The 1920s

The 1920s in The Power of the Dog are not simply a backdrop of old-fashioned ranch life: they are a period when established routines persist alongside new technology, while the effects of earlier land seizures continue to shape who can move freely and who controls the land. The novel opens in 1924 at the Burbank Ranch, where seasonal work and horse-based skill organize daily life, even as the surrounding world changes.

The Ranch in a Changing Decade

The Burbank Ranch, in southwestern Montana near the cattle-shipping town of Beech, has long been operated by the Burbank parents. By 1924, they have retired to a suite in a Salt Lake City hotel, and their sons, Phil Burbank and George Burbank, run the important valley ranch. Their arrangement preserves an older family order even as authority passes to the next generation: the brothers share a bedroom, as they have since childhood, through habit and tradition.

Modern equipment and older forms of transport coexist in the novel’s account of the decade. A motorcar can carry a witness across the landscape, and the ranch has a telephone, but horses remain central to work and travel; the railroad remains important to the region as well. The evidence of change does not mean that ranch life has become industrial or detached from the land. Instead, new conveniences sit within a working world still organized around cattle, horses, equipment, and the seasonal demands of hay.

Work, Skill, and Seasonal Time

The division of labor between the brothers makes the ranch’s economic structure visible. George manages accounts, communicates with buyers, writes letters, answers the telephone, and keeps the Reo running. Phil oversees the physical work: he inspects and repairs eight mowing machines, six buck rakes, six sulky rakes, two derricks, the cookshack, and the dining shack. He also arranges the inspection of twelve large canvas tents, directs water from the main creeks for early-summer irrigation, watches the hay grow, and sets the beginning of work for as soon as possible after U.S. Independence Day (July 4).

That schedule gives the year a sharp hinge. Before the long stretch of labor, ranch hands look back on the holiday’s celebrations in Herndon: the municipal band, a rodeo, fireworks, and the prospect of drink and company. Some workers are detained as vagrants during the holiday period and return to the ranch subdued; others arrive by stage, by hitchhiking, or on foot. Their movement between town and ranch reveals how seasonal labor depends on a mobile workforce whose freedom is limited by poverty and by local law.

The haying crews’ work demands both skill and endurance. The mowing machines are heavy but maneuverable behind partly trained horses, and their long cutting bars make them hazardous to operate. The men who drive them take on added work after the day’s mowing by removing and sharpening the bars. In return, they receive extra pay and a distinct standing among the workers: newer tents, attention when they speak, and first choice of the best meat. The arrangement links status to specialized labor rather than to ownership, while making clear that the ranch’s output rests on dangerous work performed by hired men.

Hands, Equipment, and Ranch Culture

The decade’s ranch culture is also expressed through small choices about protection and skill. Ranch hands generally wear horsehide gloves for roping, fencing, branding, haying, and riding, guarding their hands against ordinary work hazards. Phil refuses them. He treats protection as something to scorn and regards the workers’ gloves with contempt; his bare hands become a sign of the hard physical standard by which he measures himself and other men.

The purchase of those gloves shows a different kind of labor, conducted away from the fields. In the bunkhouse, workers struggle with mail-order forms from Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, puzzling over handwriting, shipping weights, and postal zones. Some give up and ask a more literate coworker to finish the forms or write letters to family members. The scene sets practical dependence beside physical competence: the hands that manage horses and ranch work may still need help with written transactions. Such details make the ranch community neither a simple relic nor a uniform group; its members possess different kinds of expertise and rely on one another in different ways.

Indigenous Dispossession and Restricted Movement

The decade’s settled ranch economy stands against the history of Forced relocation of the valley's Indigenous people. The novel recalls the last people removed from their lands traveling toward a reservation in worn vehicles and on old horses. Johnny Gordon witnesses their departure from his Model T, and his thoughts turn to the harsh conditions of the southern Idaho landscape where they are being sent. The contrast is between the value placed on land by white settlers and the lives uprooted when that land is taken; the account also makes clear that treaty obligations no longer protect Indigenous claims.

Life on the Indian reservation is described through restrictions on movement and access. Leaving requires a permit, granted only for pressing reasons; the limited prospect of finding a destination or shelter further constrains travel. The restrictions are presented as part of an order in which Indigenous people are treated as unwanted beyond the reservation boundary, not as travelers with an equal right to move through the region.

A later encounter brings that boundary-making into the present of the ranch. Phil confronts a father and child traveling with a cart and orders them to leave the property. The cart appears again in Rose’s attention during a storm, linking an earlier confrontation to a recurring presence on the road. These moments place the ranch’s private gate beside the broader system of reservation controls: the routes through the valley are not equally open to everyone, even as ranch hands and other travelers move between work, town, and the railroad.

Historical Significance

The 1920s setting is built from contrasts rather than a clean break between past and present. Electricity and motor transport coexist with horses and rail; managerial paperwork coexists with arduous seasonal labor; family authority persists after the older generation has left the ranch. At the same time, the ordinary routines of ranch life take place on land made available through Indigenous dispossession, while permits and property boundaries restrict the movement of those driven from it. The decade’s significance lies in this unevenness: modernity changes the tools and conveniences of ranch life without undoing its inherited hierarchies or the older violence beneath its apparent order.