Brand inspector rides herd across Wyoming : He knows a brand as well as he knows a rancher’s face. And he knows you can learn more about rustling at a kitchen table than on a doorstep.

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Fortified by a breakfast of pancakes, Red Garretson climbed into his Chevy pickup at 7 a.m. and headed down the two-lane highway to look in on Leon Premer, a rancher who, at age 79, says he’s already done 100 years of work.

Garretson wore the work clothes of the range--Stetson, jeans and boots. On the seat next to him, in a leather pouch, was his cherished book that lists all 27,000 registered livestock brands in Wyoming. His 12-gauge shotgun and .45-caliber revolver were tucked away, well out of sight.

“In these parts,” he said, “you knock on a man’s door wearing a uniform and carrying a gun, and, oh, sure, he’ll give you respect, but you’ll do your talking on his doorstep. You won’t get invited in to eat his wife’s pie at the kitchen table, and you won’t really find out what’s going on, like you have to in this job.”

Garretson’s job as Wyoming’s chief livestock brand inspector is a relic of the Old West. He and his 56 full-time inspectors spend their lives on the back roads of the nation’s least populated state, driving 950,000 miles a year to check brands and make sure livestock has not been stolen or somehow mixed in with another rancher’s herd. By state law, the brand on every cow and horse must be inspected--at $1 a head--before the animal can be moved to another county or state or to a new owner.

“A lot of rustling’s done with a pencil today,” said Garretson, who has inspected more than 1 million head of cattle during his 30 years in the business. “For tax reasons or whatever, a man’ll say seven or eight head have been stolen, and you have to check around and ask some questions and find out what’s really going on.

“Course, most of these ranchers around here are about as honest as you can get. They want everything that’s theirs and nothing that’s not. Still, there are people out there who’d steal your car. So why wouldn’t they steal your cow if they got a chance?”

Every cattle state west of the Missouri River, except Oklahoma, has a brand inspection division. Branding was first used to establish ownership by the Egyptians, from about 1500 BC. The practice came to North America with the first Spanish cattle in the 17th Century. In 1848, Texas became the first state to require that each brand be registered with the county clerk. Although convictions are difficult to get, the maximum penalty for rustling in Wyoming is 10 years in prison; tampering with a brand can draw three years.

Having helped Leon Premer scatter bales of winter hay to his cattle, Garretson turned his truck toward the 100,000-acre ranch managed by Lawrence Atkinson. A century ago, the Johnson County War between rustlers and cattle barons was fought a couple hundred miles from here, and Atkinson, who had recently lost 23 head, apparently to rustlers, was no less ready for a fight than his predecessors had been. Another 10 head had been taken from his neighbor’s grasslands.

“It just drives me nuts to lose 23 head and not be able to figure out who’s responsible,” Atkinson said as he and Garretson pulled chairs up to the kitchen table. “A lot of years, when the market’s down, that can be your margin of profit.”

“This country’s so darn big you can’t watch over it every hour of the day,” Garretson told him. “I’d say this was an inside job, by someone who knew this country pretty good.”

“Once he gets the cattle in a horse trailer and hits the interstate, he’s not going to stop till he hits Nebraska, and that’s the end of the (Wyoming’s) brand-inspection area,” Atkinson said.

“Course, even if he did get stopped, 99% of these patrolmen on the interstate couldn’t read a brand anyway,” said Garretson, who recognizes most of his neighbors’ brands as readily as he does their faces.

This is calving season on the northern range, and it’s a quiet time for brand inspectors. But come fall, when thousands of cows are shipped off to feed lots in Nebraska and Colorado, Garretson and his inspectors will work dawn to dusk, driving from ranch to ranch to the corrals that are, in effect, their seasonal offices.

On foot or horseback, they face the line of cattle being pushed past them onto waiting trucks, checking each brand that flashes by as though they were speed-reading. “Don’t know what it is,” Garretson said, “but I can usually pick out a stray before I even see the brand. There’s just something about that animal that looks different.”

The grandson of a rancher, Garretson, 55, grew up in nearby Elk Mountain, where there wasn’t much to do on Saturday nights except “drink, dance and fight some more.” There were four students--three boys and a girl--in his senior high school class and, a few days after graduation in 1956, all three boys joined the Marines and rode off together on the Greyhound to Denver for induction.

Garretson’s wife died of cancer in 1979. His son now works in San Francisco, his daughter in Fort Collins, Colo. He is the last of the Garretson ranching tradition.

“I could retire,” he said, “but the truth is, I’ll never quit this job. I don’t hang out in bars. Don’t fish. Don’t hunt. This is all I do. It’s all I want to do.”