Ranch Wife Types

Like saddle trees and hybrid tomatoes, ranch wives come in different varieties.

In the broadest sense, the almost-information listed below applies to “women who live in the country and are married to men whose livelihoods revolve around beef cattle production, especially men who depend on cranky horses and catch ropes to complete daily tasks.”

Here’s an incomplete list of ranch wife types commonly found in the West.

Rancher’s wife
These gals are as attached to the land their house is built on as they are to the view out their kitchen window. That’s because ranchers (and their wives) stay on a single ranch for decades, come wildlife or Mormon cricket invasion. She can plant a sapling in the front yard and know she’ll still be watering it when her own little sprout goes off to college.

Cowboy’s wife
These ladies learn early in their marriage not to get too attached to anything they can’t load into a horse trailer and haul to the next ranch with a moment’s notice. The only land she owns is the dirt her husband tracks in on his boots at the end of each day. But she’s usually seen more scenic stretches of America out her kitchen window than the average RVer, and she knows that home is wherever her family is. She’ll be fine.

Part-timers
This applies to women who are part-time ranchers, not part-time wives. But even if a woman has a town job, she returns to the ranch each night to put the steers back in after they crash a gate, change the irrigation water and collect chicken eggs. She probably picks up parts for the bale wagon on her lunch break and feeds some combination of people and animals before leaving for work each morning. We should probably scratch this category, since there really is no such thing as a part-time ranch wife.

Seasonal movers
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true — there are cowboy families who move even more than we do. Some folks move twice each year, following the cattle to summer and winter pasture. Many of them even pack kids along for the adventure. The kids usually don’t participate in conventional public school and sports team activities, but they get to ride horses all day and learn to count cattle through the gate, so it works out.

Foreigners
Did you know there are ranchers living in other countries? Yes, it’s true. They don’t shop at Target or drive on the right-hand side of the road, but they’re raising beef, kids and horses in other remote areas of the globe. I talked to one ranch wife who was born in Colorado but lives in Chile and takes a boat to the nearest town for groceries. Stay tuned for her story in an upcoming post.

Aspiring
Some young (and not so young) ladies think that marrying a rancher or cowboy will give them the rustic Western lifestyle they desire. Plenty of people will try to talk them out of it, citing things like economic stability and lack of retirement as primary reasons.

I say grab a catch rope and jump in. But maybe grab a life vest, too, in case you wind up in a boat in South America.

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