Horse

Horse life in the novel joins labor, landscape, and human movement. Horses carry the ranch’s workers through familiar routines and changing terrain, while their use in haying exposes the danger built into ranch work. They also appear in scenes of settlement and displacement, where old ponies and an old nag accompany people whose freedom to travel is sharply constrained.

Ranch Work and Equipment

Horses are part of the ranch’s practical system, not merely its scenery. In summer, Phil Burbank oversees the preparation for haying: he inspects the mowing machines and rakes, arranges the equipment and camps, and directs the diversion of creek water for irrigation. The machinery depends on half-broken horses, which must pull the mowing rigs while the cutter bars are raised for travel. Once lowered, the seven-foot bars make the machines dangerous to operate. The men driving them earn extra pay for handling the horses and for the added work of removing and sharpening the bars after the day’s cutting.

The scale of the operation makes the animals’ role tangible. The ranch has eight mowing machines, four John Deeres and four McCormack-Deerings, as well as six buck rakes and six sulky rakes. Phil also organizes the movement of tents and other camp equipment as the work proceeds. Horses connect this seasonal apparatus: they make it possible to move heavy equipment across the valley, but working with them and the machinery brings real occupational risk to the men who drive the mowers.

Riding, Hunting, and Ranch Culture

Riding is part of the partnership between Phil Burbank and George Burbank. Each fall, the brothers ride with packhorses toward the mountains to hunt, carrying a carbine or rifle. They make wagers over who will spot and shoot the first elk, and camp together below the timberline. In another sign of the ranch’s attention to its stock, they jointly decide when to sell steers and whether to buy a Morgan stud to improve their saddle stock.

The horses also distinguish Phil’s approach to work from that of the other cowhands. Ranch hands wear horsehide gloves for tasks such as roping, fencing, branding, and riding, protecting their hands from ordinary wear. Phil refuses that protection, treating blisters, cuts, and splinters as things to endure and scorning the gloves. The contrast connects horsemanship to a wider code of toughness: the horse is part of daily labor, while the human body is expected to withstand it without complaint.

As the riders approach Beech, automobiles move slowly through the herd, and young cowhands spur their saddle horses so that the animals shy and prance for the people in the cars. Phil regards the display as foolish but feels affection for the young men. He recognizes that the old cowboy world associated with Bronco Henry is changing, and that ranch life must accommodate automobiles and other signs of the times. The horses’ reactions make that change visible in the road itself, where older forms of travel meet the machines entering the valley.

Settlement and the Western Landscape

Horses give the surrounding landscape a life beyond the ranch’s work schedule. Near the settlement, thin wild horses graze on the hill behind The Inn / Red Mill. The wind continually troubles their manes and tails, while a graveyard lies at the hill’s base. Their presence belongs to a place defined by open ground, exposure, and sparse settlement rather than by the controlled routines of the ranch.

The novel also places a mounted bunkhouse elder within a landscape marked by abandoned hopes of settlement. He rides ahead of the other men, and the narration imagines the homestead, cattle, meadow, wife, and child that someone like him may once have wanted. The horse carries him through that landscape, but it does not erase the distance between a life imagined and the one he has lived.

Dispossession and Restricted Movement

Horses and ponies also accompany the valley’s Indigenous people as they are driven from their land. Johnny Gordon sees the last people leaving in broken buggies and on old, swaybacked ponies. Their departure connects the animals to a specific history of dispossession: the government no longer treats treaties as meaningful, and the people are sent to an Indian reservation in an arid region of southern Idaho.

Life on the Indian reservation is further constrained by rules against leaving without a permit, which is granted only for a pressing reason. The restrictions turn travel into a matter of permission rather than simple mobility. Horses remain present as means of transport, but their ability to carry people cannot overcome the political barriers controlling where those people may go.

When Edward Nappo and his son attempt to return to their ancestral land, they come to a gate Edward cannot remember. Phil tells them to leave, referring to the animal they have brought as an old nag. Later, Rose Burbank notices the Indigenous cart again during a storm. These brief appearances link horses and horse-drawn travel to the continuing effort to return, while the gate, Phil’s rejection, and the repeated sight of the cart underscore how access to the land remains contested.