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Branding Day

MORNING BROKE SLOWLY on Smith Mesa, as if in half time. The sky and land emerged subtly from black to grayish purple before the sun topped the sandstone cliffs and added the full riot of color. Across a brick-dirt prairie of thin grass, dotted by prickly pear in bloom, black cattle stood in small constellations and cast long shadows. A few had already squeezed into the shrinking bits of shade under clusters of piñon pine. More than a hundred three-month-old calves grazed next to their mothers.

Branding day was practically a family holiday for the Wrights. In the shade of the hollow, Bill emerged from a worn metal camper wearing a felt cowboy hat smudged with red dirt, a plaid shirt with snap buttons, a blue denim jacket, and Wrangler jeans cinched with an old silver rodeo buckle he’d won forty years before. As usual, his cowboy hat was pulled low on his forehead and his mouth settled into a slight downward curl. Bill didn’t give away his mood easily.

He walked past the tiny log cabin his parents had built decades before. The windows had been broken for years and the only occasional inhabitants were the mice that lived inside the walls. Bill was used to being alone at Smith Mesa, but now there were a dozen other trailers and pickups scattered around. Everyone else was still asleep. Empty chairs surrounded the gray ash of last night’s campfire. He walked uphill to the horses, in a pen next to a shallow metal water tank where the grandchildren sometimes swam on hot days. He put a blanket on his black mule’s back and lifted a worn saddle from a horse trailer. The saddle was heavy, but Bill was still strong enough to lift it without much trouble and wiggle it into place. As he had done a million times before, he strapped the front cinch and tied it off, then buckled the back cinch under the mule’s belly. He tugged on the saddle to make sure it was snug. His hands were tan, almost the color of the dirt.

Bill sighed and looked around, impatient for his boys. Daylight was not a thing to waste. Neither was a cool morning in late spring, when the high desert’s only promise was heat.

Down at camp, the boys stirred, careful not to wake their families, and quietly pulled on their boots. They wiped dryer sheets on their faces, because it was the best thing they’d found for fending off the swarms of gnats that came from nowhere on hot, breezeless days. Cody was the first to appear through the trees, and he came and stood alongside his father without a word. He was deep into his thirties now, the oldest of the seven brothers, twenty years older than the youngest. The brothers had similar builds—like a litter of puppies, Bill always said—not too tall, lean but strong.

One by one the others appeared, in boots and chaps and cowboy hats, and without much chatter, the boys finished saddling the horses. They climbed aboard with ease, swinging a leg up and over and sitting tall in the saddle like it was something they did every day, which it was. They moved into the pasture and into a loose formation around the small bunches of cattle. They shifted the livestock into bigger groups, a dozen or two at a time, by riding behind and beside them, maneuvering their quick-footed horses with a tug of the rein and a subtle squeeze of their spurs to cut down the escape angles of any cattle that leaned toward breaking away. Whoops and twirling lariats were secondary measures to keep order. Dogs dashed among the hooves, back and forth, marking an invisible boundary. Dust encircled each procession as it moved in slow clumps uphill toward the corral. Guttural dissents carried half a mile.

The corral the family built years ago sat at the corner of the pasture, at the right angle in the rutted dirt road that led to and past the Wright property. The faded sign warning drivers of a ninety-degree turn was riddled with rusted bullet holes. The sides of the corral were lined with concrete pilings, like logs driven vertically into the ground, five feet tall. Real logs of lodgepole pine were lashed horizontally across them, making the fence taller.

Cattle were funneled into a chute on one side. Their moans grew loud and mournful as the cows were separated from their calves. An argument ensued. Cows mooed. Calves bleated. Cowboys barked and whistled.

“Hey hey hey! Woo-woo!” the cowboys shouted. “Git up! Hey hey hey!”

Branding day had workers as well as watchers, and a crowd of watchers gathered. The children sat impatiently on a bulkhead where the road bent. Adults followed and set up lawn chairs behind them. Others sat on horseback, holding babies. A few dozen calves pressed together at the far end of the corral. They called out in high pitches to their mothers, who stood outside the fence, calling back in deeper tones. There was dust and noise and anticipation in the air.

Cody recruited an army of younger boys to gather wood, which he fed into two fires inside the corral. When they were hot enough, he placed a few branding irons into the orange and gray coals. He drove three stakes deep into hard dirt nearby. Each stake held one end of a long, black inner tube. At the other end of each tube was a metal harness that looked like a medieval torture contraption.

Near the fence, Bill kneeled and dug through a plastic bin of supplies—pistol-grip ear punchers, plastic ear tags, syringes, and medicines. He pushed his hat back to his hairline and squinted at the labels. One medicine was for a litany of diseases, from tetanus to black plague. The other was an upper-respiratory vaccine, which helped with breathing disorders worsened by dust. He pulled his phone from its leather holster on his leather belt and called someone. He read the labels into the phone while absent-mindedly unbuckling the spurs from his boots.

“Is that set on two?” he asked one of the boys, holding a syringe and a cell phone.

“That one’s on two,” his son said, “and that one’s on five.” Cody’s four school-aged sons—Rusty, Ryder, Stetson, and Statler, all miniature versions of Cody, like unnested cowboy dolls—loitered nearby on horseback, coiled ropes in their hands. Bill gave a nod.

The ropers lassoed calves by their back feet and dragged them on their sides, across the dirt to the other end of the corral, where a team waited at each stake. When a calf arrived, they scrambled in side-by-side fits of action, like pit crews at a racetrack. Everyone had a job. One person wrestled the calf ’s head into the metal harness as the cowboy on horseback kept its hind legs pulled taut with the rope. The calves, moaning and wild-eyed, were stretched long onto their sides. Once the animal was secured and still, the rest of the team converged. Two with syringes stuck the calves in the hip. One with an ear punch tagged the ear with a colored plastic marker that identified it as belonging to the Wrights.

Someone called out “steer!” when the calf was male. Another person pulled a white-hot branding iron from the nearest fire. With someone else resting a knee on the calf to hold it still, the brand was pressed hard against its back hip. The hide sizzled, smoked, and sometimes flamed. The air, already swirling with dust and noise, soon filled with the putrid scent of burning hair and flesh.

“It smells like money,” someone said.

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Wrights had run cattle on Smith Mesa for 150 years, long before there were any roads to get there. These days, it meant taking old Highway 9 toward Zion National Park and ditching most of the tourists in Virgin by turning left at the corner where Bill’s grandparents once lived. The twisty road followed North Creek for a few miles. At one bend, at the base of a bluff on the left side near a stand of cottonwoods, was a small corral made of gnarled logs. It marked the lower end of the Wrights’ range.

But to get on top of Smith Mesa, the narrow road climbed a ridge until it was a squiggly snake of pavement between steep drops. It used to be a series of switchbacks, and Bill’s dad once told him that a family lost its brakes on the way down one time and plunged over the edge, killing everyone in the car. Bill wasn’t sure about that, but it was a story he passed along. The road entered the national park, with no ranger gate and no fanfare but a small wooden sign. Then it split into a Y.

To the right, still paved, was the way that a small fraction of Zion’s millions of annual visitors ever went. It led to a claustrophobic backcountry of soaring sandstone spires with names credited to Mormon pioneers, like North and South Guardian Angel and Tabernacle Dome.

Cut to the left, where pavement turned to dirt, was Smith Mesa Road. It did not rise and disappear into the towering formations, but hung and teetered on the edge of the sandstone cliffs that formed the western boundary of the park. Most of the road was hardpan, sculpted into a chassis-chattering washboard in some places by summer thunderstorms. On a few steep corners, the wheels of trucks churned the road into loose, squirmy sand. It was a precarious ride, especially in weather and especially when pulling a rickety trailer of a dozen horses or a double-decker cattle pot full of a few tons of livestock. The road left the national park after a mile or so, the exit announced only by a cattle guard. That’s about where it disappeared from the glossy Zion map handed out at the visitor center. But the road went for miles more, curling through the wide, big-sky land that the Wrights had worked for generations.

And at one hard turn was the family’s larger corral, the center of the Wrights’ modest ranching operation at Smith Mesa. The family owned 1,200 acres, which sounded like a lot until you saw it in the context of faraway horizons. Bill leased about twenty thousand more acres of the surrounding landscape from the federal government to graze cattle during the winter months.

Bill’s cattle ventured into the park sometimes, through open spots in the barbed-wire fence, startling hikers and campers. Bill routinely got calls from park rangers asking him to come and get his cows. The Wrights and the park were friendly neighbors, even counting the time that Bill’s three-legged dog peed on a ranger’s leg as the men were talking.

Most of the grazing land at the foot of the thousand-foot cliffs was a shelf of open meadows among clusters of junipers. That was Smith Mesa. As a boy, Bill helped clear some of the trees for farming, a vocation that most folks always found hardly worth the trouble, since there wasn’t much water around.

The earth dropped away among the trees to the west, sometimes with little warning, tumbling over a series of crumbling stairstepped plateaus like giant choir risers. The last step fell away several hundred feet into a red-tinted chasm that the Wrights called, with typical understatement, “the wash.” It was a canyon, a deep and jagged gash in the forever landscape of southern Utah, seemingly carved by impatient gods with a dull knife. The slashes in the earth might have been their discarded mold for the towering and rugged formations of Zion.

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Generations ago, and miles to the north, the vast Great Salt Lake Valley was established as the new center for the Mormons, and in 1849, Bill’s great-great-grandparents were part of the Mormon migration. They had come from England, enticed by the ideals of religious freedom and open space, and made their way across the plains and the Continental Divide in wagons and on horseback on the Mormon Trail.

Joseph Wright’s young family was among the thousands to settle in the area. Joseph Wright farmed and raised livestock, and was close enough to Brigham Young that Young performed the ceremony when Wright took a second wife in 1857. By then, Young was starting to send families south to lower elevations and warmer climes to grow crops, especially cotton, for the burgeoning empire. In 1862, as the American Civil War was being fought back east, the Wrights were one of 220 families called to be part of the Cotton Mission.

They moved three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City to  a creased region of red formations and green valleys. The Mormons called it Dixie. Joseph Wright raised livestock along the Virgin River and helped establish several businesses, including a co-op store in Virgin City. He bought the Kolob Cattle Company from the church.

Now he lay beneath the hardpan dirt of Virgin’s Pioneer Memorial Cemetery, under a sandstone slab resting atop sandstone bricks, a few miles from where his family—four, five, six, and seven generations later—had gathered for the spring roundup and for branding day. “To the memory of Joseph Wright,” the headstone read, “who departed this life the 12th of June 1873 in the 56th year of his age.”

That was a few years younger than Bill was now.

Excerpted from The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West by John Branch. © 2018 by John Branch. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.