Riding for the Brand: 150 Years of Cowden Ranching (review)

Riding for the Brand took me back to my youth on a farm and ranch in central Oklahoma. Michael Pettit has captured the spirit of the cowman's ethic and life on an isolated ranch. The reader gets the notion that one of Mr. Pettit's reasons for writing this book was to capture these qualities before the family-owned livestock operations were completely gone. Indeed, the sense of extinction courses through the work from Native peoples and their reliance on buffalo to Hispanic sheepherders, and through the independently owned cattle operations. While there are no predictions, this reader was left with the foreboding that this trademark of United States settlement could become another page in the history books.

Michael Pettit shares a grandfather with Sam Cowden, the owner of a family ranch near Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Thus, in part, this is a family history, but one that can shed light on the common experience of Texas cattlemen, e.g. Chisum, Goodnight, Loving, and Slaughter, who shared similar migration patterns. Chapters alternate between the recent past—pushing herds to holding pens, sorting cattle, and working steers with a thorough explanation of how these tasks are performed and the characters who routinely work through all extremes of weather to accomplish them—and the historical narrative of the Cowden family experience from their migration to Texas in 1853, their experiences in Palo Pinto during the tumultuous 1850s including the Reservation War, their move to the Sand Hills near present Monahans and the creation of the huge JAL ranch straddling southeastern New Mexico and adjacent Texas, and their final move to the Santa Rosa vicinity.

This is a story told from the Anglo rancher perspective, and sources reflect this perspective. For general background information the author relies on the respected traditional historians like Rupert Richardson, T. R. Ferenbach, J. Frank Dobie, and Walter P. Webb; and for early firsthand accounts of the regions the Cowdens occupied he utilizes explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca, Dodge, and Marcy. For historians, this reliance on earlier interpretations and the method of citation in which no endnote number is used (just a page number, which makes it difficult to locate the information being cited) is troublesome. The Hispanic origins of ranching are given full credit and women are treated as active participants, but Native Americans are typified as the ruthless enemy, but of course this would follow the perspective of Anglo frontiersmen.

A comparison of this work to famous fictional novels concerned with transitions in ranching like Giant or Horseman Pass By is hard to avoid. The conversion of range land to oil fields occurs after World War II, but this book falls short of describing the angst associated with such a tumultuous turn of events. Aside from a reference to the alcoholism of Guy Cowden, we are left wondering how hard it was to switch from frugal rancher to spendthrift oil tycoon.

Those interested in historical ranching, cowboy culture, and/or the cattle business will find this book a joy to read. Although most of this book is devoted to activities taking place in New Mexico, Texas readers will find enough of their history to value the author's work. Michael Pettit, a prize-winning poet, has captured a certain nostalgia about ranch life that will make it difficult to close this book when you finish reading it.