The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West

By Linda Hussa and Madeleine Blake

As a stabilizing force in the American West, ranch families play a critical role in our country. They contribute to our nation with the food they raise, the resources they manage, and the environments and heritage they preserve. Award-winning author Linda Hussa offers readers an intimate view into the lives of six diverse ranching families. Photographer Madeleine Graham Blake provides engaging and often moving images that portray each family at work and at play. Chapters on the critical issues facing them, such as grazing rights, water use, and education, set these profiles in a larger context. This is family ranching as it is now, a tracing of how it always was, but made far more complex in modern times. The family ranch in the twenty-first century faces many challenges, from competition with government-subsidized agribusiness corporations to tax laws that encourage development over agriculture and prevent the smooth transfer of land from one generation to the next. By combining their traditions with the tools of modern technology, these people strengthen the ideal of family and give their business a vibrant and viable future. The text and photographs of The Family Ranch will inspire fresh thinking about tradition, values, and responsibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780874177817

Book preview

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Introduction

In the mid-1950s, a family we knew well took my parents and me to see the ranch they recently bought near Calistoga in Northern California. The purchase was initiated by their interest in the house, which I was told had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It seemed to rise out of the steep terraced hillside as bedrock might if it were squeezed enough. It was shaped like a settled v, and each room of the three levels embraced a view of gold baked hills and monstrous oaks that held deep green shade within. The Yellow Jacket Ranch was isolated far above the valley floor on the side of Horse Mountain. With range all the way to the top, it had undisputed water rights.

The manager took us on a tour of the ranch that included a look at the cattle, horse barn, a two-cow milking parlor, chicken house, garden and orchard inside a twelve-foot deer-proof fence, a root cellar, and finally, a small building set over the creek flowing through deep woods of oak, laurel, and madrone. As a fifteen-year-old, I stood in that small room hearing the eternal rush of water beneath my feet, looking at machinery I was told was a water-powered generator. The manager pushed his hat back on his head and, as if still amazed, said, This ranch is completely self-sufficient.

His words rested within me. Perhaps it was the look in his eyes of utter satisfaction. The animal in us is capable of recognizing things we must remember for our survival, and his respect for self-sufficiency settled into my being.

Urbanization in this country has encouraged a system where others keep us warm and fed. Because our houses have been built on top of the fertile soil and we are too busy to plant and harvest our own gardens, we expect our local grocer to offer a choice of the foods from the world marketplace: fresh—every—single—day. Although we ought to demand that our local government deliver to us potable water at our tap, we have been conditioned to buy bottled water. Because cities and suburbs have become unsafe places to our raise children, we drive expensive cars powered by costly fuel that pollutes our environment to commute hours each way to work just to get them out of undesirable neighborhoods. The irony is that by providing them safety, they are deprived of time with us. We have crafted other gods and lost title to the frontier. It’s a matter of