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Selling the Ranch
- University of Nevada Press
- Chapter
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Selling the Ranch In April 2000, I attended the auction of a ranch near mine in rural western South Dakota. That single sale changed our lives, put an end to the community where I grew up. The ranch owner whose death caused the sale—I’ll call him Paul—had been one of my father’s best, and most close-mouthed, friends. I remembered his parents, square-built, hardworking, red-faced Germans who taught their son to make the ranch more productive. Their philosophy matched my father’s: never spend any money. Paul had gradually expanded the ranch by buying scattered bits of pasture and hay ground on which he raised fine Hereford cattle. Too busy to court a wife, he worked the place with his parents, and then with a succession of hired hands, none of whom stayed long. One man who left Paul to work for my uncle said, “I didn’t mind so much when he told me how to fix fence. Any man might have different ideas about that than his neighbor. But when he started telling me how to tie my shoes, I decided to move on.” After his parents died, Paul, whose social life had pretty much consisted of leaning on the pickup in the pasture visiting with his neighbors, managed to marry a woman about his age with grown children. He confided to my dad that she spent most of her time driving to town to shop and get her hair fixed. She also entertained, because I remember going with my mother and a group of women to the historic stone house where they lived, a former station on the stagecoach line between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Black Hills gold fields. I loved the house’s compact rooms, its threefoot -thick stone walls. The rancher’s new wife complained loudly, her 10 Nn n o p la c e li ke h ome vivid red curls bouncing, that she couldn’t pound a nail in the stone walls! Couldn’t hang a picture! And the rooms were so small! And he wouldn’t let her build more rooms because it would cost too much money! She looked slyly at us as she said he had a lot of money, and we all looked away. Money was a subject we never discussed; most of the women in that room, my mother included, didn’t even know how much land their husbands owned. I suppose her children visited the ranch, but I don’t recall ever meeting them. Paul always drove through his pastures and went to town alone in his pickup. As Paul aged, several of us tried to buy the pieces of his land adjoining our ranches, but he wouldn’t discuss selling separate pastures. Since he hadn’t managed to found a family, we knew the ranch would likely be sold at his death. He’d built a good working place on hard work and frugality. His parents had raised him to get the most value from every single penny, and land prices rose steadily in our area as ranchers sold off plots along the highway for homesites. What was he thinking? Ranchers ought to be among the most realistic of people, since they are likely to encounter birth and death in the corrals as soon as they can walk. But sometimes, like my father, they behave as if they are immortal. I don’t know the details of Paul’s will. Soon after his death, we began to hear rumors that his widow’s children couldn’t agree. Someone wanted money, but others wanted to see the ranch continue to operate. The widow couldn’t run it alone, and none of her children had ever lived there. The solution: sell to the highest bidder and divide the spoils. Naturally, since they’d never lived in our community, it probably never occurred to them to consider what the sale of the ranch might do to the neighborhood. Worse, neither did Paul, who had spent his whole life there. We’re all taught, after all, to be independent, to defend our rights, to say that what we do on our own property is nobody’s business but ours. Each time I drive home to the ranch since the sale, I am amazed at the speed with which our community is disintegrating, almost as fast as a bulldozer can roll. Within months, the results of Paul’s sale were scattered through the pastures: houses...