1900

1900 is the year Phil Burbank recalls as the beginning of his and George Burbank’s cattle-driving partnership: they made their first round trip in that neatly numbered year. Remembered from their twenty-fifth year working together, it gives Phil a fixed point for measuring the bond between the brothers and the distance between their generation and the younger men on the ranch.

The First Round Trip

Phil takes pride in the coincidence that the first cattle-driving round trip fell in 1900, a year whose roundness seems to give the memory added weight. By the time he reflects on it, he and George have been together in the work for twenty-five years. The date is therefore more than a chronological marker: it gathers a long shared working life into a single, memorable beginning.

The recollection also places Phil’s own age in perspective. He thinks of Bronco Henry at the time of that first trip and recognizes that the older cowboy had not been much older then than Phil and George are now. The comparison brings the passage of time close, even as the remembered date remains vivid and orderly.

A Measure of Generational Change

From the vantage of the twenty-fifth year, 1900 helps Phil contrast the ranch’s earlier world with the habits of its younger hands. He doubts that the young men know whether they are cowhands or moving-picture people: they follow the fashions of movie culture, read its magazines, and admire W. S. Hart. Phil has never seen a moving picture and insists that he never will. His refusal makes the memory of 1900 part of a broader resistance to modern culture, not simply nostalgia for the first drive.

The contrast is sharpened by the continuing partnership’s practical division of labor. George keeps the books, handles buyers and correspondence, answers the telephone, and maintains his Reo; Phil oversees haying, machinery, irrigation, and the equipment used by the crews. The ranch therefore joins newer business and communication practices to work organized around land, livestock, and seasonal labor.

The Ranch Calendar Around the Memory

The work that continues beyond the remembered first trip follows an annual rhythm. Phil sets haying to begin as soon as possible after the Fourth of July, oversees water diverted from the creeks for irrigation, and checks the hay’s growth. He prepares mowing machines, rakes, derricks, tents, and the movable cookshack and dining shack before the crews begin their season.

Haying is both organized labor and a hazardous occupation. The mowing machines’ seven-foot cutter bars can cause severe accidents, and the men who drive them sharpen the bars after work. Their danger and skill bring extra pay, newer tents, first choice of meat, and deference from the other workers. These details make the twenty-five-year recollection legible as a history of continuing work: 1900 marks the beginning, while the seasonal routines show what the partnership has sustained.