1924

1924 is the novel’s opening date, establishing the present in which Phil Burbank and George Burbank run their family ranch near Beech, Montana. It anchors a world governed both by the practical calendar of ranch work and by older histories that the narrative recalls without reducing them to a single year.

Opening Date and Setting

The story opens in 1924 at the Burbank Ranch in southwestern Montana, near Beech, a cattle-shipping town. Phil, forty, and George, thirty-eight, have taken over its operation from their parents, The Old Gentleman Burbank and The Old Lady Burbank. The elder couple, wealthy easterners who had maintained a relatively luxurious life on the ranch, now live in a suite at a Salt Lake City hotel after an unspecified falling-out with Phil. Their retirement leaves the brothers in charge of the valley’s most important ranch.

The brothers’ shared household carries its own sense of time: Phil and George still share a bedroom, as they have since childhood, through habit and tradition. The arrangement places an old intimacy beside their adult division of responsibility, and makes the opening year feel less like a clean break than another turn in a long-established family pattern.

Ranch Time and Seasonal Work

The calendar becomes tangible in the work of the ranch. George keeps the books, deals with buyers, writes letters, answers the telephone, and maintains the Reo; Phil oversees haying, inspects equipment, and directs irrigation and the growth of the crop. He arranges for water to be diverted from the main creeks in early summer and sets haying to begin as soon as possible after the Fourth of July. The season is not incidental background: its timing organizes labor across the ranch.

Preparation involves a substantial inventory of equipment. Phil checks eight mowing machines—four John Deeres and four McCormack-Deerings—as well as six buck rakes, six sulky rakes, two derricks, the cook shack and dining shack, and twelve large canvas tents. The shacks are small buildings dragged from camp to camp, while the tents are brought out and inspected for damage before the work begins. The detail of this annual preparation gives the year a material rhythm: machines, shelters, water, and crop growth must all be made ready in sequence.

Haying lasts ninety days. Its beginning follows the Fourth of July celebrations in Herndon, whose band, rodeo, fireworks, and other festivities provide the itinerant workers with a brief release before they return to the ranches. Some arrive after being detained overnight for disorderly conduct or vagrancy; others reach the ranch by stage, freight, or hitchhiking. The festive interval and the long labor season stand in sharp contrast, making the holiday a marker between public celebration and demanding work.

Labor, Skill, and Hierarchy

The work year also reveals differences among the men who sustain it. Most ranch hands wear gloves for roping, fencing, branding, pitching hay, riding, and handling horses or cattle, chiefly to protect their hands. Phil refuses them, tolerating cuts, blisters, and splinters and looking down on those who protect themselves. His bare, powerful hands become a visible expression of the toughness he values, but the contrast also shows that this ideal is personal rather than a general practice among the workers.

The other men order horsehide gloves from mail-order catalogues. In the bunkhouse, completing an order can be difficult for workers unfamiliar with written forms, measurements, and postal zones; some turn to a fellow hand who has reached high school and can also write letters to family. The detail connects ranch life to a wider network of commerce and communication, while showing how literacy gives one worker a practical role among his peers.

The mowing-machine operators occupy a distinct place in the seasonal workforce. Their machines are maneuverable but hazardous when the long cutter bars are lowered, and the men sharpen those bars after work. Their skill and exposure to danger bring extra pay and a degree of deference: their voices carry weight, their tents are newer, and they choose the best steaks first. The haying season therefore has its own hierarchy, shaped not only by ranch ownership but by specialized labor.

Historical Time Beyond 1924

The narrative’s temporal reach extends beyond the opening year to the removal of Indigenous people from the valley. It describes the government abandoning even the appearance of treaty obligations as white voters’ political influence and the value of land displaced the prospect of negotiation. Johnny Gordon sees people leaving in wagons and on worn horses from his Model T, and his thoughts turn to the reservation’s arid southern Idaho landscape. This recalled history supplies a longer, unequal chronology beneath the ranch’s annual routines: the land that sustains the present operation is also land from which its earlier inhabitants were driven.

Life on the reservation is presented as constrained by specific rules. Liquor is prohibited, and leaving requires a permit granted only for pressing reasons; with few places to go and few people willing to shelter them, permission is rarely sought. The novel does not assign this history to 1924 itself. Instead, its placement beside the ranch’s seasonal calendar makes clear that the apparent regularity of the present rests within a deeper history of dispossession and restricted movement.