by almost all.
Just as the federal government began to address inflationary trends with price
controls in a post-Korean war economy, cattle ranchers began to dump their products on
the market because they could not afford to keep them. Prices reflect these phenomena.
In New Mexico, prices plummeted from $27.70/hundredweight in 1951 to $14.30 in
1953. The prices would not rebound until 1958, once the worst of the drought had
passed.28 Ranchers had increased the numbers in their herds during the war years and
28
United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Division of Crop and
Livestock Estimates, “Estimated Prices Received by Farmers, New Mexico,” New Mexico Agricultural
332
continued to expand their operations during the “good years” (1940-1950 and 19521956). One rancher remembered that the good times of the late 1940s through 1951 was
a period when “we [ranchers] took on obligations that [were] hard to pay off in bad
times.”29 Such sentiments indicate the short term nature of many ranchers’ economic
thinking and behavior. During the late 1940s, ranchers had taken out loans in order to
increase the mechanization of their operations. This ready credit in turn enabled ranchers
to increase their herds and helped them to keep up with increased demand on the part of
consumers who had more disposable income with which to buy beef.30 When the hard
times hit again in the early 1950s, many ranchers were left holding the bag. In debt and
out of feed, they flooded the market with more beef.
This flooding of the market meant that, more than ever, ranchers were in
competition with one another. They had to out-compete their rival ranchers in quality
and quantity of their herds, but they also often struggled with one another for off-ranch
jobs in the small towns that surrounded ranching lands. As cattle prices fell, prices on
other goods and services remained steady, and ranchers, like most agriculturalists in the
1950s and 1960s, were caught in a cost-price squeeze. In order to pay the mortgage on
Statistics Service, Las Cruces, New Mexico. The same kinds of price declines and rebounds occurred in
each of the states under consideration here. The drought lifted at different times in different locales during
the mid-1950s, but in each state the years 1952-56 were some of the driest on record and resulted in low
feed for ranchers and causing the need for ranchers to dump their inventory on the market, thereby
saturating it.
29
Unknown, “Words of Warning,” The Montana Stockgrower, July, 1959, 11.
30
In 1950, Americans ate an average of 71.4 pounds of beef and veal. This was up 6% from the average of
1939. With the high prices of 1951 and 1952, consumer demand decreased. But by 1955, it was up again
to a gastronomical level – 91.4 pounds of beef per person annually. As with all supply and demand
situations, it is difficult to ascertain whether or not the drought and the saturation of the market with cheap
beef inspired increased consumer demand, but the issue of causation really is moot. People were eating
meat in the 1950s more than at any time in United States history and ranchers were desperate to capitalize
on that demand. See Schlebecker, Cattle Raising, 205 and Gilbert C. Fite, American Farmers: The New
Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 81-119.
333
the ranch and to make their loan payments, many ranchers (especially women ranchers,
because of the perceived flexibility of their labor) had to take jobs “in town.”31 In the
early 1950s, ranchers’ economic decisions came to mean not the difference between large
profits and small but between solvency and bankruptcy. Forced to rush to market, to
fight for the best of the low prices, and to decide whether or not to take off-ranch
employment, ranchers increasingly competed with one another for a piece of a shrinking
economic pie.
And compete they did. But they also did something else. In addition to grappling
with the new “hard times” on an individualist basis, ranchers also began to discuss among
themselves whether or not the drought years necessitated federal “emergency”
government assistance.
Turning inward, toward the community of ranchers, they
engaged in discussion about the best course of action. Government assistance, in the
form of price supports and federal purchase of cattle, had been whispered about among
ranchers in their associations and at their communal gatherings since at least the years of
the first New Deal, but from 1952-1954, the whispers swelled to a loud roar. All across
the West, ranchers engaged in conversations about the “dangers” and “benefits” of
government support, and these exchanges, while revealing schisms among ranchers also
31
This “working-out” system was not new to rural households in this era. Tessie Liu has found similar
occurrences in nineteenth-century French artisan households. The same is true for farm families in the
United States throughout the twentieth century. See Liu, Weaver’s Knot, and Sarah Elbert, "Amber Waves
of Gain: Women's Work in New York Farm Families," in 'To Toil the Livelong Day': America's Women at
Work, 1790-1980, eds. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987);
Nancy Grey Osterud, "'She Helped Me Hay It as Good as a Man': Relations among Women and Men in an
Agricultural Community," in 'To Toil the Livelong Day': America's Women at Work, 1780-1980, eds. Carol
Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (1987).
334
reveal an openness of dialogue that laid one more plank of commonality on ranchers’
cultural platform.32
Association leaders, who tended to run larger operations, often exposed their
audiences to vehement anti-control ideology. In 1952, for example, Lloyd Taggart, the
president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association, explained to the 500 attendees of
the WSGA annual convention that “our people, are being lulled into a false sense of
security when they are made to believe that something is gained by government
aid...Washington does not become a partner in any of our financial undertakings without
demanding certain controls and we soon find ourselves dictated to by political appointees
who know as little about our business and problems as we do about the intricacies of
world diplomacy.”33 Taggert clearly hoped to play on the enduring element of ranch
culture that “they” (outsiders, government officials, easterners) always should be
suspected of trying to hoodwink the insider community of ranchers. Echoing the claim to
32
Ranchers’ associations took official positions supporting government tariffs long before the New Deal.
Import tariffs are, of course, a kind of price support, but ranchers rarely referred to them as such. See
Schlebecker, 126-127 and 220-225. For a broader discussion of tariffs and protectionism in United States
trade policy see Robert Baldwin, The Political Economy of United States Import Policy (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985); Judith Goldstein, Ideas, Interests, and American Trade
Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); J. Pincus, "Pressure Groups and the Pattern of Tariffs,"
Journal of Political Economy 83 (August, 1975). Goldstein particularly is interesting in that she explains
that protectionist policies ebb and flow because they historically are constructed based on whatever
politically legitimate ideas about free trade exist at the time of policy formation. Trade policies that
promote laissez-faire, intervention against foreign products, and intervention to redistribute social goods
have all existed simultaneously because the state structure in which they are housed may not change with
the changing times. Pincus’ article is helpful in understanding the power pressure groups have had in tariff
legislation. Ranchers, for example, were influential particularly in the passage of the 1930 Hawley-Smoot
Tariff which not only increased the import tax on beef, but also outlawed the importation of meat from any
country known to have Foot and Mouth Disease (thus Argentina, one of the world’s leading producers of
beef, could no longer legally sell beef to the United States).
33
Lloyd Taggart, Convention Address, June 1952, Box 250, Folder 2, Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association
Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Of course, Taggert
probably joined his fellow ranchers in accepting a good deal of help from USDA Extension Agents
whenever it was beneficial to do so.
335
local knowledge ranchers used in their dealings with the state in matters of wildlife and
modernization, Taggert was sure that he espoused the beliefs of “most stockmen,” but
many in attendance (and many who were not) did not agree with the idea that all
government help was harmful inherently.
In 1953, both the Montana Stockgrowers’ Association and the Colorado
Cattleman’s Association sponsored price support polls of their members in order to
ascertain how ordinary ranchers felt about the price control issue and about government
hand-outs. The polls revealed that while the majority of respondents did not favor price
supports on cattle, they did favor some government support. By January of 1954, 554
ranchers had answered the MSGA poll. Of the respondents, 461 respondents opposed
price supports, but 381 favored government purchase of beef to “stabilize the cattle
market.” The question of whether ranchers “favored no help of any kind” was divided
almost evenly. In Colorado, the numbers were much the same.34 The decision of the
MSGA, the CCA, and other state associations to launch such polls and the willingness of
10% of the overall MSGA membership to answer the poll, indicate that the issue of
government support weighed heavily on the minds of cattle ranchers, and that they were
willing and eager to enter into a collective conversation about the issue. The results of
the poll illustrate that ranchers could be deeply divided about the issue, but that they also
34
Unknown, "Price Support Poll," The Montana Stockgrower December 15, 1953. See also the October
issue of The Montana Stockgrower for the original price support poll. Interestingly, of those ranchers
answering the Montana poll, 75% were small operators who ran less than 250 head. A mere 4% were large
operators who owned more than 1000 head. These numbers may indicate that the issue of price supports
was more salient for small operators who had less leeway in their operations and so were hit harder during
hard times. Fite argues that in the farm support programs of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the larger
operators tended to receive more aid than smaller operators. Still, the possibility of having an increase in
demand for beef products (through government purchasing) would not have necessarily favored large
producers over small ones. Fite, American Farmers, 143-147.
336
held common ideas about the fact that something needed to be done to help ranchers out
of the droughty situation in which they found themselves.35
Rather than accuse one another of their plight ranchers blamed everyone else.
Ranchers saved their disdain for their favorite culprits, namely the “communist”
tendencies of the federal government (especially the agricultural policy of supporting the
prices of “basic commodities” like corn which ranchers had to buy for feed for their
herds), the meat packers and retail meat sellers, the “housewife” consumer, and the bad
weather. Whether a rancher was for or against “aid,” s/he rarely viewed competition with
other ranchers as the problem; rather it was outside forces that were to blame for “hard
times” and the imminent death of free enterprise. This is a radically contradictory and
incoherent ideology. Ranchers, more than anything else, hoped to achieve autonomy and
security, in a laissez-faire system whose founding premise was insecurity. Ranchers
wanted security in a risky business – assistance without responsibility – and as a result,
the powers that existed outside the community of ranching served as straw men for
ranchers’ scorn.36
In 1953, the Arizona Cattlegrowers’ Association encouraged its
members to write personal letters to be included in the bimonthly newsletter and in the
letters, ranchers condemned many of these “powers-that-be” – often refusing to admit
35
The NMCGA also took a poll at their annual convention in 1953. The New Mexico cattle growers
agreed almost exactly with the ranchers in Colorado and Montana. Seven out of 23 ranchers wanted full
price supports on cattle, while 2 out 3 supported some kind of government assistance just short of full price
support. The group as a whole voted 65 % to 35% to take an official stand against full price supports and
to not convene a special convention to discuss the issue further. See Mortensen, In the Cause of Progress,
37.
36
Thanks to Karen Anderson for helping me to formulate my analysis.
337
ranchers’ tendency to promote the bust of good prices due to their individual
overproduction.37
Ranchers from all over Arizona entered into the debate, taking time to write 2-3
page hand-written letters that spoke of heartbreak, frustration, and fear. Those who
favored some government involvement often couched their positions in terms of wanting
to help the “little guy” stay in business. Don Anderson, who owned the 66 Ranch in
Globe, Arizona, with his wife Evelyn, wrote a passionate letter in late September, just as
the summer rains were drying up. He explained to Abbie Keith (and the readers of the
newsletter) that “all other costs are up and ours are down. We are in a damn poor
business and if the small ranchers are going to exist, they are going to have to have
[better prices].” He went on to suggest that the market was a cruel, unforgiving entity,
and that he had learned the hard way that “the cattle business is not based on how we live
with the other fellow...it is based on costs of products to live.” The only way to help
cattle ranchers, especially those who ran smaller numbers, survive was through “1
method, Price Support from our own government” (his emphasis).38
The proponents of government aid were a self-conscious lot. They feared what
their fellow ranchers would think of their position. Lest they be accused of being overly
“communistic” most of the authors chose to assert their independence and their “rugged
individualism,” and then proceeded to explain why aid did not usurp one’s sovereignty.
Doug Cumming wrote a letter “in favor of government aid” and explained that:
37
These letters were kept sporadically by Abbie Keith. The newsletter, a different publication than the
Cattlelog, has not been archived. Still, the letters in the Arizona Cattlegrowers’ Association Manuscript
Collection give excellent insight into the ideas of ranchers’ regarding the price support debate.
38
Don Anderson to Abbie Keith, 9 September 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
338
sure ranchers are an independent breed and perfectly capable of
standing on their own hind legs. They don’t have to have
government aid. For over twenty years, though, they have been
paying Uncle Sugar checks to help pay for price supports for
everything except cattle. Maybe the cattle industry should be
independent of the rest of the American economy; but it darned
sure isn’t, and the rest of the American economy has more
screwy props under it than a Salvadore Dali painting.39
Cumming, like the Andersons, was a small rancher whose own herd rarely numbered
above 200. Cumming included a postscript to his letter telling Keith that he was trying to
make a few extra bucks to offset low cattle prices by “soliciting business for the
Greenwalt Brothers trucking outfit.”40 Presumably, those ranchers who were weathering
the drought well and had animals to get to market would need a good trucking company.
Smaller ranchers, those who had less capital on hand, tended to take price slumps harder
than larger ranchers who had some cushion. It was the small ranchers who had to rely on
economic creativity to continue “in the business.”41
Cummings did not, however, blame large ranchers for growing and selling too
many bovines, rather he castigated the federal government for offering (and other
industries’ acceptance of) price supports.
Cumming’s letter, while illustrating the
position of a small owner/operator, also shows the ways in which ranchers utilized cow
talk in their musings about economic policy in order to avoid blaming one another in
public. In referring to ranchers collectively as a “breed” Cumming was able to suggest
39
Doug Cumming to Abbie Keith, 24 September 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection,
ASU, Tempe.
40
Ibid.
41
As noted in Chapter 3, during the 1950s and 1960s, it became more common for ranchwomen, daughters,
and younger sons to take on jobs in town or in the surrounding community. Less often, but still common
enough, were those male owner/operators, like Cumming, who would diversify their activities to add to the
family coffer.
339
his own fondness for and respect of ranchers as a cultural group while at the same taking
a position he knew would be unpopular with many of his “breed.” Ranchers, like
Cumming, who desired government help, probably experienced the hard times more
acutely than others. They certainly were the more economically savvy of the group
because they recognized themselves as occupying the unenviable position of being
caught in a cost-price squeeze.42
The issue was not solely class based, however. One of the most prominent
ranchers in New Mexico, Albert K. Mitchell, supported emergency cattle buying by the
federal government to aid the “deplorable” situation in which ranchers were finding
themselves in 1953. Some (including Abbie Keith) greeted Mitchell’s backing and the
support of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association of emergency price supports
(through the creation of an “artificial” demand by the government) with skepticism, but
Mitchell and the NMCGA stood strong arguing that they viewed “the current situation as
an emergency which has been created by sixteen years of New Deal political planning for
agriculture combined with a nation-wide drought situation.”43
The cause of the
emergency, according to Mitchell and the NMCGA, lay not in ranchers’ unwillingness to
cull their herds but in the bad “planning” of the federal government and rotten weather.
42
While it was true that cattle were not receiving government help through price supports, some federal
policies, like the tariffs discussed above and capital gains tax on breeding stock, did assist some ranchers.
In 1951, Congress allowed ranchers to claim the sale of breeding stock as capital gains and not income.
The legislation subsequently became enmeshed in court proceedings for several years, but by 1954, the
judicial system had ruled that ranchers could indeed claim the sale of any breeding stock as capital gains.
Ranchers would be loathe to view this as a “subsidy,” however, and, at any rate, it did nothing to
undermine the parity price supports of “basic” commodities, and it did little to shift the price cattle received
on the market. See Schlebecker, Cattle Raising, 206.
43
Horace H. Hening to Abbie Keith, 6 October 1953, Box 5 Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe. See also Albert K. Mitchell to Abbie Keith, 7 October 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript
Collection, ASU, Tempe.
340
Ranchers’ material experiences and subsequent cultural conversations about the
drought bore political and economic fruit when, in 1956, the federal government and
various state governments created a temporary relief package for drought-stricken cattle
folk. In both New Mexico and Arizona, the states where the drought was most onerous,
the cattle associations worked rigorously to convince the Congressional delegations that
they needed legislation to help relieve the “distressed conditions.” In the early years of
the southwestern drought (1952-1953), thanks to the lobbying efforts of the associations,
cattle ranchers received cheap feed, extended (and inexpensive) government credit, and
reduced freight rates on cattle and feed. In 1956, the assistance was not as liberal, but
both Arizona and New Mexico ultimately received a discount of $7.50 cwt on hay.
Ranchers could apply for relief through the USDA and receive the certificate for aid on
hay purchase. In Arizona, the railroads guaranteed one-half freight reduction on hay and
on cattle that were shipped to feed elsewhere and brought back to the original ranch.44
Small ranchers found the above program very helpful. Irven Taylor and Alvin
Tso who both ran small operations wrote to Abbie Keith to explain how critical it was
that they obtain feed during a year when they had experienced a winter, spring, and
summer without any appreciable moisture. Tso, a Navajo rancher in northern Arizona,
ran only 25 head and explained to Keith that “we (I and several other Navajo boys) are
running cattle in the Arizona Strip...the ranges are poor and dry and like every other
member says we are wondering how we’re going to pull through the long winter...we do
44
Ibid.
341
appreciate the work of the people who are making the drouth relief programs possible.”45
Clearly, Tso and Taylor would have agreed with those ranchers in the intermountain
West who favored some government assistance – even if they would not have supported
necessarily full price supports.46
Mrs. Jo Flieger, from Winkelman, Arizona, also agreed with the drought
assistance and wrote to her good friend Abbie Keith in October, 1956, to express her
position in “firm support” of price supports on all livestock. Flieger understood that if
“the government cannot put supports on all commodities” then it should remove them or
support all livestock. Flieger believed that “70 per cent of cattle producers want the Price
Support,” and she suspected that even those “Rugged Individuals so styled” would “sure
accept [price supports] in full acclaim” if they came forth. Flieger urged her fellow
ranchers to “wake up! We are living in an age of Organization and this old idea of
‘Rugged Individualism’ is gone like the buffalo from the plains.”47
Flieger’s reference to an “age of organization” was a historically situated
reference. During the Cold War, heightened fear of the Communist Menace and the
increasing amount of “organizing” on the part of “Pinkos” caused many Americans to
fear communality of any kind. Ranchers living in the American West experienced the
Cold War, through national defense, on an intimate level everyday. This was because,
45
Alvin C. Tso to Abbie Keith, 29 October 1956, Box 5, Folder 9, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe, Abbie Keith to Irven Taylor, 10 October 1956, Box 5, Folder 9, ACGA Manuscript Collection,
ASU, Tempe.
46
Interestingly, according to Robert Mortensen, the hay program ended up being a fiscal disaster for the
state of New Mexico. The state government pledged an additional $2.50 cwt for hay for ranchers so they
received an even $10 discount. The state did not figure correctly the number of ranchers who would use
the discount and so went into considerable debt. The state then asked ranchers to pay back the money
(which was not a stipulation in the original relief legislation). The ranchers won their court case and never
had to repay the money. Mortensen, In the Cause of Progress, 42-43.
47
Mrs. Jo Flieger to Abbie Keith, 13 October 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU.
342
perhaps more visibly than elsewhere in the United States, the Cold War physically
surrounded the intermountain West. Between World War II and the end of the Cold War,
the United States federal government erected 194 military bases in the intermountain
West states. This massive construction required a well-developed structure of support
including factories, laboratories, and service industries. According to historian Maria
Montoya, more than the economy was affected by the developments of the western
military-industrial complex. As she argues, a new landscape and an altered environment
resulted.48
A hegemonic rhetoric of anti-communism also surrounded westerners
convincing many of the necessity for the military build up in their own backyards. As
historian Timothy Chambless explains in his article on the linkages between positions of
pro-defense and anti-Communism, the West, more than other region in the United States,
experienced an unprecedented expansion of a military infrastructure that the government
justified in terms of defeating the Godless “enemy” of socialism.49 Ranchers were no
different from other westerners in their general support of national defense – couched as
it was in these cultural terms.
Unlike many Americans, however, ranchers’ fear of socialism did not lead them
toward unquestioning loyalty to the state.50
48
Questioning what they believed was a
Montoya. 9-27.
Chambless, “Pro-Defense, Pro-Growth.” See also Lynn Boyd Hinds, The Cold War as Rhetoric: The
Beginnings, 1945-1950 (New York: Praeger, 1991); Martin J. Medhurst, ed., Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy,
Metaphor, and Ideology (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil
Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
50
In his article on political rhetoric in the Cold War, Philip Wander argues that a culture of unquestioning
loyalty existed in America in the 1950s. Of course the McCarthy witch hunts supports Wander’s
suggestion. In this context, ranchers’ skepticism of the power of government seems less like reactionary
conservatism and more like liberal radicalism (or at the very least neo-liberalism). See Philip Wander,
"Political Rhetoric and the Un-American Tradition," in Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and
Ideology, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 191-192.
49
343
frightening increase in the power of the federal government, ranchers came to view
“socialistic” tendencies of those in power in America as one of the greatest enemies in
civilian life. Most ranchers, even those who championed government support, tended to
view any policy that smacked of government heavy-handedness as potentially “unAmerican” and subversive.
Those ranchers, who opposed price supports (and all sorts of federal government
controls, including ownership of grazing lands), utilized Cold War rhetoric more often
and more effectively than proponents of government support. In trying to convince their
fellow ranchers that government aid was dangerous, opponents of price supports used a
rhetoric of patriotism, Americanism, and anti-communism. Opponents tended to argue
that the drought of the 1950s did not constitute a “real” emergency and/or that temporary
help from the federal government had a nasty habit of becoming institutionalized and
therefore permanent.
Anti-price support ranchers hoped that in suggesting that
permanent government aid would undermine the democratic economy of America, they
could convince all ranchers that ranching, American style, meant independence from both
support and control by a centralized government.
Ranchers, therefore, seized the typical parlance of the time and defined
themselves (ironically) as “red”-blooded Americans whose contributions as free
enterprisers bolstered not just capitalism but democracy. The defense-powered growth in
the postwar West affected cattle ranchers deeply, but while ranchers remained critical of
many of those developments, they rarely questioned the necessity of fighting the Cold
51
War.
344
Not surprisingly, then, ranchers became quite adept at throwing about freezing
rhetoric that coldly denounced those who supported government assistance. Attaching a
peculiar nationalistic identity to the law of supply and demand, the opponents of
government subsidies claimed that “American” capitalism, based on a “Constitutional
right” to free enterprise, had made the United States the strongest nation in the world, but
that unrelenting increased government control of the economy, since the 1930s,
threatened to weaken the nation-state.
Indeed, the increasing regulations and
involvement of the federal government indicated for many ranchers that America was
edging toward socialism. K.L. Switzer vehemently argued against price supports because
he believed them to be a tool of socialistically-minded government employees. Switzer
worried that “the evidence before us of the last ten to fifteen years of Government
meddling in private enterprise” indicated that a “complete liquidation of the inherent
rights and privileges set forth in the Constitution” was underway as a result the
“encroachment of socialism.”52
The fear of Communism/socialism (ranchers usually conflated the two) was so
strong that it often overpowered the fear of a vacillating “free market.” The New Mexico
Cattlegrowers’ Association even went so far as to issue a “Special Resolution” in March,
1950, which urged its members to “hold to freedom” and to resist a government that
continued to insist on substituting “an artificial economy” for the economy on which
51
When the Cold War became hot in 1950, with America’s entry into the Korean War, many ranchers
became more skeptical of what America’s obligation should be in fighting communism abroad. But after
the conflict ended, the critical voices (which had been a minority anyway) fell away.
52
K.L. Switzer to Abbie Keith, 12 August 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
345
America had been founded. That original economy had flowered in freedom, according
to the NMCGA, but in 1950 was at risk of becoming a “completely socialized state.”53
Three years later, the NMCGA would support government buy-out of cattle to
relieve the “emergency” drought situation. Even at the same 1950 convention, the
NMCGA resolved to continue to ask the United States federal government to assist the
central government of Mexico in its efforts to suppress the outbreak of Foot and Mouth
Disease. Like other intermountain West associations, the New Mexico cattlegrowers also
supported more stringent import tariffs (on beef and hides) and legislation that would
limit the amount of beef imports allowed on the domestic market. Three years earlier, in
1947, ranchers across the West had celebrated gleefully the death of a proposed treaty
which would have allowed Argentine beef to be sold in the United States.54 At the same
time, ranchers argued for less restraint in export laws and hoped the federal government
would assist them in opening global markets for beef. Ranchers also accepted untold
millions of dollars in research and development efforts from the United State
Departments of Agriculture and Interior. Ranchers’ “independence” and the existence of
a market free of government “intervention” was a myth, but it was a deeply compelling
myth that ranchers continually recycled in order to bolster their belief that government
intrusion meant sacrificing not just one’s personal economic freedom but the health of
America itself.55
53
New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association, March 1950, "Special Resolution," Box 3, Folder 5, George F.
Ellis Papers, UNM, Albuquerque.
54
American Cattle Producer, 28, (May 1947), 7.
55
Ibid. See also Dan Hanson, "Hat Creek Rancher Replies to Budd Letter," Cow Country June 15, 1956,
18-19.
346
Whether they supported or opposed price supports in the early 1950s, most
ranchers continued to attempt to convince themselves and others that they were one of the
few industries who continually had rejected help except in times of emergency. This
fabrication, of course, stemmed from the parable of rugged individualism that ranchers
told themselves routinely through various cultural venues (e.g. their collective memory
productions). In order to perpetuate the legend of rugged individualism, ranchers pointed
toward their industry ancestors’ similar refusal of aid. Frank Gyberg, of the ZA Ranch in
Cornville, Arizona, was shocked that one of his good friends, Jim Smith, had come out in
favor of price supports because Smith’s own family would have “rather been shot than
helped.”
Gyberg explained to Abbie Keith, “...I have always liked Jim – altho a
Democrat I never held it against him since his forebears from time immemorial...carried
the same brand...[but] I was to say the least shocked and dumbfounded when that Old
Stalwart... came out for price supports...”56 Ranchers such as Gyberg prided themselves
on being connected to the generation of pioneers who withstood hardship without
accepting “help.”
They argued that, except for a brief interlude during the Great
Depression when the federal government had stepped in and purchased cattle at
artificially high prices, they had not accepted government relief because they refused to
acknowledge the assistance the cattle industry received through protective tariffs,
research and development, advantageous trade negotiations, railroad regulation, and
public domain land giveaways. Connecting “rugged individualism” to their industry
ancestors allowed more than one rancher to argue that ranchers, who supported
56
Frank A. Gyberg to Abbie Keith, 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
347
government aid, were turning their back on the tradition of American ranching. Harriett
(Mrs. Dean) Curry argued in a letter to members of Congress that “the old time cattleman
is a rugged individual who expects and prepares for disaster and has gone broke more
than once without yelling ‘Uncle.’”57 Curry and other opponents of government
involvement in the economy implied that anyone who supported agricultural policy,
which overtly subsidized the “private” enterprise system, was a turncoat who cried
“Uncle.” The implication, of course, was that the “uncle” to whom ranchers called might
be Uncle Sam, but he might also be “Uncle Joe Stalin.”
The debates over government intervention and price supports in the early 1950s
illustrate a schism among ranchers. Nevertheless, ranchers downplayed the ideological
tension generated through their arguments by utilizing and emphasizing what they had in
common with one another even as they debated. In all of the correspondence and
publications, ranchers insisted on their commonalities with one another by stressing that
all “grass root ranchers” experienced private indebtedness, high prices of feed, the effects
of drought, the joy of green grass, and the thrill of selling one’s cattle for decent prices.
Ranchers casually ended their letters to one another with reports of the weather,
discussions of current cattle prices, or updates on the state of the range in their locale.
These may seem like trivial points, but these casual references to a “way of life” aided
ranchers in maintaining connections with one another even as they heatedly debated ideas
about the functioning of the market. Ranchers agreed to disagree because they were all,
essentially, on the same side – they were “Americans,” “westerners,” “businessmen,”
57
Harriett Curry to Abbie Keith, 10 July 1953, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
348
and, most importantly, “ranchers.” What is most interesting in ranchers’ discourse about
the functioning of the “market,” then, is not so much their varied ideological positions,
but rather the language they used to keep that variety in check.
Ranchers mobilized symbolic phraseology as a kind of argot to communicate with
one another about their positions. The lingo ranchers used constituted a cultural language
that allowed them to create community even as they quarreled over agricultural policy.
Recall some of the examples of correspondence already discussed above. Rancher F.A.
Gyberg had referred to Jim Smith’s “forebears” carrying the “brand” of Democrat. Jo
Flieger suggested that any rancher who had “lived out of the greasy sack” (meaning had
been impoverished and lived through hard times) would understand how it felt to need
help (and she implied most ranchers had lived out of a greasy sack at some point). Don
Anderson wanted ranchers to realize that producers of other commodities accepted
subsidization and that until subsidies stopped for everyone, ranchers would be “stepped
on and kicked about.” It was time, Anderson explained, that ranchers “either get on the
horse or get off.”
Even Jim Smith used analogies that were idiomatic of ranching to make his point.
In his address to the Greenlee County Cattle Growers’ Association, during the wearisome
month of August, 1953, just as ranchers were losing hope that monsoonal moisture would
arrive, Smith explained that riding the uncontrolled law of supply and demand (he made
no mention as to the law’s nationality) was “like riding a wild bronco, without saddle
bridle or surcingle.” Continuing the horse analogy that so many ranchers used, Smith
wondered why ranchers would ever “let these powerful forces go unbridled in boom and
349
bust cycles to the periodic destruction of those who should be their masters.” “Supply
and demand,” Smith argued, “might be a good horse, but don’t let him take us to
destruction.”58 Smith directly linked supply and demand to a “natural” animal – the
horse – as he also exerted the idea of control over nature, so prevalent in ranch culture.
Any good rancher, Smith seemed to imply, would never let a wild horse (i.e. supply and
demand) take him/her for a ride without trying to break it. Even Smith’s opponents
shared the idea that capitalist laws were “natural.” In 1947, Horace Hening, editor of The
New Mexico Stockman, borrowed from the Kansas City Daily Drovers Telegram (a
publication aimed at ranchers and cattle feeders) the following cartoon:
Figure 22 Price support cartoon, 1949
Despite the fact that six years separated Hening and Smith, they both agreed that supply
and demand had a certain “naturalness” about it. Still, they disagreed adamantly on what
the best course of action was. Hening believed that the price-fixing advocates would
upset the balance of nature, while Smith argued that to allow economy to remain
unregulated would mean ranchers allowed “nature” to get the better of them.
58
Jim Smith, “Speech before the Greenlee County Cattle Growers Association,” August 29, 1953, Box 5,
Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
350
The division created within the ranching community over issues of the market
was not unimportant, but it did not divide permanently the collective group of ranchers.
Two of the most important ways that ranchers materially bridged the ideological divides
within their community were the creation of market space wherein they centered cows
and their successful creation of beef cattle, and the diverse and intense labor they
conducted for beef promotion.
Ranchers continued to meet in their state conventions in increasing numbers
throughout the 1950s, and attendance at all association events in each state increased
steadily. In addition to continuing to attend their conventions and meetings, however,
ranchers also used the “country sales” on local/regional ranches to come together
collectively to engage in cow talk and render the market divide less divisive. It was in
1947 that Con Warren held one of these sales in the Deer Lodge Valley of Montana. Con
Warren, as you will recall, was the grandson of the famous cattle baron Conrad Kohrs,
and he must have awakened full of excitement on the autumn morning in 1947, for he
was about to conduct his first purebred sale. Con had been anticipating his first sale on
the ranch for years. After three years at University of Virginia, Con decided that in spite
of a flair for writing, he wanted to return to the Deer Lodge valley and work for his
grandfather’s corporation.59 For two years, Con worked on the ranch and in 1932, he
began an eight-year stint as the manager of the operation. In 1940, he decided to apply
for a $100,000 loan to buy the ranch outright. As manager of the Kohrs ranch, Con had
59
The Conrad Kohrs Company Ranch was part of the Conrad Kohrs Company which had been run by
family members, including Con’s stepfather Frank Bogart, since Conrad Kohrs’ death in 1920.
351
begun raising a registered herd of Hereford cattle, and it was the offspring of this herd
that he intended to sell at the 1947 sale.
In order to publicize the sale, he mailed hundreds (if not thousands) of postcards
to prospective buyers all over the country. He and his wife Nell answered countless
inquiries from prospective buyers.
He placed advertisements in stockgrowers’
association publications like the Western Livestock Journal and The Montana
Stockgrower. He and his hired hands worked diligently with the cattle to get them ready
to look their physical best for the sale and when it was all said and done, Con and the
Conrad Kohrs Ranch Company had profited $68,000 gross from the sale of his cattle.60
The kind of sale Con hosted on that autumn day in 1947 was quite common
throughout cattle country during the postwar years.
In livestock towns across the
intermountain West and on purebred ranches in every state, men, women, and often
children attended these kinds of sales. Attending a sale offered the opportunity for cattle
folk to come together to celebrate their ecological labor which had culminated directly in
a product for market. These kinds of sales should not be mistaken for the selling of steers
for slaughter. Pure-bred bull sales existed, not to sell bulls to the certain death of the
feedlots and slaughter houses, but rather to sell bulls to ranchers who would breed the
bulls, ultimately creating new life. This is not a minor point. The kinds of sales which
Con staged in 1947, celebrated the beauty, strength, and endurance of a particular genetic
line of cattle. Ultimately, those genetics might result in the selling of cattle to slaughter,
but this genetic market had a slightly different emphasis than a sale for slaughter would
60
National Park Service, “Biography,” Conrad K. Warren Papers, GKNHS, Deer Lodge, Montana.
352
have had. Con and his workers would spend hours beautifying the cattle that would be
ritualistically on display. Con and the cowboys would oil hooves, brush tails, and
condition the bull’s hair all in the anticipation of selling bulls to buyers and impressing
other members of the cattle community. Hosting and attending such an event was a
crucial part of ranchers’ cultural celebration because, like the valuation of cow work in
ranching’s social world of production, the sales represented the competency of ranchers
as ranchers.61
Con Warren’s cattle sale then could seem, on the surface, deceptively simple. It
was, generally speaking, a capitalist transaction -- a producer selling a product to a
consumer. But the sale was much more than that. The sale provided a space where the
bodies of cattle and ranchers mingled in an economic dance which celebrated a culture of
beef production. In inviting others who were “in the business” to gaze upon the products
of the unseen labor that went into embodying cows, Con asserted both a laborer and a
capitalist identity. During the act of marketing the cows, Con demonstrated knowledge
of both his cows and of the larger world of the market. As ranchers from all over the
intermountain West states attended the sale, they, as consumers of the product engaged
with one another and with Con in discussions about prices, the quality of Warren cattle,
and the vigor of the industry overall. These discussions united the market participants in
a culture of commodification and were yet another form of cow talk.
61
I use the term “cows” generally here. Warren was selling bulls, not cows. But ranchers themselves often
referred to a group of cattle as “cows” ignoring the sex-typing of cows as female, bulls as males, etc.
353
The economy in which ranchers engaged was far more than simply a fiscal
undertaking, because ranchers used the culture of capitalism to build their collectivities.62
As ranchers rallied around their commodities, they identified as entrepreneurs engaged in
an enterprise that was unique and superior to all other businesses. Accepting their
exceptionalism led them to believe that they could understand one another in ways
“outsiders” never could. The competitive economy of capitalistic agriculture allowed
ranchers to create a cultural affinity with one another, through the buying and selling of
their commodities, that they could and did use in their political endeavors.
The annual sales of A.C. Bayers of Twin Bridges, Montana, serve as another
wonderful example of a place in which ranchers came together to witness the fruits of
their labor as producers and to engage in conversations about their businesses. Bayers
raised purebred Hereford cattle and in 1946, he took out a two-page advertisement in The
Montana Stockgrower to publicize his upcoming fall sale. Bayers explained in his
advertisement that the Bayers Hereford Ranch recently had built a new sale pavilion and
show barn. According to Bayers, this structure would “give...the finest sale set up in
Montana. Room for 100 bulls tied at the halter. Room and seats for 600-700 spectators.
Rest rooms, lounge rooms and dining room will be provided.”63 Bayers’ decision to
build the pavilion (and Con’s decision to build a permanent sale barn in 1954) point to
the increased role sales played not only in the economic transactions of cattle-buying, but
62
Donald Worster in his seminal work, Dust Bowl, suggested that a culture of capitalism was at fault for
the disaster of the southern plains in the 1930s. Here I borrow this idea of a “culture” of capitalism, and
while I appreciate Worster’s suggestion of the inherently destructive mindset such a culture induces
(particularly for environmental actions), ranchers used the culture constructively, namely to build their
collectivities.
63
A.C. Bayers, "Bayers Hereford Ranch: Spring News Letter," Montana Stockman, May 1946.
354
in the social and cultural aspects of ranching as well. “Spectators” (as opposed to buyers)
could come to the ranch, observe over 100 bulls and then adjourn to the lounge and
dining rooms to discuss the product of the rancher’s labor.
Bayers’ ad described how the combination of environment and labor had
culminated in the impressive development of his cattle. He explained that the winter of
1945/46 had been mild and had allowed the cattle to winter well (of course, he made no
suggestion that luck had anything to do with his success as a rancher). In fact, the
weather had, “with...little loss,” enabled his pastures to be “covered with little dandies.”64
These “dandies” were 86 bull calves, and Bayers, of course, presumed that ranchers
would come to his sale barn and purchase his calves. He also anticipated that even those
onlookers who bought nothing would consume a little piece of ranching tradition. The
genetic strains of the cattle connected Bayers to the purebred blood lines owned by other
ranchers across the region (and in some cases the globe) and the buyers, as well as the
spectators, shared in the connections created through the generation of this economic
product. In creating a comfortable space for ranch families and in making the sale an
entertainment event, Bayers certainly gathered additional support for his business, but in
showing the genetic relationship among the purebred cows, he also reinforced a sense of
kinship among ranchers themselves.
That sense of economic kinship seeped out into the marketplace of the sale, (the
barn and the yard) as well simply because, at least visually, the sale space was a
democratic area. Anyone could attend the sales. In the southwest, Hispanic hired hands
64
Ibid.
355
mingled with the Anglo wives of wealthy cattle ranchers and the owners of smaller
operations. In theory, anyway, all who attended could and would discuss the commodity
being paraded before them at the sale. Take, for example, the photographs of two
different sales below.
Figure 23 Livestock market space, 1950s
At the Livestock Exposition in Chicago, at which the picture on the left was taken, and a
local Wyoming sale, at which the picture on the right was taken, not all could afford to
buy the calves, bulls, or cows, but all could afford to look.65 Note how the cow is the
center of both photos and how the bleachers are not separated in any socioeconomic way.
Additionally, it is a woman who is being congratulated for her cow, suggesting, at least
visually, that market spaces could include women fully.
In some ways, then,
socioeconomic divisions could be ameliorated through the very act of gazing upon the
cattle. Ranchers used this commonality of experience in the market space to overcome
65
Photos from WSGA Papers, Box 190, Folder 14, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming,
Laramie.
356
economic tensions by reporting the events at the sales without mention of conflicts. The
democratic space of the sales, therefore, reappeared in print in the association
publications after the fact. Through this cultural hegemonic rendering of the market as
cooperative and communal, ranchers interpreted a competitive enterprise which might
have polarized their political coalition irreparably as a positive, unifying experience.
In addition to physically attending and celebrating cattle sales, ranchers also
publicly recognized their economic unity through announcements in association
publications and letters to one another. All association publications contained “market”
columns announcing sales, prices, and other events of interest to ranchers.
In the
Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association’s Cow Country the “Cattleman’s Calendar” ran
throughout the postwar decades and announced private sales as well as larger marketing
opportunities (such as sales at public auctions).66 The editors included news of specific
sales near the market columns. In June, 1956, for example, Oda Mason reported to Cow
Country that he had sold “29 head of two-year-old purebred bulls to Leeland Grieve of
Rawlins.”67 Grieve explained that the bulls would be split between his two ranches.
While this exchange occurred between two large landowners, who owned wealthy cattle
operations, the reporting of the transaction in the association publication allowed ranchers
all across the state, who worked on ranches of all sizes, to share in the good news of a
successful sale and to be aware of the quality of the cattle on the two ranches. While the
story had a certain advertising air about it, the event was not just newsworthy because of
66
"Cattleman's Calendar," Cow Country June 15, 1956, 19. See also "Reviewing the November Market,"
The Montana Stockgrower December, 1961, 30; "Market News," The Montana Stockgrower March, 1963,
26-27.
67
Ibid.
357
the capital that exchanged hands (in fact the announcement did not even mention the
price of the sale) or because of the potential money to be made, but was significant as
well for ranchers because of its message of achievement. In 1956, as Keith responded to
Alvin Tso, the Navajo rancher on the Arizona Strip, she urged him to send in “news”
from his part of the state and explained that other ranchers would also be interested to
know if he sold his “winter calves or yearlings.”68 This sharing of information about the
marketing of cows allowed ranchers to keep tabs not only on one another’s progress, but
also on the health of the industry more generally.69
Reading of other ranchers’ success could inspire ranchers to dream of possibilities
for their own accomplishment, but perhaps more importantly, it suggested that the
industry more broadly was healthy and thriving. In July, 1954, Mrs. Howard Grounds
wrote from the WF Cattle Company in Kingman, Arizona, to inform Abbie Keith of the
happiness she felt when reading about a neighbor’s successful sales. Grounds explained
that “the good news for one person in the cattle business makes us all feel his luck and
bad news makes us all feel bad. Good or bad we like the news of fellow cattlemen.”70
Later in 1956, R.H. Bibelot, the owner/operator of the Yerba Buena Ranch in Nogales,
Arizona, wrote to Keith to boast that he had sold 24 Santa Gerturdis bulls to a Mexican
68
Abbie Keith to Alvin Tso, 17 September 1955, Box 5, Folder 9, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
69
In New Mexico, for example, news of the comings and goings of ranchers, their land, and their cattle
made regular appearances in the “News Notes of Interest to Southwestern Livestock Growers” section of
The New Mexico Stockman. In 1947, for example, the editors of the Stockman informed interested readers
that “Rutherford Brothers of Folsom, New Mexico, have shipped 93 cars of steers from Union county to
Ortea, California.” Here ranchers could read of the Rutherford’s successful sale and could, perhaps, dream
of their own coming day of marketing their cows. See “News Notes of Interest to Southwestern Livestock
Growers,” The New Mexico Stockman, December, 1947, 88.
70
Mrs. Howard Grounds to Abbie Keith, 17 July 1954, Box 5, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript Collection,
ASU, Tempe.
358
national rancher, “Senor Ernesto Elias of Sonora.” Bibolet enjoyed the visit of Elias and
urged Arizona ranchers to “take care” of the Mexican ranchers as they were “not only
good customers, but good neighbors.”71
The marketing of commodities helped ranchers not only to create capital and
maintain their economic solvency; it also reinforced a broader culture rooted in an ethos
of production. The cattle being sold during the postwar years, therefore, were at the very
center of ranchers’ identities, because the production of bovine products enabled not only
the economic but also the cultural existence of ranchers. While the sales provided an
opportunity for ranchers to compete with one another in a market-driven capitalist
enterprise, they also provided an occasion during which ranchers shared in a collective
identity of production and a collective culture of ranching, which would have been
reassuring in hard times, such as the mid-1950s. Sales, the physical act of selling one’s
cattle at a market location, helped ranchers surmount, through reassuring spectacle, what
might otherwise have been a profoundly alienating capitalist experience.
Ranchers also surmounted their disagreements on government interventions in the
economy and alleviated the enmity that resulted from the presence of competitive issues
such as theft by supporting and conducting beef promotion. Beef promotion unified
ranchers because it advanced the one market topic on which all ranchers could agree –
consumption of beef. Ranchers used consumption of beef and the increase of demand for
beef far more than any other market topic to create camaraderie within the livestock
community. Both K.L. Switzer and Albert K. Mitchell, two ranchers on opposite sides of
71
R.H. Bibolet to Abbie Keith, 5 November 1956, Box 5, Folder 4, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU,
Tempe.
359
the price support fence, agreed that ranches should be able “to eat their way out” of the
poor price situation.72 Ranchers’ commitment to the “law” of supply and demand led
them to believe, as Switzer explained, that they ultimately needed only “a concerted
advertising campaign designed to reach every United States citizen, impressing on him
the need for good fresh beef in his daily diet, for both nutritional value and the downright
pleasure of a good steak.”73
Instead of aiming their beef promotion activities solely toward male citizens, as
Switzer would have them do, however, ranchwomen, the ones who largely assumed
control of beef promotion at the local level in range country, targeted both men and
women. Despite their decision to aim beef promotion at both genders, ranchwomen
clearly understood that their efforts must be gender specific. They understood that all
people consumed beef, but that their clever advertising needed to target men and women
with different messages. In the case of the “typical” middle class American housewife,
the beef promotion message needed to convince women to care selflessly for their
families through consumptive buying. In the case of the “typical” masculine American
man, ranchwomen’s advertising needed to explain the benefits of ingesting protein-laden
food. Just as it colored the social world of production on ranches, then, gender also
snuck into the discussions about and activities related to increasing beef consumption.
Cowbelles’ promotion, then, was not a radically feminist activity. Instead it utilized ideas
about the hegemonic proprietary roles of the two genders to sell t-bones and unite
ranchers yet again in a strangely compartmentalized commonality.
72
73
Mitchell to Keith.
Switzer to Keith.
360
Ranchwomen’s beef promotion activities occurred generally within the
organizational infrastructure of the Cowbelles, the “women’s auxiliary” of the
cattlegrowers associations. The Cowbelles organized in 1939 in Douglas, Arizona, in
order to create social opportunities for the cattle men and women in Cochise county. In
addition to engaging in social activities, however, the Cowbelles (both state and local
chapters) in all five states took up the mantle of beef promotion within industry circles.
I say “took up the mantle” because concerted beef/meat promotion had existed
formally since 1922. Agriculturalists and legislators formed the National Livestock and
Meat Board in 1922 to promote all red meats: beef, lamb, and pork. The existence of the
Board came legally through federal legislation which established a voluntary check-off to
fund the Board. Cattle ranchers, for example, voluntarily agreed to pay 5 cents per
carload of cattle (a carload equaled approximately 25 head, which meant the cost was
about two one hundredths of a cent per head). The assessment rate grew to a penny per
head in 1931, to 2 cents per head in 1953, and to 3 cents in 1962. In 1955, just as the
Cowbelles’ efforts really picked up steam, the American National Livestock Association
decided to support legislation to create a National Beef Council (NBC). Cattle ranchers
supported having their own promotional body because they feared losing business to the
“other” meats. The NBC (1955-1963) made repeated attempts to form a legislated checkoff all of which failed. In 1963, the National Livestock and Meat Board founded the Beef
Industry Council (1963-1996) to promote beef and to serve as the headquarters of the
federation of state beef councils. The earliest formation of a state beef council was in
California in 1954. The intermountain West states set up similar councils, but not until
361
the 1970s (with the exception of Montana which started its beef council in 1954). In
1986, the United States Congress made the check-off for beef promotion mandatory if the
majority of producers approved of it through a referendum vote at the state level. That
referendum passed two year later and now the 1$/head is mandatory in every state.74
Beef promotion, therefore, was not new in the United States in the 1940s, 1950s, and
1960s, but ranchwomen’s responsibility for much of the promotional effort was new.
Into this historical context, then, stepped the newly organized ranchwomen.
In the postwar years, Cowbelle chapters began popping up in all of the
intermountain West states.
Despite the organization’s founding on a local level in
Arizona, Wyoming actually became the first state to create a state-wide Cowbelle
organization, which they did in 1940. The Colorado Cowbelles organized in Alamosa,
Colorado, in 1941, while the Montana women came on-line in 1952. In that same year,
the movement became nationwide when the American National Cowbelles organized.
Last but not least, the New Mexico Cowbelles organized in 1957.
Cowbelles’ beef promotion did not just sell beef, however, but also soothed the
strains the market put on rancher unity and provided a space for a group of rural women
to come together in spite of distance. By the early 1950s, as Cowbelle Joyce Mercer
74
My thanks to Steve Baratt at the Cattlemen’s Beef Board for helping me to ferret out this obscure history.
Author has personal correspondence with Baratt. Montana’s Beef Council was the earliest in the
intermountain West forming in 1954. The Wyoming Beef Council began in 1971. For information on
Colorado’s Beef Council see http://www.cobeef.com/cbcoverview.htm (accessed 9/7/04). Arizona created
its beef council in 1970, and New Mexico’s arrived nine years later. See
http://www.arizonabeef.org/(accessed 9/7/04). For an overall history of beef promotion see Charles E.
Ball, Building the Beef Industry: A Century of Commitment 1898 - 1998 (Unknown: National Cattlemen's
Foundation, 1998).
75
explained, the Cowbelles intended “to speak up for women on the ranches.”
362
The best
way to do this, the Cowbelles believed, was to insert themselves into the public discourse
about supply and demand. Ranchwomen’s labor identities already were unique in that
they blended the reproductive with the productive. In similar ways, as the Cowbelles
organized around the issue of beef promotion, they reconceptualized the relationship
between production and consumption.
In their efforts to bring their economic products before a consuming public
through gendered advertising, the Cowbelles also bridged the divide between the public
and private – between their own private lives as ranchers and the broader non-ranching
public and also between the insider ranch community and the increasingly hostile
outsider society. In addition to promoting beef, therefore, the Cowbelle organization
came to represent a venue through which cattlewomen could help cattle folk all across the
West bolster their collective identity as ranchers and through which the women
themselves could embrace their unique identities as rural women.
Most Cowbelles understood their work culture as extending beyond the walls of
the ranch house and as being located in an ethos of production. These are women who
identified themselves as being involved intimately with the capitalist exchange of goods
and services essential to the industry. The one market arena, however, that they believed
themselves more qualified to affect than others was beef promotion, and they saw this as
a fitting project for their group, because of the gendered aspects of food. As women,
75
Eulalia Bourne, “Kids and Cows,” Arizona Cattlelog October 1951, 6.
363
Cowbelles believed themselves uniquely positioned to speak to other women about the
consumption and preparation of beef.
Cowbelle publicity stunts were cultural productions that provide insight not only
into the ways in Cowbelles believed beef promotion should be communicated publicly,
but also about their own assumptions about their private lives. More specifically, the
Cowbelles’ publicity campaigns illustrate well their gendered approach to advertising
beef even as they retained their own producerist identities. The 1955 campaign of “’Lil
Dudette,” created by the Arizona Cowbelles, serves as a perfect example. In that year,
Arizonans would have seen an ample-bosomed, blond caricature named Lil’ Dudette
everywhere. This Marilyn Monroe-like figure would have welcomed them at the Arizona
State Fair, spoken to them from the pages of magazines and newspapers, hailed to them
from clothing labels, and greeted them at the meat counters in their local grocery stores.
In that same year Lil’ Dudette became the mascot for the Arizona Cowbelles. Lil’
Dudette came to the ranchwomen’s group courtesy of Reg Manning, “Arizona’s
renowned caricaturist.”
Manning had created Dudette for the Prescott Sportswear
Manufacturing Company which used her on the label of their “very popular western
shorts.” From there, Lil’ Dudette was “loaned” to the Arizona Cowbelles for use in their
beef promotion campaigns. From her inception in Manning’s mind, Dudette was meant
to promote the consumption of westernized living. In addition to selling western shorts
which looked cute with boots, Dudette also advertised the Arizona State Fair, the
quintessential promotional venue of western living – Arizona style.
364
Figure 24 Lil’ Dudette, Arizona Cattlelog, March 1955
The Cowbelles utilized Lil’ Dudette to promote the product that enabled their day-to-day
economic viability – namely beef cattle -- and her slogan, “Lil’ Dudette– Eats Beef – You
Bet – and so must you,” sent a seemingly simple message.76 Yet Lil’ Dudette, with her
blond hair, cowboy-like accoutrements, and sexy short shorts, was anything but simple.
Like the Cowbelles themselves, Lil’ Dudette capitalized on the symbolic power of rural,
white womanhood while simultaneously promoting a particularly sexualized and
gendered image of beef and women.
Sensing that Lil’ Dudette did not represent adequately the complexity of their
cultural way of life, however, the Cowbelles decided to ground the image of Lil’ Dudette
in someone who represented more accurately their collective experiences as
ranchwomen. In November, 1955, they chose Connie Cook to fill that role. Like Lil’
Dudette, Connie Cook was an Anglo woman who was “charming,” “slender,” and had
“natural taffy-colored hair.” Unlike Dudette, Cook was more than an overly sexualized
image. Cook, with her husband, ran the large Cook ranch in southeastern Arizona, was
76
Lil’ Dudette ads in Arizona Cattlelog, March 1955, 35-52. The image of Lil’ Dudette consuming a
hamburger appeared on page 1 of the Arizona Cattlelog in the same year and also began turning up in other
media across the state. See for example, The Bisbee Daily Review, October 30, 1955, 1.
365
an accomplished horsewoman, active Cowbelle member, and committed member of the
ranching industry (in 1955, she was the secretary of the Cochise-Graham Cattle Growers
Association). Cook was feminine and domestic, but she also rode a horse like few others,
supported a multi-generational Arizona ranching family, and often flew in the family’s
plane to survey the range on her ranch.
Figure 25 Connie Cook posing as Lil’ Dudette near the family plane
Connie Cook was Lil’ Dudette but a whole lot more, and she represents perfectly the
ways in which ranchwomen refused to separate the spheres of consumption and
production in their own lives.77
As the choice for Cook to play the real Dudette illustrates, members of the
Cowbelles possessed the typical rancher identity as business people and therefore could
not separate the two spheres of the market (production and consumption). In Montana, a
popular Cowbelle poem read thusly:
“Happiness is Doing Our Thing”
Calling the vet.
Doing the bookwork
Writing the letters
77
Elizabeth Johnson, "Four Generations of Cooks: In the Cattle Business at Willcox since 1893," Arizona
Cattlelog November, 1955, 16. Connie Cook also made headlines in Arizona. See for example, Bisbee
Daily Review, January, 1956, 1.
366
Being the extra hired man
Cooking for branding crews
Rushing to town for repairs
Warming milk for baby calves
Participating in community affairs
Learning to operate complicated machinery
Spending hours in the saddle checking cattle...And cooking, cooking, COOKING!!!78
For the Montana Cowbelles producing labor in the home (cooking), engaging in outdoor
ranch work wherever necessary (being the extra hired man), and participating in
community affairs all culminated in their identities as happy, albeit probably exhausted,
ranchwomen. Formal Cowbelle culture echoed well the professional producer identity
apparent in the poem.
For example Nel Cooper, during her infamous Arizona
membership roundups, was known to ask incredulously, “Golly gals, don’t you know
Cowbelles
isn’t
just
another
woman’s
club.
It’s
a
serious
business
organization…[through membership, you’ll have] the privilege of being allied with the
grandest herd [note the cow talk!] of women you could find the world over.”79 Utilizing
cow talk, Cooper urged the women to recognize their roles as ranch businesswomen.
This identity as a “serious business” folk became more and more essential to the
Cowbelle organization as the 1950s progressed, because the group began to understand
the need to branch out from purely social into more professional spheres in order to be
better positioned to improve public relations between the cattle industry and the publicat-large. The Cowbelles came to realize in the postwar decades that they through a
sacrifice (at least somewhat) of their privacy they could bettering the public economic
viability of the industry as a whole.
78
79
Unknown, "Reviewing the November Market," The Montana Stockgrower December, 1961.
Accomazzo, Cowbelles, 17.
367
Cowbelles’ professionalism, then, manifested itself in beef promotion and the
activities in which they engaged allowed the Cowbelles to assert a public presence, but
this assertion was not uncomplicated. While the Cowbelles threw themselves publicly
into beef promotion through images like Lil’ Dudette, which targeted female consumers,
the Cowbelles maintained for themselves, privately, a producer identity, as the poem
above suggests. The existence of Lil’ Dudette and the personification of the image in
Connie Cook reveal the tensions that existed for the Cowbelles as they sought to promote
consumption while simultaneously identifying as producers.
Both Lil’ Dudette and Connie Cook were tied intimately to the industry, but Lil’
Dudette symbolized a culturally specific icon whose primary fulfillment and identity
came not from productive activities in the workplace, but rather from purchasing and
consuming goods (e.g. hamburgers). We never see Lil’ Dudette producing a cow, only
consuming one, which positions her as a member of a particular class of people doing a
particular kind of labor. Furthermore, Dudette consumes in sexually revealing short
shorts that would have been inhibiting for real ranchwomen. In using Dudette, the
Cowbelles expected to capitalize on that aspect of 1950s symbolic white womanhood,
and they did so by playing on their own hegemonic notions of male heterosexuality and
women’s desires.
As an advertising spokes “person,” the Cowbelles believed that
Dudette, with her ample bosom, thin waist, tight clothing, and bare, shapely legs, would
be consumed by men (who would find her erotically attractive) and women (who would
long to look just like her). Having “bought” Dudette, they would also buy beef.
368
Lil’ Dudette fit well with one of the prevailing 1950s gender ideals for women
which held that “true” women gained their primary fulfillment through the purchase and
consumption of goods.80 She did not, however, fit well with the Cowbelles’ own notions
of themselves as producers.81 The existence of Connie Cook reveals that the Cowbelles
hopes for abundant consumption of the image of Lil’ Dudette and their beef products
were fraught with irony. The real Dudette did more than consume the hamburger; she
performed tasks which helped to produce the burger.
According to the article
announcing the real live Lil’ Dudette, Connie Cook could round up cattle on horseback,
raise two daughters who were “making the rodeo hands sit up and take notice,” promote
the hamburger, and contribute to the industry to which she owed it all.82 Dudette, on the
80
For interesting and important discussions of the gendered ideals of the 1950s and women’s responses to
those ideals see Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History (New York: HarperCollins Publishers,
1993); Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950’s (Boston: Twayne, 1984);
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books,
1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Leila Rupp, editor., Survival in the Doldrums: The
American Women’s Rights Movement 1945-1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
81
There has been interesting work done on rural women’s producerist identities and their relationships with
consumption. The country life movement of the early twentieth century encouraged rural women to invest
in the latest “modern” technology so that their quality of life would better match the standards set by
middle class progressive reformers. For an interesting look at this see Neth, Preserving the Family Farm,
and Lynne Curry, Modern Mothers in the Heartland: Gender, Health, and Progress in Illinois, 1900-1930
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). For a broader look at the marketing of technology
consumption to women see James Williams, "Getting Housewives the Electric Message: Gender and
Energy Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century," in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and
Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Williams argues that
the advertisers tried to convince women that their lives would be more complete (and easier) if they
consumed electric appliances (such as electric irons). These messages targeted both rural and urban
women, but few rural women could afford to entertain seriously the thought of electrification until after the
1930s. For discussions on the kinds of goods farm women bought most willingly, see Jellison, Entitled to
Power. For more general studies on consumption in the United States see T.J. Jackson, ed., The Culture
Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983);
Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999);
Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of
Consumer Culture (New York: Routeledge, 1995).
82
Elizabeth Johnson, “Four Generations of Cooks: In the Cattle Business at Willcox since 1893,” Arizona
Cattlelog November 1955, 10-17. Apparently, Connie Cook, starring as Lil Dudette, made a film
369
other hand, just looked sexy and consumed (as the Cowbelles suspected most urban,
housewives did).
As early as 1941, ranchwomen engaged in trying to stimulate demand for beef
and they formulated their message toward the audience they believed they needed to
reach most – namely the “typical” housewife. This decision to stereotype women as
consumers meant forgetting a discussion of ranchwomen’s own role in the production of
beef and centering on the average woman’s purchase and preparation of beef for the men
in their lives. In the remote Plateau Valley in western Colorado, eight women gathered
and dreamed up the “Beef for Father’s Day” campaign that by 1960 would be a
nationwide phenomenon with over 10,000 women in 30 states concocting schemes for
inspiring wives and mothers to cook beef for the “fathers” in their lives. Other creative
ideas flourished over the years and included the sponsoring and organizing of local
picnics, sending beef to President Dwight Eisenhower, awarding beef to the first new
father on Father’s Day, and having governors and mayors formally proclaim beef as the
“traditional” Father’s Day dish.83
In Arizona in 1959, Governor Paul Fannin proclaimed “Beef for Father’s Day.”84
Writing the language used in Fannin’s proclamation, the Cowbelles used their knowledge
promoting beef which won first place in the American National Cattle Growers’ Beef Promotion Contest in
1955. My attempts to unearth this film were unsuccessful. Accomazzo, Cowbelles, 30.
83
For information on Cowbelle beef promotion activities in Wyoming see Wyoming Cowbelles Records,
Box 183, Folders 3-8, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University
of Wyoming, Laramie. For the same in Colorado see Inc. Colorado Cattlewomen, Beef Promotion Activity
Materials, Box 2, Colorado Cattlewomen, Inc. Records, Denver Public Library, Denver.
84
See Accomazzo, Cowbelles, 33. See also “Beef for Father’s Day Activities,” Arizona Cattlelog June
1959, 36-37 and 1957-1959 Cowbelle Scrapbooks, AHS, Tucson, Arizona.
370
of dominant cultural trends to mobilize gendered symbols they believed would resonate
with every woman. The proclamation reads:
Whereas Father has the tremendous responsibility of providing and
caring for his brood, and
Whereas that requires great strength and stamina, and
Whereas beef is not only the most delicious of all food but provides
the Human Sinews for war and peace,
Now therefore, I, Paul J. Fannin, Governor of the State of Arizona, do
hereby join with the Arizona Cowbelles, in proclaiming that
BEEF FOR FATHER’S DAY
Shall be provided for the traditional Father’s Day meal, and urge that
Father be served generously with his favorite food and thus be
accorded evidence of the love and respect of his special day, on every
day of the year.85
Cowbelles knew to target wives and mothers and to urge them to serve father’s “favorite
food” on his special day of honor in order to prove their love and respect for him. This
food was grounded in tradition and was, according to the cattlewomen, masculinized beef
femininely cooked. Intermountain West Cowbelles helped wives and mothers all over
the region know how to cook the beef by providing recipes at the grocery store meat
counters. The groups conducted “Seven ways for seven days” and “A Cut of Beef for
every Budget” campaigns throughout the 1950s and 1960s so that the housewife would
always have a means for serving delicious beef. In the late 1950s, Lil’ Dudette helped
housewives know just how to satisfy their men as she offered her ideas on recipe cards
for how to cook the perfect pot roast. Despite their own identification as indispensable
laborers in varying capacities on their ranches, Cowbelles identified other women as
85
Cowbelle Scrapbook, 1959. AHS, Tucson, Arizona. All five of the states studied here convinced the
governors of their states to proclaim “beef” as the tradition Father’s Day meal at some point during the
1950s and 1960s.
371
housewives and mothers who were in charge of the food budget and who needed to learn
how to buy and cook more beef.86
The Beef for Father’s Day and Lil’ Dudette campaigns both publicly symbolized
the feminized characteristics of women to which ranchwomen felt sure “other” women
would relate. Connie Cook and the stories Cowbelles told one another (such as the poem
above) exhibited the more private ranchwomen identity that Cowbelles recognized in
their own lives. Both Cook and Dudette performed specific representational characters in
public, but the two had very different audiences. The Arizona Cowbelles used Cook for
their own sake; they used Dudette to communicate, in the decade of Marilyn Monroe and
June Cleaver, to the broader community of middle class women. Taken together, Cook
and Dudette projected both the Cowbelles’ gendered ideas of other women and also their
more private rural identities through the creation of two public personas. It was through
this identity-creation and public performance that the Cowbelles were able to take on the
mutually contradictory tasks of promoting the economic product of their ranches,
maintaining their cultural identities as beef producers, and reifying the hegemonic
gendered notions of non-ranching women’s roles as consumers. In the gendered world of
range ranching, only ranchwomen could venture beyond the ranch gate to the nearest
supermarket and/or into the local townswomen’s kitchens. As ranchwomen took over the
“feminine” task of communicating with the average housewife, they occupied a liminal
86
This identification of women as contributing to household economics through thrifty spending, as
opposed to lucrative earning has long been a component of gendered labor relations in the United States,
and the Cowbelles utilized this cultural hegemony to promote their industry’s product. Furthermore, rural
women, especially in the twentieth century often prided themselves on their own control over and oversight
of the books. See Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the
Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Corlan Gee Bush “He Isn’t So Cranky as
he Used to Be,” in Groneman and Norton, eds. “To Toil,” 213-233.
372
space between the gendered domains of production and consumption as only they could,
and they allowed ranchmen to maintain distance from the domestic concerns of food
purchase and preparation, and from association with women consumers.
By the mid 1960s, Lil’ Dudette had apparently retired because the Arizona
Cowbelles were searching for a new mascot. Mrs. Jack Brooks, Arizona Cowbelle
president in 1966, wrote to the Wyoming Cowbelles to inquire about Wyoming’s latest
spokescow, Barbie Q.87 The Wyoming Cowbelles had created Barbie Q in 1960 to do
much of the same kinds of marketing that Lil’ Dudette had done in the 1950s. While she
wrote about ranch life and the cow business more generally within Cow Country, it
should come as no surprise that Barbie Q’s specialty was giving recipes for cooking beef
just right. The Wyoming Cowbelles, intended Barbie Q to share recipes both within the
ranch community and, like Dudette, to the larger consuming public. The Wyoming
Cowbelles even attempted to have Swift and Company, one of the country’s largest meat
packing companies adopt Barbie Q.88
With her side-kick Pati-O, Barbie Q engaged in gossipy conversation in the pages
of Cow Country for three years. The brain child of ranchwoman and Cowbelle Rubie K.
Dover, Barbie Q was a Hereford cow that walked upright on two legs, wore a petite
necklace, had long, mascaraed eyelashes, and carried in one hoof a bar-b-que fork. Her
87
Mrs. Jack Brooks to Mrs. Graham, 10 February 1966, Box 183, Folder 8, Wyoming Stock Growers’
Association Papers, AHC, Laramie.
88
Cody Cowbelles, Minutes, Barbie Q Committee Report, December 1962, Box 183, Folder 8, WSGA
Papers, AHC, Laramie. The Wyoming Cowbelles also attempted to have the members of Swift and
Company’s (one of the largest meat packing companies in the United States) public relations committee
adopt Barbie Q for their own use. The Swift executives were fearful of using just one kind of species
(Hereford cow) for meat advertising, but still admitted that Barbie Q was catchy and thought they might
use the idea with different animals (pigs for instance). I can find no information as to whether or not Swift
and Company ever utilized the mascot. Still, the meeting of Cowbelles with Swift and Company
executives illustrates the national scope that local and state Cowbelle efforts could have.
373
friend Pati-O was an Angus heifer who served as Barbie Q’s best friend and confidant.
The two cows would meet for a monthly “over-the-fence” rendezvous where they would
have a cow talk (quite literally) about everything from recipes to modernized
technologies, to breeds, to cattle conventions – all the while using the gendered
vernacular that was so common in cow culture. In September, 1961, as she “enjoyed a
mid-morning snack of rain washed blue-stem still glistening in the draw,” Barbie Q told
Pati-O of a study that she had heard about from the Kuriyama Food Research Institute.
Dr. Kuriyama had discovered that food choices affected people’s livestyles and
dispositions.
Pati-O listened to the list, which included affectionate carrot eaters,
emotional banana eaters, and refined tea drinkers, and suggested that “we might add beef
to that list. Men who favor beef are good-natured, forceful and lucky since beef contains
all the essentials necessary for health and energy. With the numerous cuts of beef and
ways to prepare it, women who cook with beef approach the status of story book
wives.”89 Cowbelles, like Barbie Q, believed wholeheartedly that promoting beef helped
people not only become healthier physically but also enabled men and women to perform
cultural ideals of masculinity and femininity. Beef promotion not only helped the cattle
industry, according to Pati-O, it also helped society more broadly.
All Cowbelle beef promotion activities focused on getting the word out about the
importance of eating beef and the important contributions the ranching industry made in
the intermountain West states. The numerous recipe books they created for purchase
comprised one of the recurring and most successful of the Cowbelles activities. The
89
Rubie K. Dover, "Barbie Q's," Cow Country, September 15, 1961, 19.
374
books generally were inexpensive and were meant not so much as a fundraising activity
for the Cowbelles but as a public relations ploy to get housewives to buy (and cook) beef.
The recipes were those that ranchwomen supposedly served in their own homes and that
their cowboys and cowgirls enjoyed most. The list of recipes is endless, but some of the
dishes included beef fudge, date-beef squares (cookies), meatloaf, and beef stroganoff.
According to the Cowbelles, a woman should make beef fudge just like regular fudge
with a little browned hamburger thrown in. Everyone needed chocolate and beef in their
diets, so the combination of the two seemed a brilliant idea to many Cowbelles. The
combination is actually rather appalling, I’ve tried it. In marketing beef as fudge and
other forms, the Cowbelles took the cows’ bodies that they were instrumental in creating
and gave them to “America’s housewives” as edible commodities in the form of popular,
familiar dishes.
The Cowbelles not only capitalized on women as consumers and the providers of
the family meals, they also suggested in eerily Adkins diet fashion that protein could help
one stay healthy and thin. In short, Cowbelles believed that in providing housewives
ideas for good recipes for an inexpensive price, they were doing a public service because
they were conducting a public health campaign. In Wyoming, signs popped up along
state highways, nailed to trees and telephone poles (where there were telephone poles)
urging people to “Enjoy Beef for Health.” In Montana and all of the intermountain West
states, Cowbelles set up displays at local and state fairs showing women how best to buy
beef in order to serve their families nutritious and affordable meals.
375
Figure 26 Examples of Beef Promotion Materials
Left: A typical Cowbelle demonstration booth at a community event. This one
was at the Sheridan County Harvest Festival in Plentywood, Montana,
September, 1960.
Right: An example of the “unofficial” signs that the Cowbelles promoted as
effective advertising strategies to increase the consumption of beef. Sheridan,
Wyoming, ca 1958
Cowbelles often targeted the family-at-large, encouraging mothers and wives to fix beef
dishes in order to make their husbands and sons strong.
In coordination with the
Montana Beef Council, the Montana Cowbelles utilized “Montana Slim” as their mascot
for a number of publicity activities. In 1960, the Cowbelles paid for the 16-foot “Slim”
to make the long journey from Missoula, Montana, to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where
he would adorn the gateway to National Boy Scout Jamboree.
Figure 27 Montana Slim
376
The Montana Beef Council created the image of Slim, but he was “adopted” by the
Cowbelles for various events – especially those in which they needed to appeal men’s
desire to imitate bodily the image of the broad-shouldered, skinny-but-tough, cowboy (it
is worth noting as well that the man on the left is not quite as “slim” as a Cowbelle
promoting beef for thin waist lines may have liked).90
While the Cowbelles often
appealed to men’s bodies with their promotion of beef in their Eat Beef – Keep Slim
campaigns, they were particularly adept at using the “naturalized” aspects of women’s
body image concerns. In Arizona, Lil’ Dudette figured prominently in this campaign.
With catchy slogans like “To Keep Yourself in Trim – Eat Beef – Keep Slim,” Lil
Dudette advanced the Cowbelles’ belief that the beef industry was making a
“contribution to the physical, mental and moral well-being, of each man, woman and
child in these United States.”91 Dudette’s short shorts, slender waist, sexy legs and petite
hands wrapped around a juicy (and presumably Arizona-grown) hamburger offered just
the “look” that Cowbelles hoped would convince America’s women that beef was “good
for you.”92
In addition to being incredibly savvy about targeting the consuming public, the
Cowbelles’ organizational efforts in promoting beef consumption also projected an image
of ranchers unified around the hope of every increasing demand for beef. If masculine
market relations could divide the community of ranchers, the Cowbelles’ uniquely
90
Photo Archive Collection 88-18, Box 6, Folder 12, Montana Historical Society, Helena.
“Lil Dudette Introduction,” Arizona Cattlelog, March 1955, 35.
92
In the 1959 scrapbook, historian Maud Post pasted the “Eat Beef – Keep Slim” slogan on one of the
pages next to a picture of a well-endowed cow and humorously wrote, “Looks good on me gals but you
stick to the slogan.” Perhaps this is evidence of a type of “hegemony” in that slenderness was prized and
consciously incorporated into their notions of identity and community.
91
377
feminized efforts in that market could relieve the tension and assert a positive image of
the livestock industry just when it needed it most.93
While the Cowbelles targeted women with their beef promotion campaigns they
also targeted their giving campaigns toward young people – again focusing their energy
in such a way as to appear to be engaging in traditionally “feminine” arenas. In doing so,
however, the Cowbelles acted in public in a way that was contrary to 1950s prevailing
93
Women’s involvement in the cattle ranching in general is a relatively understudied topic – especially for
the postwar decades. One can find a few books about the women of Arizona, Wyoming, and Montana
ranching industry and many more about the story of the cowboy in the West. A few monographs about
cowgirls have been published, but these often discuss cowgirls broadly and focus on the unusual female
participants in cow culture, such as rodeos contestants and participants in the Wild West shows. And while
the few individual autobiographies by Arizona ranchwomen offer fascinating insights into individual
experiences with cattle ranching, there is still no secondary work on the community of cattlewomen in the
intermountain West. For studies on ranching in Arizona that contain no reference to gender see Richard
Morrisey, “History of the Cattle Industry in Arizona,” MA Thesis, University of California Berkeley,
Berkeley, California; Ronald Snow, “The Beef Cattle Industry of Arizona: A Geographical Analysis,” 1969
MA Thesis, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona; J.J. Wagoner, “The History of the Cattle Industry in
Southern Arizona, 1540-1940,” 1949 MA Thesis University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. For an
interesting cultural reading of cowboys and cow life, especially labor, see Blake Allmendinger, The
Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992). For more general sources on women in the West which contain some references to ranchwomen
Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage eds., Writing the Range, and Susan Armitage and Elizabeth
Jameson, eds., The Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). See also Dee Garceau,
The Important Things in Life: Women, Work, and Family in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1880-1929
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: the trans-Mississippi
West, 1840-1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979); Teresa Jordan, Cowgirls: Women of the American
West (Garden City: Anchor, 1982); Sandra Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 18001915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Joyce Gibson Roach, The Cowgirls (Denton:
University of North Texas Press, 1977). An excellent survey of the published primary accounts of
women’s lives as ranchers in the southwest and specifically in Arizona and New Mexico would include
Eulalia Bourne, Woman in Levis (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1967); Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, We Fed
them Cactus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954); Junietta Claridge, “We Tried to Stay
Refined: Pioneering in the Mineral Strip,” The Journal of Arizona History 16 (4, 1975); Agnes Morely
Cleveland, No Life for a Lady (1941; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977); Elizabeth
Hampsten, “The Double A Ranch,” Journal of the Southwest 29 (1, 1987); Jo Jeffers, Ranch Wife (Tucson:
University of Arizona, 1964); Mary Kidder Rak, A Cowman’s Wife (Austin: Texas Historical Association,
1993); and, Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce, A Beautiful, Cruel Country (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1987).
There is a paucity of sources on Colorado ranchwomen, and in Montana and Wyoming, the biographies and
autobiographical accounts of women ranchers have arrived more recently. For examples see Margaret Bell,
When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002);
Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Linda Hasselstrom, Windbreak: A
Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains (Berkeley: Barn Owl Books, 1987); and Necah Stewart Furman,
Caroline Lockhart: Her Life and Legacy (Cody: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1994).
378
ideals of women’s retreat to private domesticity. They sponsored the Boys’ Ranches
(working ranches where “delinquent” boys boarded in order to learn discipline and love
of hard work) in New Mexico and Arizona. The Cowbelles in all the states created
scholarships which they gave to deserving college-aged women. They gave prizes for
“best breed” cow raised by female ranchers at state fairs.94 They created beef cookery
classes for local high school home economics courses and placed place-mats and napkins
with ranchers’ brands in local cafes. They also made certain the growing media recorded
each activity.
Newspapers, stock magazines, and radios often carried news of the
Cowbelles’ activities. This press coverage aided the Cowbelles in their goal to improve
the public image of ranchers as well as propelling their woman-centered efforts into the
public spotlight.
These public activities aimed at affecting the market stemmed from
ranchwomen’s desire to promote consumption from the vantage point of the producer.
Their own identities as indispensable laborers who had important stakes in “the business”
set them on the course for working publicly for the industry. And work they did.
Consider these figures for Arizona. In every year from 1956-1962, the group selected a
Father of the Year for the state and presented the winner with a beef prize; in 1956 alone,
the Laveen Cowbelles pasted 138,000 “Beef for Father’s Day” stickers on envelopes
mailed by banks and businesses, and the Yavapai local group placed 7500 stickers in
their county; in 1959, the local chapters produced more than eight television and radio
94
See for example Tee Simms, “Wyoming Cow-Belles Award Scholarship to Student,” The Record
Stockman, March 26, 1953, 9. In Arizona, the University of Arizona, Department of Agriculture still
awards the Mattie Cowan Scholarship to a deserving female agriculture major.
programs reminding mothers to cook beef for Father’s Day.
379
By 1967, Colorado
Cowbelles had created and distributed 3 million place mats, nearly 3 million napkins,
100,000 coasters, 15,000 recipe cookbooks, and 12,000 Weight Watchers menus (telling
folks to eat steak for breakfast). Other states reported the same level of activity.95 They
wrote voluminously about their activities. They corresponded with one another, attended
meetings, served on committees, and contributed columns to each of the stockgrowers’
association periodicals. They also were visible physically as they attended local and state
fairs, rodeos, sales, and conventions. In short, Cowbelles and ranchwomen were visible
in the 1950s and 1960s in ways ranchwomen never had been in the past. In addition to
being productive as laborers privately on the ranches, the Cowbelles devoted
considerable productive labor to public beef promotion in order to ensure the
continuation of their economic livelihoods and cultural lives.
In conclusion, as competitive actors in a capitalist marketplace, ranchers
fundamentally contended against one another for pieces of the economic pie. This
competition could and did create tension within the local and state ranch communities;
we saw one manifestation of this through the issue of theft. Additionally, ranchers did
not agree on how a post-World War II and post-New Deal economy should work. In the
mid-1950s, as a severe drought hit the entire intermountain West region, ranchers had the
cause and opportunity to come together in their collective groups to discuss the need for
and appropriateness of government assistance. On this issue, ranchers were divided
95
Betty Accomazzo, Arizona Cowbelles: This Is Your Life (Unknown: Arizona Cowbelles, ca 1973) and
Richard Goff, Century in the Saddle (Denver: Colorado Cattlemen's Centennial Commission, 1967), 341.
380
profoundly, and those differences of opinion tended to rest on classed positions within the
industry. Large ranchers needed price supports less than small ranchers. Still, during the
hay bailout of 1956 (and on multiple other occasions) all ranchers benefited from some
kind of government benevolence.
Despite the fact that ranchers did benefit from
government largesse, however, ranchers of all classes tended to continue to value their
identities as rugged business people making it on their own, and this ideology tied them
together in solidarity in spite of their division.
In the midst of market anxiety and the resultant friction, lay the issue of beef
consumption. More Americans eating more beef, ranchers believed, would alleviate at
least some of their troubles.
Ranchwomen pursued beef consumption most
enthusiastically and utilized the liminal gendered space between their positions as
producers and their “feminized” roles as consumers to assume the responsibility of beef
promotion. Cowbelles, in particular, engaged in public relations campaigns for beef.
The zeal they brought to their promotional efforts of beef consumption, efforts with
which no rancher could disagree, served to strengthen the community of ranchers. In
being visible in the public marketplace in a variety of ways, ranchwomen again sacrificed
their own labor and time for the benefit of the economic culture of ranching – this time
they did so by using their gender to fashion a space for ranchers to come together in order
to rally around the market issue of consumption. In the end, all ranchers hoped that
Americans would “eat more beef” and Cowbelles’ efforts in making this hope reality
helped pull ranchers across the divide of capitalist competition and assisted in drawing
381
them more tightly into their associations. It is these associations to which we will turn in
Chapter 6.
382
CHAPTER 6:
COW TALK: RANCHERS’ CULTURAL LANGUAGE
“This is a fast and in many ways a changed world we live in today. Adaptation and
cooperation have become an essential part. The day of the lone wolf...has gone with the free open
range. We’ve had to learn to live with barbed wire and red tape and to work with our friends and
neighbors in self protection.”
~ Ralph Miracle, 1955
Ranchers segregated, in many ways, the Cowbelles’ efforts at beef promotion
from the more central “business” of the cattlegrower associations. This segregation
occurred, at least in part, because Cowbelles originally organized themselves as an
exclusively female group (men could not belong, while women could and did belong to
the larger associations).
The segregation of the Cowbelles’ efforts at association
conventions, in association publications, and in group culture (such as parades), however,
also occurred because most male ranchers considered consumerism “women’s work.”
Nevertheless, the strategies Cowbelles used to create interest in the ranching business
were similar strikingly to the strategies the associations employed more broadly in their
systematic creation of a singular ranch culture.
Recall the Cowbelles’ utilization of Barbie Q and Lil’ Dudette. In both Arizona
and Wyoming, Cowbelles directed beef promotion not only outwardly at non-ranch
consumers, but also inwardly at the community of ranchers. Ranchwomen did not allow
Lil’ Dudette to remain a caricature but re-presented her through Connie Cook, a very real
and accomplished ranchwoman.
Barbie Q did not just exist on placemats in local
restaurants but also spoke to Wyoming ranchers through her column in Cow Country.
383
Both the Cook embodiment of Lil’ Dudette and Barbie Q’s column represent Cowbelle
approaches not only in the promotion of beef but also in the reification of rancher identity
and solidarity. The use of these two mascots enabled the Cowbelles to take on the
complimentary tasks of promoting the economic product of their ranches as well as the
ranchers’ cultural identities as beef producers. Because of the similarity of their language
and the fact that Cowbelles in other states hoped to adopt both mascots, it is clear that the
Cowbelles believed Lil’ Dudette (or at the very least Connie Cook) could have conversed
easily in the language of Barbie Q (and vice versa). The two talismans both came from
“ranch stock” and their publicists believed that all ranchers would understand the ranchspecific language in which Q and Dudette/Cook communicated. That language was both
insider language – an idiom only ranchers could understand fully – and an outsider public
image – a representation apparent even to non-ranchers.
In the postwar decades, the collective group of ranchers utilized the
insider/outsider language to complete the bigger project of creating a singular ranch
culture in order to promote an image of group (and political) unity.
Ranchers
communicated with one another through a culturally-created system of signs and speech
that was at once accessible only to ranchers, and at the same time profoundly universal.
Within this cultural system, ranchers argued about price supports, bemoaned
modernization, celebrated their collective history, and talked a lot about cows.
As
ranchers went about creating powerful, effective special interest associations, they relied
extensively on a language based specifically in the ecological and economic culture of
range cattle ranching.
384
While this system of images and words centered on cattle, however, it was more
than simply a discussion about cows. Ranchers’ language system, or cow talk, was also a
way for ranchers to “continually reassure” themselves that the imagined world of rancher
solidarity was rooted visibly in everyday life. As International Studies scholar Benedict
Anderson has explained in his seminal work, the success of newspaper print culture in
creating nationalist identities relied, at least partially, on print culture’s ability to
convince its readers that despite the fact they often did not know one another, they could
be assured that they all had something in common; that, at any given time, all the readers
engaged in “steady...simultaneous activity.”1
For ranchers this steady, simultaneous
activity occurred within the ecological economy and relied on topics and representations
to which any rancher might relate.
A poem from rancher Montana Bill Grieve serves as an example of cow talk
based in the ecological economy of ranch life.
In 1965, Grieve submitted to The
Montana Stockgrower the following verse:
THE CATTLEMAN’S JOB
When we started raising cows, we hired out to be tough;
The history of the business told us parts of it were rough.
The rules are pretty much the same as since the West was won –
‘Just gather up your guts and do the things that must be
done.’
When an early blizzard hits you with your stock on summer
range,
Just saddle up and gather them, don’t wait for it to change;
For while a change is certain, there are two ways it can go,
And the betting odds are heavy that there’ll be a lot more
snow.
1
Epigraph from Ralph Miracle, The Montana Stockgrower, May 1955, 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Editions, 1983),
35-36.
385
We’ve read and heard a lot about the storms we had last fall,
Of ranchers having so much stock they couldn’t care for
them all.
While the critics were condemning, (and keeping nice and
warm),
Real ranchers tended to their stock, out in the bitter
storm.
I’d like to ask a question of those who always find fault,
Who claim the cowman is getting rich, and isn’t worth his
salt;
I wonder if you’d take the risks on a horse in drifted snow,
And spend your days in bone-chilling cold of twenty to
forty below?
Or when the banker tells you that financially you can’t survive,
Would you keep on buying cake and hay to keep your
cattle alive?
There are exceptions in everything, some in our way of life,
Some ranchers are rich in other fields, some married a
wealthy wife.
But I will tell you this my friends, most have earned their way,
When things got tough and others quit, their motto was
to stay.
So if a man has a lot of cows, I can’t think that’s bad,
For the way he likely got them – he took care of a few he
had.2
Grieve’s ode to “most” ranchers captures in one creative swoop every element of rancher
solidarity and cow talk. The ultimate end result of a cattleman’s “job” was to increase
the numbers of cows he (and the poem does assume the masculine) had. Cattle ground
the majority of the poem, but importantly, Grieve’s verse also incorporates all of the
elements of ranch culture discussed in this dissertation – modernization, memory,
markets, and the ecological economy.
Grieve relies on collective memory of
“individuals” doing what needed done to “win” the West. It is clear in these phrases that
the ranchers for whom Grieve writes are connected with those old timers in some
2
Bill Grieve, “The Cattleman’s Job,” The Montana Stockgrower, March, 1965, 26.
386
manner, but assuredly are not the same men. When Grieve refers to the marketing
troubles ranchers faced regularly, he makes sure to explain that despite hard times, a
cowman worth his salt still would sacrifice in order to buy cake (meaning cottonseed
cake) for the cows. Grieve addresses too the ecological economy when he focuses on
ranchers’ wherewithal in the face of the cruel elements of “nature.” His reference to “our
way of life” completes his tribute to the culture of “real” ranchers who are ready and
willing to take risks in order to maintain their identities and their lives as ranchers, in
spite of imminent monetary bankruptcy (and in spite of the rare incursion of women in
the industry in the guise of “wealthy wives”). Perhaps most importantly, Grieve assures
his rancher audience that their success, when it comes, is based in diligent labor and
savvy management – after all Grieve’s hero is a “man” with lots of cows who got them,
not through government intervention or luck, but rather through risk and committed caretaking.
Like the ranch community more broadly, Grieve’s poem is not tension-free. It is
his glossing over the possible tension that makes Grieve’s literary creation representative
of cow talk more generally. What he does not mention is almost as important as what he
does.
When Grieve discusses the “winning of the West” he mentions not those
dispossessed by the imperialist act of Anglo America. Grieve also seems nonplussed by
the appearance of ranchwomen as solely “wealthy wives.” A Navajo rancher like Alvin
Tso or a female owner/operator like Eulalia Bourne might have bristled at both of these
exclusionary aspects of Grieve’s poem. But they very well may have been willing to
ignore it because it is obvious that the tension with which Grieve’s poem most concerns
387
itself is the tension which existed between the ranching community and an “outside”
critic. Someone, somewhere, is “finding fault” with ranchers, and it is to this criticism
that Grieve appears to be responding.
The poem would have resonated within the
ranching community far differently than it might have in a suburb of Phoenix. For the
urban resident, the poem could have smacked of zealous self-promotion, while ranchers
could have walked away from such a depiction of themselves with some measure of
pride. Indeed, that is what cow talk was in many ways. It was a system of rituals,
images, and words based in rancher self-promotion.
In an era when ranchers felt
profoundly threatened, cow talk assured them of their place in the intermountain West.
Like Grieve, ranchers throughout the postwar intermountain West utilized a system of
symbols and vernacular language to enable themselves to believe in the appearance of
unity. The unity was possible only because cow talk indicated to ranchers that in spite of
some tension within their community, they shared generally in a similarity of purpose and
experience.
In this chapter, we will investigate the components of cow talk that occurred in
the print culture of the cattlegrower associations and in the personal correspondence of
ranchers. Within the pages of association periodicals, ranchers and the magazine editors
mobilized a language of ranching that included columns about the ins and outs of the
cattle business as well as poetry, personal stories, and photographs from ranchers
themselves. It is difficult to uncover the audience reception of the cow talk presented in
association publications, but it is possible to prove that ranchers across the West wrapped
their personal communication with one another in the comfort of cow talk and thus
388
imbibed both privately and publicly the provincial language. The use of cow talk reified
ranchers’ sense that they shared a peculiar “way of life” and thus were all in it together.
This chapter, then, will illuminate the aesthetic culture so essential to the appearance of
political unity in one of the more powerful, postwar special interest groups in the US
West.
Before moving into a more detailed discussion of cow talk, we must first examine
the membership recruitment and maintenance strategies of the state associations – for it
was in these groups that ranchers experienced much of their sharing of cow talk. When
ranchers came together in their state cattle associations in unprecedented numbers in the
postwar years, countless ranchers wrote to their publications to express their gratitude for
and belief in the “organization.” James Hogg from Meeteetse, Wyoming, was thrilled
with the work the WSGA did on behalf of cattle ranchers in 1956, and in sending in his
dues he urged the association to “keep up the good work.” Agnes Bishop, retired from
the ranching business in the same year but maintained her membership in the ACGA
because she learned “many years ago that ranch life is very much a partnership business”
and she was, therefore, happy to keep her membership in the cattlemen’s association as
there was much “to do” for the industry. Like Hogg and Bishop, many of the ranchers
articulated a sense that times were changing, especially on issues of modernization and
the ecological economy.3 These ranchers suggested the need to rally around common
3
John R. Hogg to Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, 15 October 1956, Box 251, Folder 2, Wyoming
Stockgrowers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie and Agnes
Bishop, “Neighborly Gossip,” Arizona Cattlelog, December, 1949, 48. See also “Letters from Members,”
columns in Cow Country, 15 January 1956, 18 and Letters to Abbie Keith, Box 5, Folder 8, ACGA
389
issues if they were to persevere in the new age. Economic concerns (as illustrated by the
Cowbelles’ beef promotion efforts) inspired part of this organizing while some grew out
of a desire to influence the political landscape at the state and even national levels.
A group of agriculturalists desirous of affecting political influence on public
policy was not new in rural America in the post World War II years. Indeed, cattle
associations’ postwar efforts resembled the advocacy of agrarian special interest groups
that began to emerge most strongly during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. These
new groups, according to sociologist Elizabeth Clemens and other scholars, sought to fill
the void left by the late-nineteenth-century decomposition of the two-party system. The
“non-partisan, special interest” advocacy of groups, such as the Farmers’ Union and the
Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe. I found very little evidence of ranchers critiquing the associations or
their larger political projects. When critical evidence did turn up, it usually centered on personal
animosities and less about the larger goals and/or existence of the associations. Such an example occurred
in New Mexico in 1947 when Lon Merchant, owner/operator of the Bridle Bit Ranch near Capitan,
withdrew his membership in the NMCGA because he was angry that he had not been nominated by the
group to serve a second term on the Cattle Sanitary Board. Merchant apparently protested some policy the
majority of the Board and the Association supported. The officers of the NMCGA, to whom the Governor
turned for nominations, left Merchant’s name off of their nomination list. As a result, Merchant wrote a
scathing letter to George Godfrey (then president of the NMCGA) accusing the association of being run by
“no more than six identical men.” The concentration of power, in Merchant’s mind, meant that he needed
to drop his membership (it is important to note that clearly Merchant was one of those “in power” in the
NMCGA at the time of the conflict). Even Merchant, however, was saddened by his decision to leave the
organization as it would mean he would have to “forego the pleasure of mingling with and enjoying the
society of a great many people with whom I...have every thing in common interest.” Merchant recognized,
however, that “the association managed to worry along somehow before I showed up and that it can very
well continue to grow and to follow a course determined by its full membership, and that one less in
membership today will probably result in ten new arrivals tomorrow.” Importantly, Godfrey responded to
Merchant’s letter refusing to take Merchant’s resignation from the association. Godfrey informed
Merchant that contrary to his request, Godfrey had reappointed Merchant as the chairman of the Brand and
Theft Committee, and as a member of the NMCGA Executive Committee. Aside from the major break in
the late 1950s in Montana, that resulted in the forming of the Montana Cattleman’s Association (see
Chapter 4), this anecdote is one of the few surviving stories in the archives showing intense animosity
among ranchers within the associations. Stories about irreconcilable rancher-to-rancher conflicts (aside
from the reports of theft) appear rarely if ever within the association public periodicals. See Lon Merchant
to George Godfrey, 28 March 1947, Box 6, Folder 2, George Amos Godfrey Papers, Rio Grande Historical
Collections, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, George Godfrey to Lon Merchant, 2
April 1947, Box 6, Folder 2, George Amos Godfrey Papers, Rio Grande Historical Collections, New
Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.
390
American Farm Bureau Federation, all sought to secure “bureaucratic beachheads and
policy initiatives” and turned away, somewhat, from seeking to alter electoral outcomes.4
In the postwar years, the cattlegrowers associations took on many of the same advocacy
characteristics. Certainly the association personnel continued to devote some of the
groups’ energies to electing representatives sensitive to cattle interests, but they also
sought to protect the cattle industry through lobbying and policy manipulation.
By the postwar years, then, ranchers’ collective influencing of the political
landscape occurred both informally through interest group networking and more
officially through formal lobbying on key legislative issues at both the federal and state
levels. The 1947 attempt of the WSGA to influence the new appointment of the Director
of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) illustrates both kinds of political activism. In
1947, Oda Mason, president of the WSGA, busily penned a letter to the Secretary of the
Interior urging him to reconsider his decision to appoint Fred Johnson as Director of the
BLM.
Mason suggested that the Secretary knew how important livestock was for
Wyoming’s economic health and hoped that the new Director would be a person who was
more sensitive to stockgrowers’ needs than Johnson appeared to be. In addition to
writing a “private” letter to Secretary Chapman, however, Mason also wrote to the
Wyoming Senate delegation on behalf of the collective group of ranchers in the WSGA,
4
Elisabeth Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organization Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics
in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 147-180. For more on
the creation of agrarian interest group political structures in the United States see also John Mark Hansen,
“Creating a New Politics: The Evolution of an Agricultural Policy Network in Congress, 1919-1980” (MA
Thesis: Yale University, 1987). For broader discussions on interest group politics see Frank Baumgartner,
Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998); Bruce Field, Harvest of Dissent: The National Farmers Union and the Early Cold
War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998); Ronald Shaiko, ed., The Interest Group Connection:
Electioneering, Lobbying, and Policymaking in Washington (Chatham: Chatham House Publishers, 1998).
391
and urged the Senators to propose a measure requiring that future such appointments be
confirmed by the Senate. The latter, of course, would benefit western state livestock
“interests” because the Senate was the legislative body wherein western ranchers had
considerable power as Senate votes did not rely on population of the individual states.
Rural Wyoming, therefore, had as much power in the Senate as more highly urbanized
New York or Maryland.
The Senators took Mason’s suggestion and proposed the
legislation, only to have it roundly defeated.
The attempts by the WSGA to sway immediate public policy by means of
informal, private letter writing as well as to affect long-term procedures in the Executive
Branch through more formal, public legislative channels both eventually failed. The
motion to have administrative appointments, while supported by both Wyoming Senators,
E.V. Robertson and Joseph O’Mahoney, never passed, and ultimately Secretary Chapman
appointed Fred Johnson in spite of his perceived antipathy toward western livestock
interests.5
Not all rancher-supported measures failed, however.
As we have seen,
ranchers’ attempts to receive assistance in the Foot and Mouth crisis of the late 1940s, to
receive federal government financial support for Brucellosis eradication, to benefit from
countless millions of dollars for agricultural research and development, and to keep
grazing fees lower than market value, all succeeded at various times in the postwar
decades.
5
Oda Mason to Joseph C. Mahoney, 6 March 1947, Box 1, Oda Mason Papers, American Heritage Center,
University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, Telegram to Oda Mason from Joseph C. Mahoney, 24 March
1947, Box 1, Oda Mason Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming,
Omor Chapman to Oda Mason, 19 February 1947, Box 1, Oda Mason Papers, American Heritage Center,
University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Individual ranchers would also write their Congressional
representatives. For example see, “Willcox Cowbelle Report,” March, 1952, Arizona Cattlelog, 39.
392
Ranchers’ joined their associations in increasing numbers. Perhaps they did so
because they wanted to influence governmental policy. Perhaps ranchers’ increased
participation occurred because association personnel convinced ranchers that membership
was critical for protecting cattle ranching in the new modern era. No matter the reason
for the increase in numbers, the fact remains that just as the numbers of rural residents
and the number of ranches decreased in the postwar years, the number of memberships in
the local and state cattle associations rose. The increase in membership also may have
had to do with the spirit of organization that overtook much of the United States in the
postwar years and could seem to indicate that ranchers simply were acting like many
“white collar” workers in postwar cities who, as William Whyte asserted in 1956, joined
organizations and simultaneously lost their individuality.6
The discourse ranchers used to describe their joining centered, however, on their
desire to maintain their individuality. Here they share much in common with blue collar
union members as both ranchers and union members seemed to see no irony in joining a
group in order to remain autonomous.7 Ranchers appear to have believed that having an
organ to speak for their individual needs increasingly was becoming an essential
6
William Hollingworth Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956).
This mentality of an individual’s right to “free labor” being protected by unions stretches back into the
nineteenth century. For one of the best works that deals with the topic of the rise of unions in order to
protect the craft independence of “free” men in the nineteenth century see Sean Wilentz, Chants
Democratic : New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984). For works that grapple with twentieth-century union mentalities see Lizbeth
Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor
Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991); Nelson
Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The Cio in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982). Lichtenstein focuses more on the institutional structures which changed considerably due to
political conditions during World War II. He also, however, chronicles the motivations of the rank and file
in attempting to maintain autonomy through collectivity.
7
393
component of maintaining their traditional “way of life” in the complicated postwar
world.8
Those ranchers who did choose to join the associations in these years (about 50%
of all ranchers belonged) did not hail from one “class,” as they had in the early years of
the associations. In Montana, for example, the vast majority of members came from the
“middle” class of ranchers. They neither ran huge numbers of cattle, nor did they control
vast amounts of acreage. In Arizona, the combination of mid-size and small-size ranch
numbers comprised the bulk of the ACGA memberships in these years. New Mexico
reported similar membership patterns. In 1947, for example, the NMCGA delineated
their membership based on the number of head each member owned. According to the
numbers 6% of NMCGA members owned 500 head or more, 8% of members owned
250-500 head, 8% of members owned 150-250 head, 27% of members owned 75-150
head, and well over a third (35%) of members owned 75 head or less.9 These statistics
reveal that the wealthiest group of ranchers did not comprise the bulk of association
membership. Abbie Keith received letters from all classes of ranchers who suggested
that they belonged to the ACGA for a variety of reasons. Some middling ranchers took
advantage of their membership by asking Keith to send word if she heard of any pasture
available for “400” head. Letters such as these existed alongside letters from ranchers
who ran twenty head, had no real reason for writing, but who simply enjoyed learning of
8
See, for example, Wallis Huidekoper’s argument for membership on page 20.
See Letters, The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1950, 54 and Abbie Keith to Rulon Langston, 26 September
1956, Box 5, Folder 8, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
9
10
other ranchers’ experiences.
394
The associations, therefore, seem to be less like unions
(where most members were of the working class) or the solidly middle class, white collar
groups that formed in the 1950s, because the membership base of the associations
appears to have had few classed demarcations. Most importantly, the associations seem
to have had something to offer all classes of ranchers.
In addition to recognizing tangible benefits from association membership,
ranchers’ decisions to join also stemmed, at least partially, from the systematic attempts
of paid professional association staff to create increases in numbers. The Executive
Secretaries of the state associations tended to be salaried employees paid by members’
dues to keep the organization on track. The secretaries organized the annual conventions
of each association, kept track of the association membership lists and finances,
communicated with state and federal elected representatives, tracked legislative activities,
published the associations’ newsletters and magazines, and monitored the activities of the
various standing committees of the associations.
Generally speaking, the executive secretaries of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s had
some connection to the cattle industry. Whether it was a childhood spent on a cattle
ranch, a summer job tending cows, or a long-time affiliation with the industry,
associations hired few executive secretaries from “the outside.”11
10
Their personal
Wayne Walker to Abbie Keith, 7 April 1956, Box 6, Folder 1, ACGA Manuscript Collection, Arizona
Historical Foundation, ASU, Tempe, W.A. Winder to Abbie Keith, 5 September 1956, Box 6, Folder 1,
ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
11
The exception to the hiring of executive secretaries from the inner community of ranchers was Robert
Hanesworth in Wyoming. The WSGA hired him from the Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce and
Hanesworth had little ranch experience. His hiring, according to John Rolfe Burroughs, did not come
“without a good deal of soul searching...and some skepticism among the members.” The WSGA ultimately
hired Hanesworth because he was an “organizer par excellence.” See Burroughs, Guardian, 337.
395
connections to the industry helped them in their efforts to convince ranchers that they
could understand ranchers’ concerns and also could explain the reason that the secretaries
of each association discussed here had remarkably long tenure during the immediate
postwar years. Eddie Phillips spent 34 years as MSGA secretary (1929-1954) and was
succeeded by Ralph Miracle who headed the MSGA from 1954-69.12 Abbie Keith came
to the ACGA in the 1940s and remained with the organization until the late 1960s.
Horace H. Hening headed the NMCGA for most of the time covered in this study (19401960). In Colorado, David Rice, Jr. joined the CCA in 1949 and remained executive
secretary until well past 1965. Russell Thorp presided over the day-to-day operations of
the WSGA for nineteen years, from 1930 to 1949, and was replaced by Robert
Hanesworth, who ran the organization for fourteen years, from 1949 until 1963. Thus, in
the 20 years undertaken in this study, at most two transfers of power to new secretaries
occurred in each of the five states covered here.
This stability of leadership most
certainly helped the associations create continuity of purpose and procedure and could, at
least partially, explain the successful membership drives that each state association
undertook in the postwar years.
12
Ralph Miracle is a good example of a secretary who had diverse work and life experiences, but whose
connection to ranching other ranchers always hailed as his most important qualification. Miracle was born
to a family of ranchers, graduated from Harvard Military Academy in Los Angeles, and later attended
Dartmouth College. He met and married a New York woman named Lillian Shaw in 1934 and returned to
Montana shortly thereafter to manage his family’s ranch upon the death of his father. The tough times of
the 1930s forced Miracle out of “the business” and after liquidating the ranch holdings he worked at odd
jobs before joining the service. He returned from World War II to manage briefly the Westwood Ranch
before becoming the Executive Officer for the Montana Livestock Commission and Recorder of Marks and
Brands. It was from this powerful administrative position that Miracle became the Executive Secretary of
the MSGA in 1954. See Paladin, Montana Stockgrower, 121. The majority of the other Executive
Secretaries had similar life histories and connections (however tenuous) to the cattle industry.
396
The association personnel’s membership sales pitches almost always included
pleas for ranchers to recognize the modern age in which they lived. As chronicled in the
epitaph above, Ralph Miracle, executive secretary of the MSGA tried to convince
members and non-members in 1955 that “This is a fast and in many ways a changed
world we live in today. Adaptation and cooperation have become an essential part. The
day of the lone wolf...has gone with the free open range. We’ve had to learn to live with
barbed wire and red tape and to work with our friends and neighbors in self protection.”
The “newness” of the day meant not only that ranchers’ daily operations had changed,
but that their approach to collectivity had to change as well.
In Wyoming, the “modernization” of organization took visible form in the
WSGA’s publication, Cow Country. In September, 1950, under the leadership of editor
Robert Hanesworth and assistant editor Myrna Agee, the WSGA changed the format of
their association’s publication in order to make it look more “modern.” They did so with
some trepidation as WSGA members had been receiving their association’s news in
mimeographed form for over 20 years.
Hanesworth and Agee hoped to make the
publications “slick” and professional while also maintaining the folksy feel of the older
publication. With the new edition of Cow Country in 1950, Hanesworth included a letter
to the membership explaining that “It will be difficult, indeed, to take the place of the
publication as you have known it, but every effort will be made to make it the same
personal and interesting publication that it was.” To accomplish their plans to make the
publication one of the best in the industry, Hanesworth explained that they needed “the
cooperation of each and every member” and that part of that cooperation could come
397
when ranchers contributed “Pictures, news items, comments and criticisms and
suggestions” to the staff.13 As one can see from the covers below, the new format did
indeed indicate a visual break from the earlier, more amateurish “bulletin.”
Figure 28 Two different covers of Cow Country illustrating modernization
The bulletin’s handwritten titles and drawn mast contrast sharply with the use of
photography and the printed mast of the new “official magazine” cover. In 1950, the
WSGA, seemed to come of age. Part of this modern look could have resulted from new
revenue that came from increasing members’ dues.14
Such an expanding operating
budget gave the associations better access to publishing technology.
13
Despite the
Bob Hanesworth to Membership, 15 October 1950, Box 250, Folder 12, Wyoming Stockgrowers
Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
14
In 1950, for example, the WSGA spent $2000 on the publication of Cow Country, whereas in previous
years, the costs had been only in the 100s of dollars. See Association Account Report, Box 250, Folder 10,
Wyoming Stockgrowers Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
398
modernizing of the publications, however, the images association personnel used on the
covers tended to be blatantly anti-modern – focusing almost exclusively on traditional
elements of ranch culture, including pictures of cowboys riding horses in wide open
spaces and/or pictures of cattle grazing (almost all of the covers of the association
periodicals replicated the one above).
Association personnel created a focused and
consistent effort to make the postwar associations appear up-to-date and contemporary
while at the same time renouncing modernization through the iconography of cow talk.
Other state associations also polished their image through their publications
(beginning in the late 1930s and complete by the early 1950s) by increasingly using
photography and, in some cases, revamping the entire layout of the publication. The
Montana Stockgrower had the most consistency from the 1920s to the 1960s. Beginning
in 1929, the publication continued to have the same layout throughout the time covered
here but began increasingly to use photography in the late 1940s. The Arizona Cattlelog,
began in 1945 and took over the less formal, less consistent “newsletter” that had been
sent to members since the 1920s – although the newsletter continued to supplement the
magazine throughout the postwar decades. Like the Cattlelog, the Colorado Cattlemen’s
Association’s publication, The Cattle Guard, had a postwar birth – beginning publication
in 1955.
The New Mexico Stockman has perhaps the longest and most complicated history
of the five publications. As early as 1916, the NMCGA recognized the need for an organ
through which members could stay apprised of news of interest to cattlegrowers. For
three years, the association mailed sporadically a “monthly” newsletter. At last in 1919,
399
Horace Hening, Sr., secretary of the Central Printing Company of Albuquerque,
suggested to the NMCGA executive board that they merge with his company’s New
Mexico Ruralist. Because Hening devoted his Ruralist to all “rural” New Mexico, it
reserved only about four columns to cattle news.
The NMCGA tolerated this
arrangement for about three years until, in 1922, the members and board officers decided
they needed their own publication. This publication became a quarterly bulletin and the
NMCGA mailed it to over 1000 interested parties for 15 years. In 1937, the NMCGA
and the New Mexico Woolgrowers’ Association joined forces to publish the New Mexico
Stockman Magazine. Although the editors intended of the editors to include news about
and for the sheep industry, by the late 1940s, the majority of articles centered on cattle.15
Despite this long and complicated history, by the postwar years, the editors of The
New Mexico Stockman began to utilize a discourse of fear of the modern to convince
ranchers that they needed the NMCGA.
In 1952, an advertisement for the latest
membership drive in New Mexico read:
Do your state taking officials, or your sanitary boards look out
for the interests of your industry in Washington, in Congress and
before the departments? You know they do not. They have
other duties to perform. But your Associations...keep able men
constantly on the alert to protect your interests...Very often in the
recent past, their activities have saved you...THERE HAS
NEVER BEEN A TIME WHEN THIS WATCHFULNESS
OVER THE WELFARE OF THE LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY
WAS MORE NEEDED THAN NOW.(emphasis in original)16
According to association personnel, because of the newness of the age, New Mexico
ranchers needed organized help in order to stay in business. These same kinds of
15
16
Mortensen, In the Cause, 90.
“Why Should You Belong?” The New Mexico Stockman, April, 1952, 12.
400
messages appeared in Montana. Ralph Miracle, a consummate salesperson, dreamed up
multiple membership recruitment campaigns throughout the postwar years, one of which,
in particular, drew on the idea of the modern:
Figure 29 MSGA membership advertisement, 1965
The preceding ad not so subtly capitalizes on ranchers’ fear of being left behind.17
Ranchers often wrapped references to their experiences with modernization in a discourse
of fear and victimization. This discourse appears here in membership communications in
the form of scare tactics, like the ones above. The element of fearfulness in cow talk,
therefore, drew on ranchers’ experiences with modernization and certainly can account
for at least some of the increased membership in the associations in the postwar years.
Despite the fact that much membership recruitment came from association
personnel, ranchers, who belonged to the associations, also propelled membership drives.
In particular, association officers and committee members, who were almost always
ranchers themselves, labored tirelessly to convince the membership, the bulk of whom
operated their own mid-sized ranches, that they did not have the time to keep up on the
increasingly complicated world of agricultural policy, and that, because ranching was
occurring in a “new” age, ranchers would benefit from “organization.” As early as 1945,
17
Membership Advertisement, The Montana Stockgrower, March, 1965, 11.
401
ACGA president Fred Fritz was writing to ACGA members that “today, organization has
become more vital than ever before...organization, when properly applied, is an
instrument to promote sound and constructive policies...[and these] are the fundamentals
of true representative government.”18 The rank and file membership, according to Fritz,
would do well to “trust” the representatives in the associations for protection. Julian
Terrett, past president of the MSGA, put it bluntly in a 1953 membership recruitment
letter. He explained that ranchers could not afford to not to belong to the MSGA mostly
because the organization had “a President, Executive Committee, and Advisory
Committee all of whom stand ready on a moment’s notice to take any action necessary to
protect the interests of cattlemen.”19
In 1955, Bob Schafer, membership chairman of the Colorado Cattlemen’s
Association and a rancher from east central Colorado went on a statewide membership
recruitment campaign. The CCA particularly was proud of the fact that Schafer’s efforts
were voluntary and “all at his own expense.” Leaving the ranch in the hands of his wife
and two sons for several months, Schafer traveled 12,000 miles and recruited 800 new
members for the CCA. Part of Schafer’s chore was to reinvigorate a rather impotent
organization (the CCA had almost ceased to exist due to lack of support in the late
1930s).
To do so, he attempted to persuade cattle ranchers that the industry was
experiencing “hard times” and could only be protected through a strong representative
organization. He recruited both large and small ranchers and had to assure many that the
new incarnation of the CCA would not be dominated by large cattle barons (as it had
18
19
Fred Fritz, "Organization -- Its Purpose and Need," Arizona Cattlelog September, 1946. (title page)
Julian Terrett, “In Unity There is Strength,” The Montana Stockgrower, October 15, 1953, 5.
402
been in the late-nineteenth century). According to The Cattle Guard, of the hundreds of
ranchers with which Schafer talked, he failed to convince only about two dozen ranchers
to join the new and improved CCA.20
Schafer’s membership drive is noteworthy particularly because of its cow talk
components. Not only did Schafer appear to use cow talk to convince ranchers they
should join the relatively impotent CCA, CCA Executive Secretary David Rice’s decision
to devote two long articles to Schafer’s efforts also extended cow talk within the ranching
community well after Schafer returned to his ranch. Schafer sent a “steady stream of
reports” to the CCA telling of the conversations in which he had engaged during his
journey. He discovered places where ranchers needed help in straightening out a grazing
problem, a brand inspection misunderstanding, or some other local situation – all of
which involved some aspect of the ecological economy.
Rice’s articles regarding
Schafer’s journey further reified the elements of cow talk present in Schafer’s
promotional efforts.
Importantly, according to the articles, Schafer “bucked”
snowstorms, cold mountain winter weather, and “miles of strange roads.” At times, just
as every good rancher could understand, the endless effort left Schafer feeling “dragged
out.” Through it all Schafer remained “patient” and “quiet,” convincing ranchers that
association members’ unselfish labor would make the entire industry stronger.
In
referring to never-ending strenuous labor in rough conditions, Rice used tropes familiar
in and valued by ranch culture. Cow talk, then, not only helped Schafer convince all but
20
Unknown, "A Man Working for the Cattle Business," Cattle Guard, November 1955, 11-12 and
Unknown, “Bob Schafer’s 12,000-Mile Tour Brings 800 New Members Into CCA,” Cattle Guard, May
1956, 12.
403
“two dozen” ranchers to join, it also helped Rice communicate with the larger
membership about the renewing strength of the CCA.21
Although few associations were as moribund as the CCA, by the mid-1930s,
many associations had dwindled in size and significance, and resultantly had much rebuilding to do. The bulk of that rebuilding occurred in the postwar years, and, similarly
to Colorado, associations in Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming began to
gather new members into the fold. Ranchers participated in those drives in active and
meaningful ways. For example, in their quest to “rope” new members during the 1950s,
the MSGA utilized cow talk stories from ranchers, including celebrity testimonials from
well-respected ranchers such as Wallis Huidekoper.
Huidekoper, one of the oldest
members of the MSGA, had the “respect” of ranchers across the state. Because of this
respect, the MSGA believed him to be a perfect mouthpiece. Huidekoper represented
one of the “real” ranchers who had a large operation supposedly because, as Bill Grieve
discussed in the poem at the beginning of this chapter, he had taken care of the few he
had.
Interestingly, Huidekoper mobilized the ethic of individual achievement so
prevalent in ranch culture in order to argue against it. He explained that “our Montana
stockmen have the reputation of standing very squarely on their own feet and of being
strong for ‘self help’ but there comes a time when they need an active association back of
them to be attuned to the bigger matters beyond their personal control.” In being part of
the larger collective of ranchers, Huidekoper explained, ranchers need not feel self-
21
Ibid.
404
conscious. They could be individuals and still recognize that some things simply moved
“beyond their personal control.”22
Active member ranchers as well as the executive secretaries, then, sold
membership in the broader collectivity of ranchers. Both groups knew that in order to
persuade ranchers to join the association, they had to convince them that theirs was a
united community. Member ranchers and association personnel used the print culture of
their magazines to tell ranchers both of the effectiveness of the associations and the
camaraderie among ranchers. With the help of office staff (such as office secretaries),
executive secretaries, who tended to be the editors of the magazines, published each
periodical and created a print culture grounded in the dominant values of ranch culture.
Because of their roles as editors, the executive secretaries became responsible for
“selling” the organization (and the modern) to the ranching community, and to
accomplish that goal they relied on cow talk.23
As they drew on cow talk in articles they authored, however, association
personnel also relied on unspoken requirements of cow talk in soliciting material for the
22
See “In Unity there Is Strength,” The Montana Stockgrower September 15, 1953, 5. See also Ralph
Miracle, “Editor’s Column,” The Montana Stockgrower, July, 1956, 4 wherein Miracle explains to his
readers that “most of us can’t run an outfit and find time for much outside activity. There are always more
jobs ahead right at home without going anywhere looking for more.” In selling organization to ranchers as
both protective of their own interests and necessary due to the never-ending labor required of diligent
ranchers in their operations, Huidekoper and Miracle played on ranchers’ identities as busy, earnest
workers. According to this mentality, any hard-working rancher need not feel that joining the associations
resulted from lazy inattention to larger issues, but came precisely because of a deep commitment to those
issues.
23
The one exception to the arrangement of executive secretaries also being editors-in-chief was in
Colorado, where the first editor of the Cattle Guard was Dick Goff, who the CCA hired specifically for the
purpose of maintaining the periodical. David Rice, the executive secretary of the CCA, assisted Goff in the
publication of the periodical, until Goff left the CCA to continue his livestock advertising business in 1958.
John Boyd replaced Goff as editor and also became executive secretary in 1963. See Richard Goff,
Century in the Saddle, 298-99.
405
periodicals. The editors’ primary goal for the publications was to gather fodder of
interest to their readership. The post-1935 increasing presence of government regulatory
and research agencies in range ranching required ranchers to at least try to keep their
fingers on the pulse of government projects and rules. To address this need, association
editors included in each of their periodicals recurring columns and/or articles written by
government officials. These features related almost always to the ecological economy of
range ranching and gave ranchers news about grazing fees, range management, and
scientific experiments with pesticides and herbicides. Additionally state veterinarians
consistently wrote columns updating ranchers about the latest in disease prevention and
cures.
In these columns, government agents too sold the modern to the ranching
community but disguised it in terms of increasing production – something about which
every good, capitalist rancher dreamed.
The articles, written by government agents, but accepted for publication by the
editors, tended to depict happy relations among the bureaucrats and ranch folk. The
decades of animosity over “outsiders” trying to manage the range rarely appear in the
prose of government representatives, and time and again they are sure to thank ranchers
for their cooperation.
In March 1952, W.M. Beveridge, supervisor of the Prescott
National Forest, contributed an article to the Cattlelog (which he had also given as a
speech to an association meeting) on the success of juniper control on a section of the
forest. Beveridge was “sure that all cattlemen are anxious to improve conditions on their
ranges” or he “would not have been invited to talk on the subject.” In order to speak to
cattle ranchers in a language they would value, Beveridge assured them that it was their
406
labor, and not that of the USFS, which enabled the “pioneering control work.” He
explained that “the Forest Service cannot claim credit for...this work. A number of
progressive ranchers undertook this job at their own expense...it was indeed fortunate that
a number of...ranchers had gained experience in practical methods that enabled us to start
off on a sound and efficient basis.”24 Beveridge clearly took into consideration his
audience and wrote to appeal to them, but had he not chosen to do so, Abbie Keith easily
could have refused to publish the piece. Beveridge engaged in cow talk through his
promotion of “progressive” ranchers. Ranch publications across the intermountain West
included similar such articles. The depiction of intelligent, hard-working cattle folk
trying to work diligently with the constantly present government, gelled well with
ranchers’ own heroic constructions of their cultural group.25 In their publications, then,
ranchers got to be in control of which experts spoke, and in this way they shaped not only
the topics, but also the messages’ content.
In prescribing both, the association
productions not only decided what topics counted as important in cattle culture, they also
simultaneously naturalized the importance of those topics.
The editors, therefore, chose topics that could have made it seem as though all
ranchers, in all states, shared interests in the same government topics. In order to
promote further an image of commonality among ranchers, association editors also
24
W.M. Beveridge, "Juniper Control," Arizona Cattlelog March, 1952, 53.
For other examples of similar agricultural specialists writing for the publications and trying to be of help
to ranchers by educating them in the ways of modern agriculture while still arguing that ranchers were, in
reality, the real experts and were essential to the government’s success see A.A. Beetle, "Let's Judge Your
Range," Cow Country April 15, 1956, 6-7; N.A. Jacobsen, "Are Pine Needles to Blame? A Review of
Studies on the Part Played by Pine Needles in Connection with Abortion in Range Cows," The Montana
Stockgrower December, 1961, 8-9; John L. Sears and Carmy G. Page, "The County Agent Speaks: A
Review of 1949," Arizona Cattlelog January, 1950, 52-53; Dr. J.F. Ryff, "Have You Heard About
Anaplasmosis?," Cow Country April 15, 1956, 10.
25
included in every periodical remarkably similar recurring features.
407
Those recurring
features included columns wherein ranchers could read about issues of interest to those
“in the cow business,” and the similarities in lay-out and language meant that a rancher
from any state could pick up an association periodical from any other state and read of
the familiar. Each periodical, for example, printed death notices of members, and often
these obituary sections played with cow talk. The Montana Stockgrower, for example,
entitled its memorial column the “Last Roundup” and accompanied the list of deceased
with a short poem written by a rancher:
They say there will be a great Roundup
Where cowboys, like cattle will stand
To be cut by the Riders of Judgment
Who are posted and know every brand.26
The analogy of a roundup to describe Christian judgment day illustrates cow talk. In
order to understand the analogy, one had to be familiar with ranch labor (roundups,
cutting, posting, and branding). In using cow talk, the editors of The Montana Stockman
relied on ranch culture to communicate to the group and create commonality.
Like the “Last Roundup,” many other periodical feature columns utilized rural
colloquialisms with particular relevance to the cattle business. For example, the CCA’s
Cattle Guard, included a column in nearly every issue entitled “Irons in the Fire” – a title
which played off branding lingo. A picture of branding irons in the fire accompanied the
text and served to suggest work unfinished and/or ongoing. The column offered general
information for ranchers on many of the issues discussed in this dissertation –
developments in cattle health and disease, government action (or inaction), land issues,
26
“Last Roundup,” Montana Stockgrower, June 1956, 16; “In Memoriam,” Cow Country, June 1952, 15.
408
sale of livestock, and other bits of news. Additionally, “Irons in the Fire” contained
verbiage meant to convince ranchers that theirs was a united organization with great
power to affect political change. In April, 1957, Dick Goff, the author of the column
wrote:
Maybe you hear about it, but our State Senate gave CCA and
Dave Rice quite a nod of recognition last month. It was during
the fight against Eminent Domain when Senator David J. Clarke
of Denver jumped to his feet in exasperation.
‘I move we poll this group and find out how many senators are
voting for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association,’ he told the
president of that house, ‘And how many are voting for the State
of Colorado.’
The motion was defeated, 23-14...
and so was Senator Clarke’s Eminent Domain Bill.
The relaying of such a successful power play in the vaunted halls of the Colorado
Legislature surely would have bolstered the association’s members’ sense of their own
self-importance. Perhaps, the story seemed to say, we are as powerful as we want to be.
Accompanying Goff’s snippet was, of course, a picture of cows, taken on a Colorado
ranch.27
Like Goff’s utilization of the branding reference for his column, The Montana
Stockgrower relied also on cow talk in a feature column, “The Salt Lick,” to update
ranchers on various news items of interest in the state and the industry more broadly. In
27
See Dick Goff, "Irons in the Fire," Cattle Guard April, 1957, 19. ) In The New Mexico Stockman, the
news column was simply titled “Notes of Interest to Southwestern Livestock Growers” or “News Notes of
Interest to Southwestern Livestock Growers and Farmers.” “Notes” carried similar news items as the
columns in other publications, but utilized less iconography and cow talk than the others. Still the “Notes”
section often contained a cartoon specific to ranch or southwestern culture that often made gendered or
racialized jokes. For an example of this see, “Notes of Interest to Southwestern Livestock Growers and
Farmers,” The New Mexico Stockman, April 1955, 56. The Arizona Cattlelog subsumed “news” under its
“Neighborly Gossip” column. See below for more information on the “Neighborly Gossip” section of the
Arizona Cattlelog. See also Dick Goff, "Irons in the Fire," Cattle Guard October, 1957, 18-19.
409
ranch ecology, ranchers used a salt lick to ensure cattle received enough sodium in their
diet. Salt, in the form of sodium, is necessary for all life forms, but particularly is crucial
for “successful” weight gain and overall digestive health in livestock. If cattle are not
receiving enough salt in their diets, they will seek it out. Ranchers often place large
blocks of salt, or salt licks, throughout a pasture. Cattle roam in search of these licks and
congregate around them in groups in order to get the much-needed mineral the licks
provide.
In the postwar years, ranchers began experimenting with salt-added feed
(including rolled oats and barley and/or soy meal). Throughout the publications in these
years, ranchers shared information (yet another kind of cow talk) about the
success/failure of various kinds of salt-added feed. In 1952, for example, Ace Tyrrell
wrote into Cow Country to explain to his fellow ranchers that his experiments with grain
and salt feeding had been quite successful – he had doubled his herd’s weight in just ten
months.28 Knowing that most ranchers would be interested in Tyrrell’s success, Robert
Hanesworth, the editor of Cow Country, chose to put a picture of cattle congregating
around the salt feed on Tyrrell’s ranch the magazine’s cover.29
When the MSGA decided to name the news column “The Salt Lick,” they played
on both cows’ practice of herding around the lick for sustenance as well as ranchers’
constant struggle to provide enough salt for their cattle in order to signal to ranchers that
the news contained within the column was essential “nourishment” for their ranches.
The news items sometimes included trivial facts, such as the amount of sugar consumed
28
Ace V. Tyrrell, "Grain and Salt Feeding: Weight Doubled in 10 Months," Cow Country, September
1952, 7.
29
Cow Country, September 1952, cover. See also M. Webb to Abbie Keith, Box 6, Folder 1, ACGA
Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
410
by Americans or a short history of a place of interest in Montana such as Blackfoot City.
More often, however, the news items provided important informational advice and
service for ranchers.
In 1955, for example, the column warned ranchers that the
combination of sawdust and arsenic meant to control grasshoppers proved fatal for 35
cattle who had consumed the mixture. The column’s entire focus conveyed to ranchers
that they could control the ecological economies of their ranches with enough
information and with enough cow talk.30
Additionally, “The Salt Lick” always provided a list all of the visitors who had
stopped in at the MSGA office in Helena during the month. The list visually created the
sense that ranchers from all over the state wandered into the office to receive the
nourishment that the MSGA’s block of salt (which was its mere existence) could
provide.31 “The Salt Lick” not only provided intellectual and gossipy nourishment, it
also communicated to ranchers that they could manage their lives with information and
that they were in good company as they attempted to do so. In a business in which
ranchers often had little control, “The Salt Lick,” both the columns and the actual licks,
represented spaces over which owner/operators could hold dominion. The column serves
as another example of the ways in which the editors of the publications utilized “cow
30
“The Salt Lick,” The Montana Stockgrower, January 15, 1955, 24.
All the publications considered here included a list of visitors to the association office. This strategy also
helped to shrink the distance ranchers may have felt from one another and made it seem as though they
were only a quick visit at the main office from their fellow ranch folk.
31
411
talk” in order to communicate with ranchers using a language that conveyed collective
control and unity.32
In addition to soliciting articles from sympathetic non-ranchers and writing much
of the copy themselves, the executive secretaries, also asked ranchers, who belonged to
the associations, to submit much of the magazines’ cow talk. Editors such as Abbie
Keith constantly solicited entries from ranchers.33
In 1952, Wyoming ranchers
encountered a plea in Cow Country to submit “typical” pictures from their ranches to be
included in the magazine. To illustrate the kinds of images for which he was looking,
Bob Hanesworth included four photos he believed ranchers would recognize as “typical,”
or, at the very least, cow-centered and interesting.34
32
For a few examples of the “Salt Lick” column, see Montana Stockgrower, January 15, 1955, 24;
Montana Stockgrower, July 1957, 24; Montana Stockgrower, April 1959, 23; Montana Stockgrower,
August 1959, 22.
33
At times, Keith had difficulty in getting material and she did a considerable amount of the writing
herself. In 1949, Keith convinced Mary Kidder Rak, a prolific writer and rancher in southeastern Arizona,
to write an article telling ranchers how write – as they both worried that ranchers did not send as much
material as they might for fear of not producing quality written work. Despite this, however, the Arizona
Cattlelog in any given issue had four or five feature articles written by ranchers as well as the usual
“Neighborly Gossip” section. Mary Kidder Rak, "Help Eliza Cross the Ice," Arizona Cattlelog September,
1949, 29-30.
34
“Typical Pictures Taken on Wyoming Ranches,” Cow Country, May, 1952, 28.
412
Figure 30 Pictures of “typical” Wyoming ranches
It should come as no surprise that all of the photos Hanesworth used as examples of
“typical scenes” on Wyoming ranches centered on cows: cows standing in snow, cows
grazing, cows being branded, and cows being worked over by cowboys. Here again, is
another utilization, although a visual one, of cow talk. The message here was that the
most important element in ranch culture was the cow – and discussions and
representations of cows could serve as emblematic of the entire ranching world. This
reliance on the cow as consummate unifier of all Wyoming ranches was not unique in
Wyoming as it appeared on nearly every cover and in the pages of all the association
periodicals in the postwar decades.
Ranchers answered the calls for submissions and often took the opportunity to be
creative with their submissions. They wrote thousands of letters they believed would be
helpful and/or of interest to fellow ranchers in their individual states and in the region
413
more generally. They submitted amateur poetry and photography that they hoped would
resonate with their fellows in the ranching business. They sent in commonplace weather
updates. They reported births and deaths, and agreed to have the stories of their families’
ranches published in the pages of the association chronicles (all for no remuneration).
Creating unity and fellowship among ranchers required a good deal of labor and was a
task that rested on sharing news of the everyday.
Importantly, non-ranch authors, while addressing issues pertinent to the
ecological economy of range ranching, did not often utilize a language style peculiar to
cattle ranching. The contributions from ranchers themselves, however, regularly played
with the rural vernacular to communicate with their “friends” in the business.
Hierarchical leadership, therefore, did not hand ranchers their cow talk from on high,
rather that was cow talk grew organically on the range.
Through their submissions and the submissions of their neighbors, ranchers
participated in the political community of membership through a culturally-based poetics.
Rancher-authored poetry, photography, cowboy songs, gossipy updates, and various
humor pieces filled the pages in nearly every issue of each of the five publications.
Ranchers’ literary tropes utilized a kind of “cattle slang” that was supposed to be
recognizable to any “authentic” rancher no matter her/his class position or level of
education. So that while rancher submissions often appeared to be “cultural,” these
techniques also were political and as such created an insider political community through
cultural production. Take, for example, the cartoon drawn by rancher Ray Nelson which
appeared in Cow Country in January 1960:
414
Figure ___ Cow talk cartoon
Figure 31 Cow talk cartoon, 1960
Not only did Nelson create inside humor around the reading of brands, which, in and of
itself requires a specific cultural literacy, the Wyoming rancher, also expected his rancher
audience to understand the slang of “brrlow” – which captured the ways in which cow
folk supposedly slurred their words and did not speak “proper” English.
The cartoons of renowned “cowboy” artist Ace Reid represent another of the
common rancher-authored features which employed insider knowledge of ranch culture
by playing with ranch vernacular. Born and raised on a cattle ranch in Texas, Reid
syndicated his humorous rural cartoons in the 1940s and all five of the intermountain
West cattlegrower associations picked up various editions of the cartoons to be published
in their magazines. Reid’s cartoons put into visual image the “culture” of ranching and
captured the patterns of everyday life for range ranchers. Reid entitled his cartoon
“Cowpokes” and through image and prose followed the happenings on the Draggin’ S
415
Ranch. Ace Reid, according to his wife Madge Reid, created “Cowpokes” in order to
help ranchers laugh at themselves and laugh at difficult times.35
The major themes of the cartoon echoed the issues dancing in the pages of the
association publications. Cowboys Jake and Zeb, the main characters of the cartoon,
constantly confronted the issues of politics, range health, banking, the price of real estate
and feed, droughty conditions, and tourists (to mention a few). In addition to wrestling
with the difficult circumstances of ranching in the postwar era, “Cowpokes” also depicted
antiquated cowboys using the rural vernacular so prevalent in the imaginative discourse
of ranchers. The following image, representative of Reid’s work, appeared in Cow
Country in 1956, just as the drought hit its height and feed prices skyrocketed.
Figure 32 Ace Reid, “Cowpokes” cartoon, 1956
Reid uses the grammatically incorrect referent “them” to describe the feed bills and
depicts Jake and Zeb as old-fashioned cowboys who ride horses and dress in the
traditional garb of the open range (note the chaps and the spurs). Reid’s use of cow talk
35
See John Erickson, Ace Reid, Cowpoke (Perryton, Texas: Maverick Books, ca. 1984). See also the
American Heritage Center’s Rural Images Virtual Exhibit at
http://ahc.uwyo.edu/onlinecollections/exhibits/rural/reid.htm (last accessed April 5, 2005).
416
and use of ranch-specific plot-lines may seem the product of one isolated artist, but the
fact that each of the state associations used Reid’s cartoons throughout the 1950s and
1960s indicates that the art resonated with ranchers across the intermountain West in
meaningful ways.36 Perhaps one of the most important aspects of belonging to any
community is being able to understand the “language.” Exclusion and inclusion in a
group, therefore, can be based in the comprehension of or ignorance about the group’s
cultural dialect. The ranching community could gloss over regional, classed, raced, and
gendered divisions when they believed they all could understand and laugh at an image
such as the above cartoon. The commonality of “getting the joke” and of speaking the
language helped to create cultural affinity and, at least a sense of, political unity.37
Perhaps no one utilized “cow talk” as effectively or popularly than did F.H.
Sinclair, aka Neckyoke Jones. In 1943, F.H. Sinclair, a native of Glendive, Montana, had
returned to the state from a publishing career in New York City and began ranching.
Interested in events of a political nature, Sinclair had written a letter in “the language of
the cowboy” to one of Montana’s state senators Charles L. Scofield. Ribbing the Senator
about legislative matters generally, Sinclair’s letter soon ran through the gossip channels
of the Montana ranch world and came to the attention of Eddie Phillips, Executive
Secretary of the MSGA. Phillips requested a similar letter from Sinclair beginning what
36
It is important to note in “Cowpokes” Reid often depicts women as nagging wives who tend to serve no
purpose other than nitpicking the men around them. Thus even in this broadly appealing art, there is
gender tension that is almost naturalized. For an example of this see Ace Reid, “Cowpokes,” Cow Country,
April 15, 1956, 21.
37
I borrow much of this analysis from Mary Douglas, "Jokes," in Rethinking Popular Culture:
Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
was to become a 25-year column.
417
By the mid-1950s, Neckyoke, his “pardner”
Greasewood, and countless other colorful neighbors had made their appearance in cattle
publications across the intermountain West. Sinclair’s property straddled the Wyoming
and Montana border and so the Greasewood column was most popular in the Montana
Stockgrower and Cow Country, but it also appeared in Colorado, New Mexico, and
Arizona.
Sinclair/Neckyoke pontificated on all sorts of issues in the letters (which always
were addressed to the Executive Secretary of the state association). Usually writing from
his outfit on the fictive “Long Pine” creek, he attacked labor unions, modernization,
taxes, and “Washington buearycrats.” He also argued for the necessity of association and
community within the cattle industry. In 1949, presaging Ralph Miracle’s sentiment in
the epitaph which introduced this chapter, Neckyoke explained to his readers:
Fightin’ is everybody’s job – an’ we all got to turn to an’ make a hand. If
the stockman wants to go on as a free American, he ain’t goin’ to set back
an’ yelp about 2c a day dues to build a fire guard around his outfit. This is
a age of organization. You’n me would probably like to go on
independent – an’ do as we damn please – but this ain’t 1890, which is
perhaps too bad. We live in a time when we got to travel in bunches or git
the tar walloped outen us. It might cost 2c a day – but by crackey it’s
worth it!”38
Neckyoke Jones’ discussion of the benefit of organization echoed many of the sentiments
of cattle ranchers who actively participated in their associations. What is perhaps more
important for our discussion of cow talk, however, is his use of “cowboy language” to
communicate his ideas. Sinclair, a well-educated, well-connected rancher, used phonetic
spelling of words, turns of phrase unique to ranching (such as “turn to an’ make a hand” –
38
Neckyoke Jones, "Greasewood Answers Powder River Pete," Cow Country, July 7 1949, 8.
418
which means to become an indispensable laborer), as well as colloquial configurations of
writing in order to communicate in a language he believed would reverberate in the
dominant ranch culture of the intermountain West. Even the clever name “Neckyoke”
would have made sense culturally to his fellow ranchers because “neckyoke” was the part
of the cow’s neck where the yoke rubbed as the cow worked. When the cow was
slaughtered for beef, the neckyoke was usually the toughest part of the meat. Indeed,
Neckyoke and all of his buddies were salty, curmudgeonly characters who attempted to
represent a hegemonic ranch lifestyle. Additionally, whether they agreed with his take on
the issues or not, the topics Neckyoke addressed surely stuck in ranchers’ collective
craws.
Neckyoke’s rendition of the hegemonic ranch lifestyle included few women.
When women did appear in Neckyoke’s letters, they seemed to be unwelcome interlopers
on masculine terrain. This is not to say that Neckyoke did not, at times, make an attempt
to acknowledge the increasingly visible presence of women in the industry. In 1964,
Neckyoke pontificated about the importance of the Cowbelles, even claiming that the
“men folks” were getting wise to the “fack” that the Cowbelles did more than “the men
folks ever did an’ they [the Cowbelles] sure shows more savvy than the men did.”39
Regardless of this nod of recognition, however, the majority of Neckyoke columns
excluded or denuded women – which, of course, served to reinforce the
paternalistic/patriarchal foundation of the larger ranch culture. Still, even here ranch
women asserted their power and demanded to be recognized by the larger ranch culture;
39
Paladin, Montana Stockgrower, 83.
419
in 1957, Neckyoke was joined by a female counterpart in the pages of The Montana
Stockgrower.
Written in the same vernacular as the Neckyoke column, “Maggie’s” column
came from a ranchwoman who utilized “cow talk” as enthusiastically as Neckyoke.
Maggie usually appeared in the “She Stuff” section of the Montana Stockgrower. “She
Stuff,” a phrase used in ranching vernacular, referred to anything dealing with female
cattle. Not surprisingly, the MSGA reserved the “She Stuff” section of The Montana
Stockgrower specifically for Cowbelle news and “feminine” concerns more generally.
The Montana Cowbelles mascot, a heifer cow, appeared under the section heading and,
thus,
both
the
name
“She
Stuff”
and
the
iconography
connected
the
Cowbelle/ranchwomen section of the periodical into the larger industry in spite of its
segregated appearance. In drawing on cow talk when creating the women’s section of the
periodical, the MSGA staff effectively separated Montana ranchwomen from the “men
folks,” but they also gave women a space in the publication which had not existed prior
to 1955. “She Stuff” contained all of the reports from the local Cowbelle chapters,
recipes, notices of upcoming Cowbelle activities, and a letter from the state Cowbelle
president on the status of the organization; and, in 1957, it began to run the sporadic
Maggie column.
Maggie’s real identity, unlike that of Neckyoke’s, remains a public mystery. A
1982 memory book, produced by the MSGA commemorating the longevity of The
Montana Stockgrower, dedicates an entire section to honor Neckyoke and F.H. Sinclair.
Maggie, however, appears nowhere. Even the pages of the Stockgrower of the 1950s and
420
1960s, never mention Maggie’s real identity. It is true that Maggie’s column appeared
less regularly than the Neckyoke column. This could account for the lack of attention she
received both then and later.
Her anonymity, however, is telling in that it again
underscores the privileging of the masculine so prevalent in ranch culture.
When Maggie’s column did appear in the postwar decades, it usually chronicled
some gathering of cattlegrowers from a gendered (ranchwoman’s) perspective. The first
column, in 1957, explained how Maggie had finally gotten to “let them termater plants”
go for a week and attend a Stockgrowers’ convention. She was excited because usually
she was stuck at home while “Pa” went. The reasons for her immobility ranged from
having to watch “the kids” to having “bum lambs” to attend to. She recalled the surprise
(and joy) she felt at seeing so many ranchers in one place, and explained that she was
even more surprised to see a horse in a corral “right in the middle of that big hotel”
lobby. Before she knew it, she had tickets to attend all of the events at the convention –
from the Cowbelles fashion show, to the co-ed cocktail hour – and had been signed up as
an official member of the Cowbelles. The roping of Maggie into the various activities at
the convention and her retelling of it is yet another example of the physical manifestation
and later literary interpretation of cow talk.
After the convention was over, Maggie wrote to report how attending it had done
much for her self-esteem as a rancher. She explained to “Secetery” Miracle, “I think I
gained enough in new outlook to set me up for the year, and I’ve got enthusiasm for
about every job I tackle now. I can see there’s a lot of people in the same fix I’m in, and
421
if we all work for the same thing and stay united we’re bound to come out all right.”40
The next year, 1958, Maggie attended the convention for a second time. This time she
was thrilled since she had a new dress she had made with the “Keep Slim, Eat Beef”
slogan sewn on the back (the following year, as she prepared to attend the 1959
convention, Maggie appeared in The Montana Stockgrower in her dress – unfortunately
with her back turned so we cannot see her face).41 She explained that “we are lookin’
forward to seein’ everybody and talkin’ a lot and gettin’ some new ideas or brushin’ off
some old ones and probably agreein’ we have been on the right track all the time. I sure
think Neckyoke has somethin’ when he says we cowmen is stubborn. But the longer I
live the more I think stubborness is the answer to a lot of things if’n...[it]...is used to stick
to what we know is right...it’s goin’ to take some real nerve and stubbornness to resist the
pressures we’re apt to meet.”42
The ranch vernacular Maggie used in her “report”
includes herself (a ranchwoman) in the masculine normative “cowmen” and, like
Neckyoke, Maggie slurs her words to position herself, and her message, within the
broader ranch culture.
The “modern” appears (although not explicitly named) in
Maggie’s column as something against which cowmen need to be stubborn. And, most
importantly, Maggie suggests that individual, stubborn ranchers will be safer if they unite
together.
Maggie’s columns, in addition to ignoring the gendered divisions so clear in her
own letters and indicating a similarity of purpose between male and female ranchers, also
40
Maggie, "Maggie Reports on the Convention," The Montana Stockgrower July, 1957, 15.
Maggie, "Minnie's Conventioning," The Montana Stockgrower May, 1959, 31.
42
Maggie, "Maggie Promotes," The Montana Stockgrower May, 1958, 27.
41
422
suggest the labor that went into creating unity through stockgrower conventions. Each
state association in all of the years covered in this study hosted an annual convention
(usually sometime after branding in the spring or before the sales of the autumn months
when the weather was expected to be decent and the labor demands slackened).
Hundreds of ranchers attended these meetings and hundreds more attended the quarterly
meetings of the executive committees.43
In addition to the state-sponsored events,
ranchers also gathered, in untold numbers, for meetings of their local livestock
associations.
All these group meetings were, of course, political.
At the annual
convention, ranchers chose representatives for standing committees, listened to speakers
on various issues of the day (including cattle health and the latest agency, policy, and
legislative news from Washington, D.C.), and adopted resolutions on everything from
predator control to beef promotion.44
The conventions, however, like most rancher
events existed as more than political gatherings; they also encompassed the social and
cultural. As ranchers participated in the political aspects of convention-going, as they
discussed marketing, legislation, federal regulation, and production issues, they also
participated in a convention culture steeped in cow talk. That culture informed and
buoyed the political.
Those ranchers responsible for organizing the gatherings conscientiously created
the convention culture and relied extensively on cow talk to convince ranchers of the
43
In 1958, for example, over 500 Montana ranchers attended the annual convention, The Montana
Stockgrower, June, 1958, 6. Other states reported similar numbers.
44
Committee appointments and convention resolutions were adopted by the membership through a
majority vote. Anywhere from 10 to 40 ranchers participated on the standing committees – the numbers
varied according to the type of committee and the state. The bulk of the committees’ labor, however, was
conducted by the officers of the committee (chair, vice chair, and secretary).
423
importance of participating in these ostensibly political gatherings. Both before and after
the meetings (especially the annual state conventions), the associations published detailed
accounts of the meetings. The Call to Convention issue occurred the month before the
state convention and included the convention schedule as well as a letter from either the
association president or the executive secretary urging ranchers to attend – all the while
using cow talk to try and convince ranchers of the importance of participating. In 1965,
for example, Bob Barthelmess, president of the MSGA, urged ranchers to attend the May
convention in Billings. To get ranchers to saddle up, Barthelmess explained that prices
would most certainly be poor in 1965, exacerbating the problem of a rough winter and
high production costs. By attending the convention, he assured his readers, they could
learn from the MSGA what the “many capable individuals willing to invest time, energy,
and brains” were doing about the troubles of the industry. Despite rugged leadership,
Barthelmess suggested that the MSGA needed the attendance of as many members as
possible in order to “meet the formidable tasks ahead.” And in order to remind ranchers’
of their commonality, Barthelmess ended his call with a cow talk analogy, “Come to
Billings May 20-22 and help us out. A short-handed crew might spill the head. We can’t
take that chance.”45 Not all of the labor necessary to confront the needs of ranchers (the
head) could be conducted by only a few (short-handed crew).
In the early 1960s, the MSGA also began including a poem in its Call to
Convention. Written by Montana rancher Bill Grieve, the verse urged members to go to
the convention by likening the gathering of modern ranchers to a round-up crew. The
45
Bob Barthelmess, "Call to Convention," The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1965, 9.
424
poem is worth quoting at length in order to get a sense of the ways in which it captures
cow talk:
Round-Up Time
Ranching by its nature is an independent game,
For help is seldom near enough to call for it by name.
Geography makes it necessary to do with what you’ve got,
And when a thing needs fixing, you fix it on the spot.
Or when a cow’s in trouble it doesn’t help to shout,
Whatever trouble she is in you just help get her out.
All of this is well and good, the way it’s got to be,
But in another area for help we’ve got to plea...
And we’ll never get the job done if we don’t bunch up and yelp!
So dab some polish on your boots, get your wife and hat,
Hire the calf to milk the cow and leave the ranch to the cat,
And go to the Stockgrower’s meeting the twentieth of May,
There’ll be a lot of cowboys there, see what they have to say.
We’ve got to band together like a great big roundup crew
And work for the good of the business, IT’S THE ONLY THING TO DO!
Grieve’s use of cow talk in the poem is illustrative in several ways. First, he uses the
analogy of the round-up to appeal to ranchers’ labor identities.
He then relies on
common references to which all ranchers could relate (on every ranch someone would
have to watch the livestock) in order to create commonality between himself and his
ranch readers. And, finally, he refers to the gendered convention culture which ranchers
could anticipate (shined boots, wives in tow, lots of cowboys talking) in order inspire
ranchers to attend the convention.46
His acceptance and promotion of possessive
manhood (“get your wife”) mirrors ranch culture’s broader will to dominance and
indifference toward gender, racial, and economic inequalities. The conventions existed in
order to have the collective group of ranchers pass resolutions that addressed issues
46
Whether or not it would have inspired female ranchers is difficult to say. Certainly ranchwomen were
often the ones to stay at the ranch and take care of “business” while the men went to town. Bill Grieve,
"Roundup Time," The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1965.
425
important to ranchers’ quest for continued political, environmental, economic, and
cultural power. Local and state organizations, therefore, relied on visual and written
manifestations of ranching culture to promote unity and participation at the conventions,
but also to ultimately advance ranchers’ shared agenda of unshared ecological space and
uncontested politics.
The dominant and unchallenged ranch culture manifested itself in countless and
sometimes unquantifiable ways during ranchers’ conventions and meetings. Of course
there was the informal networking that occurred outside of the formal convention
meetings. As ranchmen and women mingled in the hotel lobbies and convention halls,
they engaged in cow talk as they shared news of rain, range health, and the latest gossip
about their cows. Convention goers attended dinners and cocktail hours, and the big
dance (usually held on the last night of the convention). But convention participants also
imbibed ranch culture visually and obviously as they embodied their culture through their
dress.
Ranchers wore their best hats, shined their boots, donned leather bow ties,
purchased or made new dresses (recall Maggie’s Eat Beef dress), and on more than one
occasion displayed his/her brand on a belt buckle. Like other manifestations of cow talk,
ranchers’ dress figured prominently in their public advertisement of their culture. Seeing
one another in ranch-specific garb connoted, as surely as slurred language and phonetic
spelling, that they mingled among members of the same community.
Ranchers also infused cow talk into their meeting culture through a variety of
means – including analogies, rituals, and iconography.
For example, the Willcox
Cowbelles of Arizona had an elaborate ceremony to open their meetings. As Peggy
426
Wear, the secretary of the group explained, “we open our meetings with the Lord’s
Prayer followed by our club song ‘Our Home’s on the Range.’ Our roll call is answered
by giving our ranch or individual brand.” The Cowbelles took attendance shortly after
these rituals and, Wear proudly reported, “eighteen of our present members joined at our
first meeting; since them we have stamped our brand on 62 new members. Our tally
book [a rancher’s book which indicates numbers of head] lists 80. No cut backs [cows
who have escaped] and 2 strays [wandering cows].”47
One of the most peculiar and interesting exhibitions of cow talk in rancher
meetings was the decoration of the meeting sites with ranching iconography such as the
horse in the corral to which Maggie referred in 1957. At various times from 1945-1965,
the state association convention committees decorated the lobbies of the convention sites
with bales of hay, display booths, brand paraphernalia, and every now and then, a cow or
two.48 Convention planners also asked permission to “brand” the walls of their meeting
halls. In 1961, for example, the Western Montana Stockmen’s Association, invited Bill
Cheney, the head of the Livestock Commission for the State of Montana, to their fall
meeting because they believed the meeting would be a particularly special one as they
recently had finished the branding of the hall in Billings. As Ruth Stearns, the secretary
of the WMSA, explained, “all members who have not had the opportunity to put their
brands on the walls of the hall can do so. We think this will be fun, and bring a good turn
47
Peggy Wear, "Willcox Cowbelles," Arizona Cattlelog January, 1948.
For examples of various committee decorating ideas see “Wyoming’s Cowbelles,” Cow Country,
October 15, 1956, 9, “125 Attend Colorado Cowbelles Annual Stock Show Breakfast,” Cattle Guard,
February, 1956, 10.
48
out of the members.”
49
427
As Stearns’ letter indicates, the cultural aspects of stockgrower
get-togethers often offered as much of an incentive as the political business of the
meetings. Using iconography and language that centered around the things ranchers had
in common (in these two examples branding), ranchers could convince one another of
their commonality of experience and thus overlook issues that could potentially divide
them. When all was said and done with the political aspects of the meetings, ranchers
could simply look at the branded wall and know they were, at their core, like-minded
people with similar values and goals.
After the conventions and the bigger meetings (like the Quarterly and Executive
Committee meetings) had concluded, associations would devote entire editions of their
periodicals to convention/meeting news. The news included many of the political aspects
of the meeting.
The association publications reprinted entire speeches of meeting
speakers (especially the presidential addresses), reported the election results for officers,
and listed the convention/meeting resolutions.50 These kinds of post convention reporting
mimicked other organizations’ conferences, but importantly, the post-meeting articles in
cow culture peppered the discussions of the political aspects of the gathering with a
constant murmur of cow talk. Ralph Miracle used this language to describe stockgrower
convention culture in 1955. He explained that:
49
Ruth Stearns to Bill Cheney, 22 July 1961, Box 6, Folder 13, Montana Brands Enforcement Division
Records, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana. This practice continued throughout the 1960s.
50
For representative articles, see Abbie Keith, “48th Annual Convention,” Arizona Cattlelog, February
1952, 11-19; Abbie Keith, “Our Holbrook Meeting,” Arizona Cattlelog, December 1951, 59-64;
“Resolutions,” The New Mexico Stockman, April 1955, 10-12; “Resolutions Adopted By Cattlemen in
Clovis Meet,” The New Mexico Stockman, 5-10; “Resolutions,” The New Mexico Stockman, March 1947,
36-39; “Convention Resolutions,” The Montana Stockgrower, June 15, 1955, 6-8; “Resolutions Adopted at
the 67th Annual Convention,” The Montana Stockgrower, June 1951, 12-15.
428
there’s something about a Stockgrowers convention that’s hard to
put your rope on. Something intangible would be the fancy word
for it. There’s serious business at these meetings. There’s fun.
And there’s something that is just being with people. The right
kind of people...they [ranchers] like people. Particularly their own
kind of people. They live with real things, weather, growing grass,
cattle and horses. They like to talk about them with others who
understand their language...When you come right down to it, it
defies description, but the true value and enjoyment of a
stockgrowers meeting is hunkering down with your neighbors who
may live hundreds of miles from you but have the same interest
and the same set of standards.51
In mentioning the “right” kind of people, Miracle intended to set cattle ranchers apart
from a gathering of lawyers or dentists. Importantly, it was ranchers’ experiences with
the ecological economy – their living with “real things” like “weather, growing grass,
cattle and horses” that clearly set ranchers apart from other occupational groups in
Miracle’s mind.
Like Miracle, the Greenlee County Cowbelles attempted to convince themselves
(and others) that theirs was a unique community. Rancher Harriett Wright explained that
Greenlee County Cowbelle meetings were distinctive because the ranchwomen had to
travel “so many miles to get to every meeting” and then came home “all tired and worn,
Grateful to the one who made that good stout saddle horn.”52 As Wright and Miracle
show, the idea that cattle ranchers were unique in their convention and meeting culture
permeated the ranching community.
Conventions and meetings were not the only venues at which ranchers gathered.
Cattle folk came together to socialize and politicize with their “own kind” in myriad other
51
52
Ralph Miracle, “Editor’s Column,” The Montana Stockgrower, June 15, 1955, 4.
Harriet Wright, “Greenlee County Cowbelles,” Arizona Cattlelog, 40.
429
circumstances as well. Sales and auctions, for example, incorporated sociability as well
as economics. In a similar vein ranch tours, sponsored by various individual ranchers
and, more rarely, breed associations, occurred throughout the region during the postwar
decades. Usually free of charge, these tours included a great deal of cow talk. These one
to three day tours brought ranchers to a particular region to look at and learn from other
operations. The tours had various sponsors that could include agricultural extension
offices, individual ranchers, and/or packing houses, such as Swift and Company.
Publicity about the tours chronicled in great detail the specific moments during which
ranchers gathered at a ranch to “talk about a cow.” In 1947, over 150 ACGA members
gathered at Mrs. JV Donnet’s White Mountain Hereford Ranch to partake in a day of
sociability and education. Ranchers enjoyed a judging competition, educational sessions
conducted by featured Hereford ranchers as well as agricultural extension agents, and a
“big barbeque...on top of the Apache National Forest.”53 C.E. Hellbusch, a New Mexico
rancher, attended the tour and explained that “after the big dinner the touring ranchers
took a look at WHR Princeps 27th, the bull in their herd...that is causing so much
comment in Hereford circles. This bull is very short legged and close to the ground, with
very deep thick hind quarters...and has a very strong head to match.
It was very
educational for the ranchers to see this sire after having first seen his calves at various
ages in the fitting barn.”54 “Field trip” tours of this kind could be purely for education
and enjoyment on the part of rancher participants. Those who hosted the tours, of course,
hoped to create business relationships with the visitors, but there was no guarantee of
53
54
C.E. Hellbusch, “Field Day at White Mountain Hereford Ranch,” Arizona Cattlelog, September 1947, 3.
Ibid., 4.
430
such an outcome, and often the most important result of the tour was the further
solidification of ranch culture through cow talk.
Individual ranch tours existed throughout the region and could be both formal and
informal, but organized, association-sponsored breed tours were also popular throughout
the 1950s. In southwestern New Mexico in 1960, “good Herefords, good weather, and
good people” got together thanks to the New Mexico Hereford Association to tour
purebred and commercial Hereford operations throughout the region. The follow-up
“picture-story” published in The New Mexico Stockman, assured readers that tours were
not just for grown-up cattle folk, but were fun for the entire family. Pictures of ranchers
eating, talking, and inspecting ranch operations existed alongside photos of commercial
and purebred herds and New Mexico ranch scenery. Perhaps most importantly, the
ranchers and cows themselves comprised the subjects of these articles so that all a reader
saw was fellow cattle folk surrounded by one another and quality cattle. This imagery
would have served to emphasize the connection between ranchers and cows and to
reinforce the idea that economic affiliations with and cultural affections for cows fused
ranchers together in their political collectives.
Importantly, real ranchers (as opposed to the fictionalized Neckyoke) often
contributed articles about cultural gatherings of cattle folk to the pages of the association
publications. In addition to chronicling events, ranchers wrote in to discuss any number
of day-to-day operational issues. Some wrote to ask questions, others to share what they
had learned through various experiments on their ranches.
The presence of this
information-sharing provided valuable rallying space for ranchers’ unity. Ranches, in
431
these large western states, often lived hundreds miles from one another and ranchers
experienced great distance from one another in their day to day lives. Each ranch
differed according to its land use pattern, the number and type of head grown, the number
of hands hired, and the non-human factors involved in growing cattle (weather,
topography, etc.). In order to successfully come together in their associations and create
an image of group unity and strength, ranchers had to believe they understood one
another despite the vast distances and differences which could and did separate them.
The sharing of “gossip” and of more formal information in the pages of the association
publications negated those divisive distances by creating the appearance of commonality
in experience and knowledge.
Benedict Anderson has suggested that distances
(ideological, temporal, and spatial distances) do not need necessarily to separate or divide
groups (or nations in Anderson’s case) if those distances can be bridged through a sharing
of language and tradition. Ranchers created the appearance of togetherness, in the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, through their conscious sharing of experiences in a cultural language
specific to ranching.
Ranchers’ sharing of everyday news most often appeared in sections of the
periodicals created for the purpose of learning about one’s “neighbors,” but columns, like
the “Neighborly Gossip” column in the Arizona Cattlelog, and the “Letters from
Members” section in Cow Country, were created from actual letters written to the
Executive Secretaries in the course of transacting some sort of business, such as the
55
paying of dues.
432
The sections visually and discursively negate differences because the
letters never mention the number of head a rancher ran or the number of acres s/he owned
and, the editors printed only the locale with the rancher’s name. Thus a small rancher’s
newsy update existed side-by-side with a large rancher’s similar gossip.
The
commonality of experience across space, time, and economic position strikes the reader
as s/he peruses the letters. In particular, it appears in these letter that all ranchers are
doing is talking about the weather. When one thinks more carefully about ranchers’ use
of certain mundane topics, such as the weather, in their correspondence to one another,
however, it becomes clear that ranchers are using the discussions of rain, winter, and heat
to create fellowship with one another that, from outside the ranching world, could appear
strikingly impermeable and steadfast.56
Throughout the postwar years, poetry reigned as one of the most popular written
genres that ranchers produced, both in public and private, that drew on the everyday
experiences of ranch life to create an appearance of commonality among disparate
ranchers. Cowboy poetry is somewhat famous, especially thanks to its late-twentiethcentury resurgence at cowboy poetry gatherings where diverse literary types gather to
consume an aging art form, but in the immediate postwar decades, intermountain West
cattle ranchers contributed folksy poems for one another’s consumption – writing about
topics in which they believed they all had an interest in and using cow talk to make the
55
These kind of sections occurred regularly in all of the editions of the five periodicals. For representative
examples see “Letters from Members,” in Cow Country, November 1952, 11; and “Neighborly Gossip,” in
Arizona Cattlelog, August 1946, 34-36.
56
Anderson, 187-197. Even those ranchers who chose not to contribute directly to the association
publications could join in on the imagining of community through reading and subscribing to the
periodicals.
433
topics seem universally appropriate for all those engaged in range ranching. Rancherauthored poetry appeared in nearly every issue of the association publications throughout
the postwar decades. It is in rancher poetry, perhaps better than in any other genre of
cow talk, that we can see language created in the ranching community for the ranching
community.
Any cow talk topic was fair game for these rhyming ranchers, and their verses
included musings about their ranches, cows, horses, dogs, chickens, spouses, rain (or lack
thereof), and ranching’s illustrious past.57 Three of the most constant concerns within the
poetry, however, center on the notions of authenticity, accuracy, and righteousness. In an
age when the “old” was fast fading, ranch poets composed verses intent on representing
the way it “really” was in range country and the way authentic ranchers continued to live.
The poems then also attempted to assert ranchers’ right to persevere in their unique and
important “way of life.”
In 1952, ranchwoman Wilda Springman addressed ranchers’ shared obsession
with the prices of cattle and the long-lived presence of prices as a rancher’s main
concern. In her poem entitled “Are They?” she wrote:
Are cattle coming up, or, will they go down?
And are there any heifers around?
At breakfast, at noon and when we sup,
Are cattle going down or, will they come up?
When strong men meet there’s a mournful sound.
Will they go up? How can they go down?
And the breezes croon ‘neath the autumn sky,
57
For examples see “Poetry Exchange,” Arizona Cattlelog, February 1946, 18-19; Bruce Orcutt, “My
Range? – My Soil?” The Montana Stockgrower, May 1951, 36; Mrs. Geo. R. Smith, “In Memory of L.B.
Millison,” The Montana Stockgrower, October 1952, 40.
434
Will they be low or will they be high?
The birdies still sing and the creek babbles on.
And all us folks sing the same old song.
But come rain or shine, this much I know
They’ll either be high or else they’ll be low.
Springman’s prose communicates with Cow Country readers about something which had
an almost naturalized presence in ranch life – the market price for beef cattle. As “strong
men” met they knew they shared in common the concern over high or low prices. Only
real ranchers could have related to Springman’s discussion of “high or low” because she
never explicitly mentions prices – note that she only asks if “cattle” (not cattle prices) are
“going up or coming down.”
Cow talk’s focus on authenticity, like the idea in Springman’s poem that all the
“folks” had been present for some time as they continued to sing the same “old” songs,
found expression in many poems during the postwar years. A poem called “Take Me
Back to Old Montana” in which an “outsider” fondly recalled the natural beauty of
Montana inspired a vitriolic reply by a Montana rancher from Absarokee in 1962.
Because the rancher, B.L. Kratz, was sure that the poem’s author had offered a romantic
(or at least incomplete) depiction of life on a ranch in Montana he offered “a tip” for the
“stranger.” Kratz suggested that the author should “spend your whole winter, In some
hotel back East” because, as Kratz explained:
there is all sides to Old Montana, He [the poet] ain’t never seen at
all.
He ain’t never rode a night guard
With the rain a’peltin’ down...
...when Old Man Winter hits us And the blizzards start to rage...
all the Cowboys are figurin’ where they spent their summer’s
wage...
435
when the cow stands and shivers too damn weak to even graze...
when valleys and the landscape
is covered with a blanket soft and white,
that is the time to hit ol’ Montana
If you want to her right...
I’m no pessimist or cynic
Or poets’ friend, I’ll have you know,
But who the hell can dream of romance
When it’s forty-eight below?
Another lengthy poem written by J.F. Wootan, a ranch hand and livestock inspector,
echoed Kratz’s concern with outsiders’ misrepresentations of ranch life in the West.
Wootan penned “The Real Cowboy” in 1946 and shared it with the collective group of
ranchers in the pages of the Arizona Cattlelog. He was annoyed particularly by the
Hollywood rendition of ranching and cow work.58
THE REAL COWBOY
Backward, you film-making guys in
your flight,
And turn out a cow-boy that does
the game right;
Put on a picture that don't look so
strange
To us ol' punchers who've rode on
the range.
Don't have the daughter the ol' man
loves best,
Skip with some hard-riding son of
the west;
Backward, turn backward, till people
will know
Exactly how things on a cattle ranch
58
Show us a cow-boy with more work
to do
Than merely to ride a wild broncho
or two;
Picture him lopin' away in the rain,
Roundin’ up steers on the mudsplattered plain;
Make him appear in far different
scene,
And not as they make him appear
on the screen.
Backward, turn backward, until folks
can see
His job ain’t the snap it is cracked
up to be.
B.L. Kratz, "A Cowboy's Life Ain't All Roses," The Montana Stockgrower February, 1962, J.F. Wootan,
"The Real Cowboy," Arizona Cattlelog January, 1946. Kratz 34 Wootan 35
436
Picture a cow-boy whose job is above
Close-herdin' damsels and falling in
love;
Make him, appear in far different
light
Than hanging around the saloon half
the night.
Picture him cuttin' out steers from
the bunch,
And not with some gal at a picnic or
lunch;
Backward, turn backward, till folks
get a clew
Of some of the things that a cow-boy
don't do.
Pull off your chaps and your gun
and your spurs,
And get a real cow-boy to show
what
occurs;
Get him to tell of long years in the
west:
Of storm and stampede poor grub
and the rest;
And when you have listened, run
out
your machine
And picture a cow-puncher just
as
he's seen.
Backward, turn backward, you actors
who try
To mimic a calling, that's nearly
gone by;
Both of the above poems capture ranchers’ expression within cow talk of authenticity.
Only “folks” who endured difficult conditions with dignity and who worked ardently in
the ecological economy over time, and through generations could claim authentically the
rancher identity.
Labor in the ecological economy, then, occurred regularly in ranchers’ poetic cow
talk, and like their conversations in other venues, ranchers struggled over whether to
accept or deny the modern in ranching.
Just as the poems above reject modern
representations of cow work and urge “strangers” to hearken “backward” to labor that
“ain’t the snap it’s cracked up to be,” some ranch poetry also offered a celebration of the
modern. In 1946, for example, John Frohlicher responded to Abbie Keith’s organizing of
a rancher Poetry Exchange and chronicled his use of the modern:
437
Irrigation Ditch
There’s a mark across the desert
Where the new ways meet the old;
Where the mesquite, sand, and sagebrush
Hit the willow, flowering gold;
And a small adobe dwelling
Shelters tender hearts and bold.
There’s a mark across the malpais
Where alfalfa’s sudden green
Is alive with whiteface cattle –
Finest herds you’ve ever seen!
Where the level watered acres
Show what love and labor mean.
There’s been work done in the desert
Where the whirling windmill screams;
Where the snow-fed mountain
streams
And a man finds all work pleasure
For he’s realizing his dreams!59
As Frohlicher explained, ranchers took pride in the labor they expended in the ecological
economy, but also benefited immensely from modernized technologies (like irrigation)
because such technologies allowed ranchers to realize their dreams.
Additionally,
Frohlicher clearly “loves” his cows – an essential element in any good cow talk.
Water and irrigation were critical for Frohlicher to find “all work” a “pleasure,”
but the cyclic presence of drought also appeared as a consistent unifying experience in
ranchers’ poems. Lucille Anderson in 1949 expressed the “optimism” (and fear) ranchers
felt every year as they looked heavenward for precipitating clouds:
There’s no sign of a cloud in the sky;
With the range and the water holes dry;
59
John Frohlicher, "Irrigation Ditch," Arizona Cattlelog January, 1946, 35.
438
The withering grasses curl up to die –
The thought pains.
Cattle and horses suck dust for a drink,
As the cattlemen stand on disaster’s
brink
And futily cry, “Oh God, how they [the cows] shrink.”
All hope wanes.
Time alone the right answer will tell,
Cowmen wonder if they ought to sell,
“It’ll rain – or it won’t – what th’ hell.”
Then it rains.
“Why, there might be a Spring even
yet;
“If there’s feed we’ll buy steers, you
bet...
“Anybody can make up a little ol’ debt,
“When it RAINS.”
Here, the market (wondering about selling, worrying about debt and the shrinkage of
cows) existed alongside rancher ecological labor and dependence on a rain-filled range.
Anderson’s poem, because of its communication of ranchers’ concern about their cows,
illustrates cow talk – anyone relying on the range to grow cows in the arid West could
have and would have related to the need for rain.
Ranchers did not just use rain as poetic topics, but rather mobilized discussions of
rain and weather as cultural symbols of rural cohesiveness and rancher identity in much
of their private correspondence. This use of weather as a topic of commonality appears
in ranchers’ personal papers as much as in the pages of the association periodicals. In
Arizona and New Mexico the language of drought played a particularly important role in
the creation of cow talk. Throughout the desert southwest, “no two ranches are alike in
terms of vegetation, soils, rainfall, elevation or topography,” but ranchers everywhere in
439
the arid state, especially in the drought-ridden years from 1952-1956, could relate to the
need for rain.60 Eulalia Bourne, who ran medium-sized ranching operations in southcentral Arizona beginning in the 1930s, explained the infatuation with rain in the
following way:
rain is a touchy subject in this country. In the ‘spotted showers’
season, ranchers meet, and tactfully, sympathetically inquire about
each other’s rainfall. There are many among us who might be called
rain worshipers, so excessive is our reverence for pennies from
heaven.61
Most ranchers ended letters with a rain update from their region, but when these people
discussed rain, they were not just talking about the weather. In fact, rain symbolized for
range cattle folk the green of both pastures and cash – as is illustrated by Bourne’s
reference to “pennies from heaven.”
Ranchers were well aware of the economic importance of rain for their ranches
and the range cattle industry. Ranchers in the Southwest particularly were desperate for
rain to grow palatable feed for their cattle. For desert ranchers, rain symbolized both
healthy ranges and economic viability. Dorthea (Mrs. W.A.) Thomas, from the “Tee Bar
Three” Ranch near Sedona in northern Arizona, wrote to Abbie Keith in January of 1953,
“The Lord gave us all the rain we needed, making such wonderful feed and such pretty
fat cattle. All summer I thought how good it was to be able to say ‘Thanks’ instead of
‘Please’ for the water.”62 Ranchers infused even topics that had nothing to do with feed,
grass, or cattle with discussions of rain. Mrs. Jo Flieger from Painted Cave Ranch in
60
Diana Hadley, et al, “Commercial Livestock operations in Arizona,” in Jemison and Raish, eds.,
Livestock Management in the American Southwest, 387.
61
Eulalia Bourne, Woman in Levis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967), 136.
62
Keith subsequently published the letter in Neighborly Gossip, Arizona Cattlelog January 1953, 58.
440
Winkelman, Arizona, sprinkled her discussion of a recipe for green corn tamales with an
explanation of rain and the status of range feed. She wrote, “As I am writing this, we are
having a good slow rain; started last night and rained all night and is raining today.
Coming on the heels of two other recent rains, it will keep the feed growing and put out
plenty of water on the ranges.”63
Importantly, rain and discussions of weather were two of the few cow talk
subjects that showed little gendered construction. Ranchmen appear to have talked about
rain as much as ranchwomen. F.B. Moson, who with his wife, owned and managed the
Y-Lightening Ranch near Hereford Arizona, concluded a personal letter to Abbie Keith
with a rain update. Moson wrote, “We had some good grass growing. The rains starting
July 11th and quitting August 22nd. We had four inches and fifty four hundredths for July
and six inches and nine one hundredths for August.” Moson, knowing the importance of
rain to the larger community of ranchers, knew that Abbie Keith would not just be
interested in knowing that it had rained at his locale, but that she would be interested in
the minute details of the weather on his ranch as it was so essential to the health of his
operation and the industry across Arizona. Felton Weekes needed about 100 Eat More
Beef Stickers and also wanted to let Abbie Keith know of the stuff they had for sale. He
explained, “Am writing in from our home East of Mesa on the Gilbert Road for my dad
Chas. Weekes. Our ranch is 20 miles East of Mesa on the Apache Trail and on the Salt
River. Range and cattle are in fair condition, but need rain. We have for sale 5 registered
63
See Mrs. Jo Fleiger to Abbie Keith, Box 5, Folder 1, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe. Again
Keith published the letter, see Mrs. Jo Fleiger, “Home on the Range,” Arizona Cattlelog September 1951,
65. See also Deming Rancher WA Winder to Abbie Keith, 5 September 1956, Box 6, Folder 1, ACGA
Manuscript Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation, ASU, Tempe.
441
Hereford Bulls. One 18 mo old and 3 short yearlings our of Western Triumph 3. One 11
mo old our of RS Princeps Bocaldo. Prices $250 for the young ones and $300 for the
older. Can be seen at our home 2 miles E of Mesa and 1 mile So on Gilbert Road or
Phone WI4-6460.”64
In another, genderless letter to Abbie Keith, a Santa Cruz
ranchwoman explained that her ranch had had “those wonderful July rains. Canyons ran,
dams filled and the grass grew lush. August has brought only showers to date. It is the
same old story now -- watching clouds, hoping and praying for rain. Arizona ranchers
spend their lives doing just that.”65 The ranchwoman lumped all ranchers regardless of
class, race, or gender together in their hope and prayer for rain. Of course, large ranchers
with rights to substantial acre feet of ground water, or those who had access to reservoirs,
would weather a drought better than others, but that did not obviate necessarily ranchers’
hopes for rain. Even reservoirs or wells could run dry.
And it was not just ranchers in the desert Southwest who prayed for the pennies
from heaven. While rain references were not as prolific in Wyoming and Montana, they
were present. In 1959, when George Snodgrass wrote to accept an appointment on the
Game and Wild Life Committee of the WSGA, he explained to Bob Hanesworth that in
Natrona County, they had “been getting some rain lately” and that several of their
reservoirs had caught some water “for the first time in ten years.”66 In the northern great
64
Felton Weekes to Abbie Keith, ca 1955, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
Unknown author, Letter to Abbie Keith, ACGA Manuscript Collection, ASU, Tempe.
66
George Snodgrass to Robert Hanesworth, 26 October 1959, Box 57, Folder 7, WSGA Papers, American
Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
65
442
plains states, rain existed alongside severe weather as core elements of ranchers’ cow
talk.67 In 1965, Bob Barthelmess, wrote to MSGA members that:
Severe winter conditions persisted in our country through
December. The rest of Montana too, has felt the brunt of what
could be a serious situation for the livestock industry of the state.
If the weather should continue through January, February and
March at its present status, comparisons may be made to some of
the historic winters of the past. The industry has survived bitter
winters before and I am sure again, come spring, cows will be
calved as usual. Certainly there will be fewer in some localities
and on specific ranches due to conditions created by nature’s
wrath, but the hard nosed operators (the pride of the industry) will
be around for more frosts... On our ranch we have sustained no
loss until now but we realize the winter could be long and costly.
Some of our neighbors were not so fortunate. The future is not
bright but it is time to cinch up and ride hard.68
Here again, we see a reference to ranch life (cinching up and riding hard) in a rancher’s
discussion of the commonplace topic of weather. Ranchers’ not only used cow talk to
communicate about rain, and the weather more generally, but the weather itself, as
mundane as it might seem, composed an essential element of cow talk. Weather, for
many people, can be a painfully trite discursive topic. To a rancher, however, life itself
depended on what the weather was like. In the minds of ranchers, the banality of weather
withered and was transformed into a subject of life and death. As such the weather, in all
of its manifestations, served as a connective idiom which drew cattle folk into a common
frame of reference throughout the arid region of the intermountain West.
67
Of course the seasonality and the coming and going of hard weather dictated the amount of discussions
of “bad” weather that existed in ranchers’ correspondence. Still, like the comings and goings of drought in
the Southwest, the potential of a nasty winter served as crucial topics in northern ranchers’ cow talk.
68
Bob Barthelmess, “Your President Reports,” The Montana Stockgrower, January 1965, 18.
443
The ecological and economic aspects of growing cows joined rain and weather as
a linkage for ranchers in creating and maintaining a personal sense of connection with
other ranchers. Their tendency to mention their cows allowed them to overcome regional
variations and promote a broader identity as cow folk. As ranchers in the intermountain
West states experienced their identities as rural people living in an increasingly
urbanized West, they relied on their connections to the non-human world of their ranches
(and especially to their cows) to make sense of their individual selfhood and to
communicate with one another in collective ways.
In nearly every letter he penned (and that was preserved), JD Craighead
mentioned his cows and his concern for them. Certainly this mentioning of cows was
partly an economic concern, but it shows also a concern for the greater community of
ranchers as Craighead explained in a letter to a fellow rancher who had hit dry times in
1945. The rancher, Earl Kelly, hoped to be able to send his cows to Craighead, just until
the rains came. Kelly would either rent some pasture from Craighead or would trade
grazing time once the grass returned to his range. The informal economy and the concern
for the health of both the cows and the ranches is palpable in Craighead’s response. He
wrote:
I was glad to hear from you, but sorry to learn that you were
having such dry weather and that you wished to move some of
your cattle. I certainly can sympathize with you as I had to do
that in 1934....I could take care of 50 head of cows and heifers if
they could be run in one pasture as I have at present plenty of
grass. The thing that bothers me is the continual lack of rain
here. We had several wet snows in December and January that
went off in a few days and the grass from these got a good start
and is still green and growing but if we do not have rain
soon…the grass will stop. For this reason I hesitate to say I can
444
take care of them. We are very short of help, have only part of
the crop planted and are right up to cutting the first alfalfa. If I
could take them, would you send a man up to look after them? If
you could send a man, I might pay part of his wages to get him to
look after mine partly at least. I would need one more saddle
horse...In any event, I think it would be best for you to come and
look over the situation and see for yourself...it seems a strange
coincidence that I dreamed a few nights ago that I was moving
my two year heifers down to your place and you were moving a
bunch of bulls up here. I hope by the time you receive this you
will have had rain, but if not, you may wire or telephone me so
that I shall know what you decide about coming up and can meet
you. If you come on bus, you can get off about 600 feet from the
ranch…my experience has been that next to losing cattle the
worst thing is moving them away from home…69
Craighead, like so many ranchers in the intermountain West, believed his cows were
better off at “home” and knew that the owner/operator to whom he was writing would
share this belief. Wyoming rancher Oda Mason, remember, claimed to like cows better
than people, and when all was said and done, it was this cultural value that precipitated
endless cow talk among ranchers.70 Even when things were going really well in the
ecological economy of range ranching, ranchers could not help but talk about their cows.
In the early 1950s, the Craighead ranch was doing great, and Craighead wrote to update
the officers of the American Hereford Association on the progress of his breeding
program. He ended the letter by saying, “…conditions here have improved wonderfully
in the last ten days following our long drought. Several gentle rains have changed the
appearance from grey to green. It looks like we can forget the old cows for a few
69
JD Craighead to Earl Kelly, 6 June 1945, Box 5, Folder 3, JD Craighead Papers, The Huntington Library,
San Marino, California.
70
Refer to Chapter 4 for Oda Mason story.
71
days.”
445
Of course he, and all owner/operators in the West, could never really forget the
cows – for if they did, it would mean forgetting what it was that made them who they
believed they really were.
No matter the size of their operation, their race, or their gender, ranch folk could
all relate to certain aspects of their “way of life.” The weather, the environs of the ranch,
and cattle all served as topics of unification for ranchers rather than points of division.
Ranchers used these topics in the cultural language of cow talk. This language existed
across space and time and served to create the appearance of a singular ranch culture
around which, ranchers could (and did) rally.
The association publications and personal papers of ranchers all reveal that as
ranchers communicated, they used particular vernaculars and images based in everyday
experiences to do so. As the non-ranching public gazed upon the intermountain West in
the postwar decades, they saw a seemingly united and formidable special interest group
in which all the members agreed. This is not to argue that all ranchers did agree – as we
have seen throughout this dissertation that was never the case. This also is not to suggest
that ranchers consciously worked at creating cultural affinity with one another. The
evidence for that assertion simply does not exist, but the evidence does exist to show that
ranchers, whether they knew it or not, engaged in a reification of a hegemonic, singular
ranch culture through language and symbols. I would suggest that this use of cultural
language may be applicable to special interest group politics more broadly, and that we
71
JD Craighead to American Hereford Association, 23 May 1951, Box 4, Folder 9, JD Craighead Papers,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
446
should think seriously about the ways in which interest groups utilize language and
culture to create the appearance of political unity – both to one another within their
groups and to a broader public audience.
Special interest groups appear to have
increasing power in this country, and while ranchers continue to lose ground (quite
literally) in the political landscape of the early-twenty first century, their successful
experiences in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s can help us to think about the tactics other
special interests may use in their quests for power and influence.
447
EPILOGUE
SHUTTING THE GATE: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The joy of my life is having a good horse between my legs...and smelling the earth after a spring
rain...One day someone will take my place...I only hope that ranching, as a way of life, will continue.”
~ Lucy C. Meyring, Colorado rancher, 1997
Rather than trying to freeze the West in mythic time, Wise Users ought to be joining
environmentalists in an earnest search for both livelihood and community...Clearly it’s time to try
something new.
~ Donald Snow, “The Pristine Silence of Leaving it All Alone,” A Wolf in the Garden: The Land
Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate, 1996
In 1964, Floyd Beach, a rancher in Delta, Colorado, testified before Congress
urging them to include grazing in the new Wilderness Bill, but also to manage well the
wild game populations of the public domain and, simultaneously, conserve “the great
natural resources of water, minerals, timber, and feed.”1 This would be a tall order that
Congress would never completely fill. Beach’s testimony addressed specifically the
proposed Dingell Wilderness Bill, but it also demonstrated that even as he spoke before
his representatives, range country was changing. The graph below visually tracks this
gradual but very real change. The number of cows, like the number of ranchers, in the
United States has dwindled in the past 50 years.2
1
2
Floyd Beach, “Wilderness Testimony,” The Cattle Guard, January, 1964, 10.
Livestock Marketing Information Center, http://www.lmic.info/ (last accessed 8/9/05).
448
Figure 33 Cow Inventory
Despite the vitriol surrounding public lands ranching, ranchers and range ranching
comprise only about .0001% of the economy in the United States West today. Still,
graziers continue to utilize the majority of land area in the five states in this dissertation
to ply their trade – and they were successful in convincing Congress to allow grazing in
all wilderness areas back in 1964.
continues to this very day.
The debate that began in earnest in the 1960s
Anti-ranching environmentalists bemoan this spatial
dominance of ranching and point to the ecological damage that the practice of grazing
brings to range lands, especially public lands. They bemoan the destruction of riparian
areas, the decrease of biodiversity, and the invasion of noxious weeds. All of this
declension, these activists claim, arrived on the hooves of bovines. Contrarily, ranchers
point to the necessity of animal protein for healthy human diets (both in the United States
and globally).
They cite statistics proving the economic benefits that ranching has
brought to the region over the past 200 years. They suggest that cattle raised on grass are
449
much healthier than those fed in feedlots. And they argue that “smart” ranchers do not
denude the land because the need it to survive in a tough business.
By the 1990s, the debate over cattle ranching had manifested itself in anti-cow
protests with activists creating campaigns such as “Cow Free by ’93” – urging Congress
to end public lands ranching by 1993.
Still today environmentalists, developers,
politicians, and ranchers themselves remain embroiled in conflict over range ranching,
largely because ranchers maintain considerable access to the fast dwindling open spaces
of the West. Rarely in these arguments is any common ground found. Polemics and
hatred swirl together until there is little room for compromise, tolerance, or progress.
Much of the debate over ranching leaves out both ranchers and history. This
dissertation has attempted to shed some historical light on the debate by providing insight
into ranchers’ life experiences and world views at the moment they solidified their
political power in the “New West.” Rather than taking for granted the status of their
political, economic, and environmental power in the postwar decades, ranchers came to
fear for their place in the West. This fear motivated them to gather together in their
collective organizations and to present to the non-ranching public an image of a cultural
group well-congealed.
The cohesion they appeared to have with one another stemmed, in part, from their
cultural identities as range ranchers.
In examining the ways in which ranchers
experienced the day-to-day and in attempting to ascertain how they then gave meaning to
those experiences, I have tried to offer a new way of thinking about the important
intersections among material experience, cultural values, and collectivity.
The
450
intersections of the three seem particularly relevant in the early-twenty-first century
United States as more and more groups of people, advocating for their own needs above
the common good, become an entrenched feature of the American political landscape.
Rather than focusing on what the special interest group of range ranchers advocated
during the twenty years in this study, I instead focused on how members of the collective
group understood their own subjectivities and how those subjectivities led them to gather
together in spite of tensions and divisions. Perhaps this study can help us to think in
more interesting ways about the important intersections between culture and politics,
between identity and advocacy.
For ranchers in the mid-twentieth century, politics and advocacy were fixed
solidly in a collective, cultural identity predicated on their lives as ranchers. They did not
understand themselves all to be the same. Certainly a rancher in the vast western deserts
of Arizona knew herself to be far different from a rancher in Montana who ran his herds
in mountain meadows. Some ranchers voted Republican while others (far fewer, of
course) voted Democrat. As we saw in earlier chapters, no one rancher believed his or
her neighbor knew just what to do about droughts or coyotes. Still, rancher identity was
based in something tangible and common – namely that ranchers knew themselves to
different from others (specifically non-ranchers). As Stuart Hall has suggested, “there is
no identity that is without the dialogic relationship to the Other.”3 In the mid-twentieth
century, ranchers increasingly had others against which to compare themselves. This
presence of non-ranchers in the range spaces of the West allowed ranchers to recognize
3
Stuart Hall, "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference," Radical America 24 (1990), 16.
increasingly and celebrate their insularity.
451
Hall has also argued that part of the
postmodern experience is the undoing of social, collective identities, and here is where I
would suggest that Hall may be erroneous.4 Ranchers (and perhaps other special interest
groups such as the “Religious Right”) were not a particular class, or race, or gender, but
they were most certainly, and continue to be a social group, who tells stories about itself
in order to understand itself, explain itself to “others,” and maintain its sense of power
and entitlement.
Ranchers, like most of us, had individual identities that they situated within a
broader social milieu.
They based their identities in their work and understood
themselves to be part of an effort and history larger than themselves which then enabled
them to find camaraderie with one another and to advocate for their own group interests
based in self-interest. Ranchers used their individual identities as actors in an ecological
economy to form a group sense of affinity. In ranchers’ collective identity, memories of
long-term land use and righteous economic activity stood alongside common experiences
of vulnerability in the modern world of the postwar West. A gendered ideology of
masculine righteousness permeated their entire cultural world and was at once repressive
(because it devalued the feminine) and liberating (because it allowed space for
egalitarianism in labor – anyone could become a “good hand”). At the center of it all, of
course, were the cows. Ranchers’ labor with the non-human worlds of their ranches
forced them to rectify their group ethic of control and use with the reality of
powerlessness and limitation. In this way, then, space and environment prefigured, or at
4
Ibid.
452
the very least informed ranchers’ sense of self and group unity. This is not to say all
ranchers had the exact same identities or that those identities were static. There were,
however, aspects to the hegemonic identity of ranching that endured over time and across
space. It is these enduring qualities that have come to make ranchers appear immovable,
stubborn, and self-righteous.
It would be quite easy for some to walk away from this study and disregard it as
an apology for, or even more extremely, as a defense of range ranchers. Others might see
in these pages an unfair critique of ranchers’ and claim that I have presented them as
hypocritical, self-absorbed misogynists. I suppose there is some truth to both readings.
Certainly ranchers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were interested supremely in their
economic self-interest and held radically contradictory ideologies about the role the
government should have in their economies. No doubt the hegemonic culture of range
ranching ignored and at times insulted “women” and all things non-masculine. Many
ranchers gave not one thought to the ecological integrity of their ranchlands, while most
did only what was necessary to keep the cows growing (with little regard for the healthy
persistence of native rangeland species). Also within these pages, however, the reader
may sense a genuine respect on my part of ranchers and their lifeways. I do not believe
that ranchers set out deliberately to wreak wanton destruction on their ranches or the
public lands. As ranchers grazed their cows, they had personal motivations which drove
their actions. To expect them to have had otherwise would be patently unfair and
singularly naive. All people who use the lands of the West (whether private or public
453
lands) do so out of self-interest on some level, and all do so out of a sense that what they
do is “right.”
And that is exactly what I hope most readers will draw from this dissertation -ranchers were simply individual actors, seeking to make their way in the world and were
no more or less “selfish” than others who have ventured into the intermountain West in
the twentieth century. By understanding that modern day ranchers have a history, and
that their values are grounded in their experiences, I hope that the polemics of the debate
surrounding ranching can abate somewhat and be replaced by kinder, more realistic
vision of who this group of resource users has been. Perhaps that vision can then lead to
real progress in figuring out how multiple users can live sustainably in a fragile world.
The vision may ultimately lead ranchers and non-ranchers alike to decide that range
ranching is simply not feasible ecologically or economically, or it may help
environmentalists and ranchers to come together innovatively to save the agricultural
spaces of the West and allow them to “prosper” (a consensus on the meaning of this word
is perhaps one of the biggest challenges of all).
At the end of the day, ranchers have been neither the heroes they want everyone
to believe they were, nor have they been the villains their enemies characterize them as
being. Most importantly, in my estimation, ranchers made their homes in this region, and
struggled consistently for permanence. In an era when the lands of the West increasingly
became owned by folks who build homes in which they live only a few days a year,
residents who value permanence, in a West in which permanence may be disappearing
forever, are deserving of some modicum of respect. When people do not live in a place
454
they cannot/do not have commitment to it. When that occurs, the integrity of the place is
at great risk. I agree with Wendell Berry when he says that “if we are to correct our
abuses of each other and of other races and of our land, and if our effort to correct these
abuses is to be more than a political fad that will in the long run be only another...abuse,
we are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we
have parceled out...and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again
in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods.”5 Ranchers,
despite their faults, still hold many of those fragments through their work on the lands of
the West, their advocacy for themselves (and against others), and their collective desire to
remain. It is worth including ranchers and their collective perspectives in our recollection
of the fragmentary West.
My ultimate hope is that western historians can walk away from this study
learning a little something more about “modern” cattle ranchers and the experiences of
one group of “locals” in the postwar West. I hope that environmental historians can learn
a little something about what made this group of resource users tick and think about them
as critical actors on the post World War II western landscape. I hope that the inclusion of
ranchwomen in this treatment of an industry that too many assume was only a masculine
domain will enable women’s historians to learn about a group of rural women who
performed their identities in gendered ways in order to claim power for themselves and
their “industry.” I desire for agricultural historians to learn something about ranchers, not
5
As quoted in Dan Dagget, Beyond the Rangeland Conflict: Toward a West That Works (Flagstaff: Good
Stewards Project, 1998), vi. See also Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and
Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
455
just as they were embedded in impersonal “systems,” an approach I think agricultural
history relies on too much, but rather to learn about actual ranchers’ lived experiences
and intellectual conceptualizations of those experiences. I dream that activists (on both
sides of the ranching debate) can use this study to lend some historical perspective to
their own thinking on the issues. Lastly, I hope that ranchers might recognize themselves
in this story while simultaneously learning something new about their past and about the
history of the culture that so many of them still cling to today.
In 1960, Con Warren composed a short story about a dream he had while camping
in a pasture on his ranch. In the dream, Con relived many of the experiences he had had
with the non-human world of his ranch during his long tenure on the Conrad-Kohrs land.6
In the dream a coyote, that Con had freed from a trap years ago, appeared to him. Con
believed the animal to be an apparition meant to remind him of the all the animals he had
known and loved – especially his cows.
Con proceeded to remember each of his
breeding bulls, his favorite cow horses, and even the non-domesticated animals that had
made their homes on the ranch. Con’s dream and his recounting of it for posterity
stemmed from an understanding that this was the common “heritage” of all ranchers. He
awoke from the dream, went back to the house, and realized that the dream had been “a
great gift” that he could “carry with him the rest” of his days. In particular, the dream
propelled Con to remember, the “unmistakable” kinship wherein both humans and the
animals “depended” on each other “to fulfill...mutual needs.”7 In his dream, as he
6
C.K. Warren, ca 1960, Series 13, Box 13, Folder 13, Conrad K. Warren Papers, Grant-Kohrs National
Historic Site, Deer Lodge, Montana.
7
Ibid., 52.
456
lingered with his favorite cow horse, Con realized “that the fabric” of his life “was
interwoven with the earth, the grass that grew thereon, and the animals that fed and
watered there.” He realized in that moment that “we were all flesh and blood with
similar needs dependent on each other...we each gave of ourselves and together we
prospered.” Con’s recognition of the interdependence of all things might smack of
romance and be a bit overly emotional for most. But his sentiment that all humans,
animals, and plants have common needs, and that only when we all give of ourselves can
we all “prosper,” contains a kind of timeless wisdom. I hope in attempting to understand
range ranchers, in all their power, fallibility, and earnestness, those interested in and
committed to the intermountain West can be inspired to find commonality with one
another, recognize our interdependence, and “give of ourselves” so that we all can thrive.
Con finished his story by saying, “You think this story is incredible. Well
perhaps.” Like Con’s story, you, the reader, may find my story of range ranching
incredible. Of course incredible can mean both “implausible and far-fetched” as well as
“inspiring and extraordinary.” May you find this work and my hope for the West
incredible in the latter sense of the word.
457
REFERENCES
Primary Sources
"1950 Convention Resolutions." The Montana Stockgrower, June 1950.
"A Man Working for the Cattle Business." Cattle Guard, November 1955.
"Antelope Hunting Season Controversy." The Montana Stockgrower, October 15, 1953.
"Bob Schafer's 12,000-Mile Tour Brings 800 New Members into Cca." Cattle Guard,
May 1956.
"Cattleman's Calendar." Cow Country, June 15, 1956.
"Five-Year Demonstration Proves Value of Moderate Grazing." Cattle Guard, October,
1957.
"Foot and Mouth Situation." The Montana Stockgrower, July, 1949.
“Hopper Control Program All Set to Go." Cow Country, May 19, 1950.
"Howard Major's Deferred Grazing Pays-Off in Rehabilitation of Valencia County
Ranch." The New Mexico Stockman, January 10, 1955.
J.D. Craighead Pioneered Valley Hereford Industry." Arkansas Valley Journal, January
17, 1952.
"Market News." The Montana Stockgrower, March, 1963.
Montana Standard, Sunday, May 17, 1970, 4B.
"Mountain Meadow Grazing Results Told at Field Day." Cow Country, October, 1952.
"New Federal Brucellosis Regulations Announced." Cow Country, October 15, 1956.
"Operation Grasshopper." Cow Country, March 30, 1950.
"Price Support Poll." The Montana Stockgrower, December 15, 1953.
"Reviewing the November Market." The Montana Stockgrower, December, 1961.
Accomazzo, Betty. Arizona Cowbelles: This Is Your Life. Unknown: Arizona Cowbelles,
ca 1973.
458
Adams, Ramon F. Western Words: A Dictionary of the Range, Cow Camp and Trail.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946.
“Administration and Use of Public Lands." In Committee on Public Lands and Surveys.
Casper: United States Senate, 1945.
Agricultural Research Administration, Bureau of Animal Industry. Summary of
Developments in the Mexican Outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth Disease. Washington,
D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, January 28, 1947.
Agriculture, United States Department of. "The Foot and Mouth Disease Situation in
Mexico -- Map, February 22, 1947." Box 29, Folder 2, ACGA Manuscript
Collection, ASU, Tempe.
Alley, H.P. "Weed Poisoning and Eradication." Cow Country, March 15, 1960.
Alley, Harold. "Larkspur Control on Stock Ranges." Cow CountryMay 15, 1960.
Allred, B.W. "It Pays to Graze Correctly." The Montana Stockgrower, April 1952.
Anderson, Lucille S. Bridle-Wise. Phoenix: Lucille S. Anderson, 1991.
________________. "The Anderson Story." Arizona Cattlelog, October 1948.
Arizona Cattlegrowers' Association Manuscript Collection, Arizona Historical
Foundation, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.
Arizona Cowbelles Records. Arizona Historical Foundation. Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona.
Babbitt, John. "Cattleman Refutes 'Anti-Game' Claim." Arizona Daily Sun, September
28, 1951.
___________. "Cattle or Elk?" Arizona Republic, September 29, 1951.
Baker, Georgia. "Neighborly Gossip." Arizona Cattlelog, December, 1951.
Barthelmess, Bob. "Call to Convention." The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1965.
Bayers, A.C. "Bayers Hereford Ranch: Spring News Letter." Montana Stockman, May
1946.
Beetle, A.A. "Let's Judge Your Range." Cow Country, April 15, 1956.
459
Beveridge, W.M. "Juniper Control." Arizona Cattlelog, March, 1952.
Bourne, Eulalia. Woman in Levis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967.
Brenner, J.S. Jack. "Control and Eradication of Brucellosis in a Range State." The
Montana StockgrowerJanuary 15, 1955.
Burroughs, John Rolfe. Guardian of the Grasslands. Cheyenne: Pioneer Printing and
Stationary Co., 1971.
Burt, Maxwell Struthers. The Diary of a Dude Wrangler. New York: C. Scribner's Sons,
1924.
Cleveland, Agnes Morley. No Life for a Lady. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1941.
Coburn, Walt. Mavericks. New York: The Century Company, 1929.
George F. Ellis Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque.
________. Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Collings, Ellsworth. The 101 Ranch. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937.
Colorado Cattlewomen, Inc. Records. Denver Public Library. Denver, Colorado.
Conrad K. Warren Papers. Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site. Deer Lodge, Montana.
Corkins, J.P. "Cattle Grub Control." The Montana Stockgrower, February 1951.
Culley, John. Cattle, Horses, & Men of the Western Range. Los Angeles: The Ward
Ritchie press, 1940.
DeVoto, Bernard. The Easy Chair. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
Dixon, Mrs. Ott. "Neighborly Gossip." Arizona Cattlelog, December, 1951.
Dover, Rubie K. "Barbie Q's." Cow Country, September 15, 1961.
Dude Ranchers' Association Records. American Heritage Center. University of
Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
460
Ellis, George. "Problems of Ranching on Privately Owned Land." In Armour and
Company Tour. Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1950.
___________. Bell Ranch as I Knew It. Kansas City, MO: The Lowell Press, 1973.
Ellis, Mattie. Bell Ranch: Peoples and Places. Clarendon, TX: Clarendon Press, 1963.
__________. My Dishpan and Other Items. Clarendon, TX: Clarendon Press, 1963.
__________. Bell Ranch Recollections. Clarendon, TX: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Etchart, Gene. "Call to Convention." Montana Stockgrower, May 1959.
Fain, Dan. "Four Generations of Fains." Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1946.
Frink, Maurice. Cow Country Cavalcade: Eighty Years of the Wyoming Stock Growers
Association. Denver, Colorado: The Old West Publishing Company, 1954.
Fritz, Fred. "Organization -- Its Purpose and Need." Arizona Cattlelog, September, 1946.
Frohlicher, John. "Irrigation Ditch." Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1946.
Glenn, Marvin. "Hunting Lions." Arizona Cattlelog, April, 1952.
Godfrey, George A. "They Kicked Us Off Our Land." The Lordsburg Liberal, August 8,
1947.
George Amos Godfrey Papers. Rio Grande Historical Collections. New Mexico State
University. Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Goff, Dick. "Irons in the Fire." Cattle Guard, April, 1957.
Goff, Richard. Century in the Saddle. Denver: Colorado Cattlemen's Centennial
Commission, 1967.
Good, G.H. "Let's Control and Eradicate Brucellosis from Our Herds." Cow Country,
April 15, 1956.
________. "Brucellosis...First in a Series of Articles on Bang's Disease." Cow
Country, December, 1950.
Greer, James. Early in the Saddle. Dallas: Dealey and Lowe, 1936.
Grieve, Bill. "Roundup Time." The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1965.
461
Griffin, Mrs. Laura (C.C.). "Reminiscences." Arizona Cattlelog, February 1950.
Gudmundson, Pat. "Miles City Turns Clock Back 75 Years." Great Falls Tribune, May
17, 1959.
Hanson, Dan. "Hat Creek Rancher Replies to Budd Letter." Cow CountryJune 15, 1956.
Hanesworth, Robert. "Your New Magazine." Cow Country, October 15 1950.
Hayward, E.G. "The Livestock Industry, Harvester of Nation's Greatest Crop --- Grass."
Cow Country, February, 1951.
Hellbusch, C.E. "Field Day at White Mountain Hereford Ranch." Arizona Cattlelog,
September, 1947.
Hooker, Mrs. Harry. "Five Generations of Hookers: On the Sierra Bonita Ranch."
Arizona Cattlelog, December 1949.
Huidekoper, Wallis. "The Story of the Range." The Montana Stockgrower, January 1951.
Jacobsen, N.A. "Are Pine Needles to Blame? A Review of Studies on the Part Played by
Pine Needles in Connection with Abortion in Range Cows." The Montana
Stockgrower, December, 1961.
Jeffers, Jo. Ranch Wife. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.
Johnson, Elizabeth. "Four Generations of Cooks: In the Cattle Business at Willcox since
1893." Arizona Cattlelog, November, 1955.
Jones, John. Farm Real Estate [Microform] : Historical Series Data, 1950-92.
Washington D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research
Service, 1993, Statistical Bulletin # 855.
Jones, Neckyoke. "Greasewood Answers Powder River Pete." Cow Country, July 7 1949.
Keith, Abbie. "A Real Cowman." Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1947.
Kennedy, Micheal, ed. Cowboys and Cattlemen: A Round-up from Montana, the
Magazine of Western History. New York: Hastings House, 1964.
King, Frank M. Wranglin' the Past: Being the Reminiscences of Frank M. King. Los
Angeles: Haynes Corporation, 1935.
462
____________. Longhorn Trail Drivers: Being a True Story of the Cattle Drives of Long
Ago. Los Angeles: Haynes Corporation, 1940.
____________. Pioneer Western Empire Builders: A True Story of the Men and Women
of Pioneer Days. Pasadena: Trail's End Publishing Company, 1946.
____________. Mavericks: The Salty Comments of an Old-Time Cowpuncher. Pasadena:
Trail's End Publishing Company, 1947.
Kratz, B.L. "A Cowboy's Life Ain't All Roses." The Montana Stockgrower, February,
1962.
Krentz, Frank. "Neighborly Gossip." Arizona Cattlelog, December, 1951.
LaFont, Don. Rugged Life in the Rockies. Casper, Wyoming: Prairie Publishing
Company, 1951.
Lambert, Fred. Bygone Days of the Old West. Kansas City, MO: Burton Publishing
Company, 1948.
Lavender, David Sievert. One Man's West. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co.,
Inc., 1943.
Maggie. "Maggie Reports on the Convention." The Montana Stockgrower, July, 1957.
_______. "Maggie Promotes." The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1958.
_______. "Minnie's Conventioning." The Montana Stockgrower, May, 1959.
McCaffree, Richard Goff and Robert H. Century in the Saddle. Denver: Colorado
Cattlemen's Centennial Commission, 1967.
Mercier, Laurie. Julian Terrett Oral History, 1982, Oral History 226, Montana Historical
Society, Helena, Montana.
Miracle, Ralph. "Your Secretary Reports to the Convention." The Montana Stockgrower,
June 15, 1955.
Mitchell, Millard. “The Gunfighter.” Beverly Hills, CA: Fox, 1950.
Mollin, F.E. "Agricultural Adjustment Program as the Cattle Producers View It." The
Producer, November, 1933.
463
Morgan, Learah Cooper, ed. Echoes of the Past: Tales of Old Yavapai. Prescott, Arizona:
The Yavapai Cow Belles of Arizona, 1955.
Mortensen, Robert K. In the Cause of Progress: A History of the New Mexico Cattle
Growers' Association. Albuquerque: New Mexico Stockman, 1983.
Montana Brands Enforcement Division Records. Montana Historical Society. Helena,
Montana.
Montana Cowbelles Records. Montana Historical Society. Helena, Montana.
Montana Cattlemen's Association Manuscript Collection. Montana Historical Society.
Helena, Montana.
Montana Stockgrowers' Association. Montana Stockgrowers' Association, 1884-1984: A
Century of Service to Montana's Cattle Industry. Unknown: Unknown, 1984.
Museum, White Sands Missile Range. White Sands Missile Range History. Accessed
February 16 2005. Available from http://www.wsmr-history.org/History.htm.
Nelson, Art. "Central Montana's View on Game Problem." The Montana Stockgrower,
November 15, 1954.
Oda Mason Papers, Box 1, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie,
Wyoming.
O’Conner, Sandra Day and H. Alan. Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the
American Southwest. New York: Random House, 2002.
Olea, Mrs. Y.S. "Prickly Pear Vs. Australian Beetle." Arizona Cattlelog, March, 1946.
Page, John L. Sears and Carmy G. "The County Agent Speaks: A Review of 1949."
Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1950.
Paladin, Vivian A. Montana Stockgrower, Montana Stockgrowers Association 18841984: A Century of Service to Montana's Cattle Industry. Helena, Montana:
Montana Stockgrowers Association, ca. 1984.
Papers of Frank M. King. The Huntington Library. San Marino, California.
Papers of Jacob D. Craighead. The Huntington Library. San Marino, California.
Perkins, Clyde Riggs (Mrs. F.D.). "We Lick the Cats." Arizona Cattlelog, July, 1949.
464
Perkins, Evelyn. "Life on a Cattle Ranch." Arizona Cattlelog, April, 1950.
Rak, Mary Kidder. "A Kitchenful of Men." Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1947.
_______________. A Cowman's Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934.
_______________. "Help Eliza Cross the Ice." Arizona CattlelogSeptember, 1949.
Raney, S.A. "Prickly Pear Vs. Australian Beetle." Arizona CattlelogMarch, 1946.
Rhodes, Rosa Ronquillo. Rhodes Diaries, 1864-1982, Arizona Historical Society,
Tucson, Arizona.
Riggs, Lillian. "Chicago Girl Spreads a Loop." Arizona Cattlelog, September 1946.
___________. "Neighborly Gossip." Arizona Cattelog, February, 1950.
Rollins, Philip Ashton. The Cowboy; His Characteristics, His Equipment, and His Part
in the Development of the West. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1922.
Roney, J.N. "Cattle Grub Control." Arizona Cattlelog, September 1949.
_______. "Grasshopper Control on Arizona Ranges." Arizona Cattlelog, June, 1950.
Russell, Charles M. Good Medicine: Memories of the Real West. Garden City, NY:
Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1930.
Ryff, Dr. J.F. "Have You Heard About Anaplasmosis?" Cow Country,April 15, 1956.
Safford, Jeffrey J. Jack Brenner Oral History, September 11, 1976, Montana Historical
Society, Helena, Montana.
Sharp, Robert. Big Outfit: Ranching on the Baca Float. Tucson, AZ: The University of
Arizona Press, 1974.
Slanger, Ben S. "Range Condition Classes." The Montana Stockgrower, November 15,
1952.
Smith, Henry. "Rattlesnakes." Arizona Cattlelog, March, 1948.
Spring, Agnes Wright. 70 Years Cow Country: A Panoramic History of the Wyoming
Stock Growers Association Interwoven with Data Relative to the Cattle Industry
in Wyoming. Cheyenne: Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association, 1943.
465
Stokoe, Sonia. "American National Cowbelles' Cry for Rings for Promotion of Beef
Industry." Arizona Republic, July 21 1957, C3.
"Taylor Grazing Act." In USC, 43, 1934.
Tepoel, C.H. "Early Day Cow-Punching on Northern Ranges." Arizona Cattlelog,
February, 1952.
Thorp, N. Howard (Jack). Songs of the Cowboys. Estancia, New Mexico: News Print
Shop, 1908.
Tyrrell, Ace V. "Grain and Salt Feeding: Weight Doubled in 10 Months." Cow Country,
September 1952.
Van Cleve, Spike. 40 Years' Gatherin's. Kansas City: The Lowell Press, 1977.
Warren, Con. "Convention Address of President C.K. Warren." The Montana
Stockgrower, June, 1951.
Wear, Peggy. "Willcox Cowbelles." Arizona CattlelogJanuary, 1948.
White, Herbert P. "Typically Efficient Ranch Woman, Who Wins in Face of Wartime
Barriers." The New Mexico Stockman, December, 1943.
Wingfield, D.W. "Neighborly Gossip." Arizona Cattlelog, June, 1946.
Woolfolk, E.J. "Crested Wheatgrass Grazing Values." The Montana Stockgrower, May
1951.
Wootan, J.F. "The Real Cowboy." Arizona Cattlelog, January, 1946.
Wyoming Cowbelles Records, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association Papers. American
Heritage Center. University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association Papers. American Heritage Center. University of
Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
466
Secondary Sources
Ackland, Len. Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
Agriculture, United States Department of. Agricultural Statistics. Washington, D.C.:
United States Government Printing Office, 1949.
________. Agricultural Statistics. Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1957.
________. Agricultural Statistics. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing
Office, 1963.
Allmendinger, Blake. The Cowboy : Representations of Labor in an American Work
Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Amundson, Michael A. Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the
American West. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism. New York: Verso Editions, 1983.
Argersinger, Peter. The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism : Western Populism and American
Politics. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995.
Athearn, Robert G. The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America. Lawrence:
University of Kansas, 1986.
Baker, Wayne D. Rasmussen and Gladys L. Price-Support and Adjustment Programs
from 1933 through 1978: A Short History. USDA: Agriculture Information
Bulletin No. 424, 1978.
Baldwin, Robert. The Political Economy of United States Import Policy. Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985.
Ball, Charles E. Building the Beef Industry: A Century of Commitment 1898 - 1998.
Unknown: National Cattlemen's Foundation, 1998.
Baron, Ava. "Gender and Labor History." In Work Engendered: Toward a New History
of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Basso, Matthew, Laura McCall, Dee Garceau, ed. Across the Great Divide : Cultures of
Manhood in the American West. New York: Routledge, 2001.
467
Baumgartner, Frank. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in
Political Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization : A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995.
Belasco, Warren James. Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979.
Belgrad, Daniel. "'Power's Larger Meaning': The Johnson County War as Political
Violence in an Environmental Context." Western Historical Quarterly 33, no. 2
(Summer 2002).
Bell, Margaret. When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from
Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Berry, Michelle K. "'Be Shure to Fix the Fence': The Arizona Cowbelles' Public Persona,
1950-1960." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Forthcoming, Fall 2004.
Black, Cyril Edwin. The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History.
New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Blunt, Judy. Breaking Clean. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Bogue, Allan. From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in
the 19th Century. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963.
Bonnifield, Paul. The Dust Bowl : Men, Dirt, and Depression. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1979.
Borne, Lawrence R. Dude Ranching: A Complete History. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1983.
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in
the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
468
Braunwald, Eugene; Fauci, Anthony; Kasper, Dennis, ed. Harrison's Principles of
Internal Medicine: 15th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.
Britz, Kevin. "Long May Their Legend Survive : Memory and Authenticity in
Deadwood, South Dakota ; Tombstone, Arizona; and Dodge City, Kansas (Phd)."
Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1999.
Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race,
and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1996.
Brown, Richard Maxwell. "Violence." In The Oxford History of the American West, ed.
Carol A. O'Connor Clyde A. Milner II, and Martha A. Sandweiss. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994.
Bush, Corlann Gee. "'He Isn't Half So Cranky as He Used to Be': Agricultural
Mechanization, Comparable Worth, and the Changing Farm Family." In 'to Toil
the Livelong Day': American's Women at Work, 1780-1980, ed. Carol Groneman
and Mary Beth Norton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Calef, Wesley. Private Grazing and Public Lands: Studies of the Local Management of
the Taylor Grazing Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Cawley, R. McGreggor. Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and
Environmental Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.
Chambless, Timothy K. "Pro-Defense, Pro-Growth, and Anti-Communism: Cold War
Politics in the American West." In The Cold War American West, 1945-1989, ed.
Kevin J. Fernlund. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Western Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 17801860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Clark, Suzanne. Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Clemens, Elisabeth. The People's Lobby: Organization Innovation and the Rise of
Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1997.
Clements, Frederic. Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation.
Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916.
469
Clyde A. Milner, II, ed. A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American
West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Coburn, Walt. Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997.
Cohen, Lizbeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Coleman, Annie Gilbert. "Call of the Mild: Colorado Ski Resorts and the Politics of
Rural Tourism." In The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State, ed. Catherine
McNicol and Robert D. Johnston Stock. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Collier, Gaydell, ed. Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Comus, Steven J. Phillips and Patricia Wentworth, ed. A Natural History of the Sonoran
Desert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Confino, Alon. "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method."
American Historical Review 102, no. December (1997): 1386-1403.
Crane, Susan. "Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory." American
Historical Review 102, no. December (1997): 1372-1985.
________, ed. Museums and Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: WW
Norton and Company, 1991.
________. "The West: A Moving Target." Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1994):
476-481.
Curry, Lynne. Modern Mothers in the Heartland: Gender, Health, and Progress in
Illinois, 1900-1930. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.
Dale, Edward E. The Range Cattle Industry. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1930.
Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures.
Urbana: University of Illinois, 1985.
470
Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History. New York, 1984.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1975.
________. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century
France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Day, Sandra Day O'Conner and H. Alan. Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the
American Southwest. New York: Random House, 2002.
Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Dias, Ric. "The Great Cantonment: Cold War Cities in the American West." In The Cold
War American West, 1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Center for the American West, 1998.
Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.
Dobie, J. Frank. The Longhorns. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1941.
Donahue, Debra. The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands
to Conserve Native Biodiversity. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Douglas, Mary. "Jokes." In Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in
Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
Dowd Hall, Jacquelyn. "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique."
In Gender and the Southern Body Politic, ed. Nancy Bercaw. Jackson: University
of Mississippi, 2000.
Dunlap, Thomas R. Ddt: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981.
Dusenberry, William. "Foot and Mouth Disease in Mexico, 1946-1951." Agricultural
History 29, no. 2 (April, 1955).
Dykstra, Robert R. The Cattle Towns: A Social History of the Kansas Cattle Trading
Centers, Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City and Caldwell, 1867-1885. New
York: Atheneum, 1976.
471
Dyson, Lowell K. Farmers' Organizations. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Eidenbach, Peter, Beth Morgan, ed. Homes on the Range: Oral Recollections of Early
Ranch Life on the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Tularosa,
NM: Human Systems Research, Inc., 1994.
Eisenstein, Zillah, ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New
York: Montly Review Press, 1979.
Elbert, Sarah. "Amber Waves of Gain: Women's Work in New York Farm Families." In
'to Toil the Livelong Day': America's Women at Work, 1790-1980, ed. Carol
Groneman and Mary Beth Norton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Emmons, David. "Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American
West." Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1994): 437-459.
Engleman, Gerald. "Vertical Integration in the Cattle Business." American Cattle
Producer, 29.
Erickson, John. Ace Reid, Cowpoke. Perryton, Texas: Maverick Books, ca. 1984.
Etulain, Michael P. Malone and Richard W. The American West: A Twentieth-Century
History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Fabry, Judith. "Agricultural Science and Technology in the West." In The Rural West
since World War Ii, ed. R. Douglas Hurt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1998.
Faragher, John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986.
Faue, Elizabeth. Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor
Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina,
1991.
Fernlund, Kevin J., ed. The Cold War American West, 1945-1989. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Center for the American West, 1998.
Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American
West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.
Field, Bruce. Harvest of Dissent: The National Farmers Union and the Early Cold War.
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.
472
Findlay, John M. Magic Lands: The Western Cityscapes and American Culture.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Fink, Deborah. "Sidelines and Moral Capital: Women on Nebraska Farms in the 1930s."
In Women and Farming: Changing Roles, Changing Structures, ed. Wava G.
Haney. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988.
Fisher, John R. "Cattle Plagues Past and Present: The Mystery of Mad Cow Disease."
Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 33, no. No. 2: 215-228.
Fite, Gilbert C. The Farmers' Frontier, 1865-1900. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966.
________. American Farmers: The New Minority. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1981.
Fitzgerald, Deborah. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American
Agriculture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
________. "Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in American Agriculture."
Technology and Culture, no. 32 (January 1991).
Fleischner, Thomas L. "Land Held Hostage: A History of Livestock and Politics." In
Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, ed. George
Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson. Sausalito, CA: Foundation for Deep Ecology,
2002.
Flores, Dan. "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains, 1800-1850."
The Journal of American History Vol. 78, no. No. 2.: 465-485.
________. ""Place: Thinking About Bioregional History"." In The Natural West:
Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton
Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Foss, Phillip O. Politics and Grass: The Administration of Grazing on the Public
Domain. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
473
________. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977.
Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.
Frank, Dana. Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor
Movement, 1919-1929. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. New York: Routledge,
1993.
Friedberger, Mark. "Cattle Raising and Dairying in the Western States." In The Rural
West since World War Ii, ed. R. Douglas Hurt. Lawrence: The University Press of
Kansas, 1998.
Friedmann, Harriett. "World Market, State, and the Family Farm: Social Bases of
Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor." Comparative Studies in Society
and History 20 (1978).
Furman, Necah Stewart. Caroline Lockhart: Her Life and Legacy. Cody: Buffalo Bill
Historical Center, 1994.
Garceau, Dee. The Important Things of Life: Women, Work, and Family in Sweetwater
County, Wyoming, 1880-1929. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Gates, Paul Wallace. The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860. New York: Hold,
Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, 1973.
Getty, Harry. The San Carlos Indian Cattle Industry. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1963.
Goin, Peter. Nuclear Landscapes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Goldstein, Judith. Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993.
Good, Charles M. "Salt, Trade and Disease: Aspects of Development in Africa's Northern
Great Lakes Region." The International Journal of African Historical Studies
Vol. 5, no. No. 4.: 543-586.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
474
Gottlieb, Robert. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American
Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993.
Graf, William L. Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions. Savage,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Gray, James R. Ranch Economics. Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press, 1968.
Gregory, James. American Exodus : The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in
California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Grosskopf. On Flatwell Creek: The Story of Montana's N Bar Ranch. Los Alamos, NM:
Exceptional Books, 1991.
Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman, 2000.
Hadley, Diana, Scott Mills, and Richard V.N. Ahlstrom. El Rio Bonito: An
Ethnoecological Study of the Bonita Creek Watershed, Southeastern Arizona.
Phoenix, AZ: Arizona State Office of the Bureau of Land Management, 1993.
Hahamovitch, Cindy. Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making
of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1997.
Hall, Stuart. "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference." Radical America 24 (1990): 9-20.
Hansen, John Mark. "Creating a New Politics: The Evolution of an Agricultural Policy
Network in Congress, 1919-1980." Yale University, 1987.
Hardin, Garrett. "Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248.
Hargreaves, Mary W.M. "Land Use Planning in Response to Drought: The Great Plains
Experience of the Thirties." Agricultural History 50 (October 1976).
Harmon, Alexandra. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities
around Puget Sound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Hasselstrom, Linda. Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains. Berkeley:
Barn Owl Books, 1987.
Hays, Samuel. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation
Movement, 1890-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
475
Herron, John, ed. Human/Nature: Biology, Culture and Environmental History.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
Hess, Karl. Visions Upon the Land: Man and Nature on the Western Range. Washington,
D.C.: Island Press, 1992.
Hevly, Bruce William, John Findlay, ed. The Atomic West. Seattle: University of
Washington Center of the Study of the Pacific Northwest, 1998.
"High Noon." ed. Fred Zinnemann. Los Angeles: Lions Gate Home Entertainment, 1952.
Hinds, Lynn Boyd. The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950. New York:
Praeger, 1991.
Hirt, Paul. A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World
War Two. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
Hooks, Gregory Michael. Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War Ii's Battle
of the Potomac. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Horowitz, Roger, ed. Boys and Their Toys? : Masculinity, Technology, and Class in
America. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Hunner, Jon. Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Hunt, Lynn. "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text." In The New Cultural History, ed.
Lynn Hunt. Berkeley: University of California, 1989.
________, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Hunter, Linda Gordon and Allen. "Not All Male Dominance Is Patriarchal." Radical
History Review 71, no. Spring (1998).
Hurt, R. Douglas. The Dust Bowl : An Agricultural and Social History. Chicago: NelsonHall, 1981.
________. Agricultural Technology in the Twentieth Century. Manhattan: Sunflower
University Press, 1991.
________. American Agriculture: A Brief History. Ames: Iowa State University Press,
1994.
476
________, ed. The Rural West since World War Ii. Lawrence: The University Press of
Kansas, 1998.
Hyde, Anne. An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture. New
York: New York University Press, 1990.
________. "From Stagecoach to Packard Twin Six: Yosemite and the Changing Face of
Tourism, 1880-1930." California History 65 (Summer 1990).
Igler, David. Industrial Cowboys: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far
West, 1850-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd., 2001.
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and
Skill. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Iverson, Peter. When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in
the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Jackson, T.J., ed. The Culture Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 18801980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Jacobs, Lynn. The Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching. Tucson: L. Jacobs, 1991.
Jacobs, Margaret. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Jacoby, Karl. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
Jakle, John. The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Jameson, Elizabeth, ed. The Women's West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1987.
________, ed. Writing the Range: Race, Class and Culture in the Women's West.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Jellison, Katherine. Entitled to Power : Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Jenkins, J. Craig. The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker Movement in the 1960s.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
477
Jensen, Joan. Loosening the Bonds : Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986.
________. Promise to the Land : Essays on Rural Women. Albuquerque: New Mexico,
1991.
Johnson, Susan. ""a Memory Sweet to Soldiers": The Significance of Gender." In A New
Significance: Re-Visioning the History of the American West, ed. II Clyde Milner,
255-279. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush.
London: WW Norton, 2000.
Johnston, Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D., ed. The Countryside in the Age of the
Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2001.
Jones, Jacquline. "Tore up and a Movin': Perspectives on the Work of Black and Poor
White Women in the Rural South, 1865-1940." In Women and Farming:
Changing Roles, Changing Structures, ed. Wava G. Haney. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1988.
Jordan, Teresa. Cowgirls: Women of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982.
Jordan, Terry. North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers : Origins, Diffusion, and
Differentiation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.
Kaledin, Eugenia. Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950's. Boston: Twayne,
1984.
Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
Kaplan, Flora E.S., ed. Museums and the Making of Ourselves: The Role of Objects in
National Identity. London: Leicester University Press, 1994.
Kaye, John R. Wunder and Frances W., ed. Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience.
Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1999.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
478
Kelly, Joan. Women, History, and Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Kennedy, Micheal, ed. Cowboys and Cattlemen: A Round-up from Montana, the
Magazine of Western History. New York: Hastings House, 1964.
Klemme, Marvin. Home Rule on the Range: Early Days of the Grazing Service. New
York: Vantage Press, 1984.
Knobloch, Frieda. The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the
American West Studies in Rural Culture, ed. Jack Temple Kirby. Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Koistenen, Paul A.C. The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective. New
York: Praeger, 1980.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in
American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
________. The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers,
1630-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
LaCapra, Dominick. Rethining Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Lamar, Howard. "Westering in the Twenty-First Century: Speculations on the Future of
the Western Past." In Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed.
George Miles William Cronon, and Jay Gitlin. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
Lears, TJ Jackson. "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities."
American Historical Review 90, no. No. 3 (1985): 567-593.
Leonard, Kevin Allen. "Migrants, Immigrants, and Refugees: The Cold War and
Population Growth in the American West." In The Cold War American West,
1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico,
1998.
Libecap, Gary. Locking up the Range: Federal Land Controls and Grazing. Cambridge,
MA: Ballinger, 1981.
479
Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor's War at Home: The Cio in World War Ii. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Liu, Tessie P. The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family
Solidarity in Western France, 1750-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Long, David Wrobel and Patrick, ed. Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American
West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Viking,
1996.
Lubar, Steven. "Men/Women/Production/Consumption." In His and Hers: Gender,
Consumption, and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1998.
MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British
Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.
MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mather, Eugene. "The Production and Marketing of Wyoming Beef Cattle." Economic
Geography 26, no. 2 (1950): 81-93.
Matteson, George Wuerthner and Mollie, ed. Welfare Ranching : The Subsidized
Destruction of the American West. Sausalito, CA: Foundation for Deep Ecology,
2002.
Mattison, Ray H. "The Hard Winter and the Range Cattle Business." In Cowboys and
Cattlemen: A Roundup from Montana: The Magazine of Western History, ed.
Michael S. Kennedy. New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1964.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound, American Families in the Cold War Era. New
York: Basic Books, 1988.
McChristian, Douglas C. Ranchers to Rangers: An Administrative History of GrantKohrs National Historic Site. Rocky Mountain Cluster: National Park Service,
1977.
McEnaney, Laura. Civil Defense Begins at Home : Militarization Meets Everyday Life in
the Fifties. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
480
McEvoy, Arthur. The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California
Fisheries, 1850-1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
McGerr, Michael. "Is There a Twentieth-Century West." In Under an Open Sky:
Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. George Miles William Cronon, and Jay
Gitlin. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992.
McIntosh, Robert. "Ecology since 1900." In Issues and Ideas in America, ed. Benjamin
Taylor and Thurman White. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.
McMath, Robert. Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers' Alliance.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
________. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang,
1992.
McMurry, Sally. Transforming Rural Life : Dairying Families and Agricultural Change,
1820-1885. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995.
Medhurst, Martin J., ed. Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology. New
York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Merchant, Carolyn. Ecological Revolutions : Nature, Gender, and Science in New
England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989.
________. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2003.
Merrill, Karen. Public Lands and Political Meaning : Ranchers, the Government, and the
Property between Them. Berkeley: University of California, 2002.
Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America,
1945-1960. Philadelphia: Temple Unviersity Press, 1994.
Milner, Clyde A. II, Carol O'Conner, Martha Sandweiss, ed. The Oxford History of the
American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor : The Workplace, the State, and
American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987.
Montoya, Maria. "Landscapes of the Cold War West." In The Cold War American West,
1945-1989, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1998.
481
Mooney, Patrick H. My Own Boss? Class, Rationality and the Family Farm. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1988.
________, ed. Farmers' and Farm Workers' Movements: Social Protest in American
Agriculture. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Morrissey, Katherine. Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997.
Nash, Gerald D. The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
________. The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
________. World War Ii and the West: Reshaping the Economy. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990.
________. The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West.
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999.
Nash, Linda. "The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?" Environmental History
10, no. 1 (January 2005).
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967.
Nelson, Paula. After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Townbuilders in Western
South Dakota, 1900-1917. :. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.
Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm : Women, Community and the Foundations of
Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995.
Oakes, Guy. The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
O'Conner, Carol A. "A Region of Cities." In The Oxford History of the American West,
ed. Clyde A. II Milner, Carol O'Conner, Martha Sandweiss. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994.
Odum, Eugene P. Fundamentals of Ecology. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953.
482
Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1965.
Osterud, Nancy Grey. "'She Helped Me Hay It as Good as a Man': Relations among
Women and Men in an Agricultural Community." In 'to Toil the Livelong Day':
America's Women at Work, 1780-1980, ed. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth
Norton, 1987.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, ed. Trails: Toward
a New Western History. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1991.
Peffer, E.L. The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies, 19001950. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1951.
Pena, Devon. Chicano Culture, Ecology, and Politics. Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 1998.
Pincus, J. "Pressure Groups and the Pattern of Tariffs." Journal of Political Economy 83
(August, 1975).
Pisani, Donald J. To Reclaim a Divided West : Water, Law, and Public Policy, 18481902. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.
________. Water and American Government : The Reclamation Bureau, National Water
Policy, and the West, 1902-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Pomeroy, Earl. In Search of the Golden West; the Tourist in Western America. New
York: Knopf, 1957.
Price, Jennifer. Flight Maps : Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
Pulido, Laura. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the
Southwest. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998.
Radtke, Yoshiie Yoda and Kurt. The Foundations of Japan's Modernization: A
Comparison with China's Path toward Modernization. Leiden: EJ Brill, 1996.
Rasmussen, Wayne David. Taking the University to the People: Seventy-Five Years of
Cooperative Extension. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989.
Reiger, John F. American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation. Corvallis, OR:
Oregon State University Press, 2001.
483
Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert : The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New
York: Viking, 1986.
Remley, David. Bell Ranch: Cattle Ranching in the Southwest, 1824-1947. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico, 1993.
Richard L. Knight, Wendell C. Gilgert and Ed Marston, ed. Ranching West of the 100th
Meridian: Culture, Ecology and Economics. Washington, D.C.: Island Press,
2002.
Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef : The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. New York:
Dutton, 1992.
Ringholz, Raye Carleson. Uranium Frenzy: Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1991.
Robbins, Roy M. Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1970. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness : Race and the Making of the American
Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991.
Rothman, Hal. Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West.
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.
________. Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the
Twentieth Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.
Rowell, Andrew. Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environmental Movement.
London: Routledge, 1996.
Rowley, William D. U.S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands: A History. College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985.
Rupp, Leila, ed. Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement
1945-1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Sabatier, Paul A. "Interest Group Membership and Organization: Multiple Theories." In
The Politics of Interest: Interest Groups Transformed, ed. Mark P. Petracca.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
Sachs, Carolyn. Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production. Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Allanheld, 1983.
484
Sayre, Nathan. Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest :
Species of Capital. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.
Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender, and the
Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routeledge, 1995.
Scharff, Virginia. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. New
York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991.
________, ed. Seeing Nature through Gender. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,
2003.
Schlebecker, John T. Cattle Raising on the Plains, 1900-1961. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1963.
________. "Grasshoppers in American Agricultural History." Agricultural History 27,
no. 3 (July, 1953).
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Schudson, Chandra Mukerji and Michael, ed. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary
Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Schwartz, Marvin. J.B. Hunt: The Long Haul to Success. Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1992.
Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988.
Sellers, Christopher. Hazards of the Job : From Industrial Disease to Environmental
Health Science. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
________. "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History."
Environmental History 4 (1999): 486-514.
Service, United States Forest. The Western Range. Letter from the Secretary of
Agriculture Transmitting in Response to Senate Resolution No. 289 : A Report on
the Western Range - a Great but Neglected Natural Resource. Washington, D.C.:
United States Printing Office, 1936.
Shaiko, Ronald, ed. The Interest Group Connection: Electioneering, Lobbying, and
Policymaking in Washington. Chatham: Chatham House Publishers, 1998.
485
Sharp, Robert L. Big Outfit: Ranching on the Baca Float. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1974.
Sherow, James E., ed. A Sense of the American West: An Environmental History
Anthology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
Skaggs, Jimmy M. The Cattle-Trailing Industry: Between Supply and Demand, 18661890. Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1973.
________. Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 16071983. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986.
Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization, 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1950.
Smith, Richard K. Agricultural Statistics 1949. Washington, DC: United States
Department of Agriculture, 1949.
Solinger, Rickie. Beggars and Choosers : How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption,
Abortion, and Welfare in the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Sparks, James A. Young and B. Abbott. Cattle in the Cold Desert. Logan: Utah State
University, 1985.
Sparrow, Bartholomew H. From the Outside In: World War Ii and the American Atate.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of
the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Starrs, Paul. Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Steen, Harold K. The U.S. Forest Service: A History. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1976.
Steiner, Michael and David Wrobel, ed. Many Wests : Place, Culture, & Regional
Identity. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1997.
Stewart, Mart A. "What Nature Suffers to Grow": Life, Labor, and Landscape on the
Georgia Coast. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
486
Sutter, Paul. Driven Wild : How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern
Wilderness Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.
Switzer, Jacqueline Vaughn. Green Backlash: The History and Politics of Environmental
Opposition in the U.S. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997.
Thompson, Charles Dillard, ed. The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor,
and Advocacy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books,
1966.
________. "Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History." Indian Historical Review 3
(1977).
Tobey, Ronald C. Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of
American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981.
Truman, David. The Governmental Process. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
Tuan, Yi Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 (originally published 1974).
Turner, Frederick. Of Chiles, Cacti, and Fighting Cocks: Notes on the American West.
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.
Udall, Stewart. The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War
Affair with the Atom. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Unknown. "Wyoming Memories: Blizzard of 1949." Annals of Wyoming: The Wyoming
History Journal 76, no. 1 (Winter 2004).
Vavra, Martin, ed. Ecological Implications of Livestock Herbivory in the West. Denver,
CO: Society for Range Management, 1994.
W.K. Lauenroth, D.G. Milchunas, J.L. Dodd, R.H. Hart, R.K. Heitschmidt, and L.R.
Rittenhouse. "Effects of Grazing on Ecosystems of the Great Plains." In
Ecological Implications of Livestock Herbivory in the West, ed. William A.
Laycock Martin Vavra, Rex D. Pieper. Denver, CO: Society for Range
Management, 1994.
487
Walton, John. Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture and Rebellion in
California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Wander, Philip. "Political Rhetoric and the Un-American Tradition." In Cold War
Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology, ed. Martin J. Medhurst. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1990.
Warren, Louis. The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century
America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Weiner, Douglas. "Presidential Address American Society for Environmental History."
Houston, Texas, 2005.
Welsh, Michael. Dunes and Dreams: A History of White Sands National Monument.
Santa Fe: National Park Service Intermountain Cultural Resources Center, 1995.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978.
White, Richard. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983.
________. "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" : A History of the American West.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
________. ""Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?"" In
Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon. New
York: Norton and Company, 1995.
Whyte, William Hollingworth. The Organization Man. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1956.
Wilbur-Cruce, Eva Antonia. A Beautiful, Cruel Country. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1987.
Wilcox, Robert W. "Zebu's Elbows: Cattle Breeding and the Environment in Central
Brazil, 1890-1960." In Territories, Commodities and Knowledges: Latin
American Environmental History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed.
Christian Brannstrom. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2004.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic : New York City & the Rise of the American Working
Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
488
Williams, James. "Getting Housewives the Electric Message: Gender and Energy
Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century." In His and Hers: Gender,
Consumption, and Technology, ed. Roger Horowitz. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1998.
Williams, Robert C. Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin' Johnny: A History of the Farm
Tractor and Its Impact on America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1991.
Winkler, Allan M. The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 19421945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Wirth, John. Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution.
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000.
Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1977.
________. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979.
________. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New
York: Pantheon Publishers, 1985.
________. "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in
History." The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1087-1106.
________. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Wrobel, David. Promised Lands : Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American
West. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002.