Graze Master Group

From Bloomberg article linked below: ‘ … homesteaders gathered the buffalo bones. It was easy work: Children could do it. Carted to town, a ton of bones fetched a few dollars. Sent to rendering plants and furnaces in the big industrial cities, that same ton was worth between $18 and $27. Boiled, charred, crushed or powdered, it was worth as much as $60."

We were along the South Dakota and Minnesota line looking at cattle in the mid-1990s with John Delaney of Lake Benton, Minn. We were looking at Hereford herd bulls that the Delaneys had penned up at this old farmstead. All of them were drinking out of a clawfoot bathtub. We were in the process of remodeling my Great Grandfather H.F. Ficke’s house where my son and his wife along with their family live now.

The “Flat Water” our indigenous neighbors referenced was the great expanse of surface waterways: nearly 80,000 miles of rivers, streams and 430 square miles of lakes, that grace and sustain Nebraska’s landscape. Not included in those miles of waterways noted above is the entire Ogallala Aquifer, one of the most expansive in the world, covering about 175,000 square miles across parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.