Winter Comes to the Dawson Ranch : The Montana Cattleman of the ‘80s Is Both Master of His Land and Its Hostage

In the first cold glint of dawn, when frost clings to the high-country meadows and the autumn winds are sweet with the smell of newly cut hay, the ranch houses that reach through Montana’s Boulder Valley appear from the road to be not much more than silhouettes lost in the shadows of cottonwoods and rolling hills.

Then, as if on prearranged signal, bedroom lights flicker on one after another, and soon men in sharp-toed boots amble out onto their porches, coffee cups in hand, collars of sheepskin jackets pulled high. Their faces are turned toward the west, toward the snow-dusted Bull Mountains, and they know they must hurry to cut and stack the hay and drive the cattle to lower ground before nature seals both men and animals in a capsule of winter isolation.

These men who stand there now in the half-light of dawn, who roam the valley in pickup trucks and on horses, tending their cattle as mindfully as parents do their young, sleeping for weeks on end in sheds with newborn calves before the first thaw of spring, are the guardians of an American legend. They are the Montana rancher-cowboys of the 1980s--as likely as not college-educated these days but still tough as a chunk of overcooked beef--and they are both masters of and hostages to the homesteads their ancestors carved out of raw wilderness in Boulder Valley a century ago.

Jack Dawson, 46, sets down his coffee cup and tucks a pinch of chewing tobacco alongside his gum. “Don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t look out at this land every day; surely don’t,” he says. His Dodge pickup is loaded with barbed wire and fence poles and he climbs into it, moving slowly out onto the range, across a stream, past tightly wrapped, round bales of wild hay as tall as a man. His dog, who has scampered into the back of the vehicle, yelps unmercifully.

“Badger,” he yells, rolling down the window, “keep still!” The dog ignores him, and Dawson notes with a smile, “He minds about as well as my wife.”

Last season, Dawson says, was spooky. The hay ran out in the dead of winter, and he and his brother and father had to truck in feed at $82 a ton to save the herd. His banker told Dawson he had lost $10,000 on the year. His accountant figured Dawson’s taxes and said he owed the government $5,000 and, with beef prices down, Dawson wondered if he’d ever get comfortably ahead. But at least this year the summer rains had been generous across Montana, producing good crops of alfalfa and wild hay for winter feed, and there was hope that the farm crisis that is creeping west across the Great Plains could be held at bay a bit longer.

Dawson, a former professional rodeo rider and still the best bronc-buster and roper in Boulder Valley, slips the Dodge into four-wheel drive. In the meadow ahead, his 83-year-old father, George, is in the cabin of a stalled cutting tractor, and Jack’s brother, Dave, 40, is laboring over the machine, pulling clods of dirt and lumps of hay from its bladed mouth. Jack’s inclination is to bang the $30,000 machine with a hammer and cuss a bit, a technique he finds remarkably successful with equipment that costs megabucks but has never been as reliable as a good team of horses.

“I’m plugged up,” his father announces, glancing at the sky and fearing rain or, worse, snow. “Damned gopher mound. Can’t see ‘em too good out here, and now I’m plugged up.”

“Okeydoke,” Jack says.

George Dawson’s Quebec-born father, John, left Deadwood, South Dakota, after years of prospecting and moved to Boulder Valley in 1882, when Montana was still a territory and the valley, according to a door-to-door census by Assistant Marshal Harim Cook, had a population of “48 white males, 42 white females, no colored males, no colored females, no blind, no deaf, no idiots, no insane.”

John Dawson carried with him tales of his friend Wild Bill Hickok and a scar from a poisoned Indian arrow, which George remembers as “a homely-looking thing.”

Land was mighty cheap then--160 acres cost only a registration fee of $34 if you stayed on it five years--and John Dawson laid claim to a homestead, the same one that is now the 8,000-acre Dawson ranch. Here he met and married another settler’s daughter, Alice Porter from Virginia, and they had 13 children. The youngest was born when John was 79.

As the Dawson family grew, so did Boulder Valley. Irish Catholic settlers, many direct from Ireland, poured in, and whole deer would be consumed at weddings and wakes. A stagecoach line to Helena was started, and a post office was built not far from Dawson’s log home--Coldsprings, it was called, though Coldsprings today is not on any map. In the fir-covered mountains just up the road, the mining town of Elkhorn boomed to a population of 2,500, boasting its own rail line to Boulder, a grand fraternal lodge and nine saloons.

“They was evidently drinkin’ people,” George Dawson now notes.

Even though signs of failure are everywhere here--Elkhorn is a ghost town; Coldsprings has disappeared; abandoned homesteader cabins are scattered among the junipers and aspens--the valley is a peaceful place that exerts a powerful grip on the soul. With the love these ranchers have for the valley comes the belief that hard work on the land is still a noble endeavor and that honest labor is the first step toward a hopeful future.

Like the Dawsons, most of the ranchers along the 30-mile-long valley are descendants of the original settlers. Their fathers struggled to make the land good for the cattle, and their children will make it better. Almost no one leaves, because the ranchers, although they may be pressed to pay mortgages and equipment loans, are rich in a way city people might not understand. They do not lock their doors at night, they need only to ask a neighbor for help in time of need, their families stay close and, perhaps most important, all this, all this vast, underpopulated expanse that rolls to the mountains and beyond, is theirs , and in it there is room to breathe and move and feel free.

“Now, right here is where our place ends,” Jack Dawson says as his pickup bounces up the country road toward Elkhorn. “The Carey ranch starts at the property line. They’re real good people. They’d go out of their way to help you, and they sure wouldn’t let you pay them anything for it. Their daughter got married Saturday. Let me tell you, that was a party. Anybody left the ranch sober that day, it was their own fault.”

The leaden clouds that hang low over the mountains smell of snow, and the unmowed hay reaching out on both sides of the road ripples gently like the ocean on a calm day. Sitting alone in the meadow, as though misplaced, is a small, white Catholic church built with hand-hewn lumber by the first settlers 106 years ago. It is open for Mass only on special occasions now, but the ranchers donate their time and money to maintain it, and St. John’s looks cared-for and fresh enough to have been set there only yesterday. Dawson pulls off the road, unlatches the gate and walks around back to the cemetery.

Many of the homesteaders and their families are buried in this tidy little graveyard. The McCauleys. The Murphys. The Flahertys. John Dawson (1837-1922) rests next to his wife, Alice, who died when a gas lamp exploded in the ranch house where Jack Dawson now lives. Jack’s great-uncle is here, as are four of his uncles.

“And my mother’s over here,” Jack says, pausing in front of a headstone that bears the inscription, “Edna, 1977.”

The wind has picked up, and it swings out of the west with a cold sting. Dawson sticks his hands into the pockets of his denim jacket.

He says: “What we’d like to do is have the ranch here for the children, if they’d like it. That’s what Dad and my mother did for us. They never made you stay or leave. It was your choice. But if you stayed, you helped make decisions. You were never treated like a hired hand.

“I figured last year we could probably sell out and live pretty good. Figure our folks could have done the same thing, but I’m sure glad they didn’t. You couldn’t ever afford to get a start now, and you couldn’t ever find another place like this valley. Even though it’s getting scary how much money you need to stay in business these days, I’d like our kids to have the same choice Dave and I did.

“For a while, every paper you picked up, someone was figuring beef caused this and beef caused that. You wondered if people were going to plumb stop eating beef. There seemed a time some time back when I could see myself getting out of debt. Now I’m not so sure I can. It’s getting so the prices we’re getting just aren’t enough to meet expenses.”

The problems that he and other Western ranchers face are not dissimilar from those of Midwest farmers: Costs are going up and commodity prices are going down. The price of their land is inflated, making it difficult to either sell or buy more, and high interest rates and the need for expensive equipment--tractors, balers, cutters, irrigation systems--have sent indebtedness soaring. George Dawson is quick to point out that the first secondhand tractor he bought 30 years ago cost less than the lawn mower he just purchased from Sears.

Americans are eating less beef, cutting their per-capita consumption from 70 pounds in 1976 to 59 pounds in 1985. Montana ranchers, who receive no government commodity support, will earn about 58 cents a pound for heifers and 68 cents for steers this season. That’s a couple of cents more than last year, but a long way from the $1-a-pound bonanza they enjoyed twice--once during the Truman Administration and again under President Carter. The result is that ranches are getting smaller in number and larger in acreage; Montana, which had 58,000 farms and ranches in 1920, now has 24,000.

“No doubt about it, there is a lot of hurt out there in the country,” says Mons Teigen, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Assn., in describing the situation in the state. “It’s gotten so a 200-head outfit can’t provide a man with much of a standard of living anymore, and this impacts on everything. For instance, they tell me there’s not an implement (farm equipment) dealer left west of the Divide.”

Even in tough times, Teigen says, ranchers are under constant pressure to acquire more land in the belief that they have to run more cattle to be profitable. Montana stockmen are also spiritually obsessed with the acquisition of land; it is their legacy to their children and their only real yardstick of success and wealth. Land and the size of one’s herd are to the Montanan what a stock portfolio and a healthy checking account are to the city professional.

As one rancher put it, “I don’t want to own all of Montana--just what’s next to my property.”

There’s nothing fancy about the ranch houses in the Boulder Valley. Most are modest homes with a fireplace in the living room, a dining area that’s part of the kitchen, bedrooms for the kids in the basement and a backyard as big as a national park. The people here get their news from television and perhaps a local weekly paper and drive 40 or 50 miles every few months to one of the cities--Helena, Butte or Bozeman--to buy major supplies. Their workweek runs Monday through Sunday, dawn to sunset.

Since George Dawson was widowed nine years ago, he has taken his meals with his sons’ families--lunch at Dave and Ann Marie’s, supper at Jack and RaeCille’s. It is nearly dark this evening when he and Dave shut down the cutter and baler. Dave heads out into the hills to drain the irrigation pipes so they won’t freeze at night, and George drives across the meadows to Jack’s, where RaeCille, back from substitute teaching for the day, has put together a feast right off the ranch. The vegetables are from the garden; the roast is from a recently slaughtered cow; the butter, bread and pecan pie are homemade.

“Well, there’s George now,” RaeCille says as the front door opens. “How’d it go today with the haying? Jack says you plugged up. You want a short snort before dinner--Walker and 7-Up?”

“Yup, that’d be good, bourbon and 7, and don’t forget the bourbon. I didn’t go too good today. I plugged up a few times on those damn gopher holes. Wasn’t for them, I’d of finished up easy.”

With some encouragement, George Dawson gets to reminiscing about his eight decades on the land his father homesteaded and he himself has labored on to build a successful ranch with 500 head of good beef. He is proud that the Dawson cattle still carry the same brand--a JD pushed together to form a single character on each cow’s right rib--that his father first registered at a time when owning all this land was but a dream. He believes that hard work is the panacea for all ailments.

“I remember back in the winter of ’19 and ‘20, there was lots of snow and it was cold, too. At that time, by God, some of the homesteaders--they called them dry-land farmers--were losing their milk cows and homes. We bought some hay from one of the Dakotas, but the damn stuff wasn’t any good. Had cat-o’-nine-tails in it. That broke a lot of people. Some of ‘em never did come out of it.

“There were some pretty rich people in the valley in those days. I can remember talking about someone and saying, ‘By God, I bet he could get $10,000 together.’ Today, I do believe, it’s getting tougher to make money with all that expensive equipment you need. The first mower I bought cost $45 and you pulled it with a horse.

“You asked if this was ever the Wild West. Hell, no. This was just always honest ranchers here. Just damn good people. They got along and they were good neighbors, and they still are that way, I think. I never forced the boys to stay around, though. I just tried to point out the good parts of ranching to them. The best part is knowing you’re your own boss and there’s plenty of work to do. You can’t ever get bored.”

“We stuck around,” Jack says, “and that’s why he’s still working so damn hard to support us, isn’t that right, Dad?”

As RaeCille clears away the dessert plates, George pushes back his chair and announces that it’s time to get home; he has a full day of work to do tomorrow. His grandchildren--Matt, 5, and Trudy, 7, a fourth generation of Dawsons who one day probably will carry on the family ranching tradition--are in the next room, sitting by a roaring fire.

“You know,” RaeCille says, “I read in Reader’s Digest about how a lot of teenagers took over an area of China in 1977 and killed all the educated people or made them clean out pigpens. Then China went in and killed off the teen-agers, and I tell my kids, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are until you make comparisons.’ Most kids come home and turn on the VCR. Matt and Trudy come home and climb on their horses.

“Of course, they complain some. They say they’d like to have a VCR. But I think they understand what a good life we have here. We may not have a lot of money--there are lots of things I’d like to have that I can’t--but if you look at our life, at this ranch George built up, at our friends in the valley, then I’d have to say in that respect we are rich, very rich.

“That’s what being rich really means, doesn’t it?”