Climate Change: Cowboy Birth in Wyoming’s Dying Cattle Country
Outside my Wilderness winnebago there is a soft frost on the
ground. The sun reaching above the badlands to the east throws shades
of yellow and orange. The air is cold and the field nearest the river
is alive not only with calves and cows but Canadian geese that roost here
during the spring and early summer. The outhouse door is swung wide
to the rising sun and the toilet seat is cold to the point of unfriendly;
but it is beautiful and silent and still and the cows are welcome as the
geese and the sun, so I sit longer through the cold than necessary.
It’s March 2 and the cottonwood and Russian olive that line the river
have not yet budded. New grasses and alfalfa shoots are not yet visible.
The earth is brown and yellow and bare and I am a green cowboy beginning
a two and half month stint in Wyoming’s cattle country through the calving
season.
* * *
Wyoming cowboys have long been figures of romance. The images are
still fresh, still plastered over billboard signs fostering idols of solitude
and sureness, ruggedness and uncompromising masculinity. From Wyatt Earp
to the Marlboro Man, cowboys are brute, restless, evolutionary. They
are the link still visible between modern man’s technological development
and his conquering of our continent. And while much of history already
holds the icon in posterity, cowboys yet inhabit the untamed territory,
remain masters of untamed animals and continue to conquer a way of life
beset on all sides by the evils of economy, politics, and progress.
The Big Horn Basin in north central Wyoming nestles itself between three
mountain ranges, the Carter and Owl Creek Mountains to the west and southwest
and the Big Horn Mountains to the east. In the Basin’s center sits
Worland, the largest of the communities in the region with a population
that bulges to no greater than 5500 in its best years. It was in
Worland that my parents settled, that I was raised, that I came to loathe
and at once appreciate the John Deere green that colored the region agricultural,
hard-working, and prejudiced.
So there was little question as I left the remainder of my belongings
on a San Francisco street corner at four in the morning, waiting for the
cab that would return me first to the Wyoming where I was raised, second
to the Wyoming I never knew. I grew up in Wyoming, surrounded by
agriculture and ranching, good old boys talking about the good old days,
cowboy hats and wranglers; more exacting however, I grew out of Wyoming.
Never did I rope and ride the way many did and many still do. Never
did I take to the pleasures of chewing tobacco, chaps and spurs.
I left Wyoming, cursing it under my breath for underdevelopment and backwards
if not backcountry philosophies. Outwardly I relished my western
upbringing, gloried in the history available to me, relished the thought
that I hailed from the most brilliant land in the most beautiful country.
“Sure I could cowboy,” I told my friend as he proposed the time spent calving.
It was just a matter of quitting my job, breaking the lease on my apartment
and dusting off my never-worn Stetson.
* * *
While fantasy was Wyoming’s original commodity – old west ways, shoot ‘em
ups and rodeos – we’re witness now to a real estate boom whose results
may include an accelerated end to the cowboy. The Big Horn Mountains,
the Tetons and ranges all across Wyoming are seen now as the final frontier
for vacationers seeking their own personal and private piece of paradise.
Ranch lands are fetching sums no rancher can afford and the landscapes
are being turned over to the wealthy and their contemporary vision of heaven;
keep just enough cows on the land for agricultural tax exemptions and the
super-rich enjoy their ride into the sunset that much more.
The rising price of real estate in the area is much of the reason that
Lloyd Nielson and his partner belong to a ranching association. The
Otter Creek Association is a conglomerate of ranching families. Like
Wyoming, there is a history in it that bears more on its management than
sound grazing practices and a good market. The Association owns or
leases nearly 75,000 acres between the desert and the southern tip of the
Big Horn Mountains. On those acres a total of 2,200 shares (or cow/calf
pairs) may be run. In addition to various dues and fees, for every
share a rancher in the Association owns, $13.50 must be paid per month
for a six month stretch. Those six months represent the time a member’s
herd will be pastured on the association’s land in the desert and high
country. There is a full-time manager and hired-hand and at all times,
the work done to maintain corrals, fences, reservoirs, etc. is tended to
by members of the association and the help they provide. For the
next two and half months, much of that help will be Lloyd’s son, Hunter,
and I.
The Association also pools its resources in terms of bulls. There
are roughly one hundred and ten bulls owned by the group and maintained
by the manager, a wiry old cowboy with a soft but acidic tongue.
This means also that the majority of the Association’s members raise Black
Angus cattle compared to any number of other breeds. Ranching is
about genetics because the sale is about genetics. Pure bred brings
the most money. At bull sales, the bulls with the greatest genetic
history fetch the greatest sums. Taken into account are birth weight,
weaning weight, and various indexes that may prefigure a cow’s milk productivity
and the birth weight of a particular bull’s offspring.
The aim of any ranch then, is to increase the size of the herd.
If a cow is no longer reproductive she is culled. If a bull is no
longer reproductive he is culled. If a cow aborts or proves riley
she is culled. Simply, from one year to the next, a rancher is concerned
with successfully breeding as many cows as possible. The more sexually
active a herd, the better. The more sexually aggressive a bull, the
better. Bulls are tested fall and spring for sexually transmitted
diseases and virility. What’s the circumference of the scrotum?
The greater the better.
* * *
Our first morning is a hard one, as mornings will go. Even before
I understand the powers and virtues of the landscape, and long before I
am comfortable with my first day’s work and the promise of future days,
we are upon a diseased calf whose contribution to the ranch before it dies
will be only to pass along whatever ailment has infected it. This
is a rancher’s problem. Raising cattle, breeding cows, weaning calves
is about the law of averages; it is about genetics and history and what
contagions remain in the soil. Trichomaniasis, scours, over-eating
disorder – from sexually transmitted diseases to infectious pathogens the
rancher fights nature’s health while he similarly tries to manipulate it.
Today Lloyd will handle nature – hopefully nipping the spread of whatever
is killing this calf – in a violent fashion. In so doing I can’t
distinguish if Lloyd is proving himself more cowboy, more Wyoming, or more
man. We do not have a gun on hand so it is the blunt end of a hatchet
that does the trick. I am amazed at the lack of sound; the dull thud
as if marble dropped on marble, as the hatchet rebounds. The calf’s
skull doesn’t buckle beneath the rain – it doesn’t split. The charge
of three blows like a hammer against an already finished nail works its
way through the limp body in mechanical fashion.
The cowboy is iconic. He became so for reasons told in dime store
novels, the way he answered that intangible call to the wild, the way he
made sport of brutality and animal mastery. He is stolid and metaphoric:
the taming of the west, the wresting of the continent away from tyranny
and savagery. The rise of the cowboy was the rebirth of masculinity,
a nineteenth century answer to a country turned civilized and dainty.
Wyoming would be the resting-place, the region where politics and economics
would garner those stigmas and make them bedrock.
The calf is dead and Lloyd apologizes. This is why Hunter and
I will have guns at the ranch, he says. Lloyd is a chemist turned
car dealer turned cowboy. He lives in Wyoming because in Wyoming
self-preservation is the virtue, not social engineering. He is a
rancher because he loves its way, its people, and the power and puzzles
it provides. More often than not Lloyd tries to out-think the cows
or the cowboys. He rarely rides a horse, doesn’t throw a lariat,
but if called upon he will prove brutal, uncompromising, businesslike.
Unlike real cowboys however, he betrays his boyish love for the game with
a gregarious personality. He is too quick to laugh at himself through
the cursing and the frustration. Real cowboys, real
Wyomingites don’t do that.
8 March
In Wyoming, self-sufficiency is a goal. The rancher is dependent
upon himself and his family. After that it is the hired hand, often
times understood as a member of the immediate family. The cowboy
then considers himself responsible for all things within his sphere, whether
it’s cows, cars, or the conditions which affect all of the above.
The ranch then is ideal when it is self-sustaining, self-contained,
self-sufficient. Which makes most ranchers also farmers, and most
ranches farms. Even Lloyd is moving towards a more independent operation
despite the constraints on his time. His ranch outside Basin, just
north of Worland, is gaining much needed ground. Nearing capacity
in terms of cattle, his acres are also nearing a size great enough to yield
a sufficient quantity of oat-hay or alfalfa during the growing period.
When a ranch is able to farm enough of its own land so as to garner the
feed necessary to make it through the barren winters, then the rancher
is steps closer to independence.
* * *
The first week of the calving season is over and I am the picture of cowardice.
The cows are frightening. It is our charge to see that every newborn
calf is on the ground healthy. After that we tag them, record their
colorings and their sex, and castrate the bulls. When that is said
and done, the cow-calf pair is to moved to different pasture so that the
herd of haves is kept separate from the have-nots.
What is intimidating about so simple a process is not the ninety-pound
calf bawling in confusion, but the twelve hundred-pound cow with maternal,
animal instincts.
The pregnant cows in our care are kept on a triangular bit of acreage
that surrounds our trailer. In the night we take a last stroll through
the darkness, concerned with the hypothetical cow in breech or distress.
I am afraid of the night, of the dark, the stampede of cows and rodents,
and the unknown. I wear a braver face when we eventually give the
night back to the eyes that shine in our lamplight.
In the morning as we feed eighteen-hundred pound round-bails using a
hydraulic lift, we count the new calves in our little maternity ward, recording
the numbers written onto rubber tags that dangle from mother’s left ear.
In the afternoon we plod about, driving alongside the newborns and grabbing
hold of a hind leg with a lengthy aluminum hook. I am the picture
of Little Bo-Peep. Thrown into the bed of the truck one of us straddles
the calf on its back, holding its hind legs while the other slips two sturdy
bands around the scrotum (if a bull) and pierces the left ear with a tag
to match mother’s. The cowboys of old and so many of the cowboys
that remain dare not tangle with such passive-aggressive ways. It
is not two rubber bands that slowly deprive a bull of his strictly male
development but a steady and sharpened blade.
More benevolent, Hunter and I are far from iconic. Most would
consider us “dudes,” a term more pejorative in these contexts than in L.A.
and more widely used than expected. As dudes we’re easily spotted.
We don’t ride and we don’t rope. We don straw cowboy hats when most
wear felt, Carharts where all wear Wranglers.
25 March
Well into March I am a cowboy on the make. I fashion myself of
the metaphors and idioms gleaned in the past weeks, coloring my cowardice
and my speech with façade. I am eager to do this or that when
in the company of cowboys, showing a willingness to work and a charge to
action (that I assume) keeps secret my misunderstanding. Hunter and
I are quick to jump and slow to think for fear of being outed even further.
While most accept us on a patronizing level, answering our questions in
honest fashion but anticipating a degree of helpfulness on par with a moving
fence post, it is our aim not to be seen differently, just seen.
Cowboys embody and embrace images that die-hard. They are hard
working and determined and while their acumen may be limited to a particular
set of causes and their predetermined effects, they accommodate these with
practiced intention. The cowboy continues from the source, from the
mold, rarely diverting his attention from expected (so much more than anticipated)
outcomes. A fence is built in this manner, in this order, to these
dimensions. A cow will need this much feed, this much water, to make
it this far or this long in the desert. This variable prefigures
this summation. My grandfather did it this way. My father.
This is the way I will do it. Because Lloyd is without blueprint,
he makes gains that others do not – in efficiency, production, etc.
Because he is without foundation he is met with loss – in respect, welcome,
appreciation.
The cowboy works from the mold outward. Preserving the good as
well as the bad. Speaking to that point, Lloyd puts it that “there
are more ways to be a bigot in this world than you can imagine.”
And while the cowboy is at one time a hard working character, conscious
of family and community ties, he is equally a voice of old-fashioned prejudice.
Overlooking the visible ignorances, it is the contrasts that contribute
to the beauty of this place and this way. The landscapes, like the
cowboys that remain, exist in intense ways, embracing the natural and historic
fashion to the point of cliché. The mountains, deserts, and
the foliage in between are stark, lone, aggressive. Like the cowboy,
the country is clad in essentials. The opportunity for ornament –
spring and fall for the mountain with the budding and changing of leaves;
a rodeo or wedding or fourth of July celebration for the cowboy and his
dress wranglers – is seasonal and so met with an appreciable flare.
The cowboy drinks and curses and approaches strangers with caution.
The mountain too swells in its own manner, sheds visitors at its whim with
an embrace of cold, a hello of rain or snow. Neither converse
unless suited to do so.
23 April
Working your way into the graces of these communities is not easy.
The opportunities to gain those graces are few and they come only at the
price of a hard sweat. Work brings the area together and while the
niche may be as large as the county the pathway to acceptance (and conversation)
is a narrow one. A branding continues to be one of those roadways.
This offers a wonderful irony; while the cowboy’s existence is predominated
by a silent and solitary way, the mechanisms most powered by this culture
are based on an implicit communal understanding. The cowboy and his
hand, while rightly associated with quiet and steady work, become integral
components in the machinery necessitated by so great a task as branding
and inoculating calves. Cowboys and their families turn out en masse,
passively acknowledging a cowboy order that contributed to the earliest
successes in this wilderness and continues today. Self, family, community
– beyond that, the cowboy prefers ignorance. If it is drawn outside
those lines, if powers beyond their immediate control threaten their immediate
circles, it is an uphill battle and the resistance is silent most often,
grudging forever.
Today the landscape is alive with the trail of cows. Cowboys are
strung out at the back and flanks, barking and yelping in high-pitched
tones at the cows and calves that straggle. Occasionally a palette
rich in expletives spills its colors into the air.
Brandings are the great cowboy mechanism. Like a barn raising,
numbers apply the appropriate force to tackle the task; each contributing
according to silently understood roles. Most women, in particular
the women of the hosting ranch, spend the morning preparing the day’s lunch,
made complete only when two meats are served, beans, breads, casseroles
and desserts fill the available tables. The men that can ride and
rope take their turns, two at a time, sauntering through a collection of
cows and calves, roping the calves and dragging them to the waiting wrestlers
whose loveable job it is to hold the calf prone and still during its fixings.
One man on the head, one man on the heel, as many as five calves are held
to the dirt at one time while others move through the melee performing
various functions: branding, inoculating, castrating, tagging, ear marking,
de-horning. Every person has a task and the number of calves on the
ground makes every task the more efficient. One man brands; a woman
offers one injection, marking the jowl of the calf with an oil marker to
note her place; another woman applies a shot to the nostrils and marks
her place. The calves buck and bolt and bawl in undeveloped tongues
as the hot iron is pressed to their hide. The flesh burns pink and
wrinkles in the heat and there is a smell as thick as the blue-green smoke.
One cowboy grabs hold of the scrotum and pulls it from the calf’s underbelly.
With a convincing push and tug he cuts off the stretched end of the sack,
revealing the testicles that hang in staggered fashion. They’re pulled
again from the body and cut free, thrown in a bucket now half-filled –
fried in a heavy batter, the next branding’s appetizers. He rinses
the knife and cuts off the tip of the left ear. With that the calf
is let to its feet where it wastes little time despite the confusion.
It is a first rate circus. All know their parts without direction
and here Hunter and I are awarded with silent approval.
When the branding is done we wash in bunkhouse fashion and file into
a kitchen typical of ranch homes. Countertops are covered in a collection
of dust, papers, tools, and various ranching paraphernalia. A pair
of spurs act as a paperweight, themselves anchored to the mess with a coil
of leather braid. Ranching fashion has it that the horses and vehicles
are tended to long before the home.
Sitting around the table for lunch may be the most difficult experience
to date, as the silence is louder and more consistent than chitchat.
The room is dominated by history and those around rely on it to control
the tempo. History seems to govern the thoughts and the banter, as
if the men rely mostly on some unwritten ranching almanac. The topics
are predetermined as their outcomes. Conversation is carried out
in low, staccato bursts. Questions are asked and answered with the
same vocabulary, the intonation is all that changes. “Going-to move
‘em up the mountain starting Sunday?” “Going to move ‘em up the mountain
starting Sunday.” It is not so much that those at the table embrace
an academic understanding of their particular roots, the heritage in their
trade, or a particular appreciation of the ties that have bound these families
together for so long. It is simpler than that. Self, family,
community. Rely on the one before the other. Rely on the herd
only in the end. Mince words with yourself, question only yourself
or your family, ask the community only what you already know, you’ll not
get more nor would you give more.
The irony is what gets you. The cowboys collect at any cost, willing
always to aid, to support the community and its quid pro quo ways.
But even such alignments don’t lead to deeply rooted friendships, and the
cowboy continues even today in the fashion he made famous – singular.
1 May
In the evening hours I am convinced of brilliance. Hunter and
I have taken to the fields as the sun sets. We are surrounded by
a rich emptiness. The calves frolic and the cows are less wary as
they have been fed and become the more accustomed to our meandering about
the farm. Each evening, as geese enter the fields in great geometric
patterns, thousands of smaller birds, starlings perhaps, cut the sky into
sections as they move. We hear them in the trees and as they pound
the air above us. They too frolic, moving as some great black cloud,
coursing through the blue as schools of fish through brilliant seas.
The light is warm as the mood. Here I am reassured of my decisions.
Night falls in two fashions. Often it is still and solemn.
Other nights are turned inside out with the din of clashing leaves and
the eerie belch of pregnant cows. When serenity prevails, the
cottonwoods that surround our trailer do not move. They do not shudder
at the calm crisp air the way I do, they do not whisper to each other through
a banter of leaves. While the night is governed by something charging
it to be still, the darkness accelerates the power and piercing of the
calm and cool and silence. These are the nights when the darkness
is frightening. Only after the dangers and the stillness have been
accounted for is it magnificent and splendid.
I regard the weather for a time, the cows and their calves. I
am fettered to an appreciation of this world. Saddened by my understanding
of the defeats and how they must outnumber the victories. Ranching
in Wyoming is threatened on all sides. The thought persists more
today than yesterday, more this year than last year, that Wyoming is a
cliché. Its various symbols – the cowboy, the Indian,
its mountains and prairies – simply prevailing anecdotes for west-headed
Easterners in the family minivan forcing through the terrain on a hot July
morning. I came not to further dismiss the clichés but to
embrace them, to turn them over and discover if their undersides do not
reveal a future for their wonderful metaphors.
There are few things so beautiful as the imagery presented by the lone
cowboy atop his horse, the powerful herd ahead of him and the setting sun
behind. Unfortunately, beauty does not intimate power, and something
about this image is changing, changing slowly. The herd is thinning,
scattering perhaps. The cowboy’s eyes are no longer intently trained
on the herd, but taking more careful note of the sun behind. The
sun is setting and for the first time the cowboy understands that the sun
is setting on his herd, on his way. The shadows of policy and politics
are stretching before him, passing him. There is no longer a friendly
warmth on his shoulders but a growing chill. Like the trail and pastures
ahead, his future is indeterminate. While this same sun convinces
me of wondrous things, it is portentous of the coming darkness. The
twilight of western Americana is nearer now than at any point in history.
19 May
In the end the ranch is still and silent, differently than when we
first arrived. The cows are gone to the high country to pasture for
the summer. The barn is empty. The fields are flush with alfalfa
and the cottonwoods cast a heavy shade. It is hot and tiresome and
the ranch, it seems, prefigures the future of Wyoming, of ranching, of
the cowboy. Despite the rich yield the land has to offer, it is the
silent landscape and its imaginative holdings that will reign. The
view will be purchased, an intangible investment whose returns will double
if not triple those made when this very same land is sewn and harvested,
flooded with cows and their calves.
Now into a new century, Wyoming and ranching in particular succeed by
virtue of their own inertia. But physical laws still apply and the
momentum that carries this way and these people on will succumb to those
forces opposing it – economics, politics, the price of paradise itself.
Stereotype prevails in many ways, supported here by its foundations of
rhetoric and action, form and function. The cowboy remains aloof,
silent, brute. He dresses the same, acts the same, struggles the
same. But even surrounded by the certainties of tradition and ornament,
you hear the trappings of his demise. “What’d the market do today?”
“You check your email?”
The argument is made that by managing the forces around you, those that
govern your life and your past and those that augur an end to your peculiar
ways, by embracing the changes around you while celebrating and supporting
the centuries long stasis, you would perhaps better make the long awaited
and prefigured transitions before you. Ironically however, embracing
the changing currencies – technology, real estate, the value of perspective
– you instead augment if not reproduce from the inside the influences that
so torture and torment from the outside. The rancher tuned to the
information age, the global village supporting the global economy, transforms
himself and his understanding of his ranching; he in fact dismantles it.
The cowboy who has traded horse for four-wheeler, form for function, is
no longer a cowboy.
The ranch is still and silent, differently than when we first arrived.
©2003 Adam Sopko