Things You Never Noticed In The First Yellowstone Episode

Montana is a land of big skies, jagged mountains, and that most American of icons, the cowboy. The romance of wild lands and tough men on horseback explains why people from all over the world flock to small western towns, why cowboy hats can be seen on the streets of Manhattan, and why Paramount's modern, Montana-set cowboy series Yellowstone has become such a hit.

Yellowstone snagged fans from the very first episode. For one thing, the pilot throws you into a three-way battle that carries through the first two seasons. Moreover, important characters die, huge animals roam the landscape, and tough men make tough decisions. It's a story as old as the West, and still as prescient: There's no clear good guy or bad guy, though there is a family to root for. The Duttons make their entrance in Yellowstone's pilot as well, full of the convoluted, painful, and potent ties the show goes on to explore at length.

Yellowstone's first episode weaves indelible dialogue and truly ugly events together, juxtaposed against a jaw-droppingly beautiful landscape. There's so much packed into this pilot, in fact, that there's a good chance you missed many of its details. Not to worry: We're here to remind you.

The pilot's opening scene ends with John telling his horse that all he can offer it now is peace. He then shoots the animal, before turning to the cows by the road and saying, "The things we lose to keep you fed." This is basically the theme of the whole series. The Dutton ranch involves so much more than just raising livestock, and yet, that's just what a ranch is: A place to keep cows alive long enough to sell them. The ranch is the cattle, and vice versa. Trade-offs must be made to keep it all afloat, but they're never easy to make.

Throughout the series, serious decisions and sacrifices are made to keep the ranch. Everybody questions, at some point or another, whether it's even worth it. This scene from the pilot, and the theme it embodies, is very specifically referenced in the season three finale in a harrowing way. In that cliffhanger, Rip sees a horse in pain, and has to put it out of its misery before realizing something is wrong. Meanwhile, John bleeds on a roadside, gunned down by would-be assassins. Another John Dutton accident, another dead horse, another brutal sacrifice for the sake of the ranch. Life is tough on the open roads of Montana.

It's pretty easy to miss the scene where John agrees to take on the hapless Jimmy Hurdstrom. It happens at the livestock auction, where Jimmy's grandfather Dirk sits down next to John and asks for a favor, just before he talks to the governor. John's had a rough week so far and wants to avoid this conversation, but there's obviously some unspoken history that makes him listen to Dirk. Despite saying that he's "looking for cowboys, not criminals," he finally acquiesces, though he says it'll be done his way. Dirk replies that he remembers when John's way was the only way and the world was better for it.

The backstory between John and Dirk is never really explored. The original script describes Dirk as a farmer, which means he wouldn't have necessarily run into a cattleman like John very often, other than to lavish respect on a town dignitary. We do later find out that Dirk's wife died, leaving him with nobody alive and out of jail except Jimmy. This is pretty similar to how the death of John's wife began the Dutton family's decline. This might have been enough to bond the two men. Whatever the reason, only in Montana is a livestock auction a place where folks help prevent recidivism.

Thomas Rainwater chastises John for having a ranch the size of Rhode Island while discussing how the Duttons (and white people in general) have hurt Native Americans. This claim of land size sounds exaggerated, but remember: Rhode Island is a very small state, and Montana is a very big one. Yellowstone National Park itself is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. 

Still, this stated size for Yellowstone Ranch has to be an overstatement, though it is later mentioned that John Dutton could sell 50,000 acres while still possessing most of the ranch. Let's break it down. First off, Rhode island spans approximately 776,000 acres. The largest contiguous ranch in the US is the Waggoner Ranch in Texas, at roughly 535,000 acres. While there are people who own more land — Ted Turner, for example, owns around 2 million acres, including large holdings in Montana —  the largest landowners in Montana, the Wilks brothers, have over 300,000 acres. So either Rainwater is exaggerating a lot, or the Yellowstone Ranch has absolutely no real-world basis.

You can do whatever you want in Montana, Jenkins says: Up here, land ownership is near sacred. "This isn't California, gentlemen," he smugly asserts. But when John Dutton does what he wants on his own land by diverting a river to remove Paradise Valley's water source, Jenkins suddenly cries foul. 

This is a hypocrisy that runs through Jenkins' character. He thinks that whatever he's doing is right and justified, since he feels he deserves his piece of the American dream. He's not all that concerned about the dreams and desires of those who came before, of course: He can only really conceive of his dreams and visions being worthy of respect. When the people he's infringing on come back at him, he's shocked and insulted.

This makes it all the more ironic when his dreams are finally taken down — not by John Dutton, but by the Beck brothers in season two. Jenkins even makes a brief alliance with John Dutton and Thomas Rainwater, showing how far from his original pedestal Jenkins has fallen. In the first episode, however, Dan Jenkins still thinks he's a conquering emperor whose dreams will be flawlessly realized.

After the standoff, while the sun rises and John and his people are still looking for Lee, we see a scene of elk crossing a river. We can hear them bugling, which they do in fall, during the rut. This means that subsequent episodes of Yellowstone are set in the fall, which, in turn, means there should be snow at some point. This makes things a little problematic. John going to a rodeo in the following episode, for example, becomes strange, considering the fact that there are no rodeos in Montana around that time of year. Even if there were, they certainly wouldn't take place in an outdoors arena.

Of course, the elk bugling might just be the sort window dressing nobody gave much thought to. It is, after all, a compelling natural sound. Beyond this, however, it contains important symbolism: The elk cross the river just before Kayce returns covered in blood, during the "Daybreak" from which the episode gets its name. It signifies the show's beginning, and reminds the viewer that nature doesn't care about human battles and deaths.

We first meet Kayce rushing headlong towards a wild stallion that's been disrupting an oil field. When he brings it home to the reservation, the kids are quickly captivated by the animal. John comes to visit as Kayce is trying to tame the horse. John mentions how Kayce needs to break the animal for it to serve him better, and Kayce replies that a horse doesn't need to be fully broken to be good. This is a heartbreaking back-and-forth full of buried meaning, though it's easy for the first-time viewer to miss.

Later, Kayce rides the horse into the firefight. Eventually, he brings the wild stallion as a gift for John, a first step toward their eventual reconciliation. He mentions how the horse has a lot of heart, and would have died for him. Furthermore, in the second episode, Jimmy gets taped to the horse to break it. This leads John to say that Jimmy might have some cowboy in him, which leads Jimmy to a rodeo career.

Eventually the horse becomes an excuse for John to ask Kayce to come back to the ranch. A wild, impressive animal that changes the lives of everybody it touches? Sounds a little like Kayce himself.