William Kittredge, "Owning It All" (1987)

. . . A MYTHOLOGY can be understood as a story that contains a set of implicit instructions from a society to its members, telling them what is valuable and how to conduct themselves if they are to preserve the things they value.

The teaching mythology we grew up with in the American

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West is a pastoral story of agricultural ownership. The story begins with a vast innocent continent, natural and almost magically alive, capable of inspiring us to reverence and awe, and yet savage, a wilderness. A good rural people come from the East, and they take the land from its native inhabitants, and tame it for agricultural purposes, bringing civilization: a notion of how to live embodied in law. The story is as old as invading armies, and at heart it is a racist, sexist, imperialist mythology of conquest; a rationale for violence—against other people and against nature.

At the same time, that mythology is a lens through which we continue to see ourselves. Many of us like to imagine ourselves as honest yeomen who sweat and work in the woods or the mines or the fields for a living. And many of us are. We live in a real family, a work-centered society, and we like to see ourselves as people with the good luck and sense to live in a place where some vestige of the natural world still exists in working order. Many of us hold that natural world as sacred to some degree, just as it is in our myth. Lately, more and more of us are coming to understand our society in the American West as an exploited colony, threatened by greedy outsiders who want to take our sacred place away from us, or at least to strip and degrade it.

In short, we see ourselves as a society of mostly decent people who live with some connection to a holy wilderness, threatened by those who lust for power and property. We look for Shane to come riding out of the Tetons, and instead we see Exxon and the Sierra Club. One looks virtually as alien as the other.

And our mythology tells us we own the West, absolutely and morally—we own it because of our history. Our people brought law to this difficult place, they suffered and they shed blood and they survived, and they earned this land for us. Our efforts have surely earned us the right to absolute

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control over the thing we created. The myth tells us this place is ours, and will always be ours, to do with as we see fit.

That’s a most troubling and enduring message, because we want to believe it, and we do believe it, so many of us, despite its implicit ironies and wrongheadedness, despite the fact that we took the land from someone else. We try to ignore the genocidal history of violence against the Native Americans.

In the American West we are struggling to revise our dominant mythology, and to find a new story to inhabit. Laws control our lives, and they are designed to preserve a model of society based on values learned from mythology. Only after re-imagining our myths can we coherently remodel our laws, and hope to keep our society in a realistic relationship to what is actual.

In Warner Valley we thought we were living the right lives, creating a great precise perfection of fields, and we found the mythology had been telling us an enormous lie. The world had proven too complex, or the myth too simpleminded. And we were mortally angered.

The truth is, we never owned all the land and water. We don’t even own very much of them, privately. And we don’t own anything absolutely or forever. As our society grows more and more complex and interwoven, our entitlement becomes less and less absolute, more and more likely to be legally diminished. Our rights to property will never take precedence over the needs of society. Nor should they, we all must agree in our grudging hearts. Ownership of property has always been a privilege granted by society, and revokable.

* * *

DOWN BY THE slaughterhouse my grandfather used to keep a chicken-wire cage for trapping magpies. The cage was as high as a man’s head, and mounted on a sled so it could be

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towed off and cleaned. It worked on the same principle as a lobster trap. Those iridescent black-and-white birds could get in to feed on the intestines of butchered cows—we never butchered a fat heifer or steer for our own consumption, only aged dry cows culled from the breeding herd—but they couldn’t get out.

Trapped under the noontime sun, the magpies would flutter around in futile exploration for a while, and then would give in to a great sullen presentiment of their fate, just hopping around picking at leftovers and waiting.

My grandfather was Scots-English, and a very old man by then, but his blue eyes never turned watery and lost. He was one of those cowmen we don’t see so often anymore, heedless of most everything outside his playground, which was livestock and seasons and property, and, as the seasons turned, more livestock and more property, a game which could be called accumulation.

All the notes were paid off, and you would have thought my grandfather would have been secure, and released to ease back in wisdom.

But no such luck. It seemed he had to keep proving his ownership. This took various forms, like endless litigation, which I have heard described as the sport of kings, but the manifestation I recall most vividly was that of killing magpies.

In the summer the ranch hands would butcher in the after-supper cool of an evening a couple of times a week. About once a week, when a number of magpies had gathered in the trap, maybe 10 or 15, my grandfather would get out his lifetime 12-gauge shotgun and have someone drive him down to the slaugherhouse in his dusty, ancient gray Cadillac, so he could look over his catch and get down to the business at hand. Once there, the ritual was slow and dignified, and always inevitable as one shoe after another.

The old man would sit there a while in his Cadillac and

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gaze at the magpies with his merciless blue eyes, and the birds would stare back with their hard black eyes. The summer dust would settle around the Cadillac, and the silent confrontation would continue. It would last several minutes.

Then my grandfather would sigh, and swing open the door on his side of the Cadillac, and climb out, dragging his shotgun behind him, the pockets of his gray gabardine suit-coat like a frayed uniform bulging with shells. The stock of the shotgun had been broken sometime deep in the past, and it was wrapped with fine brass wire, which shone golden in the sunlight while the old man thumbed shells into the magazine. All this without saying a word.

In the ear of my mind I try to imagine the radio playing softly in the Cadillac, something like “Room Full of Roses” or “Candy Kisses,” but there was no radio. There was just the ongoing hum of insects and the clacking of the mechanism as the old man pumped a shell into the firing chamber.

He would lift the shotgun, and from no more than 12 feet, sighting down that barrel where the bluing was mostly worn off, through the chicken wire into the eyes of those trapped magpies, he would kill them one by one, taking his time, maybe so as to prove that this was no accident.

He would fire and there would be a minor explosion of blood and feathers, the huge booming of the shotgun echoing through the flattening light of early afternoon, off the sage-covered hills and down across the hay meadows and the sloughs lined with dagger-leafed willow, frightening great flights of blackbirds from the fence lines nearby, to rise in flocks and wheel and be gone.

“Bastards,” my grandfather would mutter, and then he would take his time about killing another, and finally he would be finished and turn without looking back, and climb into his side of the Cadillac, where the door still stood open. Whoever it was whose turn it was that day would drive him

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back up the willow-lined lane through the meadows to the ranch house beneath the Lombardy poplar, to the cool shaded living room with its faded linoleum where the old man would finish out his day playing pinochle with my grandmother and anyone else he could gather, sometimes taking a break to retune a favorite program on the Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio.

No one in our family, so far as I ever heard, knew any reason why the old man had come to hate magpies with such specific intensity in his old age. The blackbirds were endlessly worse, the way they would mass together in flocks of literally thousands, to strip and thrash in his oat and barley fields, and then feed all fall in the bins of grain stockpiled to fatten his cattle.

“Where is the difference?” I asked him once, about the magpies.

“Because they’re mine,” he said. I never did know exactly what he was talking about, the remnants of entrails left over from the butchering of culled stocker cows, or the magpies. But it became clear he was asserting his absolute lordship over both, and over me, too, so long as I was living on his property. For all his life and most of mine the notion of property as absolute seemed like law, even when it never was.

Most of us who grew up owning land in the West believed that any impairment of our right to absolute control of that property was a taking, forbidden by the so-called “taking clause” of the Constitution. We believed regulation of our property rights could never legally reduce the value of our property. After all, what was the point of ownership if it was not profitable? Any infringement on the control of private property was a communist perversion.

But all over the West, as in all of America, the old folkway of property as an absolute right is dying. Our mythology doesn’t work anymore.

We find ourselves weathering a rough winter of discontent,

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snared in the uncertainties of a transitional time and urgently yearning to inhabit a story that might bring sensible order to our lives—even as we know such a story can only evolve through an almost literally infinite series of recognitions of what, individually, we hold sacred. The liberties our people came seeking are more and more constrained, and here in the West, as everywhere, we hate it.

Simple as that. And we have to live with it. There is no more running away to territory. This is it, for most of us. We have no choice but to live in community. If we’re lucky we may discover a story that teaches us to abhor our old romance with conquest and possession.

My grandfather died in 1958, toppling out of his chair at the pinochle table, soon after I came back to Warner, but his vision dominated our lives until we sold the ranch in 1967. An ideal of absolute ownership that defines family as property is the perfect device for driving people away from one another. There was a rule in our family. “What’s good for the property is good for you.”

“Every time there was more money we bought land,” my grandmother proclaimed after learning my grandfather had been elected to the Cowboy Hall of Fame. I don’t know if she spoke with pride or bitterness, but I do know that, having learned to understand love as property, we were all absolutely divided at the end; relieved to escape amid a litany of divorce and settlements, our family broken in the getaway.

I cannot grieve for my grandfather. It is hard to imagine, these days, that any man could ever again think he owns the birds.

* * *

THANK THE LORD there were other old men involved in my upbringing. My grandfather on my mother’s side ran

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away from a Germanic farmstead in Wisconsin the year he was fourteen, around 1900, and made his way to Butte. “I was lucky,” he would say. “I was too young to go down in the mines, so they put me to sharpening steel.”

Seems to me such a boy must have been lucky to find work at all, wandering the teeming difficult streets of the most urban city in the American West. “Well, no,” he said. “They put you to work. It wasn’t like that. They were good to me in Butte. They taught me a trade. That’s all I did was work. But it didn’t hurt me any.”

After most of ten years on the hill—broke and on strike, still a very young man—he rode the rails south to the silver mines in what he called “Old Mexico,” and then worked his way back north through the mining country of Nevada in time for the glory days in Goldfield and Rhyolite and Tonopah. At least those are the stories he would tell. “This Las Vegas,” he would say. “When I was there you could have bought it all for a hundred and fifty dollars. Cost you ten cents for a drink of water.”

To my everlasting sadness, I never really quizzed on the facts. Now I look at old photographs of those mining camps, and wonder. It’s difficult for me to imagine the good gentle man I knew walking those tough dusty streets. He belonged, at least in those Butte days, to the International Brotherhood of Blacksmiths and Helpers. I still have his first dues card. He was initiated July, 11, 1904, and most of the months of 1904 and 1905 are stamped, DUES PAID.

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Excerpt from William Kittredge, “Owning It All,” in Owning It All: Essays (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1987), 62-69, copyright 1987 by William Kittridge. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. www.graywolfpress.org