Open Range (2003) and the Myth of Free Range Ranching.

Filmic representations of ranching and an open range still sometimes rest on bifurcations between ranching and farming methods, chiefly because they perpetuate a myth rather than an accurate representation of the American West. Open Range (2003) is a case in point. Years after research negated the ecology behind free range ranching, Open Range argues vehemently (and violently) for free range ranching and against enclosed farms and ranches and, especially, private property rights and barbed wire. 

Highlighting this flawed stance, the film’s heroes, Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) and Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall), battle a town whose citizens have been forced to support a large ranch owner who restricts any other cattle crossing his “privately owned” land. The rancher has bullied the town’s support for private ownership and fencing so strongly that the first business in view when Charley and Spearman arrive in town is a store that sells barbed wire and advertises the service on its front façade. The conflict seems clear and its result relentlessly unjust: Charley and Spearman suffer the loss of many of their trail crew. But they fight back and win, so their worldview in favor of the open range is valorized. 

The town’s chief property owner, Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon), and his men “don’t take to free grazers or free grazing.” But Boss Spearman counters with wisdom that seems to line up with the American ideal of freedom: “Are we moving on?” he asks. “We always do once we graze off a place.” And when Baxter’s men attempt to scatter his herd, he decides to fight back—“one man telling another where he can go; that’s another thing,” he proclaims. After Mose and his dog are killed, and Button (Diego Luna), another hand, is injured, Spearman and Charley seek revenge and seem to be fighting for a way of life as well, a way of life valorized by the film.

Spearman and Charley are associated with only positive qualities: friendship (between themselves and their crew), loving relationships with pets (their own dog and one they save from drowning in a storm), pragmatic gentility embodied by Sue Barlow (Annette Benning), and both courage and ingenuity in their battle with Baxter, the sheriff and his men (against incredible odds). Corporate ranchers like Baxter, however, are constructed as corrupt villains who kill for property rather than ideals.

Ultimately, Open Range comes out in favor of free-range grazing and all of the ideal qualities it represents in the film. Fenced ranching, in contrast, is associated with corrupt land-grabbing corporate ranchers like Baxter. The film, however, oversimplifies arguments for and against free range ranching and harks back to research from the 1920s-1950s that both valorized and contradicted the free-range ranch method. More importantly, it reinforces a mythology resting on American ideals of the Western frontier. The film’s argument in favor of free-range ranching rests on this mythology rather than on contemporary land-use research.