Montana gives The Power of the Dog both its physical scale and its social order. In the southwest of the state, near the cattle-shipping town of Beech, the Burbank Ranch stands within a world of cattle, horses, fences, and seasonal work. The open range remains within living memory, but the land’s apparent openness is sharply at odds with the boundaries imposed on Indigenous people who have been driven from their homelands.

Setting and Landscape

The novel’s Montana is described through Beaverhead County, a rough ranching region whose ethos remains close to the pioneer era. Its culture is organized around cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, guns, fences, and property. Ranch life is not simply pastoral: it depends on work, equipment, and the management of land. The Burbank Ranch, near Beech, is one of the valley’s most important operations.

The scale of the western landscape also informs how people understand their place in the world. The account associates western openness with the sight of the Rocky Mountains and an equally vast horizon, which can make distant places and neighboring communities seem remote. This sense of space is not merely scenery; it helps explain the independence and isolation attributed to westerners.

Montana’s ranch country is nevertheless changing. Electricity reaches a ranch house through a Delco generating plant, later replaced by a wind charger, and automobiles are present in the state during the 1920s. The Burbank brothers’ work reflects that mixture of older and newer arrangements: George handles the books, buyers, correspondence, telephone, and the Reo, while Phil oversees field operations and the machinery on which the ranch depends.

Indigenous Land and Restricted Movement

The history of Montana’s open range is inseparable from the removal of the valley’s Indigenous inhabitants. As the last people are forced from their land and sent to a reservation, the government abandons even the appearance of honoring treaties. The account connects that policy to white control of valuable land and to the political influence of white voters, while the displaced people leave in worn buggies and on old ponies.

Johnny Gordon witnesses their departure from the high seat of his Model-T. His thoughts turn to the reservation in southern Idaho, where he imagines the harsh conditions of winter, poor soil, sparse trees, and unpleasant well water. The passage thus links Montana’s settlement and ranching order to consequences borne beyond the state by people driven from their ancestral land.

Life on the reservation is further defined by rules that restrict both consumption and movement. Liquor is prohibited, and leaving the reservation requires a permit, granted only for a pressing reason. The explanation that Indigenous people have nowhere to go and no friends to shelter them exposes how formal permission operates within a deeper condition of dispossession and isolation.

The novel also places these restrictions beside encounters at ranch boundaries. At one gate, a visitor reaches a place Phil does not remember. During a storm, Rose notices that an Indigenous cart has appeared again; Phil responds to a visitor by ordering him and his child to leave. These moments bring the history of forced removal into the ranch’s immediate surroundings, where private property and inherited authority determine who is welcome.

Ranch Work and Seasonal Labor

The ranch’s annual rhythm is set by haying. Phil directs the work, inspects equipment, arranges irrigation from the main creeks, watches the hay’s growth, and chooses a start date as soon as possible after the Fourth of July. Preparation is extensive: he checks eight mowing machines, six buck rakes, six sulky rakes, two derricks, the cookshack and dining shack, and twelve large canvas tents for damage. The mobile shacks and tents follow the crews from camp to camp, making seasonal labor a temporary settlement within the larger ranch.

The mowing crews occupy a distinct place in this work hierarchy. Their two-wheeled machines are maneuverable behind unreliable horses, but their long cutter bars make the job dangerous. Accidents occur across the valley, and the workers’ skill and exposure to risk are recognized through extra pay, newer tents, first choice of meat, and a special deference to their opinions. After work, they remove and sharpen the cutter bars, maintaining the equipment that makes their labor both essential and hazardous.

The season’s start is also framed as a brief release before ninety days of work. The hands carry memories of the Fourth of July in Herndon: the municipal band, the rodeo, fireworks, bonfires, and the possibility of drink. Some return to the ranch after celebration subdued and contrite. The contrast between public holiday and long work season makes the ranch’s labor calendar feel both communal and demanding.

Masculine Customs and Everyday Life

Montana’s ranch culture prizes toughness in small, repeated practices. Most hands wear horsehide gloves to protect themselves while roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay, or riding. Phil refuses them, tolerating cuts, blisters, and splinters while scorning the protection others use. His dry, powerful hands become a visible expression of the ranch’s masculine ideal: endurance is treated as proof of character, while practical self-protection can be mocked as weakness.

The contrast also reveals differences in literacy and access to routine tasks. The hands order gloves from mail-order catalogues, but filling in the forms can be difficult. In the bunkhouse, men bent over their order blanks struggle with handwriting, shipping weights, and postal zones; someone with more schooling may finish the forms or write letters to their families. Ranch life depends not only on physical skill but on less visible forms of assistance and expertise.

Taken together, these details make Montana more than a backdrop. Its vast landscapes foster a sense of openness, while its ranches impose demanding labor and rigid expectations on those who live there. Most starkly, the apparent freedom of the open range coexists with the removal of Indigenous people and regulations that confine their movement. The state’s social world is therefore shaped by both expansive space and unequal control over who may occupy or cross it.