Category:

Q: Okay. And can you tell the Court why?

MR. JARRETT: It's tough to make a ranch, by itself, make ends meet.

Big Timber, Montana, population 1,650, is a railroad town. Like many small Western towns, it exists because someone put his thumb on a map and decided it would make a good spot for a train station. The Northern Pacific Railway Company laid track through the area in 1882, tracing the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition along the Yellowstone. A year later, a railway surveyor platted a site at a bend in the Yellowstone for a town to go with those train tracks, and named it for the tall cottonwood trees that Captain William Clark had noted in his journal.

Big Timber's rail yard forms the top line of the town grid: twelve principal streets crisscrossed by nine numbered avenues. Turn-of-the-century buildings of rough-edged sandstone and weathered brick line its tiny business district; modest mid-century bungalows and carports dot its cross streets. The town's central axis is McLeod Street, a broad thoroughfare that dead-ends in the train tracks and a spectacular view of the Crazies.

When Big Timber was the wool capital of the world, a river of sheep flowed down McLeod Street every September, trotting back from summer grazing leaseholds in the mountains past the saloon of the redbrick Grand Hotel. The Grand still anchors McLeod Street, one of the few old buildings to survive the great fire that incinerated a third of the town in 1908. It sits opposite Cole Drug, Little Timber Quilts & Candy, and the Timber Bar, whose neon lumberjack lights up, red-faced, when the sun goes down. Many of the old storefronts are empty now. It's been more than a decade since anyone played pool at the Madhatter Saloon. Big Timber doesn't get as many visitors as the larger city of Livingston to its west, or the rodeo town of Red Lodge to its south. Mostly, it's a place you pass through on your way to Bozeman or Billings.

But it's a picturesque old town, with a weekly summer rodeo, huckleberry milkshakes, and some of the best fly-fishing in the state. Every summer, the Grand's fourteen rooms fill up and the Sorry sign switches on, in loopy neon cursive, at the Lazy J Motel. All through the night, guests hear the whistle of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) freight trains hurtling past town. Each train stretches a mile or more, a conga line of hoppers, boxcars, tankers, and gondolas loaded with coal, crude oil, plastics, and fertilizers. The sound of the heavy cars juddering over the train tracks fills the quiet streets for a minute or more, when the wind doesn't drown it out.

The wind touches every aspect of life in Big Timber. It rattles plate-glass windows in their frames on McLeod Street, where tourists shop for T-shirts and tractor caps at Gusts department store and the old-timers gossip over coffee at Cole Drug. Golden eagles and red-tailed hawks use it to hunt, catching a gust as it bounces off a ridge and surfing it like a wave as they scope the prairie dog towns below. Townies joke about the wind, the way it will pluck the dollars from your hand and steal the lawn chairs from your yard. The uninitiated have been locked out of their vehicles when the wind slammed shut car doors left carelessly open.

But for cattle and sheep ranchers, the wind is an affliction. It sucks every drop of moisture from the soil, tosses thousand-pound bales of hay across pastures like tumbleweed, whips up brushfires into blazes that can consume thousands of acres in a night. Most people in Big Timber learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it.

Rick was a rancher. He never had the imagination to be anything else, he said. His people had ranched in Big Timber since 1882—cattle first, then sheep, then cattle and some sheep. Any Montanan who makes his living off livestock will tell you that what he really does is raise grass. Rick raised fields of alfalfa and orchard grass and timothy hay and forage winter wheat, to be cut and baled for the long winters. When spring came in April or May, he'd turn the calves and the mother cows out on fresh green grass. Everything came in cycles on a ranch, just as it had for Rick's grandparents and his great-grandparents.

Being a rancher meant knowing how to do things. How to brand a calf, dock a lamb, break a colt. Mending a barbed-wire fence, cleaning out a clogged irrigation ditch so the water could flow clear and cold to your hay fields, knowing when to cut the hay and how many days to let it cure in the sun before you baled it—those were essential skills, along with a basic grasp of cattle futures, soil science, and veterinary medicine. You preg-checked your cows by sticking your arm up the rectum and giving a squeeze. If a calf got stuck in a heifer's birth canal, you'd loop a chain over its fetlock and slowly tug it free. Then you'd get some suture thread from the floor of your truck and stitch up the torn mother cow.

Not every calf lived, not every heifer survived. You saw a lot of death on the ranch. So you adapted. You'd skin the dead calf, then tie its pelt to the orphan, fooling the bereaved bovine into suckling it like it was her own.

It took a lifetime to acquire such knowledge. Rick could kill a rattlesnake with a rock or a rein, drive a fence post, cook beef goulash. If it busted, he fixed it. Rick always had a bit of wire or baling twine on hand if a gate didn't hook right or his suspenders snapped under the strain. When his tractor sputtered or the muffler fell off his 1987 Cadillac Brougham, he'd scavenge a spare part from one of the many junked vehicles that dotted his land. To be a rancher was to be a master of the work-around—to make do with what you had and get on with it. This was called ranching it. The corollary to ranching it was that your ranch looked like shit, because you never threw anything away. Rick's ranch was an open-air museum of historic farm machinery in various stages of decay, with the serrated white and blue peaks of the Crazy Mountains for a backdrop. He called it the Crazy Mountain Cattle Company.