Haying Season

Haying Season is the roughly ninety-day summer cycle that turns the Burbank ranch from a managed landscape into an intensive work camp. Beginning as soon as possible after U.S. Independence Day (July 4), it sets the pace for equipment preparation, irrigation, the arrival of seasonal workers, and dangerous hours behind the mowing machines. Its annual rhythm also exposes the labor arrangements and social contrasts on which ranch life depends.

Calendar and Preparation

The season starts with a short interval of celebration. The ranch hands carry into the coming ninety days the memory of the Herndon Municipal Band, the rodeo, fireworks, bonfires, and the possibility of drink and other diversions. Some arrive at the ranch by stage, by rides, or on foot from Beech after the holiday; others have been arrested as vagrants during the festivities. Their arrival, pale and subdued after the celebration, marks the abrupt shift from public release to sustained labor.

That shift is organized by the calendar as much as by the machinery. Phil Burbank sets the start of haying for as soon as possible after July 4, which he regards as a holiday before the work begins. The phrase “one last fling” captures the season’s structure: a bounded respite, followed by a long stretch in which the men’s time and effort are committed to the ranch.

The Work of the Ranch

George Burbank and Phil Burbank divide the operation’s responsibilities. George keeps the books, deals with buyers, writes letters, answers the telephone, and maintains the Reo; Phil oversees haying, checks equipment, directs irrigation, inspects the growing hay, and determines when cutting will begin. Before the season, he has eight mowing machines—four John Deeres and four McCormack-Deerings—repaired, along with six buck rakes, six sulky rakes, and two derricks. He also arranges for the cookshack and dining shack, both portable buildings, to move with the camps, and has twelve canvas tents unrolled and checked for damage.

The work follows a practical sequence. Phil directs the diversion of water from the main creeks for early-summer irrigation, watches the hay’s growth, and coordinates the start of cutting. The mowing machines are two-wheeled rigs drawn by horses. Their seven-foot cutter bars make them useful but hazardous once lowered to the ground; serious accidents recur in the valley. The eight men who drive these machines also work with half-broken horses and, after the day’s labor, remove and sharpen the bars themselves. Haying is therefore not simply a busy season: it is a concentrated system of skilled, physically demanding work, organized through equipment, water, transport, shelter, and timing.

Labor, Risk, and Rank

The danger and specialized work of the mowing crews shape their standing among the ranch hands. They receive extra pay, newer tents, a hearing when they speak, and first choice of the meat, including the best steaks. These privileges distinguish them within a labor force whose lives otherwise follow the camp’s shared routines. The hierarchy is not abstract: it appears in who gets listened to, who has the newest shelter, and who reaches the serving platters first.

The wider ranch culture makes bodily protection a visible point of difference. Men wear horsehide gloves for roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay to cattle, and even riding, guarding against ordinary work injuries. Phil refuses them, tolerates cuts and blisters, and scorns the protection they provide. His ungloved hands become a small but telling expression of his preferred toughness, set against the practical habits of workers whose hands are essential to the season’s work.

The hands’ relationship to written work also reveals distinctions within the crew. When they try to order gloves from mail-order catalogues, they struggle with order forms, handwriting, shipping weights, and postal zones. Those with more schooling sometimes complete the task for the others, just as they write letters to relatives. The seasonal workforce is thus shown not only through its physical labor but through the unequal skills and dependencies that accompany it.

Summer Evenings and the Valley’s Longer Time

After work, haying has its own slower rhythm. The sun lingers above the mountains before disappearing, and the day’s activity gives way to quiet evenings around the creek and the tents. The men who operate the mowing machines return after supper to tend and sharpen their equipment. Their leisure remains bound to the next day’s labor: even in the evening, the dangerous tools require attention.

The seasonal cycle occupies only one scale of the novel’s time. The valley’s agricultural routines unfold against a longer history of Indigenous dispossession and restricted movement. Johnny Gordon witnesses the last Indigenous people being driven from their land toward an Indian reservation; government policy has ceased to honor treaties, while the reservation imposes restrictions on alcohol and requires permits for travel beyond its boundaries. The contrast is between the ranch’s recurring control of work, water, and land, and the disrupted ties to place experienced by those removed from the valley.

That history returns in the attempted journey of Edward Nappo and his son toward their ancestral land. They reach a gate Edward cannot remember, and Phil orders them to leave the ranch; later, Rose Gordon Burbank notices their cart again. These episodes do not make the Nappos’ journey part of the haying schedule, but they set the season’s dependable agricultural calendar beside a more unsettled history of land, memory, and access. The ranch can plan when to irrigate and cut; the displaced family’s return is constrained by boundaries they did not choose.