Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Four

61 Four I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE, BUT SOMETIMES WEIRD COINcidences crop up that make you wonder. Like the time I got home from Minnesota, after I’d spent many months coming to the conclusion that our little ranch was too small to have much impact on the health of the Great Plains, when a message was waiting for me from a friend who wanted me to partner with him in buying a larger ranch. “Down on the Cheyenne River,” he said, when I called him back. “They call it the JD Ranch. About eight thousand acres with a good-sized permit to graze on the National Grassland. I can only handle about six thousand acres and I don’t want the hassle of dealing with a government permit.” I pretended that I had no interest whatsoever, but as soon as we hung up I went to the maps that I had been studying for years. I ran my finger down the Cheyenne River, around the southern edge of the Black Hills, then up the east side until it touched the Buffalo Gap National Grassland. The ranch that my friend was dealing on had to be close to where my finger stopped—within the big red circle I had drawn on the map when the idea of large-scale buffalo was new in my mind. It was the kind of coincidence that could not be ignored. Jill and I took a drive down that way and had a look at the ranch. It was about seventy-five miles between the Broken Heart and the ranch that we were already calling the Cheyenne River Ranch. All the way down we talked about buffalo. At that time we had a tiny corporation to worry about: Wild Idea Buffalo Company. Jill had Wild 62 P A R T T W O Idea Buffalo Company by the horns. She was learning a lot about advertising, processing, shipping, customer income statements, and all the rest of it. She was driven by the idea that buffalo meat was healthy and seemed to like all the details that made it a business. I was more than willing to cede all those details to her. What interested me was figuring out how Wild Idea Buffalo Company could mesh with the land that the buffalo needed and the fact that the land, too, needed the buffalo to be healthy. We drove down the Interstate to Rapid City, then took Highway 44 to the southeast, toward the Pine Ridge Reservation. Fifteen miles out of Rapid we took a county road to the south. After seventeen miles of curvy gravel, we topped out on the endless river breaks above the Cheyenne River. We looked through the windshield of the pickup, over the river bottom and onto Badlands National Park ten miles off in the blue distance. There were no buildings, no roads, not even fences as far as we could see. For a full minute we just stared. “You can see the curvature of the earth.” I said. “We must be parked on the deeded part of the ranch.” I pointed out to the endless grassy draws, buttes, and dry water courses. “That must be the Forest Service permit that goes with it. “We’re parked on the ranch?” “It’s got to be around here someplace,” I said. Jill nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “someplace.” From where we sat, there were no signs of ranch buildings, but we could see cottonwood trees snaking along the river until they disappeared in both directions. We knew that the ranch buildings were near the river, so we assumed we were close. Even on the civilized side of the river there was no sign of human habitation, save a few strands of rusty barbed wire hung on leaning cedar posts. We were high above the river, where the tops of the bluffs are large flats that had once supported native grasses but for the last hundred years had been used for dryland farming. It was clear that the farming had never been very successful. Without even rolling the window down I could see signs of wind erosion and the tell-tale presence of invasive species of old-world plants. 63 Situated on the opposite side of the river is a massive portion of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland. If we were where we thought we were, we were looking at what is...