Home on the Range
CROKE, BILL
Home on the Range A discouraging word. BY BILL CROKE The Great Plains are a wreck. In a northward swath from western Kansas to eastern Montana, birth rates have plunged, towns are dying, schools...
...And buffalo don't need to be watered in winter...
...Dick Saterlee has bad news for this rancher who wants three hundred dollars an acre...
...They have always been a sort of ungulate tourist, and in ranching them I felt a little like a tour guide who spends his life translating menus and pointing out the restrooms...
...In the hard winter of 1997, sixty thousand cattle and sheep perished on the northern plains...
...O'Brien writes: And that is when I figured out the problem with cows...
...When bison seek to escape the heat and flies, they roll on their backs and create "buffalo wallows": shallow wetland-ponds or waterholes that draw other wildlife...
...On the way back to town Saterlee says: "These are good people out here, . . . most honest people in the world...
...The Broken Heart, the name of O'Brien's thousand-acre ranch near Whitewood, South Dakota, on the eastern slope of the Black Hills, is an apt metaphor for the contemporary Great Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming...
...After three years in the buffalo business, Dan O'Brien's Broken Heart ranch is slowly getting on its feet...
...In their two-hundred-year heyday, from the introduction of the horse around 1680 to the closing of the open plains around 1876, the tribes of the Great Plains enjoyed a unique prosperity—considering that they were essentially a stone-age culture...
...They visit a three-thousand-acre ranch on the White River that Saterlee may list for its elderly owner, a man—like a lot of other people—getting out because of "falling prices, rising expenses, same old Great Plains stuff...
...They wouldn't lie to you for anything...
...While riding around with a friend named Dick Saterlee, an eighty-year-old real-estate agent and retired rancher, O'Brien gains some insight into his region's problems...
...Always on good terms with his local banker, he went into $100,000 of debt as he and Hersman built an elaborate eight miles of heavy duty sixstrand fence eight-feet tall, and he added to his herd after trips to auctions in Colorado and Utah...
...Hardier Black Angus fared better, but nothing like the few native bison that not only survived, but thrived...
...Only one buffalo died, hit by a semi-truck while crossing a highway...
...Some of these buffalo are merely the playthings of the wealthy...
...They believed absurd railroad propaganda such as "Rain follows the plow," a bold bit of nineteenth-century junk science that claimed that large tracts of cultivated land actually changed weather patterns...
...O'Brien points out the well-known fact that these quarter million bison once numbered sixty million and were the larder of large tribes of people...
...In thirty-five years, sixty million buffalo were exterminated on the Great Plains...
...Running the Broken Heart has been a labor of love, and several times over the last twenty years O'Brien has been forced to leave its daily maintenance to a hired man named Erney Hersman, taking temporary teaching jobs and working on his books to pay the mortgage...
...O'Brien slaughters his own quota every fall by shooting them at close range with a county meat inspector present, and thus markets his own as "organic" bison...
...They are valued for their nutritional strong points of high protein and low cholesterol and fat...
...This was a nod to the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic of virtuous, hardworking farmers, but the reality of life on the Great Plains soon exposed this ideal as a fantasy...
...Ted Turner owns massive herds, for example...
...The need to destroy these wild herds was an inevitable consequence of the American government's decision to force the recalcitrant plains tribes onto reservations in the late nineteenth century...
...And on a clear day in Whitewood, South Dakota, you can see in the distance Bear Butte, the birthplace of Crazy Horse...
...In a northward swath from western Kansas to eastern Montana, birth rates have plunged, towns are dying, schools and stores are closing...
...But they'll lie to themselves every time...
...Even dryland crops like wheat and barley are a problem...
...The cattle culture of the Great Plains has remained this same kind of boom-bust, government-subsidized crapshoot for over a century...
...Some of O'Brien's neighbors have made the change from cattle to bison, and after helping one of those neighbors with a typically tricky roundup, O'Brien ended up buying thirteen rust-colored calves...
...The rest are owned by environmentally conscious and entrepreneurially minded ranchers, such as O'Brien, tired of long days and financial struggle in "a place that by its nature shrugs off puny human notions of power...
...In creek and river bottoms, buffalo will stop to drink and then once more move onto the range...
...They lightly crop the range, trimming the western wheatgrass, bluestem, grama, and buffalo grass, and move on...
...Today, 250,000 commercially raised buffalo roam the plains...
...Buffalo don't need the hay in winter that cattle require...
...Hersman whimsically named the calves the "Gashouse Gang," and O'Brien was in the buffalo business...
...To attract settlers to the emptied plains, 160-acre homestead tracts were offered by the government for the price of a small filing fee and the promise to "prove up" by making at least minor improvements to the land...
...O'Brien began to notice a steady improvement of the range over what it was in his cattle days...
...The warnings of people in the know— such as explorer and surveyor John Wesley Powell—fell on deaf ears...
...After that, a few hundred survived as pets on ranches, and Yellowstone National Park began to develop a herd that numbers roughly three thousand today...
...The Great Plains are at least semi-arid and not fit for conventional agriculture without the benefit of irrigation...
...Hereford cattle ran in terror to exhaustion ahead of the screaming blizzards...
...Unlike cattle, bison are selective grazers...
...The costs of all this were overworked squaws forced to maintain the prosperity and constant nomadism, and a rising death rate among young men from war as the tribes crowded each other in the prime hunting grounds...
...A few wet, fat years in the early 1880s gave the sodbusters a false optimism that was finally smashed by the ferocious winter of 1886, which killed most of the domestic livestock on the northern plains...
...The constitutionally spare Charolais stood whining in the snow until they froze...
...The plains, of course, have always been unforgiving, but this is new...
...The landscape is dotted with empty farmhouses, broken fences, and board-ed-up churches, the paint peeling in the relentless prairie wind...
...The last recorded killing of a wild bison was of a lone bull near the Can-nonball River in North Dakota in 1883...
...they use their massive heads to sweep away deep snow and get at the grass...
...When creeks and stock ponds are frozen they take what moisture they need from the snow while foraging...
...Cattle—unless moved from pasture to pasture—will graze the range down to the dirt...
...The simple fact is that west of the hundredth meridian (a line that neatly bisects the Dakotas, Nebraska, and states to the south) annual rainfall drops below twenty inches...
...Birth rates rose and lifespans lengthened...
...Wallace Stegner once remarked that "to live successfully in the West, one must get over the idea of green...
...even the average size of teepees grew, allowing space for those bigger families, and their accumulated wealth...
...mobility increased, allowing more opportunities for trade...
...It's just that out here on the Great Plains, they seem painted on the landscape in a way that will never allow them to be truly part of it...
...Cattle will graze to the water's edge and then eat the young willow and cottonwood...
...And so the report Dan O'Brien gives in his new nonfiction account Buffalo for the Broken Heart is a different story from the old reports given by writers from Willa Cather and Walter Prescott Webb to Wright Morris, Mari Sandoz, and Jonathan Raban...
...The consequent land rush populated the Great Plains with thousands of immigrants, mostly from northern Europe...
...They don't need the attention of veterinarians as much as cattle, and they don't need to be feedlot-marketed...
...Like his neighbors, O'Brien—a self-described environmentalist, a rancher, and the author of eight previous books—has had his share of hard times thanks to low cattle prices and the vagaries of weather...
...It's not feasible to list it for more than two hundred...
...Washington bureaucrats and railroad executives imagined that the plains could be ranched and farmed with the proved agricultural practices of the eastern United States...
...In hot weather, cattle will stand for hours in a creek, muddying it and fouling it...
...He soon had a herd of fifty-one bison on his place in a constantly shifting forage, like a cloud shadow slowly dragging over the prairie...
...It's not that there is anything wrong with them in general...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 5
