By Catharine Melin-Moser
One indelible image of the American West is that of cowboys dragging roped calves to a fire where a branding iron is seared against the hide. Branding, however, is not a product of western cattlemen ingenuity. The use of branding to identify ownership is 4,000 years old. Paintings in Egyptian tombs depict people branding fat spotted cattle. In Asia, the Chinese have branded their animals for more than 1,000 years. At the Battle of Crecy in 1346 in Europe, English soldiers rode horses that bore the Broad Arrowhead, the brand signifying ownership under the English monarchy. In 1520, the Spanish traveler Hernan Cortes introduced cattle to North America and branded them. The Cortes brand of Three Crosses symbolized the Holy Trinity of the Christian faith.
Nineteenth century cattlemen used this Spanish method to identify cattle that wandered for miles on unfenced land and to deter rustling. By 1860 and during roundups on the Texas prairie, an unbranded calf was called a “maverick” and assumed to belong to Samuel Maverick. The Texas lawyer acquired a ranch through land speculation, but he had little interest in ranching, including the cattle herd which he never bothered to brand.
In Montana, several thousand cattle and horses wore the Square and Compass brand of Philip H. Poindexter and William C. Orr. The P & O was one of the earliest and largest stockholding partnerships in Montana, with its brand the first register in Montana brand books on February 10, 1873. The Square and Compass reflected Poindexter and Orr’s lifelong membership in Freemasonry, whose coat of arms contains a carpenter’s square and surveyor’s compass.
A cattleman’s brand was his coat of arms. The mark not only disclosed ownership but also stood for his reputation as well as that of his ranch. It was not uncommon for cowboys to want to ride for a big famous outfit with name recognition. This gave the cowboy a sense of identity and prestige.
All cowboys had to master the three elements of the branding alphabet: numbers, single letters, and figures, such as a slash, circle, cross, square, or box. In brand vernacular, a letter could be crazy, lazy, swinging, rocking, running, tumbling, dragging, or flying. As told by nineteenth century cowboy Evans Coleman, “I knew cowhands who could neither read nor write, but who could name any brand, either letters or figures, on a cow. In time he could pick out any one of hundreds of markings in a milling herd.” Cowboys read the brand in the correct order: from left to right, top to bottom, outside in. According to Coleman, “A good cowboy could understand the Constitution of the United States were it written with a branding iron on the side of a cow.”
More recently, in the 1930s and 40s and as told by an old- time central Montana cowboy, “The neighboring ranchers would get together, and we’d go from one place to another and brand in the spring. These were small outfits, and we’d brand three or four places in one day. At whatever outfit we were at noon, the women served a meal.”
Brands passed down from one generation to the next are treasured family symbols of a ranching heritage. As is true of nearly every industry and livelihood, a thing called technology has modified ranching operations. Mobile gas stoves replaced the branding iron and holding chutes lessened the need for roping skills, though not all ranching families have abandoned the traditional method of branding. Every spring at those outfits, cowboys flank and rope a calf, drag it to the fire and in one quick motion, the cowboy sears the hide with a brand.