It’s a scene from a movie set in the pioneer days of the Old West: A herd of bison thundering across the tallgrass plains as cowboys on horseback ride alongside.
But this is real life, and Chad Kremer is one of those cowboys - the head cowboy, in fact.
Chad, who grew up on a farm near Reading, just north of Worthington, has been the manager of the bison herd at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota for 14 years. On Friday, the annual roundup of the herd began, a spectacle of pounding hooves witnessed by thousands of visitors to the park. There’s also an arts festival and Dutch oven cookoff, but it’s the bison with which Kremer is concerned.
Raising buffalo (a misnomer, but one that has come to be commonly accepted in referring to the American bison) wasn’t even a faint inkling in Chad’s mind when he went to college at South Dakota State University in Brookings. While growing up on the farm, he’d helped with custom feeding cattle, but his educational focus was landscape design.
“At Brookings, I had a public speaking class, and one of our first assignments was a 25-minute informative speech,” Chad related in a phone interview before the roundup got under way. “At the time, I didn’t really care for doing that, so what was I going to do? I saw in the paper that Blue Mounds (State Park in Luverne) was having its buffalo sale, and I thought, ‘Well, buffalo - that interests me.’ At the sale, I met a couple of guys who were raising them - one guy up at Sauk Centre, and another down on Swan Lake .. so I went and visited them, did my research for my speech, and really got interested in it.”
As a result, Chad attended his first buffalo roundup at Custer in the late 1980s, and he bought his first calves in 1992 or ’93. Along the way, he became acquainted with Rod Sather of Round Lake, who was building his own bison enterprise in western South Dakota.
“He ended up offering me a job to come work for him out there,” Chad explained. “Suzi and I got married in 1995, and we decided that was what I was pushing toward, so we moved out there, where the buffalo trail started.”
Chad worked for Sather’s Mosquito Park Enterprises for four years, from 1996 to 2000, followed by a short stint on a central Colorado ranch.
“We were looking to move more to this part of the country - there were other things we looked at - and then the job at Custer came open. The previous herd manager died in a horse accident.”
For Chad, there’s just something about bison that set them apart from other livestock.
“The first auction I came to out here, it was a late November day, and there was this 2-year-old bull in the ring. I just remember him making a lap around it, maybe 30 foot around, then he stopped in the center and then went right over the fence. I thought, ‘That’s cool. I got to have one of those.’
“There’s the intrigue, the history of them, and the animals themselves are so much more athletic than beef and a lot hardier,” Chad continued. “I’ve learned, especially being at the park here, but even in private ranches, that lots of times things are done that tend to overmanage them. If you give them enough room and let them do their thing, they are usually just fine and can take care of themselves.”
The Custer herd currently numbers 1,166 head of bison. Chad is in the process of rebuilding the Custer stock. Extra animals are auctioned off in November.
“We were in a drought when I started here in 2001,” he said. “So we continued downsizing for a few years, and we still have not seen our normal number. We grow all our own replacements. We have a closed herd, don’t bring in any from outside herds. ... By the end of next season, short of any unforeseen reasons, we should be back up to normal numbers, 1,460 to 1,470.”
The roundup gives Chad a chance to take stock of the animals up close, pregnancy test the cows and determine how many animals will be sold in November. The testing used to be done during a second winter roundup, but Chad felt that was added stress.
The roundup itself has also been modified to reduce stress for both the animals and their caretakers. The physical roundup takes place on the last Friday of September, with spectators directed to two viewing areas, north and south.
“It gets to be a special event for all our volunteers and seasonal staff,” related Chad. “We do a briefing for them, walk them through it a week before: helping to pen them, running the gate. It’s a treat to come help and be a bit close up to them.
“Our horseback roundup team is up to 60 riders. Approximately 20 of them are the core team, people who have helped and have experience doing it. We have a number of local people, some from around the state who come every year. Then we have our draw riders - we’ll take 20 to 25 slots. They fill out an application, and we do a drawing on it. And then the balance is our invited list, which comes typically through the governor’s office.”
Chad heads up the horseback teams, his riding skills having improved on the job.
“For a farm boy with very limited riding experience before I started, I like to think I can hold my own,” he said. “That first weekend, I said I was glad the horse knew what he was doing, because I was just along for the ride.”
As spectators watch, the animals are funneled into a trap and eventually into holding pastures.
“One change I made to reduce stress on them is now we wait anywhere from four, five days to a week to process them,” explained. Kremer. “We do a small group immediately after the roundup for people to see what we’re doing - around 100 head or so we’ll run through in two hours or so. The rest of the herd we brought in will go into a holding pasture there for up to a week, then we’ll begin working them through.”
While the crowd comes to see the spectacle of the roundup, Chad also sees it as an opportunity to educate. Tourists don’t always realize the dangers of getting too close to the bison, which have free range of the park and can move swiftly despite their size.
“There’s the selfie movement,” he said. “People want to get a picture, and they think they have to be within five or six feet. … They’re big, and they’re furry, and they look kind of cumbersome. … but they can run 35 mph, and I’ve seen that bull that weighs a ton jump over a five-foot fence. They’re very, very athletic, very quick. … They’re individuals just like people. Probably the most protective is the cow with the calf early on. The next most dangerous is a bull during the rut or breeding season. He don’t care if you’re in a pickup or not, he’ll stand you off.”
As manager of a large bison herd, there is no typical day for Chad, although he said there is a seasonality to the enterprise. But he really never knows what each day will bring. His most dangerous on-the-job mishap occurred about two and a half years ago while rounding up some calves.
“It was February, and five or six of us were out riding, bringing those little calves in,” he described. “We hit a side slope, and the ground was frozen, and the horse slipped, his feet went out to the left, and I crashed into the hill. I dislocated my shoulder, tore my rotator to pieces and injured the axillary nerve in my shoulder. After about a year, I ended up at the Mayo Clinic for nerve surgery.”
Chad and Suzi have three children: Hannah, 18, Grace, 12, and Isaac, 11. The family has its own smaller herd of buffalo, but only Isaac has shown an interest in following in his father’s footsteps.
“He says someday he’s going to have my job,” said Chad with a chuckle.
