CHAPTER 10

As surely as land use in the West is changing, the people who live on the land are changing, too. The heartbreak of the Depression and Dust Bowl left the people who lived through it resentful, tough, and practical to a fault. This older generation tends to be hardworking and honest but provincial and politically eclectic. This depressed land and those Depression people have brought the nation such philosophic contradictions as George McGovern and the Montana Freemen, prairie populism and deep racism toward Indians, Tom Daschle and high radio ratings for out-of-control talk shows. Education has never been held in high esteem out here and a broad grasp of history, civics, and economics is rare. Too many of the older ranchers profess to hate government intervention while suffering a chronic addiction to subsidies. When it’s convenient, they insist they should be treated like any business. Yet they admit that there is an emotional attachment to land and livestock that does not exist between, say, a grocer and the cans sitting on his shelves. In truth, they are involved in a lifestyle, and that lifestyle suffers greatly when subjected to the cold laws of business, where profit is supreme. Still, ranchers feel a pressure to succeed like other businesspeople and so some latch on to an illusion that shifts the blame for failure or mediocre performance from personal shortcomings or serendipity of markets and weather to something solid. Some have never met a Jew or an African-American, but are pretty sure that they, like “the government,” have something to do with their problems.

Scapegoating is a way of life for many people and some of our old ranchers are no exception. But this old guard is gradually, if reluctantly, giving over the reins of stewardship to a new generation with a broader view. Refugees from the coasts are finding ways to make livings on the Great Plains, college-educated children of ranchers are returning home, the ranchers themselves are expanding their view of what this life can be.

Beyond the highly publicized movie-star types who have both blighted and invigorated parts of the West, there are normal people who have moved to this country for the sake of their children, searching for a place that is safe and still has the values that they feel are important. One example of this new generation of rancher is my friend Sam Hurst. After producing a story on buffalo ranching in South Dakota in 1992 for NBC News, he and his wife, artist Denise DuBroy, brought their talents and their two kids to a small buffalo ranch on the eastern slope of the Black Hills.

My neighbor to the south is a native son—but a native son who went away to earn degrees in environmental engineering. He worked in mining restoration until three years ago, when he came back to the ranch to take over for his father. He still consults for restoration projects but mostly he’s a rancher, the third generation of Andersens to ranch his land. But his forays into the larger world have made him different from the Andersens who preceded him. Myron’s an Internet junkie; and he fishes with a fly rod and turns the fish loose.

Straight west, two miles overland but ten by gravel road, is the Berger place. Ron and Mary live in Whitewood Valley, the broad strip of cottonwoods watered by the creek that begins in the gold fields of the northern Black Hills. They were both born in the Whitewood Valley but like so many, were pushed off by older siblings and forced to work in the town of Rapid City for twenty years before returning to buy Ron’s older brother out. For two decades Ron installed garage doors, a job he hated, and even though things have been tough since they moved back to the ranch, he says he’d do about anything before he’d go back to a nine-to-five job. Ron is generous with his special blend of licorice and chewing tobacco. He claims he’s eaten beef for every evening meal of his adult life. “I just love beef,” he says. “Beef and potatoes. I don’t know why anyone would mess with eatin’ anything else.”

A mile and a half northeast of the Bergers lives the neighbor that thinks most like me. Stan Holsclaw, my Rosebud Sioux neighbor, lives along our northern boundary with his wife, Sharon. Stan is a big burly fellow who worked the mines of the West—from the hard-rock copper mines of Montana to the open pits of Colorado and Wyoming. He was gone from South Dakota for twenty-five years before he, Sharon, and the two boys, Dan and Jess, came back to take over Sharon’s family’s place. Stan and I are about the same age, and though we look at a lot of things the same way, we have taken different paths to this little patch of prairie in the northern plains. I’ve spent much of my life with books, while he wrestled with giant machines, unions, and raising a family. I envy the solid family man in Stan. Though he would never express it this way, I believe that when they came back home he was pursuing the meaningful life that seems so elusive to me. With a history of hard work, a couple sections of land, and their two boys to pass the place on to when the time came, they seemed to have that noble life by the tail.

Unlike some of my neighbors, Stan and Sharon endure no xenophobia. Stan knows a little bit about most things and is interested in everything. He’s as comfortable fixing a tractor as he is moving cattle. Neither he nor Sharon get excited about much. When they show up at my ranch house on their four-wheelers they are not afraid to accept a glass of whiskey, no matter what time of day.

On our east side is the Johnson ranch. The reins of the place have recently been passed from the old man, Ken, to his son Dale, who is a graduate of the state agricultural college. Dale’s brother, Carl, is a veterinarian in Sturgis and together they run a vertically integrated operation: from raising high-quality mother cows grazed on well-cared-for pasture, to farming irrigated corn for feed, to running a slaughter plant in a nearby town.

And then there is Erney and me. I live in a little old house that was once a grain bin and Erney lives in his twelve-by-sixteen log cabin because we are not neatness compatible. Our agreement is that he will do his best to keep the ranch buildings neat and I will not comment on what goes on inside the little cabin. Erney and I ran a small cattle operation where we made hay each spring and fattened yearlings on summer grass. We lived on what we could make selling the hay and the fattened cattle and what I could glean from the outside world. I suppose there are those who say we are just a couple of old bachelors.

Bachelors are nothing new on the Great Plains, of course, and bachelors have always been known for their eccentricities. Still, our neighbors have never quite understood what we are doing here. Among the usual trappings of a ranch—the barns, the machinery, the well house, the corrals—are molting chambers for falcons, dog kennels, pens for raising Hungarian partridge, and a pigeon coop. Erney is cut from Old World cloth. He grew up in eastern South Dakota speaking Czech in a household with no running water. His needs are few and he watches over the ranch when I’m away in exchange for a place to get away from the modern world. I’ve come to trust him in all things, and though the ranch and its responsibilities belong to me, I consider him a partner. We live pretty close to the land. We hunt with the falcons and dogs, gathering as much nutrition as possible from the wild, and do our best to reduce the layers of human enterprise between ourselves and the world we consider to be most real. Unlike some of our neighbors’ pastures, ours are thick with grass. The stock is rotated to preserve the brushy draws, old irrigation dikes have been remodeled to recreate a wetland for duck production, and our only farming is a few grain strips left growing to help sustain the wildlife during winter.

Though western South Dakotans can be a surprisingly tolerant bunch, there is something in the way Erney and I live that offends some. For them this land is a sort of factory and it should produce wheat and beef. The idea of enjoying the natural features of the country, minimizing human impact on the land, and deviating from the way people have traditionally lived out here simply does not compute. And what really puzzles some of them is that by managing the land for wildlife and grass we end up raising more and better-quality livestock than many.

When I first moved here some of the neighbors were suspicious of my intentions. It took almost two years to become friends with my closest neighbor. Those were in the years when parts of the West were dotted with missiles pointed at Russia. They are gone now, but back then there were a dozen within ten miles of the ranch. Steve Bestgen has become a good friend, but at first he seemed to avoid me. He farmed a field that had no good access except through my yard, and for a week or so in the spring and fall Steve passed back and forth outside my office window several times a day.

The road he took is not a public thoroughfare, it is our mile-and-a-quarter driveway, but I didn’t mind. I would be at my desk trying to write, but since I welcome every opportunity to stop writing, I waved as he passed. He would pretend not to see me, and after a few trips past my window I was so desperate to stop writing that I would run out to flag him down when I heard the tractor straining to climb the hill. Once he was stopped, I’d crawl up on the tractor and attempt a chat with him. For the entire first year it did not go well. I got monosyllabic answers to my questions, but I refused to be dissuaded. I kept right on with my chatter about the weather and livestock prices and he slowly loosened up.

Finally he began to ask questions about the falcons perched in the yard, and one particularly beautiful autumn day he came out with a confession of sorts. “You know,” Steve said, “you’re really all right.”

“Yeah?”

“We weren’t too sure, you know.”

“About me?”

“Yeah. I mean all this stuff.” He waved a hand at the falcons, the bird dogs pistoning up and down in the kennel. “Some people said it was a front.”

I grimaced, afraid the local gossip was that I was a drug dealer. “A front for what?”

“Well, nobody can figure out what a guy with an education is doing out here. We kind of figured you were a spy.”

“A spy?”

“You know, a Russian or something. Keeping an eye on these missiles. But, heck, you just like birds.”

This was a breakthrough and I didn’t bother to tell Steve that I was not interested only in birds, but also insects, plants, weather, and solitude. “You got it,” I said. “Not a spy, I just like birds.”

“Well, that’s all right with me,” Steve said. “I got nothing against birds.” Our friendship began with that tepid approval, and twenty years later it has matured into something quite durable.

Steve and most of the neighbors accept most of the irregularities that occur over here. The bird dogs, the duck ponds, the grazing systems, the stacks of books have all won approval. They’ve come to accept that we knock off work every afternoon to fly the falcons and given up being shocked when introduced to a black man or a person with a “foreign-sounding” name. All in all, the neighbors have proved to be accepting. I don’t worry much about exposing them to new ideas anymore. But I was worried about what they would think when they first saw a buffalo staring over the fence at them. And I wanted to be sure Steve’s first sighting of a buffalo would be on my side of the communal fence.

When the herd consisted of twelve tame little orphaned buffalo calves, there wasn’t much danger of a neighbor finding a smashed fence and one of our buffalo chasing his cattle. But the heifers coming from Colorado were nearly full grown. They weighed a thousand pounds each and had been raised on the open range. It was going to take more than a three-barbed-wire fence to keep them on my property. In a literary sense I had always known that “Good fences make good neighbors,” but these new buffalo were not New England milk cows and so that old Robert Frost line took on a decidedly western twist. If we wanted to keep good neighbors, Erney and I had a week to make a pasture buffalo-tight.

Of course, we’d repaired a lot of fence in our lives and built several miles from scratch. We understood barbed-wire fences, and our understanding went something like this: there are two basic kinds of posts in a fence. The line posts are usually steel. They are driven into the ground about sixteen inches and set sixteen feet apart. The corner posts are wood, set in twos, with a braced crosspiece that forms an H, and are buried into the ground to a depth that will stand the pull of the wire. The wire is not so much hung on line posts as it is stretched between the corner posts. The line posts do support the wire but mostly serve to keep the wires a certain distance apart so animals can’t crawl through.

Armed with this meager knowledge, we put our minds and backs to making a small pasture buffalo-tight. But everything we knew about fences was based on the standard cow fence: line posts five and a half feet long, seven- or eight-foot corner posts sunk into the ground two and a half or three feet, three or four wires strung between them, the top one about forty inches off the ground. From Duane we knew we needed six total strands with the top wire at sixty inches. We figured to use seven-foot line posts to get a little over five feet out of the ground. What we didn’t realize was how much extra pressure all that wire, set at that height, would put on the corner posts. We started out building the fence as we’d built lower, lighter fences. We dug the holes for the corner posts three feet deep. The pasture we chose was only about forty acres, and forty acres has a perimeter of one mile. That’s 330 steel line posts and six miles of barbed wire. When you go down through a draw you have to use extra wooden posts, and our total for that forty acres was about twenty-five wooden posts: for a startling total cost of about five thousand dollars.

The new buffalo were coming in three weeks, so we had to hustle to get done. We didn’t bother to take out the old cow fence because that’s a big job in itself. We just built the buffalo fence a few feet inside the cow fence and left tearing out the old fence until we had time. The corral where the Gashouse Gang were kept was right in the middle of the pasture and so we would stop by to feed them as we went to work on the fence. As we approached our deadline we fell behind schedule and hurried through the chore of feeding the calves. Erney and I still argue about who did it but somewhere in the last week before the new buffalo arrived, the corral gate got left open. When we broke for lunch and drove past the corral, we found that the Gashouse Gang had escaped.

We immediately tried to lay the blame on each other but realized quickly that it really didn’t matter. The closest fence that would hold a buffalo was somewhere in Canada. I had visions of the Gashouse Gang on their way to Saskatoon and began organizing a search plan. An airplane came to mind but I decided to try a ground search first. We went back to the house and got the ATV. Erney went one way in the pickup and I screamed off on the Kawasaki. Five minutes later I crossed buffalo tracks left at a mud hole in an open gate to the north pasture. They weren’t heading for Saskatoon. They were heading for Billings.

I wandered a northwesterly line from hoofprint to buffalo chip and almost cried when I realized that the buffalo calves were heading toward the roughest part of the country. The fences for the next three hundred miles were poor cow fences and the calves could jump or run through them with ease. They were already on Stan Holsclaw’s land. He had made a special trip to my house when we first got the buffalo calves to tell me that he was planning a ceremony for the first day he found my buffalo on his land. The ceremony involved a rifle and a barbecue pit. “Indian been waitin’ long time,” he said with a laugh, “for white man’s buffalo to get on his land.”

I twisted the throttle on the ATV and raced north at a speed too fast for the terrain. The machine bounced and bucked, but I didn’t let up on the accelerator until I was a mile into Stan’s land. From tracking falcons with telemetry equipment I had learned that, after determining the direction a wild animal is moving, it is best not to linger behind them but rather to try to get ahead. They generally move faster than you think.

When I got to the high ridge that runs through the middle of Stan’s land I looked back to the south and, to my surprise, there they were, twelve splotches of fuzzy brown grazing along the edge of a draw a mile and quarter north of my fence. They were meandering along as if it was only natural, which of course, it was. But the days of the open buffalo range were over and I had to find a way to get them back into the corral a mile and a half south. My entire experience herding buffalo was at the 777, under the strict oversight of Duane or Scott Lammers. Erney would no doubt find me, but there was no telling when. I was alone in the middle of a few thousand trackless acres, just me and a dozen little buffalo. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Should I try to get them running back toward my land? Or should I ease down the hill and attempt to turn them gently? What would they do when they came to the fence?

I opted for the gentle approach, idling to the lip of the ridge and coasting downhill with my foot on the brake. The calves did not lift their heads until I crossed directly upwind of them. That was the first proof I had that their eyesight is poor and their sense of smell is excellent. They sniffed at the air and strained to see what was coming, but they did not seem frightened and, thank the gods, they didn’t run. I moved slowly toward them and, about a hundred yards away, began to talk in the same tone Erney and I used when feeding. They let me approach to within thirty yards before the closest ones began to move away. They continued to graze but started to drift as if I were pushing a wave of air in front of me and they felt it.

I kept them directly between me and the gate I wanted them eventually to go through, all the time expecting them to take off in a stampede. I was resigned to the possibility that they might decide to run and not stop until they had either reached Billings or charged over a cliff. All I could think to do was crawl along at about one mile per hour and hope for the best. As long as they were moving in the right direction there was no hurry. The closest buffalo continued to respond to my proximity by grazing through the herd. That left different buffalo closest to me and they, in turn, moved away. Only Curly Bill, now the biggest male but still less than four hundred pounds, would stand and stare at me before leaving a particularly sweet patch of grass. When we had to alter our course for a draw or pond I found I could steer them by changing my relative position. For an hour and a half the Kawasaki never once left first gear, but finally my errant little herd meandered through the gate of the corral and walked over to the watering trough, as if returning had been their idea.

A few days after the great escape I toured our new fence and met Stan touring his pasture in his pickup. It was a beautiful day and we stopped and talked over the fence. He mentioned that he’d seen the tracks of strange, perhaps prehistoric, beasts in his pasture. I told him the story and he laughed. “Hell,” he said, “it’s great to have them around.” Then he told me a story from when he was a kid on the reservation.

His father had a ranch that was fairly prosperous when compared to the poverty of the reservation. They raised cattle and a few hogs, and every fall they loaded up an animal and drove the truck down to the White River, where several families of full-blood Sioux lived in small cabins scattered among the trees of the river bottom. The animal would be traded for a load of firewood and the old Indians would usually slaughter the hog or steer on the spot. Stan shook his head and let his devilish eyes sparkle. “Them old squaws could butcher a pig in about twenty minutes. But if we traded a steer, they took more time. The old boys would pull a hank of sweetgrass out of some beat-up old pouch, and after they killed the steer, they’d get that sweetgrass burning and swish it all up and down the carcass.” He shook his head and the eyes told me he was seeing those childhood days in his mind.

“Never used the sweetgrass on a hog. Guess they figured a steer was close enough to a buffalo to try to appease its spirit or something. They told me it was a kind of prayer that the buffalo would return.” I could tell that this sort of talk embarrassed Stan. But he’s a brave guy and he says what he feels. “It feels good to have them on us,” he said again. Then he laughed. “Even if they belong to a white man.”

We parted then with broad smiles, but Stan’s words stuck with me. “It feels good to have them on us,” he’d said. As if he’d found the buffalo tracks on his own skin.

I went on inspecting the new fence and found it impressive except for the top wire on the first section we had built. For some reason it was not as tight as it should have been. The Colorado buffalo were due the next day, so I rushed back to the shop for the wire stretcher. A wire stretcher is a hand-held winch that can bring a quarter-mile of loose wire to the tautness of a guitar string. I wanted our first buffalo fence to be an example for fences to come so I hooked on to that slack top wire and cranked until it was tight enough to tickle Jimi Hendrix.

The new buffalo arrived in a thirty-foot aluminum trailer pulled behind the standard issue, four-wheel-drive, crew-cab, dual-tired Dodge diesel pickup. The truck was piloted by two cowboys who were originally from ranches fifty miles east of me. They’d been working for the Colorado Buffalo Company, a huge ranch on the plains outside Denver, for a few years and were more than happy to bring my load of buffalo up to South Dakota if it got them home for free. It was a ten-hour haul, mostly interstate highway but, with a heavy load of buffalo pulling the truck toward the ditch, stressful enough to turn a cowboy’s brain to jelly. I planned to pick those brains about buffalo ranching, but as it turned out they had family and girlfriends to hook up with. The brains might be jelly but the legs were ready to two-step.

A tall cowboy with a black hat unfolded himself from the passenger’s seat and came toward me with a clipboard while his buddy expertly backed the huge trailer up to the gate of the corral. The Gashouse Gang stood in the next pen sniffing the air. The cowboy pulled papers from the clipboard and handed them to me. “O’Brien?” I nodded and took the papers. They were health certificates from the state of Colorado. When I looked up the cowboy was already at the back of the trailer.

“Heads up,” he said, and pulled the pin that held the trailer gate shut. Erney and I moved to the corral rail as the trailer began to rumble. Then ten tons of buffalo leaped out in what seemed like one solid mass of black fur. One instant they were in the trailer and the next they were standing in the corral looking into the next pen at the Gashouse Gang. The first thing we noticed was how much blacker they were than our little herd. Then, as the mass began to dissolve into individuals, we saw how much bigger they were, how much more stately these older animals appeared. These were wild buffalo, any one of which could have modeled for the engraving on the old buffalo-head nickel. They looked briefly through the fence at the Gashouse Gang but seemed quickly to dismiss them as runts. Then they moved to the far side of the corral and looked out at the prairie that they must have known would soon be theirs.

I tried to pump the cowboys for tips on buffalo management but their minds were elsewhere. They didn’t say much, just a parting comment about the fences looking all right except that the top wire could use a tightening. Erney and I were watching Curly Bill trying to make friends with the new heifers by straining his head through the corral rails into the next pen. But I heard the comment, and as the cowboys pulled away, already popping the tops of Coors beer cans, I glanced at the wire I had tightened just the day before.

It was indeed loose, and since neither group of buffalo were paying attention to the other, except for little Curly Bill’s clumsy overtures, we turned our own attention to the fence. We got in the pickup and started around the perimeter of the pasture, stopping every hundred yards to check the tightness of the fence. The top wire on every section had loosened and the second to the top was not nearly as tight as it had been. “I tell you, Ern,” I said, “I stretched the top wire just yesterday.”

Erney rolled his eyes slightly. “Did you get it tight?”

“I got it tight.”

“Well, it’s not tight now.”

“No shit. I’m wondering why.”

We drove back to the corner post closest to the corral where the new heifers had found their way into the larger pen that held the Gashouse Gang. We stopped and watched. The bigger, darker animals ignored the little guys, and I pulled the fence stretcher from the back of the pickup. “Just have to tighten it again,” I mumbled.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Erney said. He was standing at the corner post and looking down. “It’s just going to loosen again.” He pointed to the bottom of the post. When I looked down I saw an inch gap on one side of the post. “You’re just jacking the corners out of the ground. That’s why the top wires are loosening.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “How do we stop that?”

“Have to reset all the corners.”

Corner posts can act like levers and the extra height of the new fence was putting more pressure on the lever and pulling the posts out. If we were going to run buffalo we’d have to reset every corner on the place, dig the holes deeper, maybe buy ten-foot posts to replace the old eight-footers. That would cost an additional fifteen dollars a post and there were hundreds of posts in the eight miles of fence we planned to rebuild. I looked up from the shifting corner post and out across the ranch. The new buffalo had mixed with the Gashouse Gang and were grazing the sparse grass inside the corral. Very soon we’d have to turn them out into the forty-acre pasture. I hoped it would hold them for a while, hoped these big black newcomers wouldn’t test the fence. We could replace the poorly set posts gradually. Then we’d have to start on the rest of the fencing. I hadn’t figured on new ten-foot corner posts. That was going to add 20 percent to the cost I’d already had trouble budgeting for. Eight miles of fence to build, I thought. At ninety pounds a roll, the wire alone would weigh over eight tons, the posts another seven, probably another ton just for staples and clips. That would make sixteen tons. And what do you get? It was like the beginning of a slow, hard journey. No real way to know what was ahead, and once committed, no real way to stop.

Thinking about all that frightened me. But when I looked back at the buffalo in the corral my spirits rose. The two groups had merged and the members of the Gashouse Gang seemed bigger and stronger for their association with the Colorado heifers. Already they were part of something larger than themselves. They were a herd, and when I stood in just the right place and squinted my eyes, I could make the corral disappear and the buffalo blended into the landscape, the way they belonged.