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Show THE ZEPH YR/JUNE-JULY 2004 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 ... es Subsidy can be a good thing ora 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 huge building, mansard roof, veranda ... maybe playing polo or cards or dining in high round and try our best to be good custodians" Is this an appeal to sentiment and nostalgia? 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, I see it mainly as a defense, a counter-attack, and also a reflection of true sentiment: being 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? The thing that gripes varnmentalists is that the rancher is using the land, extracting from it, whereas we simply enjoy it. Right? Wrong. Smug hypocrisy on our part... 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 dayby-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. Allright, 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 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. bb 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 th ely 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” | 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? IfI 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. 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