Guns, Horses, a Tripod and Transit–When a Government Job Was Cool
- nancymclelland0
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
In 1938, Dad graduated from Utah State University with a degree in range management. The 1930s were a significant time for establishment of this field of study in other western universities like Texas A&M, Colorado A&M, and the University of Arizona.
I never asked what attracted him to that major. It seems an unlikely choice. After all, he was born and raised in Brigham City, Utah, a farming community known for its peaches, not its ranches. Also, the Harris family always lived in town in a red brick home with white trim three blocks north of Main Street and five blocks west of an LDS church.
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However, Grandpa Harris did have a peach orchard on the nearby fertile slopes of the Wasatch Range. My father did speak fondly of “going to the farm.” as a kid.
As it turned out, his education served him well in his first job with the University of Nevada Experiment Station as a researcher in range and ranch economics; in his eighteen-year career as a ranch manager in Nevada and Colorado; in his business, Nevada Ranch Service, where he was not only a successful ranch broker but also a respected range management consultant.
In 1938, he couldn’t have known any of that. What was his motivation? I will never know. Surely, a secure government job after the employment insecurity of the Depression was a factor. The hunch most fun to think about is that, at the time, some government jobs were cool.
I love looking for clues in this 5x7 album of black and white photos labeled "Range Survey Photos 1938.”
(pull pages from right to left)
That summer, Dad and six classmates comprised a survey crew camped in two locations, the Falls Creek Camp north of Winnemucca in Humboldt County and a site in Ruby Valley in Elko County. I’m assuming the field work was a range management degree requirement.
There are two pictures on the first page of the album. One photo is of three large canvas tents pitched in a sagebrush flat. It could be anywhere in the Great Basin.
In the other photo, seven young men strike poses in front of one of the tents. Dad is third from the left. Either he is taking a drag on a cigarette or pretending to. With his hat at a jaunty angle, thumb in the right pocket of his levis, and one foot cocked in front of the other, he seems to be playing it up for the camera. Do they think they are cool?
In a couple of the photos pretend to fist fight. A third watches. There’s one of Dad and two friends who really are smoking. There’s a classic photo of someone sitting on a hillside looking over an expanse of high desert. Two saddle horses stand nearby.
There is a photo labeled “My Graduation,” their Stetsons upside down for caps and blankets for gowns. That one is labeled “Bachelors of Science.” Their mock ceremony must have been a proxy for the formal graduation they were missing in Logan at the U.
When my sister and I look at the album, we agree that with a few changes they could be models for this year’s Filson catalog. All are in long-sleeved khaki shirts and canvas pants or levis. They wear tall field boots, probably Packers or Whites. Five of them wear hats, a classic Stetson model, Open Road. I notice the crown on Dad’s hat is pinched into a Montana fold, like the Stetsons worn by the Canadian Mounties and the Stetson Teddy Roosevelt wears in pictures of him at his Dakota ranch.
Their outfits remind me of the prestige of the lead surveyors of the U.S. Geological Service: John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Lt. George M. Wheeler and Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden. They had peaks, plateaus, and mountain ranges named after them. John Wesley Powell was buried at Arlington Cemetery with full military honors.
Under the aegis of the U.S. Forest Service, the park ranger was another government profession with cache. A ranger at Yellowstone National Park was a good example. Beyond Old Faithful were more than 3,000 miles of lakes, canyons, rivers and mountain ranges populated with black bears, cougars and wolverines, as well as buffalo herds and a variety of game animals.
In the early days, the ranger’s work was mostly carried out on horseback and with a loaded rifle in the scabbard attached to his saddle. In this rugged profession, the mindset and the garb of the frontiersman was more than de rigueur. Second Yellowstone Park superintendent Philetus W. Norris is a case in point.
By my father’s time, the 1940’s, this advertisement for the popular Yellowstone Park presents the park ranger as a movie hero, a gun in his holster and a damsel in distress.
I think the U.S. Forest Service park ranger owed his romantic status–and his hat–to his northern neighbors, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In this preview of the 1936 film, Rose Marie (filmed at Lake Tahoe, by the way), you can see western tropes run amok.
Rose Marie Trailer
In Dad’s day, there was respect not only for the federal institutions taking care of the land, but also for those defining its borders. For example, the historic Border Patrol. In 1924 when the U.S. Border Patrol was established as a federal agency, you were given a badge and a gun. You had to provide your own horse and saddle. 1924!
In 1924, the name of the agency was the Mounted Guard, similar to Canada’s Mounted Police. As late as 1934, at the first Border Patrol academy in El Paso, Texas, the classes were in marksmanship and horsemanship.
American novelist, writer, environmentalist and historian, Wallace Stegner, was a booster of the good old days when the federal institutions in the West were not an anathema.
In The American West as Living Space, written in 1987, Stenger notes the following:
“ One of the things Westerners should ponder but generally do not is their relation to and attitude toward the federal presence…The federal presence should be recognized as what it is: a reaction against our former profligacy and wastefulness, an effort at adaptation and stewardship in the interest of the environment and the future…the land-managing bureaus [italics mine] all have as at least part of their purpose the preservation of the West in a relatively natural, healthy, and sustainable condition.”
In 1941, Dad left his government job with a “land managing bureau” to become a ranch manager.
His five years at the University of Nevada Experiment Station was invaluable preparation for his career in ranching. Also, there was the timing. The war years were a period of cooperation–maybe unprecedented–between the federal agencies overseeing public lands and the western stockmen grazing livestock on them. The common cause was feeding the nation during wartime. The common problem was how to increase beef production and how not to depredate the rangeland.
You might think that the mutual management goals would remain. They didn’t. As federal government jobs dealing with public lands in the West became more deskbound and rulebound, they became less cool. The argument intensified over who was the better steward of the land: rancher or Bureau of Land Management.
The transition from cooperation to conflict may have been gradual but it increased in intensity. Three drastic and dramatic stories stand out: Claude Dallas; The Shovel Brigade; The Malheur Standoff.
Which leads me to the present. In 2025, it’s clear that a job with any federal agency is about as uncool as it gets, particularly in the West. The controversial efforts of the current Administration to shrink the size of the federal workforce has received mixed reviews and uncertain outcomes–to say the least.
As of February 2025, about 2,300 job losses across the Bureau of Land Management, including 1,000 positions at the National Park Service and 3,000 at the U.S. Forest Service. As of April 2025, the U.S. Border Patrol has experienced a significant reduction in its workforce, with over 4,000 agents leaving the agency since October 2020. (CHATgpt)
When my father died in 1987, it was after half a century’s commitment to finding the balance in beef production and rangeland management on public lands. In his later years, he was a valued expert witness in public land disputes, especially over grazing permits. Although he worked to find common ground, he often expressed his dismay over the BLM’s lack of understanding about, well, range management.
Even so, I think he would be saddened by the loss of stature of the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and by the impossible mission of the U.S. Border Patrol at the southern border.
Of course, he would be critical of the crisis of burgeoning bureaucracies. But he was close enough in time to the great eras of exploration and surveying in the West, to the pioneer’s westward movement, and the time when statehood meant joining the United States.
I think he would also understand that, when so many men are unhappy in their work– and the statistics back that up– why they search to the past to find authenticity. And why Filson’s gear has become a style statement among city dwellers.
Dad's Mackinaw Jacket 1953 Filson Mackinaw Wool Jac Shirt 2025 - $247.50
I see by your outfit…you likely are an internet content creator working remotely from your six-figure second home in Jackson Hole, Aspen, Bozeman, Telluride…
2025 Filson Tin Cloth Pants accessorized with a gun and a tattoo.
Yorumlar