The cultural impact of cattle brands

Thousands of academics have gathered in Calgary this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from the linguistic minutiae of cattle brands to narrative inquiries into the erotic lives of the disa

There is a restaurant in Billings, Mont., known as the Dude Rancher Lodge, where guests can bring their own cattle brands and sear a black mark on a wall. A symbol of Western pride that hearkens back to the days of the open range, the cattle brand has left an indelible cultural mark on places like Montana.

“I was living in Lewiston, Mont., and when I first got there, I didn’t know the first thing about cattle brands,” said Carol Lombard, a researcher and PhD student with the University of the Free State in South Africa who is presenting a paper examining the cultural symbolism of U.S. cattle brands.

“I kept seeing these symbols. I’d see them on people, signposts; I’d even see them on personal chequebooks. They were all over.”

She soon got curious about the history of brands in her adopted home, where the state actually registers brands.

“I came to realize that, at least in central Montana, there’s more to the brands than just putting them on the animals. People spoke very fondly about their brands and there were all these stories attached to them.”

Cowboy culture emerged in the Northwest U.S. over the past two centuries. Cattle brands — created by metal rods bent to a particular shape, heated, and then pressed onto a cow’s hide — have long been used by ranchers to identify herds that wandered across a wild expanse of prairie trails that stretched between Texas, Montana and Washington.

The brands have their own kind of syntax: they are read left to right, top to bottom and outside to inside. They use a combination of letters, pictures and numbers that can be read aloud to form a simple name. They are also used in other states, and in Canada. But the brands appear to have become a dominant cultural force in Montana in particular.

Over time, the brands gained a life of their own. Ranches became known by their brand, and the symbols became inextricably linked to the land on which cattle were raised. Cowboy clans were named after their brands. Even towns like Two Dot, Mont., were named after famous brands.

Many brands also have an important family connection.

“The brands are so ingrained in the people, and the people are so ingrained in the land, that they’re all kind of inseparable,” said Audrey Clark, who has lived near Lewiston all her life and has long familial ties to the ranching industry.

“And the people are very, very proud of their brands.”

Much has changed in the cattle industry, and the brands themselves, over time. Early brands were simple and thus could easily be changed or obfuscated by cattle rustlers. Over time, they became more complicated and now often include a family’s initials.

There have also been changes to the way a brand is applied. Once the branding iron was heated over hot coals, now it’s warmed with propane. Companies also make electric branding irons.

And cattle ranching itself is no longer entirely a family-run affair.

“The brands become attached to the land. Even though a family may have owned a brand for a very long time, often when they sell the ranch, they will sell the brand with the ranch so the brand stays with the land,” Lombard said.

“It’s almost like there is a sentimental attachment … a sense that the brand belongs to the land.”

Following other agricultural trends, modern ranches tend to be large corporate entities, making traditional brands less significant.

But as brands have become less important to ranching, they have grown ever more important to cattle culture.

“It’s harder to hold on to small ranches now,” Clark said. “Ranchers used to be able to get along on 160 acres, and there was a homestead on every 160 acres and they were subsisting on that totally.”

Those days are long gone. Ranches nowadays are enormous. But the brands, and the attachment to them, remains.