In February of his forty-fourth year, journalist David McCumber signed on as a hand on rancher Bill Galt's expansive Birch Creek spread in Montana. The Cowboy Way is an enthralling and intensely personal account of his year spent in open country—a book that expertly weaves together past and present into a vibrant and colorful tapestry of a vanishing way of life. At once a celebration of a breathtaking land both dangerous and nourishing, and a clear-eyed appreciation of the men—and women—who work it, David McCumber's remarkable story forever alters our long-held perceptions of the "Roy Rogers" cowboy with real-life experiences and hard economic truths.
In February of his forty-fourth year, journalist David McCumber signed on as a hand on rancher Bill Galt's expansive Birch Creek spread in Montana. The Cowboy Way is an enthralling and intensely personal account of his year spent in open country—a book that expertly weaves together past and present into a vibrant and colorful tapestry of a vanishing way of life. At once a celebration of a breathtaking land both dangerous and nourishing, and a clear-eyed appreciation of the men—and women—who work it, David McCumber's remarkable story forever alters our long-held perceptions of the "Roy Rogers" cowboy with real-life experiences and hard economic truths.
That first morning, the sun beat me to White Sulphur Springs by the barest of margins. As I approached from the south, first light spilled over the rim of the Castle Mountains and painted the stubbled hills above the town the color of a flared match.
It was barely north of zero and the wind was blowing. For the past hour and ten minutes I had been pushing my old GMC up Highway 89, through little towns still huddled under blankets: Clyde Park, Wilsall, Ringling. The surrounding country rested easy under its own blanket of snow, oblivious to the names bestowed by recent visitors: the Crazy Woman Mountains, the Bridgers, the Shields River, the South Fork of the Smith. Then White Sulphur, the Castles and daybreak, and ahead of me as I tumed west onto icy gravel, the main Smith River, the Big Belt Mountains and a job I had no idea how to do.
These days there are many. Montanas. I live in Livingston, a railroad town seventy-five miles south of White Sulphur. It is still at the stageof having a charmingly split personality, with cowboy bars and art galleries and coffee houses mingling in happy profusion. Other Montana towns like Bozeman have been yupped into another time zonesay, Pacific Daylight-but this place, White Sulphur Springs, Meagher County pronounced Marr, is still firmly old Montana, Mountain time, 6:45 A.m. at the moment. Big country, open, mountains on the horizon, sagebrush and bunchgrass under snow, and not a Range Rover or a Humvee anywhere.
That thought cheered me as I mashed the brakes to avoid a ribbon of whitetail deer streaming off an alfalfa field, over a fence and across the road. Ian Tyson, the magnificent Canadian cowboy singer, bounced along with me on the tape player: "Open up the gates, boys, let my ponies roll/I'm gonna travel on the gravel, gonna head 'er for the setting sun." Hell, Ian's still cowboying, I thought, and he's sixty. I can do this.
Right. Ian Tyson had been doing this most of his life, and I hadn't. I had come out a month before, met rancher Bill Galt, and he'd asked me what I knew about ranch work. I don't know shit, I'd replied, but he hired me anyway, maybe because at least I was honest. Honesty did not give me much comfort this morning.
The road kept climbing into the foothills, the rise approaching each hilltop a little greater than the drop on the other side. About five miles from town it crossed the Smith, and in another four the road swept to the right, but I kept going straight, through a ranch gate and toward a big, new-looking rectangular wooden building. I knew from my previous visit: this is Birch Creek Ranch and that building is the calving shed, where the heifers, young cows bred for the first time, are taken to have their calves.
I parked and got out. Something was wrong; the shed was deserted. "We get going at seven," Bill Galt had said. It was seven and there was nobody here, and suddenly I was suffused with the same panic I had thirty-eight years earlier on my first day of school, when I got on the wrong bus and ended up miles from where I was supposed to be. Bill had not told me where to report; I just assumed the shed would be the place to go. Lesson number one: You don't know something, don't assume. Ask.
I looked up at the hillside above the road I just drove and saw a large white vehicle with what looked like a huge yellow claw on the back, tilted toward the sky. A couple of people were standing on top of something on the bed of the truck. Perhaps they could use some help. I walked in that direction, and when I got over the rise I saw that they were standing on large bales of hay, the width of the truck, stacked two bales high. They were pulling on one of the bales together, their exertion...
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