Manifest LATTE

Today's run on western land is spreading not American power but five-star living dressed up as frontiersmanship. Welcome to the home of end-table antlers and Escalades.

- ANTONIA HITCHENS

On a snowy April afternoon in the rugged empty beauty of remote western Montana, I go out shooting with two guides at what may be America’s most expensive ranch. They pick me up in an SUV with heated seats, they lend me gloves, and we drive out to the range, past the Ranch at Rock Creek’s 70 or so horses, listening to George Strait and Brooks & Dunn on a Sirius country station. We don’t see any people, only a group of white-tailed deer. I practice shooting clay targets meant to emulate the flight of ducks. I am taken aback at first when the guides have me load my own rounds of ammunition into the gun instead of doing it for me. But by my second day at the ranch, I come to understand that part of what you get for the $3,600 price (per couple in high season) is the luxury of getting to pretend that you aren’t a luxury guest. Instead, you get to settle into an imagined rural idyll, a fantasy of the American West.