CHAPTER 9

The mythic American character is made up of the virtues of fairness, self-reliance, toughness, and honesty. Those virtues are generally stuffed into a six-foot-tall, dark-haired, can-do kind of guy who is at once a family man, attractive to strange women, carefree, stable, realistic, and whimsical. In the lore of America, that man lives on the Great Plains. He’s from Texas, Dodge City, Cheyenne, the Dakotas, or somewhere in Montana. In fact, the seedbed of this American character, from the days of de Tocqueville through An-drew Jackson, Wyatt Earp, Pony Express riders, pioneers, and cowboys to modern caricatures played by actors such as Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne has always been the frontier. It’s a place with plenty of room to roam, great sunsets, clear lines between right and wrong, and lots of horses. It’s also a place that does not exist and never has.

The truth is that there has never been much fairness out here. The homestead acts were mostly ways to get serfs onto the fees of eastern and European industrialists. When the land, the economy, and the climate revolted, these people had to suffer or be supported by the government. Self-reliance went out the window. As for toughness, the vast majority of homesteaders failed and either gave their land back to the government or sold out to the neighbor at pennies on the dollar. There wasn’t all that much honesty out here, either. From cheating the Indians out of their birthright and culture to pervasive homestead fraud in the form of filing for people who did not exist, pioneers proved to be just as human as the next man, maybe more so.

What we’re left with is an American character built on the imagined virtues of the people of an arid region that is about a quarter of the landmass of the country and represents only a tiny fraction of the population. How did this happen? As long as we were assigning false attributes to a group of people as a baseline for a national identity, why not use loggers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the jewelers in New York, or the shrimpers on the Gulf? Ironically, the answer might lie in something a real estate broker once told me.

I bought my ranch from Dick Saterlee; that was in 1978, and he was pushing sixty then. But he had not always been a real-estate agent. In fact, he’s done about all there is to do out here, and for that reason I’ve got a lot of respect for his opinion.

At one time he farmed thousands of acres and is famous for insisting that his tractors keep moving. He instructed his hired man to drive the pickup right up alongside the moving tractor when he relieved Dick. The two men would set the throttles and leap from one moving machine to the other. This kind of practice— multiplied over thousands of daily tasks—meant it didn’t take Dick as long to cultivate a section of land as it took his neighbor, and he did well. He’s also owned countless numbers of cows, and at the age of seventy-five he took on a failing feedlot where he and another geezer fed twenty thousand steers through the toughest winter in recent memory. They lost two head during a winter that killed 150,000 on the high plains.

Now Dick hangs out at Bob’s Family Restaurant in the town of Sturgis with a crew of men old enough to remember the Dirty Thirties and crotchety enough to profess that those were the good old days. He is full of good stories and can bullshit with the best of them. I was once having breakfast at Bob’s with the novelist Jim Harrison and Dick came over to talk. Jim had just finished writing Dalva. He and Dick fell into a deep conversation about the Sand Hills of Nebraska, where the novel is set, and where Dick once owned a ranch. Dick is no reader but he took right off talking about the nutritional properties of the bluestem grass that’s dominant in that country and the need to rotate livestock in sandy soil. He claimed to know the ranches that Jim had written about and spoke with authority about the finances of some of the longtime residents of Jim’s acquaintance. When he walked away, Jim, who has dealt with some of the legends of the movie industry, shook his head. “That guy,” he said, “reminds me of a Hollywood producer.”

I was a little amazed. “Dick Saterlee reminds you of a Hollywood producer?”

Jim nodded. “He actually believes that what he’s saying is the truth. A belief like that makes it so. It’s a precious quality in negotiations.”

Dick is a good negotiator. He can sweet-talk and charm, but he can also be blunt and more than a little ornery when that’s what’s called for. He knows the economic side of this land better than anyone of my acquaintance, and for that reason he is the dean of the breakfast cabinet at Bob’s Family Restaurant. He sits most mornings with the other old men discussing cattle prices or the latest outrage in Washington. He still has a real estate broker’s license, though he told the head of continuing education for the South Dakota Real Estate Commission that if he thought Dick Saterlee, who has had a license since before there were licenses, was going to take the required two hours of class work to keep his current, he could just kiss Dick’s ass in a public place. But for now he’s got a license, and a reputation for not listing a ranch for sale unless the owner was willing to list it at a reasonable price. Telling people their ranches aren’t worth what they think they’re worth makes a lot of people mad, but Dick has reached the age where he doesn’t much care if people get mad or not. He sells what he lists because, as he says, he’s “in the land selling business, not the land speculation business.”

Most real-estate agents think they know ranch- and farmland, but because of his experience, Dick really does. He’s sold hundreds of places, many of them several times, and owned and run a dozen himself. He’s a rugged old bastard, six-foot-two and drop-dead handsome at eighty years old. His long wide hands are still hard and scarred from working his father’s ranch in the days before there were fences, when a kid got sent out with a saddle horse, a wagon filled with supplies, and the responsibility for a thousand wild steers. He swears with great authority and reasonable appropriateness. When I come into Bob’s Family Restaurant he waves from the codger table and shouts, “O’Brien! Get over here, you little fucker.”

To Dick Saterlee, “little fucker” is a term of endearment. Dick and I have always liked each other, and because times have changed since Dick’s heyday he’s taken to asking me to ride along with him when someone asks him to come out to list their ranch for sale. It’s not that I know any more about ranches than Dick, far from it. But nowadays there is more to evaluating a ranch than calculating how many cattle it will run and the quality of the water. Dick takes me along to consult on things that he never paid much attention to, things like hunting and fishing potential, wildlife, “ass-thetics.”

“Shit,” Dick says, “ranchers don’t have any money. The market is with people interested in hunting dogs and fly-fishing, bird-watching, that kind of junk.”

On a recent trip to a ranch on the White River, Dick was talking a blue streak as we whizzed down the interstate at ninety miles per hour. “With the economy the way it is, we need buyers with more money than brains. We need buyers with no common sense and damned little experience in the real world. We need doctors.” He was waving both hands in the air above the steering wheel for emphasis, still doing ninety and just entering a construction zone. I started to say something but the highway patrolman’s siren drowned me out. Dick was back with the patrolman for only a few minutes. He returned to the pickup, folded his lanky old frame back into the driver’s seat, and tossed the ticket on the dash. “Two hundred and forty bucks,” he laughed. “Double fines in a construction zone.” He threw his head back in a real horse laugh and stomped on the accelerator. “Fuck ’em,” he said. Dick is a real, live cowboy.

The ranch we looked at was a nice place: three thousand acres of high benches planted to wheat above the river that marks the boundary of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, rolling pasture to the horizon, and a hillside of springs that feed the White River. The owner had been born there. He was in his late sixties and had taken good care of his land. With great pride he drove us around for three hours, showing us the water pipeline he’d put in, the new plantings of alfalfa, the Black Angus cattle he’d been breeding for thirty years. No one asked why he was selling. We knew the reason was exhaustion brought on by financial problems: falling prices, rising expenses, same old Great Plains stuff.

The owner probed Dick’s mind, trying to figure out without asking what he thought the place might sell for. The man’s entire life, his self-perceived value as a human being, depended on the figure the two men settled upon. If Dick’s number was too low, there would be no settling. If the owner’s idea of what the place was worth was too high, Dick wouldn’t list it for sale. We all knew that the man could find someone to list his ranch at almost any price but the chances were great that it would actually sell at the price Dick named. I felt the tension building and found myself hoping that the two had the same number in mind.

But on the Great Plains people often don’t say what is on their mind. This is not Santa Monica or New York City. It is considered rude to be straightforward, and conversations out here are often little more than displacement activity. The cattle and grass talk of the two old ranch warriors reminded me of two tomcats, sitting two feet apart, knowing they would eventually fight but funneling their frustrated energies into nervous self-grooming.

We wound down a trail cut into a ridge that had once been the bank of the White River. Now the river bottom was a full mile away, on the outward swing of its millennial meandering. We descended into an old oxbow with ancient cottonwoods a hundred feet high. “Now, something needs to be done down here,” the owner said. “Damned water backs up in here. Drowns out fifty, sixty acres of grass. Kills the trees, too.”

My eyes followed his dismissive wave and my mouth fell open. The flooded area he was railing against looked like a Louisiana bayou. In my first glance I saw a pair of wood ducks standing on a cottonwood branch beside their nesting hole, three great blue herons launching leisurely into flight, and a muskrat purring across the impoundment. “Damned county commissioners won’t let me dynamite the downstream end of this mess. Say it will flood the road, but hell, once I got this thing drained the road would dry out.”

We moved a quarter mile along the edge of the wetland and I saw where the herons were coming from. There was a rookery of twenty nests in the cottonwoods growing from an island in the swamp. “Goddamned mess,” Dick agreed. “I’d just get a ’dozer and cut a ditch along that side. Screw the commissioners. Let ’em sue you.”

Two more pairs of wood ducks sailed through the trees, a hairy woodpecker worked on a dead branch, and I could no longer keep my mouth shut. “Don’t do it,” I said. “Acre for acre, this is the most valuable land on the place.” The two old men looked at me and the rancher’s disgust was so complete that I thought he might let the pickup roll to a stop. But Dick was looking at me thoughtfully.

“How come?” Dick asked.

“Well,” I said, “it’s so fertile.” I pointed to the rickety stick nests of the herons. A half dozen of the giant, graceful birds stood in the trees or sat on the nests. “See those boys sitting up there?” It took them a full minute to see six birds as big as ponies.

“Jesus,” Dick said, “what the hell are those?”

“Great blue herons,” I said. “Those guys can nest only in certain places.” I swung my arm to indicate the trees the men thought had been ruined by the water. “And those dead cottonwoods are filled with cavities. All kinds of birds need those holes. There are a lot of people who would love to spend a day in here just watching.”

The rancher laughed and shook his head. “But would they pay?” He downshifted and started up a trail that led to a wheat field he thought was more interesting.

I surreptitiously nodded to Dick. “It might pay better than farming,” I whispered.

We pulled into the ranch yard at the end of our tour and I pretended to find something interesting over by the corral while Dick and the rancher got down to brass tacks. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I knew pretty much what Dick was telling him. As we drove around I’d done a little figuring myself. It was a good place, but with markets the way they were and with this ranch being a hundred miles from anywhere with jobs, I’d come up with about $200 per acre. Maybe a little more if they found a buyer with money, interested in something besides cattle and wheat. A hunter or someone with a passion for great blue herons might go to $215. Dick had told me before we arrived that the rancher had a higher number in mind and when I glanced over to the two leaning against the pickup I could see that they weren’t seeing eye to eye. I’d watched Dick in these situations before. As tough as he was, he could be gentle when telling a man that the land appreciation he had been counting on most of his life was an illusion.

Now the man was leaning with his back against the truck and Dick, taller and older, stood facing him, not two feet away, with his big hands out in explanation. The man’s head was tilted in a brave attempt at cockiness. But though he might not like what he was hearing and might pretend to dismiss it, he must have known that Dick was an old veteran and knew what he was talking about.

Later, when we were speeding back toward Rapid City, Dick said something that has stayed with me for years. I’m not sure exactly what it means or how it came to be, but it weighs in heavily on solving the riddle of why western legends achieve such purchase in the popular imagination. “So, did you list his place?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Dick said. “It’s not really for sale yet. He still thinks he can get out of it in good shape. He wants three hundred an acre.”

We drove on for another mile or two before Dick spoke again. “These are good people out here,” he said. “Most honest people in the world. They wouldn’t lie to you for anything.” He shook his head. “But they’ll lie to themselves every time.”

A year after that trip with Dick Saterlee, I was living alone with Erney and my dozen little buffalo calves from the 777. I really didn’t know what to do with my life or with the buffalo calves. A rancher and aquaintance forty miles north left a message on my answering machine proudly announcing that he had just bought thirty yearlings from the Colorado Buffalo Company. He’d recently made the leap to buffalo and was on me to do the same. His message said that the Colorado Buffalo Company still had twenty yearlings to sell and that they would be a perfect addition to the Gashouse Gang. He said they wouldn’t last long because the market for buffalo was hot and left a number to call in Colorado.

I had to laugh. My friends had been telling me for years that the buffalo market was hot. In fact, it had been going up every year and I figured that was a damned good reason to stay out of it. I could have bought yearling buffalo heifers like the ones in Colorado eight years before for $500 apiece. Now they wanted $2,200. The money had already been made. There was a crash in the future, and with my luck it would start the day after I committed. Of course, there was still the idea that buffalo were better for the land than cattle, that my whole place would be better off in the long run, and I couldn’t help dreaming about parlaying the buffalo calves into a real herd. I had enough in the bank to fence my ranch and buy a few more buffalo. But not enough to fully stock the place. Since I didn’t buy lottery tickets and there was no movie deal from my writing in the works, it would be a very risky undertaking. My cash flow was nearly nonexistent and I was far too scared to spend my savings. The thought of borrowing more money crushed me with inertia. I had done that with cattle. Trying to make loan payments is what pushed me off the ranch before. I didn’t want to incur any debt if I could help it, but it was coming spring and I had to make a decision whether to commit my entire ranch to buffalo or to simply sell the remaining dozen calves and continue the status quo of buying yearling cattle, fattening them on the summer grass, and, if markets and weight gain went well, selling them at a tiny profit in the fall.

After four months, the Gashouse Gang was doing well. They had all gained fifty pounds, and the little one with the deformed horn, Curly Bill, had caught up to the biggest of the bunch. He’d gained probably a hundred pounds. One Sunday night Duane called to tell me he had a buyer for the calves if I wanted to sell. He told me I could make a little money and added, “By the way, on Tuesday we’re working some buffalo that are going to Canada.”

On the Great Plains, an offhand remark like Duane’s is a request for help, and I responded with something like, “Tuesday? I’m not doing much. Maybe I could give you a hand.”

“That’d work. We’ll get started about seven.”

So at seven o’clock on Tuesday morning I was there, along with a half dozen other men, standing in the cold spring air in my insulated coveralls and stocking cap. The day was going to warm up, perhaps creep above freezing. We all knew it but we’d dressed for the predawn with an eye toward peeling clothes as the sun got higher. Duane showed up right at seven o’clock, sporting his trademark cowboy-cut white shirt, white hat, and carrying his standard steaming, twenty-ounce coffee cup. It was a small job for the 777. We were pregnancy checking and drawing blood on fifty cows. The vet would be there any minute. Duane assigned two men to the squeeze chute then pointed to three younger men. “You guys push them up into the ready chutes.”

“Let’s see,” he said as he looked over the rest of us. “Scott needs someone in the back with some buffalo experience. Dan, maybe you could do that.”

Buffalo experience? Me? I wanted to say, “Wait. There’s been a mistake,” but Scott was waving for me to come with him.

With cattle the best hands are usually assigned to work the chutes and help out around the vet while the inexperienced and kids are given the job of pushing the cattle up to the chutes. With buffalo the dynamic is different. First, kids and people with no large-animal experience are discouraged altogether. Second, cutting the buffalo from the herd and moving them up to the chutes is considered the most skilled job. Cattle have been bred for sluggishness and seldom get excited. How they are cut from the herd and moved is not particularly critical or difficult. Though one hears a lot of exaggeration about the dangers of buffalo, they are essentially wild and must be handled carefully. They don’t want to hurt people or smash into things but their main instinctive focus is to stay with the herd. So when they are split up in the corrals behind the chute, they are more apt to become dangerously excited and to hurt themselves or the cowboys. At the 777, and all other good buffalo ranches, the art of low-impact herding is valued highly. I felt honored yet unworthy, like an airline attendant inexplicably promoted to pilot in the middle of a flight.

Herding is not as simple as it might appear to the uninitiated. Television and feature films have given most people the wrong idea about moving animals from one place to the next. The first rule is no yelling and racing around. Herd animals such as cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and buffalo do not want to be near people and respond to their proximity in one of two ways: they try to move away from people or they try to chase the people away from them. It is the classic flight-or-fight mentality that allows us to move herd animals at all. In the case of domestic animals, moving toward them will make them move away, moving left will make them move right, backing up will allow them to stop, or even come toward you. The faster you move, the faster they move, and only when the animals cannot move away, or think they can’t move away, is there real danger that they will switch from flight mode to fight mode.

Though almost anyone can chase a bunch of cattle from one pen to the other, it is possible even with tame old milk cows to excite them to the point where they quit thinking reasonably and start smashing out of the pens. Every step a herder makes means something to the animal. A step to the left or right is a signal from the man to the animal and the best herders don’t confuse the animals by broadcasting unnecessary or contradictory signals. They keep their voices low. They move slowly with precise motions that give the animals only the cues that are necessary to ease them to where they need to go. The basic rules apply to all herd animals, but wild animals are more sensitive. Since there is less human-engineered mush between their senses of sight, hearing, and smell and their hooves and horns, buffalo react quickly. They are the opposite of cattle in that they have been selected to mistrust humans. Every buffalo has a pedigree of ancestors who made a living by eluding humans. Some have progenitors that occasionally wore a human or two on their horns. As a result they see humans as dangerous and their antenna for danger is acute. Subtleties ignored by cattle can cause panic in buffalo.

While it was true that I had moved the Gashouse Gang from one pen to the other on many occasions, it was also true that my experience with adult buffalo cows was severely limited. Almost everything I knew I had extrapolated from experience with cattle or gained through watching Duane and Scott. But there is a little bit of cowboy pride in all of us and, feeling like I was under a microscope, I determined to do my best.

In the best tradition of impostors I planned to watch Scott and do exactly as he did. He is not a verbal guy, so I had to stop him before each operation and make him tell me what we were trying to do and how he figured it was going to work. The basic idea was to quietly persuade four or five buffalo cows to leave the herd and to move up into a small pen, then to push them into an even smaller pen with a small gate that leads to the chutes. The small pen is called a “tub” and has one wall that swings and reduces the size of the pen, encouraging the buffalo to go through the small gate and into the chutes. Our job was to get the buffalo cows into the chute with minimal fuss.

Had I been given that job to perform by myself I would still be trying to convince the first cow to leave the herd. Getting down into pens surrounded by seven-foot fences with a mother buffalo is dicey to say the least. But I was not given the job to perform by myself. I was there to help Scott, and he is something of a prodigy at moving buffalo, renowned for knowing just how close to get to buffalo to make them drift away. He almost never gets so close that the animals feel threatened and decide to charge. Now I see that I was there in the pens with Scott as part of Duane’s master plan to train and groom me for the future. But that day I was not thinking of the future except to conduct myself in such a way as to insure that I had one.

There were fifty cows to move up into position to be vaccinated and pregnancy tested by the vet. The vaccinations were to satisfy international law. A Canadian rancher had bought the fifty cows and he had paid extra to be sure they were carrying calves. We planned to bring them up in about ten separate sorts. The cows were in a large pen, perhaps 250 feet by 100 feet, and true to their nature they moved to the far corner as soon as we entered. Scott opened the heavy steel gate of the next smaller pen and chained it into position. Then we walked at a right angle and away from the buffalo until we could come back, angling toward them, and by so doing, creating pressure that would move them into the smaller pen. Unlike cattle, buffalo have the idiosyncrasy of wanting to return to where they began, and as the bulk of the herd went into the smaller pen, Scott called to me to be careful because they probably wouldn’t stay in the smaller pen.

He was dead right. As we approached the gate with the idea of closing it behind the buffalo, the ground began to tremble. About the time I realized that the trembling earth was caused by buffalo charging back at us it dawned on me that I was in the middle of the corral, a long way from cover. Involuntarily I commenced a sprint for the fence, leaped, hit the top rail, and flipped over it to land on my back on the other side. The impact knocked the wind out of me but I pretended like I was fine because I landed, of all places, at Duane’s feet. He just looked at me and nodded. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t speak but my expression must have told him that I had no idea what he was talking about. “There’s a little gymnast in all of us.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Scott’s got five of ’em caught. Go on and push them up. The vet’s ready for ’em.”

To my amazement, Scott had managed to slam the four-hundred-pound gate in the face of the last five and they now milled calmly in the pen where they were supposed to be. “We’ll just move ’em on up and into the tub,” Scott said. The buffalo moved away from us just as they were supposed to. They went into the tub and we handed over responsibility for them to the chute crew. As we walked back to run up another group Scott said to me in all earnestness, “When they come back like that they aren’t after you. Stand right in the gap. Try not to weaken.”

Try not to weaken, I said to myself. Try not to eat. Try to dunk a basketball. Try to fly. But I told myself that Scott was an expert and if he said they weren’t really after me, then I had to believe that they weren’t. The buffalo’s intent had to be taken on faith. Standing in the gap was an existential decision. I tried not to weaken. And to my surprise, it worked. The buffalo would run right at me, lowering their massive heads and focusing their black eyes on my solar plexus. They would zig and zag like halfbacks in the open field, their muscular backs and hindquarters pumping the legs like pistons. But they stayed clear, only occasionally passing close enough for us to catch a whiff of their sweetgrass breath.

By the time we brought up the last few groups, Scott and I were working like a couple of Border collies. I found that to some extent you could steer buffalo by shifting your weight. It was not unlike riding a good horse, the subtlest movements could result in massive shifts of serious power. There was something satisfying in herding those buffalo, like being attached to them by a pillow of air: they felt our every move, kept the same distance between us at all times. It was as sensual as dancing, and at the end of the day I had the distinct impression that I had learned a tiny bit more about what is important and everlasting on the Great Plains.

When Scott and I pushed the last group through the tub we were finished. We climbed down off the corral and moved up to watch the last two cows being pregnancy tested. The sliding steel gate on the back of the squeeze chute opened and the cow charged in so fast that I didn’t see her move. There was only the crash, like cars colliding, and the twelve-hundred-pound iron chute rocked and came to the end of the chains that held it to the concrete pad. Duane operated the hydraulic head catch, quickly and precisely closing the welded steel pipes behind the buffalo’s horns. Then he touched the second lever of the control panel bolted onto the outside of the chute, and the hydraulic cylinders gently collapsed the chute side and held the cow tight. Once the buffalo was immobile, a cowboy unfastened a small metal door behind the buffalo as the vet lubricated his shoulder-length plastic glove. The cowboy stepped aside and the vet began the long push up the cow’s rectum.

After a strenuous battle to get his hand in the proper anatomical position, the vet paused pensively with his cheek against the buffalo’s curly hip fur. He palpated the uterus for a few seconds, feeling for the fetus. “Pregnant!” he yelled as he withdrew his arm.

“South pen!” Duane called out. The head catch came off and the buffalo pulled back into the chute. “Heads up,” Duane hollered.

When the squeeze came off and the crash gate opened, the indignant buffalo charged from the chute, blowing snot left and right as she swung her sharp black horns with serious menace. “Watch out,” Duane said, “she’s looking for someone that needs his oil checked.”

The cow had stopped not ten feet out of the chute and seemed to be considering reprisal. But Duane stepped out from behind the chute and waved his cowboy hat. “Go on, you old sow.” The buffalo looked at him, thought it over, then turned and trotted into the south pen. “Canada’s good place for her,” Duane said as he pulled his hat back on.

As those last two cows moved through the chute, other men’s days came to an end and they settled back against the scale house, content and satisfied. They were all as tired as I was. But we were happy and it occurred to me that I had passed the whole day and not given life’s persistent problems a thought. I took a good look at every man. They were mostly young. Two college kids were dipping into a communal snoose can for chewing tobacco. A short cowboy with a big black mustache reached into his coveralls for a pack of cigarettes and shook out a smoke. A man with an innocent face pulled on a piece of buffalo jerky. And at the very end of the line, staring intently at the last buffalo cow in the chute, stood a man twenty-five years older than any of us. It was old Dick Saterlee, his coveralls hanging on his broad shoulders as if on a coat hanger, his cowboy boots tucked into ancient overshoes the size of Volkswagen tires.

I walked through the relaxing men and clamped my hand on Dick’s arm. “Hey, you old bastard. What are you doing here?” The day of good work had me feeling wonderful and I wanted to joke, but when Dick turned to say hello I could see that he was in a serious mood.

“I came out to watch,” he said. Then he looked back to the last cow as she entered the squeeze chute. He went on talking but his words weren’t meant for me. “This is where agriculture is going, where we should have been all along,” he said. “It’s the future.” His old eyes were staring at that last buffalo like she was a topless dancer, and I had to lean close to hear him whisper. “Goddamn,” he said. “If I was twenty years younger I’d be into buffalo with both feet.”

“Pregnant!” the vet called out.

“South pen!” Duane shouted.

I spent most of that night thinking about what Dick said and what it really meant. I could feel my life changing. After drifting for a year in my post-divorce sea of uncertainty, I could see a destination taking shape on my horizon. By morning I had convinced myself that Dick Saterlee was passing to me some of his wisdom about these changing Great Plains and, by association, my life, too. I put the coffee on to perk at about six and went into my office to try to find the number for the Colorado Buffalo Company. By the time the coffee was ready I’d spent all the money I had in the world and my life had made a turn toward something very new.