By Joan M. Jensen University of New Mexico Press, 1995 In his collection of autobiographical essays, Owning It All, William Kittredge tells of how his grandfather had built a cage near a slaughterhouse on the family ranch and stocked it with the entrails of butchered cows in order to trap magpies. Once a week during summer he drive an old Cadillac there and, proceeding in slow, measured steps to confront the birds, would lift the shotgun, and from no more than 12 feet, sighting down that barrel where the bluing was mostly worn off, through the chicken wire into ... their eyes,... kill them one by one, taking his time, maybe so as to prove that this was no accident (66). Kittredge's stunning image evokes the grandfather's daunting conviction of rightful ownership and his deep-seated malevolence toward what he, and his ranching ilk, had decided did not belong in Warner Valley, southeastern Oregon. One senses that the power of this episode derives from Kittredge's own appalled understanding of the grandfather's action. Out in the far West, in places well removed from cities, such ranchers, who owned and leased massive acreages, cast great shadows across the land. Kittredge details the far-reaching changes they made to the Great Basin environment in order to make it suitable for commercial agriculture. When in 1946 his father traded in 200 working horses for chicken feed, this was seen as progress, for the new John Deere tractors proved far more efficient than animal labor had been. Meanwhile, through mechanized power and irrigation, former marshlands that for centuries had supported massive populations of annually migrating