World War I

World War I is a historical turning point in the novel’s account of the early twentieth-century West, but it does not appear only on a distant battlefield. It reaches the Burbank business through cattle prices and enters Beech through wartime distraction, migration, and the deaths of men known at home. At the same time, the war changes the atmosphere in which the town remembers Johnny Gordon: as local knowledge fades, the circumstances of his death become uncertain. The novel’s wartime setting therefore joins economic calculation to a broader erosion of memory, while the daily structures of ranch work continue around it.

War, Cattle, and Business

In 1917, as cattle buyers approached, Phil Burbank urged George Burbank to hold back the herd. Phil read widely and closely, and he expected the United States to enter the war soon. He reasoned that wartime demand would raise the value of their cattle and make the ranch a substantial profit. George resisted his brother’s advice and sold. When the United States entered the war in April, the price opportunity Phil had anticipated became apparent: George had given up a possible additional five thousand dollars. Phil enjoyed hearing George acknowledge the poor result of his decision. The episode makes the war a concrete business forecast rather than merely a national backdrop, while also showing how the brothers’ partnership gives economic disagreement a personal edge.

Phil’s confidence depends on reading political developments as market signals. The cattle buyers’ approach creates immediate pressure to sell; his prediction asks George to tolerate that pressure in expectation of a larger return. George’s decision closes off that possibility before the April entry into the conflict confirms Phil’s expectation. The novel presents the outcome as a specific missed gain, not as evidence that every wartime change benefited the ranch. It reveals instead how national events could be anticipated and interpreted through local decisions about livestock and money.

A Town Distracted and Remade

In and around Beech, livelihoods were already precarious, and people who had known Johnny Gordon moved away in search of work. A barn converted into a roadside garage closed as automobiles became more reliable, leaving weeds around its gas pump. The chicken farm failed, and the seller of unusual rocks and petrified wood had never established a successful business. The town also acquired new bartenders. These changes form the local background against which the war arrives: Beech is not a settled community insulated from economic change, but a place where businesses close and familiar people disappear.

The war further unsettles local understanding by taking men from the town’s shared life. People find it difficult to reconcile the men they had known, loved, argued with, or deceived with the news that those men have died in France. The narration links their disbelief to the ordinary spectacle of the sun setting over the western mountains. The distance between the familiar town and the trenches makes death seem almost impossible to those left behind. War thus alters the community not only through absences, but through the difficulty of making those absences comprehensible.

The Inn, later painted red and renamed the Red Mill, also changes in the war’s shadow. Passing commercial travelers no longer necessarily know its old stigma: some arrive too late to hear about it, while the alternative is a dirty room above a store. War and bootlegging traffic from Canada help divert attention from the establishment’s earlier history. Wealthy visitors from Herndon drive down in expensive cars, stop at bootleggers’ places, and come to the Red Mill for chicken. The sequence connects wartime conditions to a changed local economy and clientele without making the war the sole cause of Beech’s transformation.

Johnny Gordon’s Death in Local Memory

As the war and its surrounding changes occupy the town, the old suicide at the Red Mill recedes into what the narration describes as a realm of myth and wonder. Accounts conflict: some people say Johnny Gordon shot himself, others say he took a poison available to doctors, and still others claim he simply disappeared, leaving his wife and child. These versions are presented as community stories, not as settled explanations. Their disagreement shows how a remembered event can lose its reliable details as witnesses move away and public attention shifts.

The stories also reshape the image of the person left behind. In one version, Johnny abandoned his family; in the town’s retrospective account, his wife is praised for staying and turning the place into a kind of roadhouse. The contrast does not resolve what happened. Instead, it shows how recollection reorganizes a private loss into a public tale, with the woman’s endurance becoming part of the Red Mill’s reputation. The war does not cause Johnny’s death in the evidence presented, but it helps create the conditions in which the story of his death becomes harder to distinguish from rumor.

Historical Time Beyond the War

The novel places wartime change within a longer history of dispossession. Johnny Gordon had seen the last Indigenous people in the valley driven from their land and sent to a reservation. The account describes a government that no longer maintained even the pretense of honoring treaties, with land value and white voters shaping the terms of policy. The people leaving in worn vehicles and on old horses are associated in Johnny’s thoughts with a difficult landscape in southern Idaho. This removal is not identified as a consequence of World War I; rather, it establishes a deeper history of coercive change alongside the war’s more immediate disruptions.

Life on the reservation is described through restrictions on movement and alcohol. Residents may not leave without permits, which are granted only for pressing reasons; because they have few places to go and few people willing to shelter them, the restriction is rarely challenged. The account also states that liquor is neither sold nor consumed there, presenting that prohibition as an imposed rule. These details make clear that the novel’s historical setting includes forms of governance and confinement that do not begin with the war and are not displaced by it.

The ranch’s routines offer another measure of continuity. Phil oversees haying, equipment repair, irrigation, and the preparations for a season beginning as soon as possible after Independence Day. He inspects mowing machines, rakes, derricks, tents, and the movable cook and dining shacks. The seasonal work depends on hired men, dangerous machinery, and a division between management and labor. Elsewhere, cowboys protect their hands with catalog-ordered horsehide gloves for tasks such as roping, fencing, branding, and pitching hay, while Phil scorns gloves and works without them. These details are not assigned specifically to wartime months, but they show the working world whose routines continue amid the broader historical shifts.

Significance

World War I marks a period when distant political events become legible in local terms: a five-thousand-dollar difference in cattle sales, men who do not return from France, businesses and residents disappearing from Beech, and a once-known death dissolving into competing accounts. The war’s effects are therefore material and narrative at once. It changes expectations about profit and draws attention away from an older scandal, while the people who remain struggle to preserve a trustworthy account of the past. Set beside the ranch’s recurring labor and the longer record of Indigenous dispossession, the war appears as a powerful historical disruption within a West already shaped by economic insecurity, mobility, and unequal control of land.