Shootouts and chopper assaults? The real story of livestock police beyond 'Yellowstone'

ST. IGNATIUS, MONTANA – Snow-dusted peaks towered in the background, cows lowed in the expansive rangeland and cowboys on horseback moved heifers and steers off trailers.

There wasn’t a film camera in sight, but it sure looked, sounded and felt like a scene straight out of the hit television show "Yellowstone," which begins its final season on Sunday night.  

And Wes Seward certainly looked the part. 

Donning his black cowboy hat and worn-in cowboy boots, with a gun holstered on his hip, Seward pulled up in a white GMC pickup with a badge emblazoned on the door, the words “Stock Inspector & Detective” circling the star. He hopped out of his truck and headed over to the cattle. 

But Seward isn’t an actor pretending he’s an agent of the Montana Livestock Association, the fictional state agency that Kevin Costner, playing the part of John Dutton, employs as a sort of paramilitary outfit for fighting the forces that threaten his ranch and family in episodes of "Yellowstone."

Seward is a district livestock investigator for the very real Montana Department of Livestock, a state agency with a $20 million budget, a history that reaches back to before the state’s formation and a mandate to ensure law and order within the state’s expansive ranching industry. 

Seward isn’t a fan of the show, but he’s watched enough “parts and pieces” to know that Taylor Sheridan and his co-writers of "Yellowstone" drew from the reality of his job – while of course bending it for dramatic effect.

It’s true that — as the television show portrays them — state livestock inspectors are trained and certified law enforcement officers who have full arrest powers that are not limited by jurisdiction. 

But while the "Yellowstone" characters take those powers as far as they can — dragging suspects around in the back of horse trailers or shooting indiscriminately from an open helicopter door — Seward said he has never personally arrested anyone in his eight years as an investigator. 

“Haven't had to,” Seward said. “Most of my stuff I can deal with without an arrest, and if there is an arrest, I bring other law enforcement with me.” 

"Yellowstone" hasn’t just borrowed from Seward’s reality, though.

It has changed it, he said, bringing in more people, more animals, more money and more pressure on livestock producers who already face long days and long odds to make a living and to keep Montana’s ranching tradition alive. 

And it has fueled a fantasy about the Treasure State, presenting real-world consequences for the ranching community that Seward serves and for the job he is trying to carry out. 

“There’s people moving in that think that they're in the middle of nowhere, and they can do whatever they want with whatever they want,” Seward said. 

But Seward and the rest of the livestock department’s Brands Enforcement Division are out every day to show them they have to follow the rules. 

‘Problem to problem’

The laws that Seward and his colleagues enforce reach back to 1885, when the territorial governor “appointed seven livestock inspectors to deal with a lot of the cattle rustling that was occurring at the time,” said Jay Bodner, administrator of the Brands Enforcement Division and Seward’s boss. 

While the livestock department has grown and changed significantly over the past 140 years, the mandate to prevent cattle theft has remained the “basis” of the job that Seward and the state’s 15 other livestock investigators perform, Bodner said.

Rustling may not top the state crime list, but Bodner said livestock do go missing “more than you think.“

Sometimes, it is “outright theft,” he said. Sometimes, it’s the result of a “civil dispute between owners.” In some cases, a cow just wanders into a neighbor’s herd. Other times, a hunter might mistakenly shoot someone’s animal — or a bear or a wolf might kill it very much on purpose. 

With some 2.5 million head of cattle roaming private and public lands across the state — plus about 100,000 horses — it’s a lot for the livestock department’s fewer than 16 investigators and two supervisors to monitor. 

To make that job easier, many ranchers brand their livestock, searing an indelible mark of ownership on the animals. A brand acts, Bodner said, “like a deed on your house or a title onto your car. That brand on that animal signifies that ownership to that individual.” 

But unlike a deed or a title, a brand isn’t required. 

“There's a lot of no-brand cattle in the country,” Seward said, “and I'm not sure how people keep everything.” 

Without a brand, he said, it’s hard for investigators to determine who owns a stray animal, and it’s difficult for an owner to get a missing animal back. 

To reduce livestock loss, livestock producers are required to have their animals inspected any time there’s a change of ownership or they are moved across county lines.

Often that change of ownership occurs at the 12 livestock yards spread out across the state, where some 500 local inspectors and an army of state employees check brands and other indicators of ownership as cattle are bought and sold. 

But it also occurs at places like the Lazy JM Ranch north of St. Ignatius, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, where cattle from three nearby ranches had been shipped on a recent morning to be weighed, sorted, sold and then shipped off to feedlots in Canada and Kansas. 

Cattle broker Seth Stoddard was there, doing the sorting, deciding on behalf of those out-of-state and out-of-country buyers which cows to take and which ones to reject. 

While Stoddard picked and chose, Seward was in the pen with him, checking the animals for signs of ownership and illness and otherwise ensuring everything was being done by the book. 

October, November and December are the busiest times for moving and selling cattle, Bodner said, but the work never really lets up.

“We do not have a lot of downtime in the state of Montana,” Bodner said. 

While Seward’s schedule is packed with horse inspections and cattle sales and packing-house visits and training sessions, most of what he does is “phone call driven,” he said. 

“You go to the hottest fires and try and put those out,” he said. “And the smoldering ones, you hope they either get put out on their own — or you can get to them before they get to be big fires. You never know what's going to happen. You get calls for cattle out or you get calls for somebody's horse that got shot or cow that got shot.”

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Some days, he said, he’s doing necropsies on dead animals. Other days, he’s dealing with divorces that are splitting up a ranch. Recently, he was involved in shipping birds infected with avian flu. 

‘Makes it tougher’

And the number of problems, Seward said, just keeps going up. 

The challenges, he said, are, in part, a product of Montana’s booming population, which is, in part, a product of the massive success of the TV show "Yellowstone."

Since it premiered in June 2018 on Paramount Network, the show has exacerbated the very issue that serves as its subject: Montana’s contentious shift away from its rural, ranching roots and toward a future as a playground for wealthy newcomers. 

Those changes have been felt statewide, but Seward has seen it up close in the booming Flathead Valley, where he has spent much of his life, working on ranches and, since 2016, serving as a livestock investigator for Montana’s four northwesternmost counties: Lake, Flathead, Lincoln and Sanders. 

In that time, he’s had an up-close and personal view of how hard it is to survive raising livestock — and how much harder it’s getting. 

As more and more people move into the state, Seward said, they often bring with them visions of a rural life that disrupts the reality of established ranchers. 

In part, that disruption is a matter of grazeland being gobbled up by developers and subdivided for housing. That drives up the cost of land, cutting into the already slim — or nonexistent — profit margins. 

“So it makes it tougher for these ranchers to make a living,” Seward said.

But while many of these people are buying relatively small parcels of land that only span a few acres, they are bringing with them the “fantasy” of Montana life that they’ve seen on TV, Seward said. 

“For us, this is the wide open,” Seward said, referring to the expansive ranchland spreading out all around him, toward the mountains and horizon. “But for them, it’s five acres.” 

And on those acreages, he said, people often bring horses or cows but no knowledge of the laws that govern the state’s livestock industry.  

“With the out-of-staters, you see a lot of people that move in, build a house, and then these cattle that have been running on that piece of ground that's been leased for hundreds of years are coming in,” Seward said. “And they don't like the cattle on their place, but parts of the state are what we call ‘open range,’ where you have to fence out the livestock. And that causes a lot of problems. 

“A lot of those people also buy one or two horses and don't know the state laws. … A lot of people move in and buy goats because they're cute or whatever, and then the goats run at large. Well, goats can't run at large in Montana, anytime, anywhere. So then we have to go in and do the enforcement action on that.” 

‘Thankless job’

While the Duttons use the fictional Montana Livestock Administration to bend the law to protect their wealth, Seward said he sees his role with the state livestock department in a different light. 

He goes out at dawn, in the cold, in a cattle pen, because he wants to help the ranchers who are struggling to survive beat the odds and keep their way of life alive. 

“We are public servants,” Seward said, “but we are public servants for the producers. That's who pays our wages — the people that pay the per capita fees that raise livestock, pay the tax on the livestock, essentially. And today, when I'm inspecting for these guys, I'm not really working for them. I'm working for all their neighbors. I'm making sure that their neighbors’ cattle aren't in with theirs, that the strays aren't getting shipped, you know. And it's kind of a thankless job.”

As he took a break from sorting heifers and steers, Stoddard, the cattle broker, said the work Seward and livestock department do is “essential for our business.” 

“They police and make sure everything's going where it's supposed to be, and that it's coming from who the rightful owner is,” said Stoddard, who is also a rancher in the Big Hole Valley. 

With such tight margins, Seward said a lot was at stake as he searched the cows for signs of anything amiss as they were being weighed and sorted. 

“Shipping days are big days for people,” he said. “There's a lot of stress on a lot of people because this is their yearly income. They depend on every hoof that goes across there, across the scale.” 

Television show as a recruiter?

It’s not a glamorous job, but in the years since "Yellowstone" first aired, a lot of new people have wanted to do it, said Bodner, the division administrator. 

Bodner said the show has “drawn tremendous” interest from “individuals that are interested in maybe putting in a resume for a livestock agent. And ‘livestock agent’ is the term that's used in the show. So we know that those individuals are familiar with the show and watch the show most likely and like what they see.” 

But when people see “what we really do, it's kind of like, ‘Oh, this wasn't what I thought,’” Seward said. “No throwing people in horse trailers and dragging them around.” 

Seward said the Brands Enforcement Division hired one person who was motivated by an interest in the show. But he didn’t last. 

There wasn’t enough action. 

He quit, Seward said, and became a sheriff’s deputy instead.