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New life in a cold world

February is the middle of winter. There is more snow recorded in this month for Montana than any other month of the year, the nights are below freezing and during the day the weak sun barely wins the temperature contest against the bitter wind off the Rockies.

And yet February marks the start of lambing and calving on the millions of acres of Montana ranchland. A rancher’s year is tuned to this pastoral wheel.  He knows that in February his nights will be disrupted by the insistent alarm clock. At 2 am he will repeat his round of the expectant cows in the birthing pasture.

The headlights of his powerful farm truck pick out the delicate wisps of steam above the tiny mound as its mother pushes at it roughly to move. If the calf does not stand soon on a night such as this he can freeze solid within the hour. Nature is unforgiving to the weak, but at a thousand dollars per calf, it is the rancher’s business to intervene if needed and get the baby next to his mother where he will dry in her heat and find warm milk on tap.

Flurries of snow speckle the damp wavy hair of the calf as he shivers wobbling on bandy legs to struggle into his new life.

The Charlie Russell paintings on display at the Montana Historical Society in Helena are part of the Mackay Collection. Charles and Nancy Russell were great friends of Malcolm and Helen Mackay who went on to become his primary patron. Though hailing from New Jersey Mackay had, in 1901, proved up on 160 acres between the East and West Rosebud. Over time that would become the Lazy EL, Bench Ranch neighbors here to the south.

When the Land still belonged to God

For those born and bred in this part of the West the long manipulated cowboy myth is both a source of pride and a straitjacket. All places and people are more than the archetypes we use to represent them, though nowhere more so than here, where the hard drinking, mono-syllabic itinerant cow herder has been crafted into a blazing emblem of a  region, a lifestyle, a people and a young country’s fierce individualism.

And yet! And yet for incomers such as ourselves, the cowboy motif endures, rewarding further investigation with fables and yarns, skills and traditions, all the more powerful in that they are depicted with earnest rectitude, a bright foil to today’s pervading irony.

The myth was propagated by the country’s need for a righteous symbol of its relentless push westward, then nurtured and sown abroad by the showman W. F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody and artists Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

  

 On a recent visit to Helena, the State Capital, we indulged ourselves in a couple of hours of deep cowboy in the Montana Historical Society museum. Here the haunting photographs of L.A. Huffman  and Evelyn Cameron  and the storytelling paintings of Charlie Russell are magnificent testimonies to  these artists desire to document this landscape and people before the tide of inevitable change rolled over them. For Huffman and Cameron it is the sweep and scale of the scene, along with the dignity of the hounded indigenous people that is most evident: for Russell the humor and compassion in the small details of the interactions between men, women and animals in a harsh environment.            

Cliché or not, these newcomers to Montana still can’t get enough of the cowboy thing.

One more cast

“I have received your information. Thanks very much for sending this along. We are in the process of collecting resumes and will be in touch soon.

-Of course we are thrilled you are Stegner fans!”

We clasped each other and danced about the office. What had a fifty-something couple said to garner such a positive response? The country was in a double death grip with recession and high unemployment and although we were working, our resumes were sparse in many important areas. Everything hinged on the fact that we had been swept away by the books of Wallace Stegner.

As we looked for work it helped that we had been ruthless in our research process and relentless sending out applications and resumes to at least two job ads every day for six months. Some of those days the word “cavalier” describes our bravado as we gushed about our experience level to would be employers. But, it is important to have faith in your own potential. We were also willing to move anywhere in the world for the right job with people with whom we felt comfortable. We drove thousands of miles from Maryland to Georgia to Colorado and up further to Montana in our fifteen year old Ford F150 pickup truck. Some of those long hauls through the night felt as if we were voyaging across a dark and bottomless ocean in search of “the big fish.”

We did catch that fish and landed it, and Wallace Stegner was in our boat. He wrote about Bench Ranch in Montana in his 1981 book of essays “American Places” co-authored with his son Page Stegner. At the time of its writing Wallace and his wife Mary had developed a close friendship with ranchers Jack and Susan Heyneman. Stegner had a deep respect for the Heyneman’s sense of ‘place’.  Wendell Berry a student of Stegner’s described it this way, “those who settle and love the life they have made and their place in it.” Stegner’s own mother was a ‘sticker’ at heart and he loved her deeply for her desire to stick with a place and a life come what may. He viewed the Heyneman family in a similar light and theirs was a friendship that stuck.

Our new life as caretakers at Bench Ranch is comprised of paying attention to details and caring for the holistic health of the “home” portion of the ranch. There are 30 odd laying hens, 6 trail horses, various dogs, a greenhouse and flower garden. Vegetables and fruit for planting and harvesting, assorted barns, buildings and machinery to maintain, snow to remove in the winter and pasture weeds to control in the summer. We manage the vacation rental down stream from the main ranch, where the Stegners often stayed. It is the original hewn log homestead, called The Torgrimson Place, after the Norwegian who proved up the land in 1906 following the Homestead Act. The home has been carefully renovated to preserve its character and serene atmosphere and has many return visitors year after year.

The main ranch house and barns sit seductively along two miles of the West Rosebud River. Brown trout bide their time in the shade of its boulders and overhangs as cottonwood blossom blows downstream. In the fall hunters arrive with their tags to harvest white tail and mule deer as well as the elusive herds of elk.

In “American Places” Stegner’s chapter about the area is called “Crow Country” because once the Crow Nation lived free and hunted here. He describes a high place on the ridge above the Heyneman’s home where a picnic is underway. Three of the Heyneman’s five sons are scampering through the gathering of neighbors and close friends as the conversation explores the serious topic of land management and the survival of families on that land the ‘hard scrabble’ way. It is a conundrum that has haunted settlers in the American West who craved freedom and open spaces, but in turn paid mightily for it. Those stickers that Stegner so admired were the forefathers of many of today’s largest, most influential ranching empires.

It is good to feel physically tired at the end of a day doing honest, simple work. The imperious Beartooth Mountains keep their vigil and the bald eagle silently glides above the river. Thank you Mr. Stegner, we owe you one.