Backdrop Series 2: Violence and the Picturesque
I just published the following essay (read it online here):
The Fourth of July is our biggest holiday here in Livingston. The kids who have grown up and gone off to wider pastures all come home. There’s the parade and the rodeo and a ton of music and, as I pointed out in my last newsletter , lots of people boating on the river. As I was scrolling Instagram over that weekend, I came across a picture of one of “my girls” with a sweet looking brown horse that had a large brand on it’s jaw. I’d never seen a jaw brand before and, instinctively replied “Oh my god who would do that to a horse?” I got the dismissive response a kid gives when an older relative yelps at something they’ve posted online; she said her friends’ family said it was easier to brand in that spot, because they only had to burn it once.
Aside from the jaw brand, it was exactly the kind of picture that all the 20 somethings were posting that week — pictures of how “Western” they were, how “Western” Livingston and our parade and rodeo are, of how “Western” their vacations were.
One of the central things I want to explore in this series, is what the ways we treat things we consider “background” tell us about the ways we see the world, and so I wound up going down a rabbit hole of research on jaw branding. I grew up in the horse business, but in hunter/jumpers and racehorses. Show horses are never branded, and while racehorses used to carry identification tattoos on the inside of their lips, the industry has moved to microchips because they’re easier and more humane. While it appears that most reputable jaw brands are done by freezing, and with local anesthetic, the online horse forums make it pretty clear that there are still plenty of outfits stuffing young horses in cattle chutes, throwing a rope over their necks to keep them from flipping, and hot branding them on the face.
Imagine it. You’re a young horse, just learning about halters and bridles and bits and saddles, and the people you’re trusting with this process, come at your face with a flaming hot piece of metal and burn you. You can smell burning flesh and hair. You don’t have to be a person who read Black Beauty a million times as a girl to imagine it.
It’s the kind of thing someone does when they see you as property, when they want to establish dominance over you, when they want you to know they can, and will, hurt you.
The Ranching Way of Life
Branding in our part of the west is an absolutely ordinary part of ranch life, and it’s usually a social occasion. Ranchers will throw a weekend party, family members will all come back home, and the year’s calves will be branded, and castrated if they’re boys (this now happens with a rubber band method that is relatively painless). Cattle are hot branded, and like so many initiation ceremonies, one reason everyone comes back, one reason it’s a party, is to normalize the violence that is a crucial part of the “ranching way of life.” There’s a bonfire, in which actual branding irons are heated, then applied to calves immobilized either in a squeeze chute or by being tipped over and held on the ground. Kids will get teased for crying, or for hesitating to participate. You see the same socialization with 4H, when the kids have to sell off the animals they’ve been raising all year, and specifically, sell them off to slaughter. It’s really hard. There’s always kids in tears. Here’s a piece about a girl and her ewe that turned out to have a happy ending , but it’s an explicit part of the 4H educational mission, to initiate kids into responsibly raising animals going to slaughter.
I mean, I eat meat. I’m as implicated in animal husbandry as anyone else. I try to eat meat that’s local, that hasn’t come through the brutal industrial meat supply system. A system where constant pressure to speed up the lines leads to injured and maimed workers and animals. I grew up in Chicago, during the last days of the stockyards, among families whose fortunes came from inventing ways to turn live animals into commodity parts, and who often used coercive and union-busting means to get that done. Violence has always been a part of it.
Just as violence has always been a part of “the American way of life.”
But what struck me about the photo of the branded horse and my beloved girl is the way it felt to me like a snapshot of our particular time in this corner of the American West. On the surface, it was an unremarkable photo of a pretty girl, and a pretty horse, and one she posted to show she was In the West for the holiday, at her family’s summer home, and she was Doing Ranch Things.
Branding the American west
That the violence at the heart of the iconography and culture of the American West is invisible to most of the folks posting their pictures online, seems important. Pretty backdrop in social media posts has a specific social class cachet — look where I am, look at how beautiful it is, look at how beautiful I am. Pointing out the violence that isn’t even hiding in this case, but which lurks just below the surface in so many social media posts, mostly gets you a “Jeeze, would you lighten up?” or, my other least favorite reply, “it brings money to town.”
I kept trying to forget about the horse photo, but it haunted me. While the horse herself appears to be fine, that she bears this violent inscription of dominion on her face had me putting one hand to a cheek for days. In our current political climate, in which the right is so eager to dehumanize whole swathes of humanity, I think there’s something to be learned by looking at the ways even those of us who think of ourselves as right thinking treat other creatures.
In this case, one of the ways the brand functions is as an inscription of the picturesque. Branding is no longer necessary as an actual mode of identification. We’re not living in the 19th century anymore, and branding horses, especially in this way, is a class affect. It’s a way of highlighting the historic nature of your ranching operation by resorting to an anachronistic mode of marking a domestic animal as property, in part to produce pictures exactly like the one that originally set me off. It’s as much an affectation as are the hats and boots and spurs and silk scarves these guys wear when they come to town.
It’s also a means of explicitly marking (in the sense that animals mark territory) property and tying it to a specific piece of land, to a specific family. Most ranches out here are comprised of owned acreage in conjunction with equal or greater acreage leased from the government at deeply discounted prices, and so this brand, on this jaw, also ties this horse to a complicated history of private control of public lands. Ranchers think of these leases as a part of their property, and in recent decades have been fencing the public out more and more aggressively. Ranching is not some salt-of-the-earth means of raising cattle and “feeding the world” anymore, it’s a sport of the rich, and showing off a photo of yourself with a branded horse is also a way of showing off that you’re from one of the rich ranching families. Like many instances of the picturesque, it’s a class flex.
Chris Clayton, reporting in The Progressive Farmer , notes that for the 2022-2023 real estate season:
“It’s the brand, the Montana brand, and it comes with a premium. … Today’s average buyers are not your typical owner-operator. We are seeing buyers who are well capitalized from other means. … [He] contrasted buying a high-end townhouse in New York City versus a large ranch in Montana. “It’s irreplaceable. It’s an entire ecosystem. You essentially own a national park.”
The picturesque as a tool of enclosure
The picturesque was pretty much invented as a way to shore up the authority of the class system, by defining itself as a marker of the kind of “good taste” that wealth likes to both naturalize and enforce. The term came into use in the latter years of the 18th century, congruent with the rise of the “landscape garden” craze that swept across the English aristocracy. Landscape gardens replaced formal French and Italianate gardens with a curated landscape of rolling lawns, scattered clumps of trees, water features, and on occasion, a “hermitage” complete with hired hermit to complete the look.
Defined as a space between the awe and terror of the sublime, and the lesser qualities of the beautiful (belittled by philosophers like Edmund Burke as being “merely an instance of prettiness”), the picturesque was defined by William Gilpin, in his Essay on Prints (1786), as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.”
In the service of re-inventing their estates to serve the picturesque, English landlords turned to landscape architects like Capability Brown, who designed more than 170 manor estates during these years. He’d famously show up with a large book of watercolor paintings showing what the surrounding landscapes would look like, literally how picturesque they would be. However, it was not coincidental that this wholesale redesign of the English countryside happened as the enclosure acts were privatizing public outdoor spaces that villagers had used in common (“the commons”) for grazing and growing food for their own use, food they didn’t need to pay as tribute to the landlords. Capability Brown’s landscapes, which appeared to be “nature perfected” were also a view of the natural denuded of the people who had lived there, the people who had been removed. And they were often paid for by the fortunes obtained through colonial exploits in India, China, the West Indies, and the Americas. These peaceful landscapes, with their rolling hills and artful cows, that we think of as the model for pastoral beauty, are as much a cover for economic violence as any of our spectacular landscapes in the American west.
Private ranches as modern enclosure
While the photo that originally set me thinking about this was a portrait of violence done to a domestic animal, a sentient being with whom one has to build a relationship of trust in order to do the work you both need to do, it also represents these other forms of violence that are absolutely baked into the fabric of life in western states like Montana. That is, the historical violence with which the land was taken in the first place, and the century and a half of violence that’s been done to keep, and amass, and run, and sell these big ranches. This violence continues, as wealthy ranchers lock the rest of us out of the public lands that belong to us, whether by fighting corner crossing , or illegally closing public rights of way , or simply refusing access to landlocked public sections, requiring hunters to have the means to helicopter in, like the Wilkes Brothers, infamous Texas oilmen have done with the Durfee Hills section in the middle of the N-Bar ranch . This is enclosure. Just as the picturesque views of English manor houses of the 18th Century mask the eviction of commoners off the lands they’d used for centuries, so too these huge ranches are using private property laws to keep “common” hunters and recreationists out of the public lands we hold as citizens. And of course, also mask the violent removal of the Native Americans who lived here for centuries, and who were subjected to that earlier version of enclosure known as the reservation system.
There are a lot of gradations of class here in our corner of Montana — we have a a whole cohort of famous (and formerly-famous) neighbors. We have ranching families who like to pose as salt of the earth, who are proud of their pioneer ancestry, and who have, through rising land prices become very very wealthy. And then there are the new moguls like the Wilkes Brothers, buying up big ranches, and pretending to be born to it. Ryan Zinke famously posed with his hat on backwards (see also, his fishing reel ), and Tim Sheehy, currently running for Senate against the only actual farmer in that body, also has a well-documented history of carpetbagging.
There are no ranches in Montana that were not established by violent means. Which is not to say that ranchers are inherently violent, but the history of American capitalism is a history of “wealth creation” that came from seizing resources, including land, by violent means. This was not an empty landscape waiting for the glorious white men to “tame and civilize” it. And now, the rest of us who live here are being colonized in turn by the gentrification of what were working class cities. Tourists landing at the airport in Bozeman are driving into town through a gauntlet of displaced people living in campers along the frontage road. Where the large landowners of the 18th century used invisible barriers like the ha-ha (a sunken ditch invisible from the Big House terrace) or simple statutes and gamekeepers to enforce their vision of the Arcadian picturesque, the large landowners of today use aggressive no trespassing signage, satellite-connected backcountry webcams, and armed caretakers on ATVs to patrol property lines.
The natural and the wild
One of the things you learn when you study concepts like nature and wilderness is that very few things are “natural” in the sense of being ever-present, untouched by humans, or pure. Landscapes that appear natural at first glance, like Yellowstone National Park or the Wilderness Areas that surround it turn out to be highly manipulated topos, formed by acts of enclosure that fenced out the people who lived and worked there for centuries.
As Gary Snyder points out in Practice of the Wild :
“… we can say that New York City and Tokyo are ‘natural’ but not ‘wild.’ They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd. Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order.”
Their own sorts of order. Not order imposed from outside, but order that is self-willed, and self-disciplined. Gary was an old-school anarchist before he was a Buddhist, and he (rightly) sees wilderness as the kind of anarchic space that is the opposite of disordered.
And while the postmodern theorists of the past forty years sometimes get a bad rap, that they have taught us to take a second look at even the most picturesque images, to question what power is served by our admiration, to investigate what violences are papered over with “agreeable” images is not a bad thing. That we’re drowning in images thanks to social media makes this task more urgent than ever. We all like a pretty picture. We all want to think of the world as an agreeable place. It shouldn’t take something as obvious and jarring as a jaw brand on a horse to remind us of this, but sometimes, it’s the small things that make you stop, and take a second look at where you are, and what you’re doing there.