This Land Is Our Land

Tragic car wrecks. Wolves in the cattle. Robber barons in suits and ties, come to steal the land and turn it into gold. Family drama and political scheming.

I’ve been fascinated by Yellowstone ever since it premiered on my birthday back in 2018. What better birthday present for a Montana boy like me? I was born and raise in Bozeman, MT, near the fictional Yellowstone Ranch of Taylor Sheridan’s hit Western drama. There were fewer shootouts and bombings in the Bozeman of my youth, though I did see a police standoff on the side of the freeway one of the last times I visited my old hometown. The most I remember of crime in that city was the time, as a preschooler, I hid from my teachers among the coats and boots—a fun prank, a clever hiding spot, until they called my mother, crying, to tell her I was missing.

And I remember it getting very cold. So cold you couldn’t leave your house and cars wouldn’t start and they finally closed school for a couple days, something no amount of snow could achieve. So cold that the kind of coastal transplants that John Dutton (Kevin Costner) and his family are endlessly fighting off didn’t need much convincing. Who would live in a place like this, so remote and frigid? Climate change has been a major selling point for the gentrification of the Gallatin Valley and Montana writ large. Milder winters, warmer summers. More devastating forest fires.

When we moved, my parents sold our house for $53,000. Zillow estimates its value at $511,000 today. The average home price now is over $700,000—even more expensive than my current hometown of Flagstaff, AZ, where the average home is around $650,000 (and we have nicer weather). The influx of rich outsiders to these mountain havens has been part of my life since as long as I can remember. Growing up in Bozeman, the only state people made fun of more than California was North Dakota—North Dakotan jokes were our version of dumb blonde jokes back then. I have some good ones.

My grandfather built a log cabin in the Swan Valley when my dad was a kid and we still go up there as often as possible, and you can see how much that area has changed. One thing that hasn’t: A sense that outsiders are coming to take away something precious. Not tourists—Montana still needs its tourists—but second-homers, coastal elites, big money that comes in and drives up home prices higher and higher until the locals are squeezed to breaking. Last year we went up there and drank at a local bar filled with old-timers who did not seem happy to see us—until I told them I was Montana-born and we were staying at the cabin my grandpa built nearby.

It’s “the last best place” and Montanans would like to keep it that way. But places like Bozeman are simply too beautiful and pristine. A college town with an increasingly great food scene (Dave’s Sushi is absolutely incredible) and lively bars. The ski resort town of Big Sky is nearby. There are trails galore. I backpacked there years ago up to a field of wild flowers blanketed with fog. When the sun finally broke through, we found ourselves in a bowl of pure nature. Waterfalls, an alpine lake, not a soul around. I mention all of this because I understand why John Dutton is fighting to preserve his ranch, and why his promise to Montana voters has such resonance with them—and with me. “The last best place” is worth fighting for; it’s just not always clear how.

“I am the opposite of progress,” Dutton said, when announcing his campaign for governor in Season 4. “I am the wall that it bashes against.”

This might sound like conservative boilerplate, but I don’t think so. I think it sounds a lot like the Sierra Club.

Progress is not some unalloyed good. Progress is simply moving forward and making changes. In my review of Andor recently I discussed Jeremy Bentham, a Utilitarian thinker and progressive of his time, whose work on the Panopticon concept—of prisons and society—is fairly dystopian when you think about it now. But at the time, it represented progress toward a better, more moral and equitable society.

It can also mean the development of the natural world at any cost, without any thought toward the future—and at times in the two-part Season 5 premiere, Dutton may as well be Joni Mitchell: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot…they took all the trees put ‘em in a tree museum and they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.” Or “Hey farmer farmer put away that DDT now give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees, please!” That last bit conjures the younger Dutton’s reprisal against the construction company whose chemicals were poisoning his cattle. They destroy the construction equipment, take the foreman from his home and toss him in the grass covered with the same chemicals he was using in his project. He wakes up, his skin covered in chemical burns. That’s one way to show how destructive these chemicals are, I suppose.

When Dutton speaks to his constituents at his swearing in—there’s a time jump between seasons to after the election—he says:

“Well I’m not a politician. That was never my plan. My only plan was to preserve my family’s way of life and the land where they make it. The fact you’re sitting here, the fact that you voted for a man who does not want this job to lead this state, means we share the same goals . . . God isn’t making anymore land and he certainly isn’t filling any more rivers.”

He goes on to discuss his plans to raise taxes and fees on non-residents. The message, he says, is this:

“We are not your playground. We are not your haven from the pollution and traffic and mismanagement of your home states. This is our home. Perhaps if you choose to make Montana your home, you will start treating it like a home and not a vacation rental.”

Later, when speaking to the press about his defunding of the Market Equity airport project, he says:

Freedom. Been thinking a lot about that lately. The word. What it means. The dictionary thinks that it means the power to think, speak or act as one wants, without hindrance or restraint. As governor of this state, I’m sworn to protect that right. Building a city in the middle of the most pristine wilderness strips you of that freedom. It eliminates your freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water. It strains the ability of our schools, our hospitals, and our police. It requires an increase in our taxes whin in turn strains our families, forcing you to decide if you can even afford to live in a place you call home. That’s not progress in mind. It’s an invasion.

This is one reason I believe that Yellowstone is much more complicated than merely a ‘red state’ show, or right-wing or conservative. Yes, there are conservative themes at play, and it’s no wonder that a story about rural America filled with tough cowboys appeals to rural America, but Dutton is also a conservationist. He wants to stop progress not merely as some reactionary right-wing politician, but to preserve natural resources and beauty. And we soon learn, that it’s not even to protect his own wealth or even his own ownership of the ranch and the land.

In order to stop Market Equity, he tells potential political allies that after he revokes the lease, he’s placing the Yellowstone ranch in a conservation easement—much to the dismay of his daughter, Beth (Kelly Reilly) who points out that this will restrict their own ability to develop on the Dutton’s own land or sell off pieces to cover losses or pay taxes. “We could lose the whole thing,” she tells him.

“But it’ll be whole, honey,” he replies. “It’ll be whole. And that matters more than any name on a deed.”

This is, I think, an evolution of Dutton’s way of thinking that might have been partially influenced by his brief fling with environmentalist Summer Higgins (Piper Perabo) in Season 4. (As a side-note, I really liked his counter to her protests over animal cruelty, pointing out that large-scale agriculture also results in the death of countless living things). Whatever the case, Dutton is now solidly in the environmentalist camp, while also being a staunch opponent of ‘progress.’ And I can’t help but admire him for it. There is a major problem facing countless Americans across the country right now in terms of affordable housing. Normal working people are being priced out of rent and home-ownership by wealthy second-homers, big corporations and the rise of AirBnB and VRBO (not to mention inflation writ large).

Elsewhere in this two-part Season 5 premiere we have:

• Beth being generally so terrible to Jamie (Wes Bentley) that even though I find Jamie kind of a snake, I feel bad for him. He’s made a lot of bad choices, but he’s also been treated pretty badly by so many in his own family, it makes me sad. Perhaps more compassion earlier on would have made him a less dishonest man. And his advice isn’t always wrong or even self-serving. His father wanted him to become a lawyer to help protect the ranch, and these are the skills he’s learned. I’m curious what you think of the Beth / Jamie dynamic. I feel like he’s going to snap and kill her someday when she pushes him too far. We know he’s capable of it. I have pretty mixed feelings about both these characters, truth be told.
• Both Tate (Brecken Merrill) and Carter (Finn Little) have grown way up. Poor Tate has been through so much, and now he has to go through the car accident with his mom, the loss of his baby brother. I feel equally bad for Monica (Kelsey Asbille) who has also suffered far, far too much. I question, however, the wisdom of being alone and remote that pregnant. They said she was three weeks early but she looked close to bursting to me. Either way, that whole bit was tragic but also classic over-the-top Yellowstone melodrama. A part of me wishes they’d tone that stuff down a bit. Let her have her baby for goodness sake. (Maybe I’m also still a bit raw from the childbirth stuff in House Of The Dragon).
• I also don’t understand why Rip (Cole Hauser) is so hard on Carter. He’s really such a grumpy bastard sometimes. You got the girl, finally, Rip. Lighten up a little. Everyone else on the ranch—at least the cowboys—seems to be able to now that Lloyd (Forrie J. Smith) has chilled out and made his peace with Walker (Ryan Bingham).
• Speaking of Walker, I didn’t even know who Ryan Bingham was until last season when he played The Poet and I realized that this guy was, indeed, just a seriously talented musician and not just an actor playing a musician. I got pretty teary watching that scene, watching Lloyd’s reaction to the song which felt so raw and so real.
• Fun fact: Young Lloyd in the flashbacks is played by Smith’s son, Forrest Smith, which is why he looks so much like him. Pretty cool!

In any case, I’ve gone on long enough about these two episodes. Other than Kayce’s (Luke Grimes) horse thief scene and the car wreck, these weren’t the most action-packed episodes, but that’s okay. I think they’ve set the stage pretty well for a big showdown with Market Equity and company boss Caroline Warner (Jacki Weaver). There’s a sense of impending doom hanging above everyone throughout, and while plenty of terrible things have already happened to the Duttons and the people close to them, I’ve no doubt more is on the way.

What did you think of the Season 5 premiere? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

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