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Rick's connection to the place was earthy, sweat-stained, prideful. He took pride in the grass crops he grew on the land, pride in the cattle and sheep it sustained. The land gave him independence. He had the freedom to do what he wanted with it, to manage it how he saw fit, and that was more valuable to him than whatever he earned from it. Not everyone could find happiness in this life, one of punishing physical labor without much money or time off. But ranching suited Rick Jarrett. It wasn't a hard life if you'd never done anything else.

One July afternoon, Rick took me on a tour of his hayfields in his side-by-side—an open-sided, two-seat Yamaha Rhino built for rough terrain, like a Hummer crossed with a golf cart. Ten minutes earlier, over coffee at his kitchen table, Rick had seemed listless, his hazel-green eyes dull. I was asking him questions about the past and there were gaps in his memory. "I'm not exactly able to recall stuff," he said.

Now, at the wheel of his side-by-side, jolting across his domain at twenty miles per hour, Rick straightened and brightened like a cut plant dropped in a glass of water. We passed low fields of alfalfa sprouting tendrils of clustered purple flowers, and timothy hay whose nubby plumes nodded back and forth with the wind. The cows and their calves had moved to a summer grazing lease up on the Boulder River. Rick seemed infused with vitality by the sight of all the green things shooting up from his earth, their juicy vegetal fragrances mingling with the smell of warm dirt and sage crushed under the wheels of the Rhino.

"Holy shit, this is good!" he said as we drove through a pasture of orchard grass and smooth brome, so tall and lush that it completely concealed a startled deer, which leaped sideways and bounded away, vanishing again in the ocean of grass. "This'll be cut for hay, this is way too good to graze. Goddamn, holy shit. It's beautiful," he exulted. "Isn't it something? Isn't it goddamn something?"

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Rick was born in 1950 on land that his great-grandfather Ralph Jarrett, the son of homesteaders, bought in 1908. The ranch sits in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains on Duck Creek, which winds through its sandstone bluffs under a canopy of silvery-leaved cottonwoods and golden willows, fringed with chokecherry bushes heavy with purple-red berries that generations of Jarrett women boiled into syrups and jams. Duck Creek is both the spine of the ranch and its main artery, gushing with fresh snowmelt from the Crazies every spring. The Jarretts rely on the mountain snowpack for water to irrigate their hayfields and water their livestock. Their rights to that water date back to Big Timber's earliest days.

In Montana, owning land doesn't confer ownership of the water that flows through it, the rivers, creeks, and streams. Ranchers must own a deeded right to draw that water, and the amount they can draw is measured to the inch. Those with the oldest recorded water rights have priority—"first in time is first in right," or so the doctrine goes. The Jarretts' deeded water rights are older than many of the higher-elevation mountain ranches above theirs—the trophy ranches with the best views—because their land was homesteaded first, in the 1880s. The growing season is longer in the valleys, the land more productive, which once made it more valuable. They were practical in the old days, Rick said. Today, people valued the scenery more.

Rick grew up in a farmhouse with a Northern Pacific boxcar pushed up against one side of it that had been repurposed as living space for his grandparents. He was the youngest of four boys. A fifth brother, Donald, died in his crib in 1941 at the age of six months. An old photograph shows the four surviving Jarrett brothers in a row, tallest to smallest: Billy, Ron, Ray, and Rick, a grinning, tow-headed toddler. The boys are dressed in Western shirts with pearly snaps sewn by their mother, Betty, who has wetted down their hair and brushed it neatly to the side. Rick's father, Bob, whippet-thin, his face shadowed by a white hat with a high, narrow crown—a gentleman's hat, for special occasions—smiles down at his sons from the top of the line.

Bob Jarrett was a sheep man; he didn't give a s hit about cattle. He ran two thousand mother ewes on a ranch that sprawled across both sides of the Yellowstone River, some eight thousand acres in all. Rick's mother, Betty, was a Halverson, the granddaughter of the Norwegian sheep rancher who built the Grand Hotel. She was small enough to sit on a child's chair, with a short temper to match. They fought a lot, Rick's dad and mom. Ranch life could be hard on a woman.

From the time he was five years old, Rick went everywhere with Bob, one small hand tucked in his father's hip pocket. He tagged along when Bob irrigated the fields and tossed square bales to the sheep and drove the 1950 Studebaker truck high up Mendenhall Creek with provisions for the sheepherder, an old Norwegian who spent winters there in a humpbacked aluminum wagon with a sleeping bunk and a potbellied stove. The sheepherder would make them coffee on the stove, boiling the water with the grounds, maybe cut up some salt mutton. Rick sipped his coffee from a tin cup and felt like one of the men.