"Yellowstone" and the preservation of the modern west

As a fan of Taylor Sheridan's films, I recently began watching his television series, "Yellowstone." Like all of his films, "Yellowstone" captures the entanglement of modern life in the frontier Western United States. This time, the narrative follows John Dutton, patriarch of a multi-generational cattle ranch near the national park. His single ranch is supposed to be the largest in the country, and he spends his days maneuvering to protect it from encroaching interests. In that regard, he has three sources of anxiety: his family, land developers, and a neighboring Native American nation. Despite his wealth and influence, Dutton is pessimistic about the future of his ranch without absolute control over his family and foes, alike. Still, he represents possibly the only figure who can resist the powerful forces of concentrated wealth in rural America: someone with the same means and ambition.

Unlike his adversaries, Dutton is an owner-operator of his land. He lives there with his employees and occasionally his adult children, too. Gil Birmingham plays one of his antagonists, Thomas Rainwater; a tribal chief of the neighboring Broken Rock Reservation, who owns a casino and wants to use his amassed wealth to reclaim the land from the Dutton family ranch. Danny Huston plays another, Dan Jenkins; a billionaire land developer from California who has Dutton's ranch in his crosshairs. Both Rainwater and Jenkins represent the past and future converging on Dutton in the present day.

For his part, Dutton is more of a real estate magnate than a rancher. His work mainly takes place in different offices, such as the Governor's or a private box at a cattle auction. He maintains control of the ranch with the help of his sons: a lawyer and a quasi-SWAT livestock agent. His daughter does her share by convincing her employer, a financial firm, to turn the land surrounding the ranch into trusts for the tax incentives. If not for the landscape and outfits, the Dutton family's story would translate well into an urban elite setting.

Despite being fictional and possibly out-of-touch with its rural setting, the main driver of the plot--land and its ownership--is not farfetched. For example, the Land Report recently published an article about Bill and Melinda Gates being the largest private farmland owners in the United States. At more than 240,000 acres, that amount of real estate defies notions that the founder of Microsoft is focused on a technology-based future. Likewise, a few years ago, NPR reported that the amount of farmland in the US owned by foreign investors doubled in the past two decades to thirty million acres. 

On a much more minute level, corporate ownership is attached to tools used on the land, too. As previously discussed in this blog, a farmer's "right to repair" their tractor has been a subject of debate in some states in recent years. At the national level, a unanimous Supreme Court in Bowman v. Monsanto found that farmers could not save seeds patented by Monsanto beyond their single season limited use license. Against this backdrop of modern macroeconomic decisions affecting the rules of rural living, Dutton is the hero for beating against the tide. He plays the same corporate game, but he is redeemed for not looking outward, like the "coastal elite" developer. He is equally uncompromising when it comes to the grievances of the bordering reservation. 

These aspects of Dutton were a given at the beginning of "Yellowstone." He was set up to be as formidable as possible, and so the show begs the question: how long can such a person last?