Branding Day in Nebraska

The morning sun has taken up a determined spot in the sky as I lean against the corral fence. From the toes of my boots to the vast rolling horizon, waves of green careen this way and that in the Sandhills winds. I close my eyes for a moment, and they want to stay closed, but the sound of faraway thunder snaps me awake. The distant roar looms louder, louder, begins to consume the air around me, and then I can hear it for what it is: bellows and hooves – an enormous herd, a torrent of cattle rolling over the Great Plains. American thunder.

Cresting a low westward hill, hundreds of cows and calves flow downward, packed so close to one another that their only place to go is forward, and with vigor. Soon this turbulent dark wave is crashing straight toward me. Then I see the devil that drives: the silhouettes of dozens of horse-mounted cowboys in cavalry formation. The far edge of the line swings around to the southern flank of the herd, keeping the cows pressured against the northern scarp. The advance guard of the herd now aims directly toward the opening of the U-shaped corral. As the driving line gets closer, I can make out individual cowboys – men, women, and children – in chaps and pearl-snaps and felt hats, moving with practiced intuition to narrow the gaps between one another and create a wall behind the herd, pressing, pressing, pressing until all of the cattle are captured in the bottom of the U.

The cows have been wrangled, and branding day has begun.

Here in the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills, forty people from eight cattle ranches have gathered at S. Ranch for this morning’s work. With the help of neighboring ranches, a cattle operation can do its spring branding in a single go, marking hundreds of calves. These ranchers have been holding this event every year for decades, spending much of May working at each other’s branding days.

All photographs courtesy of the author.

With the cows in the corral, several riders start roping calves, dragging their quarry between a pair of wrestlers who are on foot in the paddock. The wrestlers flip the calf on its side, pin it down, and free the lasso so the rider can go back and catch another. Pinning the calf is more about technique than strength, making sure to keep it from thrashing when the hot iron touches. While the calf is pinned, someone will come by and attach an ear tag, someone else will administer a vaccine, a third will do a quick castration, and then a lucky winner tackles the most revered job, the brand. In just a few seconds, the entire process is done. The wrestlers spin the calf around, facing away from its herd and toward the pasture, and let it go. On to the next.

Nobody at branding day wants to be useless. They set to work in earnest, and sometimes there are more hands trying to get a given job done than there are jobs to go around. Several times I pair up with another wrestler, but just as we step toward the roper’s next catch, a pair of old-timer cowboys cuts in front of us to take the calf. Nothing personal, stud. The roping corral fills with shouts of encouragement, a little cussing, and a few pearl-snaps of wisdom.

While calf wrestling is fun, riding and roping are the quintessential cowboy skills. Veneration transcends generations, and competitive parents, kids, grandparents, and hired hands all come to measure their salt by their success with a lasso.

As I watch them all, immersed in their shared work, purpose, and tradition, I realize there are things in life which seem banal until the world around changes enough that the normal is revealed to be extraordinary. That is cattle ranching to me. The idea had seemed romantic but unexceptional, until I saw firsthand the jubilee of branding day. Its work evokes a sense of communal effort that most people might only witness after a natural disaster, when unlikely neighbors come together in common cause to rescue and repair. To me, this day may be one of the richest traditions – at least as far as workdays go – that’s emerged from the American West.

There are alternative approaches to branding calves that don’t require this level of community effort. As with every industry, technological innovations can optimize processes on the cattle ranch. Extracting calves from cow herds and pinning them down to administer brands, medicines, and castration can be done with more efficient methods and tools that require neither horses nor many dozens of neighbors’ hands. After the seclusions of Covid, many ranches in this region decided to do away with their branding day events, and those that wanted to maintain the tradition had to seek one another out to continue practicing it.

In the late 1800s, homesteaders tried to grow crops in these Sandhills, with little success. Instead, the land has long proven its abundance for ranch cattle and horses, who eat the native grasses which grow from deep, intertwining roots. Those roots make the grasses resistant to drought and resilient enough to grow back when wildfires sweep through.

Getting rid of the branding day tradition would be like ripping those native grasses out of the ground from the roots up. You might plant new crops, but their roots will be shallow, with no reserve of connection to draw upon when things get tough. The problem is not new technology, but anything that strips connectivity and historical depth from relationships. Replacing a tradition with a technology that satisfies only the most obvious purpose – the branding – risks losing all of the other resilient traits that such an event provides. Some extraneous outcomes of this day are obvious, like the simple joy of communal connection and the trust built while working together. Other traits may be hidden, only revealed in times of singular stress, times that call upon all resources the ranches possess, seen and unseen, to survive. This point stands whenever we adopt new ways of doing things: never throw away more than you’ll gain.

Lunchtime arrives only when all the calves have been branded, sometimes when the sun is well past its peak. Still dusty from the morning, everyone joins in for an enormous meal prepared by S. Ranch’s matriarch. The brisket she serves, and a bottle of Coors Golden, accompanied by the jovial atmosphere of people sharing well-earned vittles, is as good a meal as I’ve had.

I attended this branding day as part of my graduate research into the topic of social-ecological resilience. I wanted to know how these ranches had lasted for so many decades, through multi-year droughts, catastrophic storms, the poverty of down markets, and the temptations of selling off. I asked each of them some variation of, “Why do you think your ranch has lasted so long?” There were two answers that nearly everyone – from teenagers to retirees – repeated, independently of one another. The first one was, “I love this way of life.”

Love of this way of life was palpable that day: a source of energy, resilience, strength, and will. Branding day celebrates that life. It brings ranchers together to sweat alongside one another, welcomes the kids home from school, gives them all a sense of purpose, a community of grace. It’s no dying ember of tradition; it’s the whole fire, preserving the light of its forebears, warming those around it, protective against encroaching shadows.

It’s a fire passed down through immersion. The kids were at home, as if they had ridden on horses to get here. In fact, some of them had. To be an eight-year-old kid on branding day is to do work that feels like play, and then follow it up with play that could be confused for tumbleweeds in high winds. In the process, they’re receiving an education in the full cycle of life, good times and hard times. It’s a school that teaches them tacit know-how, and the knowledge that they’ll be able to command a wage not too long from now. It imbues them with a work ethic that they’ll only realize is rare when they one day labor alongside peers outside of their valley, and gives them an exuberant love of life and an understanding that they are blessed with a lifestyle they can call their own.

These lessons are as enriching as the roots that bind the Sandhills soil, and from them grow the values that make up this way of life: loyalty to family, love of God, gratitude for the grace of a beautiful land, and willingness to work hard to live in it.

The second answer the ranchers gave to my question was, “You’ve just got to want to work hard.” As late afternoon doziness caught up with me, the ranchers got up to leave, casually commenting on their next call of duty. “I’m off to mend fences,” “We’ve got to go round up the mares,” “I’m headed to feed our weaning calves.”

Undoubtedly, the life I got to glimpse this day demands hard, willful work, as each rancher stewards the ecosystems, livestock, and traditions of the Nebraska Sandhills. There would be no hard work without the grace of this way of life. There wouldn’t be this way of life without that hard work. And without either, there’d be no branding day.