A fine summer evening at a BLM campground, the camp host making his final rounds. We got to talking, about cows; a bunch of range cattle were having their just-before-full-dark bellowing, just across the road. Rangeland out there, desert mountain country, various and wonderful in spite of drought and overgrazing. Sometimes you come across a pit in the ground, grown over, where prospectors went down deep, testing for gold. Not all that long ago, and it's easy enough to feel spooked, as if ghosts of those who moiled for gold are hanging around, remembering the work, the devotion, the heartbreak. In actual fact misty thoughts are here; I'm conjuring them up, they hover and drift in the dark of this BLM campground where huge RVs sit at designated openings in pines and aspens, sounds of music or a laugh track or low conversation from these huge closed-in shelters, and each place is supplied with a stone fireplace for outdoor cooking, complete with adjustable iron grill. Sturdy posts, one at each opening; each post bearing a number. You've probably felt vague presences like that in worked-over places in the west. It can happen. You tune your history nerves to the silent channel, and listen. Others walked this earth the way we do. Well, okay, they walked a lot, we drive. The camp host had time to spare; we moved on from cows, but only after the host pointed out that overgrazing is a fact. He's not hostile to ranching, but voices criticism. "Some ranchers don't give a damn, fail to handle their stock the right way." I'm hoping there is a right way and that somebody knows about it. The conversation drifts, we're on a new topic, wages. I ask if some of the workers in the "service industry" in Jackson Hole are still commuting over Teton Pass. "Oh yes, absolutely, and don't go thinking they get paid for all that commute time and fuel." We get more personal. I tell him I'm a retired biologist and he admits to a former life as a government field worker. I won't reveal which field. I realize I'm talking to a westerner who knows the territory; our conversation turns even more interesting; it has the same caliber as a talk with anyone, retired or still in harness, who has jumped a few fences, crossed into plain English. Such conversations tend to rove, back and forth; remembrances of times past have a chance. Later in one of my frequent spells of thinking about cows I remembered a vivid scene, three kids running in willows and through a barbwire fence into the yard of the game warden's family where a huge milk cow took a few menacing steps toward us. We scrambled, climbed the fence in a clumsy rush. A wire caught Harold's arm, twisted it, broke it. He yowled. Harry and I ran to the edge of town, found someone to call the doctor. Meanwhile, the game warden's wife had shooed the cow back, un-hooked Harold, taken him to the hospital. It so happened that on that very afternoon her husband was in the county courthouse being tried on a charge of assault. He had shot a rancher who was reaching for a shotgun because the game warden had shot his dog because the dog was harassing elk. The game warden was aquitted: self defense. The rancher recovered. Where were we? Cows. Doesn't really matter, I'm working in the ecological truism that everything ... past, present, emerging future ... is interconnected. Stories can be entered at just about any place. Let's go in at the cow end, skipping for now the widespread talk about overgrazing, the damaged land, pedestals where drought-stricken clumps of grass hold dry clusters of soil; invasions by cheatgrass and other opportunists; places where only creosote bush survives, no tracks of kangaroo rats or pocket mice because they could no longer make a living there; cattle-trashed banks of mountain creeks. Extremes, but there is a lot of extremity out there. We're on a different trail, paying our respects to the glory days of the open range. Don't worry, we'll get back. First thing to notice: cowboy is one of those "double words," deriving from cow boy. I'm grateful to Penelope Reedy for reminding me of this. (1) That puts a different spin on it, don't you think? Time: Late 1800s, the War Between the States a very recent memory. Place: Huge herds gathered from chaparral jungles are driven north to Abilene and Dodge and the other railroad terminals. Most of the drivers are very young men, sons of cattlemen or working stiffs from other walks of life. Those boys endure tough, gritty work, saddling horses in rain or sleet or stifling heat, eating dust, fighting bone-deep weariness, crossing rivers. Sometimes a stampede takes lives. At the end of the trail the boys whoop it up. "First down to Rosie's, then to the card house." Some of them write about it, later. Pulp fiction finds a bonanza there, and then Hollywood takes over, launching a fantasy ediface of colorful confusion: cowmen, sheepmen, herders, cowhands, nesters and cowardly townspeople, bandits and gamblers, stage drivers and lawmen, Indians and cavalry and women in bonnets and women with hearts of gold, all of them marshalled in an infinite number of hokey plots. When technicolor came in, the colors of choice became bright blue sky and red-red rock. But something happened along the way. Hired hands with a certain unique panache as mounted masters of big animals, and often owners of the tools of their trade, went through a strange sea change, turned into lone gunslingers, ranchers, deputies, sheriffs, bellicose barflies, sardonic gamblers, hired guns ... the entire cast more or less divorced from wage work. In westerns the actual business of working cattle is typically a shot or two of Herefords swimming a river or hollered up into a cloud of dust and clamor. Of other useful labor we see only snippets, a typical scene showing a gunslinger or rancher splitting wood, or wasting good blue-sky weather hacking at a big stump in the front yard ... as in Shane. ...instead of being out in the field irrigating alfalfa. Meanwhile, back in real life on the early ranges cowboys sometimes formed unions and went on strike against the big ranchers of Texas, New Mexico and points north. This too has been by-passed by culture vultures and film makers. Here's a sample, a minor and unsuccessful labor action in Wyoming. (Notice that the story is a script, ready and waiting). Time: 1884 Place: Swan Cattle Company's Fall roundup, Crook's Gap, Wyoming. The herd is headed for Rock Creek, a U.P. shipping point. The cowboys pull a wildcat strike, demanding wages through December instead of the usual fall layoff. The Swan's owner is not present; he's probably in Cheyenne at the Cheyenne Club ... huge building, mansard roof, veranda ... maybe playing polo or cards or dining in high formality, sometimes white tie and white shirt front, coat with tails, the whole outfit known as a Hereford. In those days big stockmen, like future Wyoming governor Frances Warren, could fence tracts of public domain and get away with it. (Joe Glidden had conveniently invented barbed wire in 1874) Back at Crook's Gap, the Swan's manager rustles up two foremen and three scab cowboys to shift the herd to the 7 Quarter Circle ranch for the night. The strike is broken, though the foreman of the haying crew quits in solidarity. A lesson to be taken away from happenings like that is the clear distinction between rancher/owner and cowboy/wage worker. Both show the prime traits celebrated in our national annals: rugged individuality, independence. But these traits express themselves very differently; on one hand we have those subject to the demands of ownership; on the other, those subject to the exigencies of wage labor. I think the radical blurring of these differences is one of the more telling moves that elevated the cowboy myth so high above reality that just about any damn thing can be done with it, and is. Scene change. Bring the cowboy myth with us because it's taken on another dimension as a weapon aimed at modern ranchers of the arid west. Debra Donahue, legal scholar, summarizes the charges: "They [public land ranchers] act like they own the range when, in fact, their toehold on it is but a revocable privilege. They pride themselves on their self-reliance and rail against government meddling in their affairs, while availing themselves of every government benefit and fighting to maintain a grazing fee that fails to recoup even the government's administrative costs. They replace their own cowboys with new-fangled balers and four-wheelers and snowmobiles and yet appeal to public sentiment and nostalgia to help preserve their traditional way of life." (2) There is some truth there, as far as it goes, but ... let's lay out the accusations and put some flesh on their bones. A) "They act like they own the range." Yes. So do other citizens, any one of us who harkens to that old song, This is your land, this is our land. The thing that gripes varmentalists is that the rancher is using the land, extracting from it, whereas we simply enjoy it. Right? Wrong. Smug hypocrisy on our part, because recreation and communing with nature have gone big-time, spewing out machines and thrills for sale, and there are consequences. It's true that recreation damage to the arid west doesn't match livestock ravages ... yet. But what lies ahead, as that industry gets into high gear, fitting ever more neatly into the "amenities" culture, the market driven west?

B) "They rail against government interference while extracting from government all sorts of privileges." Much has been made of the fact that grazing leases are much lower than the value of leases in the "private sector." This is a subsidy, and we're supposed to recoil in horror at the word. Furthermore, the grazing fee isn't the only subsidy. There are reseeding projects, chaining of junipers, controlled burns, all at government expense. But in the day-by-day world we live in, subsidy is a major engine. Sugar moguls and cotton growers are subsidized by way of exceptions to "free trade," for the express purpose of keeping sugar and cotton growers in business at acceptable levels of profit. There are the federal bailouts of Chrysler, of Mexico, of Savings and Loan banks. There are tax breaks and loopholes for corporations, from the year one. And so on, and on. All right, if everybody's doing it, shouldn't arid land ranchers get the breaks too? There's a vital distinction to be made here. Ranchers are agriculturists, sharing in that old dilemma, meager prices for their product. These days a typical western rancher hopes for a profit margin that hovers around 2 per-cent, or less. Conglomerates like Archer, Daniels Midland and Armour and Cargill and ConAgra expect margins of upward of 20 per-cent, or even higher as they sweat and strain to grow bigger, ever more ruthless. Subsidy can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how it's applied. How about a decent health-care system? C) "They appeal to public sentiment and nostalgia to help them preserve their traditional way of life." Maybe I don't visit the right websites or read the right newspapers, but the appeals I hear most often from individual ranchers go like this: "We live on the land year round and try our best to be good custodians" Is this an appeal to sentiment and nostalgia? I see it mainly as a defense, a counter-attack, and also a reflection of true sentiment: being on the land, living there, knowing that the land is not paradise, knowing that it is your life. That's something chronically missing from our critique of ranch life: that it is a life. Arguments about cost-benefit and subsidy don't touch that. I was visiting a Nevada rancher, the phone rang. It was a BLM range con asking permission for his crew to cross the rancher's big spread to access certain streams that had to be poisoned to kill "trash" fish. I admired the ranchers calm and friendly yet just a hair condescending manner as he granted the permission. Lord of the Manor. In grazing districts the feds and the leaseholders know each other; they've been making deals for years. Compromise, blurring of certain lines, name of the game. Varmental lawyers rail at this, as they should. But there is, as always, another side to any human situation, in this case the fact that feds in the field learn about the land by way of their particular ways and under particular pressures and insights that haunt their lives. The land is their life too.

*** Cow bashing, condemning cows for bad behavior, has been a staple for many varmentalists in the west, the aim being to get the ranchers and their cows (what about sheep?) off the land. Inevitably, condemnation of cows all too easily demonizes ranchers, portraying them as smugly feeding at the public trough. It was, and is, a one-size-fits all characterization. A favorite tactic has been to go to the feds and urge the elimination of subsidies. Raise the cost of doing business, drive ranching into oblivion by legitimate means. By "legitimate" I mean that using money to do your talking and walking is to follow well-worn ruts that are so familiar we don't give them a passing thought. After all, the "welfare problem" was "solved" by cutting subsidies to single mothers and other deadbeats. Why not "solve" the cow problem the same way? A recent proposal favored by some varmentalists and some ranchers appears to reverse the older one: buy out public land grazing leases; throw money at the cattle industry instead of taking it away. Suppose that approach succeeds and federal money moves west. Here are some of the outcomes: Ranchers who take the money and try to increase the efficiency of their own acreage will put extra pressure on land and water. Some will lose that struggle and sell to another rancher, thereby following the trend of agriculture everywhere on this continent: bigger holdings, fewer people. Or they will sell to developers, thereby adding to the creep of ranchettes, trophy homes, condos. The losers willl trade in the pickup and the machinery, ship the animals, load the kids and the dog into a SUV and head for what's left of Florida. Or, if the kids are grown and flown, the old folks might invest in one of those fuel hog motor homes and rove the west, from one BLM and Forest Service campground to another, conjuring up ghosts. Are these great victories? Will the rangelands heal themselves, without experienced people living there (subsidized?) helping out? If I thought TINA (There Is No Alternative) I'd shut up and watch the show, feel sad and mumble in my beard, "People are no damn good." But there are alternatives. I'll mention one and then sign off. Get out of this dark, confining place of thought where "the market" rules everything, where commodities are the only counters, everything else branded romantic foolishness or idealism.. Hell, why not be so bold as to take another look at the cowboy myth. Maybe a crooked little trail leads from there to a touch of actual earth. It's a question of who's to be master. So far, we've been more or less going along with the management of people by those with moneyed power, as though it's all one big planetary game where rulers make the moves and counter moves.

Why is it that, so often, routinely even, bodies are left behind, dead and wounded? Time: 2004 Place: Earth

* (1) Penelope Reedy, editor/publisher of The Redneck Review of Literature ,now teaching at Idaho State University. (2) Debra L. Donahue, The Western Range Revisited, U. of Oklahoma, 1999. A meticulous and valuable source for the history and legal ground of federal land management.