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PrintRiding for the Brand
From working irons to heirlooms
Jim Maher, Teton County Brand Inspector of twenty-three years, says he inspects forty to fifty brands per year.
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At one time, nearly everybody who lived in Jackson Hole had a livestock brand. Cattle raising was the livelihood of the majority of families through the mid-1940s. Today, although most of the brands no longer mark the hide of cattle or horses, they remain important to the early settlers’ descendants. The brands serve as part of their family identity, and they often protect these practical relics of the past with passion.
Rancher Deon Taylor Robinson remembers that her grandparents, Jack and Mary Eynon, closely guarded their brand, the combined JE, which derived from Jack’s initials. “That branding iron was probably one of the first things they did when they were ranching,” Robinson says. “They built a branding iron and that was probably the basic pride of their whole operation. All her life my mother pointed her dad’s brand out on the napkins in the Wort Hotel. It was a big source of pride.”
The first homesteaders came into Jackson Hole in 1883. Settlers labored to grow crops—part of the “proving up” required before they could legally obtain the title to their homestead. Most had just a cow or two to provide milk and butter for the family, selling the excess. By the turn of the twentieth century, only five homesteaders had more than fifty cattle.
As people continued to bring their families and hopes to Jackson Hole, it wasn’t long before they realized the futility of trying to raise agricultural crops in this valley, with its short growing season and cold, snowy winters that stretch far into spring. On the other hand, the valley’s grass was lush and long. Homesteaders could raise hay and ninety-day oats to feed their animals in winter, so many turned to raising cattle.
In late spring, when the snow melted and the grass began to grow in the high country, cowboys and cowgirls drove their cattle by horseback to Forest Service grazing allotments at places like the Gros Ventre country beyond Kelly and Black Rock near Togwotee Pass. A rancher’s brand was the only way to identify his or her livestock when it came time for fall roundup.
Eventually, most of the cattle ranches in Jackson Hole gave way to tourism and recreation. Land was developed to support the influx of people from other places. Most of the cattle grazing on the valley’s renowned grass today are trucked in for summer only—though a few ranchers do have cow-calf operations, keeping their cows here the year around.
