This is an email is part of a monthly series called Inside the Herd, that our subscription customers receive — offering a front-row seat to the reality of what it takes to bring you meat raised right.
This was a very moving piece by Colton Jones reflecting on his time with Dan O'Brien.
May pulled us south this year, down through the Badlands and into the western edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, where Deer Creek Ranch stretches across 80,000 acres of rolling grass and river-cut valleys.
It’s a place that feels both endless and intimate, the kind of landscape that reminds you how small you are and how big the work is.
The route from our Cheyenne River Buffalo Ranch to Deer Creek is one I hadn’t taken in years.
It was the same road Dan O’Brien used to drive when he first started hauling me around the Plains, trying to show me the world that would eventually become the backbone of both our identities.
Back then, we were helping his old friend Ed Iron Cloud catch and sell yearlings. Ed never called himself a rancher, “caretaker” was the word he preferred.
In Lakota thought, if you take care of the buffalo, the buffalo will take care of you.
Ed lived that truth with a quiet steadiness that stuck with me.
This May, heading out before sunrise to meet the harvest crew, the light bouncing off the Badlands pulled me back to one particular morning with Dan.
We were supposed to turn west toward Porcupine, but he kept driving. “There’s something I want you to see,” was all he said.
A few miles later he eased the pickup onto a subtle rise beside a small sign: Massacre of Wounded Knee.
Dan didn’t look at the sign. He walked past it and stared out over the open flat where hundreds of Lakota — mostly women and children — were slaughtered by the 7th Cavalry.
Without the sign or the mass grave, you’d never know what happened there.
No marble walls.
No fountains.
Just grass moving in the wind.
“Just remember,” he finally said. “1890 wasn’t that long ago.”
Fifteen years later, I stopped again. Same grass. Same wind. Same silence. But without Dan there, the place felt lonelier.
I walked the mass grave, reading names like Yellow Bear, Spotted Elk, High Hawk. Then I got back in the pickup and kept heading south, letting the weight of that history settle into the work ahead.
By the time I crossed the Niobrara River, my thoughts had shifted from loneliness to the familiar anticipation of long days — sore backs, sore feet, cramped muscles, and the quiet satisfaction that comes from doing something hard with people you trust.
Our harvest crew is four men: three young Lakota skinners and a sharpshooter.
While the sharpshooter waits for the right moment, the skinners are inside the mobile harvest unit, giving everything they have to skin, eviscerate, split, trim, and rinse the previous animal.
I bounce between them — time in the field, time in the unit — trying to keep the whole operation humming.
A year ago, none of these young men had ever held a skinning knife. Now I have to work to keep up with them.
When I step into the production area of the mobile unit, it feels like entering another dimension — the Sandhills outside, vast and wild; inside, a tight, focused world of steel, steam, and intention. One guy scrubs equipment.
Another sharpens his knife on the tri-stone. All of them carry themselves like craftsmen, not laborers.
They’ve adopted the mindset that harvesting buffalo on the Plains is a calling, not a job. Halfway through the month, our old heirloom Bluetooth speaker finally died for good.
Without the usual mix of rap, classic country, and rock rattling the walls, the unit filled with stories, teasing, and the kind of laughter that only comes from men who trust each other.
They caught me up on whatever it is 18- to 20-year-olds are doing these days.
I felt proud to be with them — proud of the work, proud of the brotherhood, proud of the small world we build together each time we roll the semi onto a new ranch.
Out there, nothing can touch us. The outside world, its noise, its problems, it all has to wait until we’re home again with 30 head hanging in the cooler.
On the drive back north at the end of the month, I passed Wounded Knee again.
I still don’t know exactly why Dan brought me there all those years ago.
Maybe he wanted me to understand the land differently.
Maybe he wanted me to feel the weight of the past before I stepped into the future.
Or maybe he just wanted me to remember that the work we do, the buffalo we care for, the people we feed, the young men we train, is part of a much longer story.
Whatever his reason, I’m glad he took the detour.