Montana in the novel is presented through a particular valley where the Burbank Ranch dominates the local economy and where the history of Indigenous removal remains active in the present. The landscape supports ranching and seasonal work, but it is also marked by the transfer of land into white ownership and by restrictions on Indigenous people’s movement. In this setting, the open country is not equally accessible to everyone.

The valley and the Burbank Ranch

Phil Burbank and George Burbank are brothers as well as business partners, and together they own the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. Their partnership divides the work between them: George manages the books, communicates with buyers, handles correspondence and telephone calls, and keeps the ranch’s Reo running. Phil directs the physical operations that make the business function. The ranch is thus more than a backdrop; it is a center of ownership, employment, and authority within the valley.

The scale of that authority becomes clearest during haying. Phil inspects and repairs eight mowing machines—four John Deeres and four McCormack-Deerings—as well as six buck rakes, six sulky rakes, two derricks, the cookshack, and the dining shack. He also checks twelve large canvas tents, oversees irrigation from the main creeks, watches the hay’s growth, and sets the start of work for as soon as possible after the Fourth of July. These details place the valley’s economy within a cycle of preparation and seasonal labor, with decisions about water, equipment, and timing concentrated in the ranch’s management.

Indigenous dispossession and restricted movement

The valley’s ranching order rests alongside an earlier dispossession. The novel describes the government driving Indigenous people from their lands and sending them to a reservation, abandoning even the appearance of treaty obligations as land became more valuable and white voters’ anger more politically consequential. The removal is not treated as a completed past: its consequences persist in the restrictions imposed on those who have been displaced.

On the reservation, liquor is prohibited, and leaving requires a permit. Permits are granted only for pressing reasons, while the people subject to the rule have few places to go and few people willing to shelter them. The contrast is stark: ranch owners and workers move through a broad valley for business and labor, while Indigenous people’s ability to travel is governed by official permission. The novel thereby connects private control of land with public regulation of movement without presenting those controls as equivalent; one sustains a powerful ranching enterprise, while the other confines people removed from their home ground.

Return to ancestral land and the ranch boundary

Johnny Gordon witnesses the removal from the high seat of his old Model-T motorcar. As he watches people leave in worn vehicles and on old ponies, his thoughts turn to the dry flats of southern Idaho, where winters bring severe cold, few trees grow, and shallow wells have unpleasant water. His recollection gives the removal a material consequence: displacement means not simply leaving a place, but being sent toward a harsh and unfamiliar environment.

The return attempted by Edward Nappo and his son brings that history into direct contact with the ranch. They reach a gate the father does not remember, a small but consequential sign that the land has become bounded and its routes altered. When Phil Burbank learns who they are, he tells the father to take his son and leave. The encounter makes the ranch boundary an active instrument of exclusion: the Nappos’ effort to return to ancestral land meets the authority of a private landholder, while the wider system of removal and restricted travel remains in force. Rose Gordon Burbank later notices the Indian cart again, a recurrence that keeps the attempted return present in the household’s view rather than allowing it to fade into a single encounter.

Seasonal labor and the valley’s social order

The ranch’s summer work also reveals how the valley’s economy organizes its workers. The haying season lasts ninety days, and the laborers’ brief celebration around Independence Day precedes a long stretch of work. Some arrive at the ranch after festivities in Herndon, by stage, by rides, or on foot from Beech. Their movement follows the demands of seasonal employment: the ranch gathers a mobile workforce, houses it in tents, and directs it across the hay fields.

The machine crews occupy a distinct position within that workforce. Eight men drive the mowing machines, whose seven-foot cutter bars make the equipment especially hazardous. Because the drivers handle difficult horses and sharpen the bars after work, they receive extra pay and a measure of deference: newer tents, a hearing for their opinions, and first choice of the meat and best steaks. The arrangement links status to specialized skill and risk, even as the work remains subject to the ranch’s schedule and management.

Hand protection offers another measure of the valley’s working culture. Ranch hands use horsehide gloves for tasks such as roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay, and riding, protecting themselves from rope burns, splinters, cuts, and blisters. Phil Burbank refuses gloves and scorns those who wear them, making his bare-handedness a personal expression of the toughness he values. The other men’s difficulty filling out catalogue order forms, and their reliance on a better-educated coworker to help with writing and numbers, also distinguishes the practical skills demanded by ranch labor from the literacy needed to navigate the commercial world on which that labor depends. Together, these details present Montana’s valley as a place shaped by concentrated landownership, seasonal work, and unequal freedom of movement.