What Yellowstone did to Montana

I have watched the whole thing twice, and the spin-offs. I liked it enough to say so without hedging, and I think it lost its own subject somewhere near the end, when the body count crowded out the farm.

But the part I keep coming back to is not the writing. It is that a drama about a family holding onto land measurably changed what land costs.

Somebody counted

The University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research and its Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research went and measured it for 2021.

2.1 million visitors. About one million of them said the show was the reason they came. Combined visitor and production spending of $730 million. State tax revenue of $44.5 million. More than 10,200 jobs. Household income of $376 million. Around $1.1 billion in business output.

Melissa Weddell, who directs the tourism institute, put it in a sentence: film is an economic driver of tourism, and the show has demonstrated the power of Montana’s American West image to influence people to visit.

Montana’s American West image. Not Montana. The image of it.

What that does to the ground

Tourism spending is one thing. Land is another, and the two are connected by people who came, looked, and decided to buy.

In neighbouring Wyoming, ground that went for around $35 an acre in the mid-1980s now goes for around $300. A real estate agent there, Bob Brockman, describes a large share of buyers as people who made their money in investments, businesses or stocks, and who treat a ranch as an investment or a retreat.

Those buyers are not outbid by a better cattle operation. They are not running one.

I want to be careful, because the tidy version of this post would draw a straight line from a television programme to a rancher’s son who cannot afford to start. Nobody in these sources draws that line, and I have not found anybody who has measured it. The visitor study measures visitors. The land article measures land.

What is fair to say is that both are happening, in the same region, in the same decade, and that the show is documented as having sold the image with unusual force.

The gap I actually wanted to write about

Here is the thing the numbers do not capture and the drama does not either.

The show’s ranch is threatened by developers, politicians and men with guns. The threat is external, personified, and can be fought. That is what makes it a story.

The threat the sources describe is that the land under a working ranch is worth more than the ranching on it, and that the people who can pay that price want it for the view. There is nobody to fight. The price is not a villain. It is a number that a lot of separate, ordinary decisions add up to, and one of those decisions is a person watching a show and thinking they would like some of that.

Including, if I am honest, me. I have never bought a ranch and never will. But I have spent a year reading about Wyoming at midnight because of a television programme, and there are two million people a year doing a more expensive version of the same thing.

Does it get anything right

The reporting I read says the ranching is not accurate and the pressure is. That seems right to me from the outside, for whatever an outside opinion is worth.

The family in the show is asset-rich and cash-poor, watching land values rise around them in a way that helps them only if they sell, and fighting people who want the ground for something other than cattle. Strip out the shootings and that is the situation the extension services and the land agents describe in flat, unexciting prose.

The show got the squeeze right and then made it exciting. The real version has the same squeeze and no third act.