“A Huge Mass in a Single Hand”: Yellowstone and the Selling of Montana

This chapter argues that the television series Yellowstone rewrites the history of white settlement and white relations with Native nations in Montana, revising a cultural idea of the “Frontier” that promotes a notion of “rugged individualism,” a ranching-style monopoly capitalism, and an ethically empty “environmental” ethos. It is a narrative adaptation of a story of the American West that positions the land as “beautiful” without considering its extreme environmental precarity and its long entanglement with extractive economies, including mining, logging, agriculture, and, most significantly, ranching. The series has had real-world impacts, affecting the state’s demography, housing market, and tourism. Even though the axiom of the series is “protect the land,” the proposed method of doing so reinforces white settler principles of class, status, and race.