Beef and Sand | Post 27 | Nebraska
Coastal ignorance unmasked: I didn’t know the Cornhusker State’s #1 agricultural product is not corn. It is beef.
I became suspicious soon after I departed Columbus while moving along State Highway 22, in Howard and Greeley Counties, where my hopes for a screen grab of an iconic sunset-over-Nebraska-cornfield were dashed by endless all-cattle landscapes.
The pattern held true as I progressed northwesterly through small farming communities, past isolated ranch homes, and right up until the grain elevators of Gordon, near the South Dakota border. Cattle.
Corn is indeed Nebraska commodity #2 — about $1 billion worth is exported out of state each year — but cattle and calves operations put the state atop all important national beef rankings: annual red meat production (8 billion pounds), commercial cattle slaughter (7.2 million head), exports, cattle feedings, and more.
Thus the landscape of my expectations — flat cornfields — was replaced by undulating, mesmerizing pastureland. The space — and, yes, there was lots of it — flowed and curved, frequently punctuated by a simple, congruent feature (hay, ranch entrance, train, picnic sign, cow, telephone pole, fallen barn).
Almost 90 percent of Nebraska’s cities have fewer than 3000 people — many hundreds of towns have fewer than 1000 — and my cross-state travel took me through the very least dense parts. This caused me to pause an extra moment when I did encounter Nebraskans.
Half of Nebraska’s 23 million acres of rangeland and pastureland are in the Sandhills, a geologically apt name for the grass-stabilized dunes and prairie in the northern west/central counties. Up here, I learned of the Spade Ranch, a large cattle operation founded in 1888 and occupying quantities of land off of Highway 27 between Ellsworth and Gordon.
The ranch, active since essentially the earliest days of Nebraska’s beef cattle industry, boasts a colorful history that spans an early 20th-century dispute over fencing on federal lands (which resulted in the imprisonment of Spade’s founders Bartlett Richards and William Comstock, the latter’s sentence commuted by President Taft when Richards died in jail); Depression-era foreclosure; and ownership by today’s operators, the Bixby family, the first of whom, Lawrence, initially worked at the ranch in 1909 when he was thirteen years old.
Though I missed any sign of the Spade Ranch cattle brand — an ace of spades — the sole business in Ellsworth (pop. 32) is Morgan’s Store, the original Spade Ranch store built in 1898 that served as ranch headquarters and a post office and today is still a ranch supply shop.
From the store north to Gordon, Highway 27 is known as the Mari Sandoz Sandhills Trail. Sandoz, a writer and Sandhills native born at the time of Spade’s founding, never finished high school but nonetheless became a school teacher at 17 by passing the rural teachers’ exam; convinced a dean to let her attend the University of Nebraska; and endured a thousand rejection letters for various work before her biography of her father’s life as a pioneer farmer, Old Jules, was published in 1935 by a major Boston publisher. She soon emerged as a leading writer of the West, known especially for Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942) about the famous Lakota leader.
Sandoz is buried near her family’s ranch, just south of Gordon along the portion of Highway 27 that bears her name, most of which looks like this:
Ground covered since last post:
- Start:Columbus, Nebr.
- Fullerton, Nebr.
- Scotia, Nebr.
- Arcadia, Nebr.
- Westerville, Nebr.
- Broken Bow, Nebr.
- Dunning, Nebr.
- Mullen, Nebr.
- Ellsworth, Nebr.
- End: Gordon, Nebr.
Trip to date:
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Badlands Basketball | Post 28 | South Dakota
