Up close and personal: Nebraska couple telling, showing, bison story to visitors

Their low, rumbling bellow first cuts through the silence of the Sandhills.

Next comes the crunch of pointed hooves, trudging their way through tall prairie grasses.

Then, the oohs of the out-of-towners watching – people up close and personal with the majestic thousand-pound mammals for the first time.

This is Golden Prairie Bison, a ranch nestled in the Sandhills where Carl and Vicki Simmons raise a herd of 50 bison. Theirs is one of the dozens of bison ranches in Nebraska, one piece of an ongoing effort to rebuild North America's once-decimated bison population.

The Simmons' herd is small compared to large-scale operations like Turner Ranches – the driving force behind Nebraska's No. 2 ranking for most bison.

But to Carl and Vicki, this isn't about size or money. It's about the bison's bond to Nebraska's oft-forgotten and important grasslands. And as one of the growing number of ranchers integrating tourism into their operation, it's a story they're telling one visitor at a time.

"(The bison and the prairie) belong together," Carl said. "There have been droughts and catastrophes that have caused their numbers to go up and down. But the one constant has been the native prairie."

***

Carl, a third-generation cattle rancher, started with five bison calves he bought from Custer State Park in 1997.

Don't call them buffalo, he says – bison have bigger humps and shorter horns. The two species live on different continents, too.

He thought the burly animals were fun. They had personalities, running at groups of unexpecting cattle, scaring them, then seeming to look at each other and laugh. There was no business plan for these bison, Carl said. It was, initially, just a hobby.

Carl bought five more calves from North Dakota. He bought a bull from the Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge up the road from his ranch.

One year, Vicki learned from the radio that Carl was the top bison buyer at the refuge's auction that day. She didn't mind.

"We were just as infatuated with them as Carl," she said. "I think they kind of get under your skin and grow on you."

They started to share that fascination with family and friends, driving them out to see the massive animals.

Then, they thought, what if we shared this with strangers?

During a Zoom call during the pandemic's early days, Carl and Vicki floated the idea by their four kids: What if we turned our bison hobby into a tourism business?

The kids, scattered across different states, were on board. They built a website and wrote the text. One filmed a video, while another helped them complete legal forms.

Now, a few times a week, Carl and Vicki pile small groups of Sandhills tourists into a 23-year-old Ford Excursion.

Vicki dons heavy gloves to undo the barbed wire fence. Carl lurches the SUV over the hilly prairie.

But before visitors can see the main attraction, they have to listen to Carl tell a story. A story about grass.

He plucks tall stalks and flowering forbs, naming them, describing their root patterns. Yellow sunflower and goldenrod. Purple dotted gayfeather. Velvety white sagebrush, feathery switchgrass.

The grasses and rich soil have the power to sequester carbon, he tells visitors, affecting the atmosphere and weather. Grazing bison help the prairie flourish. Their hooves till the soil, and their dust baths create "wallows," that collect water and offer new habitat for plants and bugs.

The Nebraska Sandhills are the world's most intact prairie, Carl says, improving air and water quality, protecting species from extinction and mitigating wildfires and floods.

And they're disappearing, being replaced by farmland and development.

"...this story of the prairie, and how it's an integral part of us...it needs to be out there that the prairie is important," Carl says. "We charge money, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is to tell the story."

Then, it's time to find the herd. Sometimes, Carl pulls out a drone to find where they're gathered.

Sometimes, the bison – big, brown splotches on the golden prairie – come lumbering up on their own, their furry humps popping out from the grass.

The hulking masses of deep brown curls poke their shiny noses toward the windows of the Ford, sticking out their long tongues to receive snack pellets. The fluffy, red-furred calves stick close to their mothers.

They sniff around the car of newcomers. They nuzzle the ground for the tastiest pieces of grass.

Carl and Vicki have shared this tour with fellow ranchers who want to compare bison to raising cattle. With campers from Colorado escaping the crowds of Rocky Mountain National Park.

There were the doctors from Chicago, taking a break and camping at one of the four sites on the Simmons' ranch listed on the website HipCamp.

"I've read about the healing aspect of nature," one of them told Vicki. "But I've never experienced it until now."

There was a family, pulled out of international work because of the pandemic, whose kids went from being miserable while camping to being fascinated by the bison and not wanting to leave.

And the group of middle school girls from a nearby reservation, on a trip with their science club. They knew their tribe's history with bison. But the girls had never seen one in real life.

"They looked at me, and they said, 'Do you think they can tell we're native? Can they tell that we have this deep connection?'" Vicki said.

**

Millions of bison once roamed North America, according to the National Park Service. Uncontrolled hunting started pushing their numbers down during the 19th century.

By the 1860s, the U.S. government was encouraging the slaughter of bison to intentionally harm the native tribes of the Plains. It worked: By 1884, there were only 325 left in the country.

Conservation efforts have helped rebuild their numbers. Bison herds now roam national parks and wildlife refuges, like Fort Niobrara in the Sandhills and Crane Trust in Hall County. There's a push to restore bison on tribal lands.

Ranchers like Carl have also leaned into bison. From 2012 to 2017, the number of bison in Nebraska grew from 23,152 to 28,047.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2022 census has yet to be released. But experts and monthly USDA reports suggest the number of Nebraska bison continues to increase.

"I'm confident that the bison numbers are up," said Jim Matheson, executive director of the National Bison Association. "We're processing about 10% more bison than we were a year ago in 2022. 2022 was up 8% compared to the year before...we think there are more animals out there on the ground."

It might not make sense for increased bison consumption to tie to efforts to grow bison numbers. But with about 90% of bison living on private land as livestock, ranchers are a key part of conservation, Matheson said.

"We call it commerce by conservation," Matheson said. "Through selling the end product – the meat, the fiber – we are in turn creating an economic incentive for property owners to have bison on their land."

For Carl and Vicki, financial stability comes from cattle ranching. They're selling bison meat on a small scale. Their tours are small, too.

This summer, they started averaging two a week. On Labor Day weekend, they had four in a day. They recently started having to turn people away for the first time.

They've heard of ranches that pile dozens of people into open air buses and talk about bison on a loudspeaker.

Carl's family has ranched this land since 1914. A bus tour is the last thing he wants.

"What we want is something that's personal, where we can meet each person that comes," he said. "There are lots of special places. But this is really a special flyover place. Even though it's not these great grandeur mountains and lakes...(grasslands) are a unique thing. People start to understand that there are unique things everywhere. And it's worth our attention."

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