“To different parts of the ranch. Let me show you something.”
He turned to the left and started to drive down a road that had also beenplowed.
“Does someone live down this way? Is that why it’s been plowed?”
“No, but this is the west side of the ranch, and the ranch hands make weekly trips around the ranch to check the fence. The last thing you want is your cattle to get out or someone else’s to get in. This is my favorite part of the ranch, and someday I plan on building a house here.”
I took it all in. “How much land does your family own?”
“A thousand acres, but there’s BLM land, which means Bureau of Land Management, to the south of the ranch, so we’re able to have the cattle graze on that as well. That gives us an additional few hundred acres. You see that mountain right there? We own part of that. That’s usually where the cattle will go in the summer to graze, if not on the BLM land, so that we can grow the fields on the ranch to stock up for winter.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of land. And you own part of a mountain!”
His smile faded. “It was a lot more, but my grandfather sold off the land that the BLM owns when he got into some financial trouble. My father also had to sell some of it off to keep the ranch going. It about killed him to do it. This ranch has been in the family since my great-grandfather started it in 1887.”
“That is so sad he had to sell it off.”
“Yeah, I know it was hard for him to do. My grandfather, Flint Wilde, didn’t have a head for business. He was the only son of my great-grandfather, Lawrence Wilde. Flint liked to spend money faster than it came in and was a gambler. By the time my father got control of the ranch, we were in debt. Big time. So he made the hard decision to sell offover five-hundred acres to the state of Colorado like his father did. They turned it into BLM land and gave us grazing rights. Some other ranchers have grazing rights as well, and my father has sold a few grazing permits to a couple of smaller cattle ranches near ours, for the higher elevations, and that money also helps a lot.”
“I’m sorry your family had to sell so much land.”
“It didn’t hurt me or my brothers any, we never grew up with all that land, but my father did. By doing what he did, though, he was able to pay off all of the ranch’s debts and still have some left over to make improvements.
“My grandfather died of a heart attack while playing poker. During that game, he’d put up the deed to the farmhouse where his wife, my grandmother Lilith, had been born. He lost, of course. I think the knowledge that he’d gambled away the house was too much, and his heart gave out. The only thing was, it wasn’t his to gamble. It was given to his wife when her parents passed. My father thinks it was more likely he was scared to death…because if Grandmother had found out what he’d done, she would have killed him.”
“Did she lose the house?”
Ladd smiled. “No. Flint’s name wasn’t included on the deed, so it wasn’t his to give away. He died of a heart attack for no reason at all…of course, unless his heart really was that bad.”
“Or it’s like your father said, scared to death…literally.”
Laughing, Ladd nodded. “I never met him. He died before any of us were born. My father took over the ranch when he was pretty young. He had to run this place, plus take care of his mother.”
“That’s crazy. Does your grandmother still live on the ranch?”
“She lives in her ancestral cabin, the one that Flint tried to use for the poker game. It was on a ranch next to ours. When her father gave it to her as a wedding present, he gifted her the land as well, which wasn’t much since it was on the property line pretty much with our ranch. He wanted her to have a part of the ranch she grew up on. My father bought the rest of the ranch when my grandmother’s parents could no longer run it. He put it in Gram’s name along with the hundred acres that surrounds her cabin, which was once her family ranch. Grams lives in the cabin now. She has a separate entrance to her place that was the original ranch road for her family’s place, and my dad had another road built that takes her to the main ranch of River Falls Cattle.”
“I think it’s lovely that she lives in the house she was born in.”
Ladd nodded. “Grams just turned seventy-seven but acts like she’s thirty-seven. She walks every day, tends to her garden, and every Thursday, she plays cards with a group of ladies she grew up with.”
I chuckled. “I love that.”
“You’ll really like her, and she’ll adore you.”
“Why do you think she’ll adore me?”
He winked. “She’ll be the first to tell you that any woman who falls for a Wilde man is indeed a treasure from God, because we’re all stubborn and in need of a good woman to keep us in line.”
“She does not say that.”
He laughed. “I swear, she’ll say that to you!”
Ladd pulled up and parked where the road had leveled at the top of a hill and was about to start back down. You could see a huge pasture down below. Cows sprinkled the area, andI asked, “What kind of cattle do you guys raise? These look different from the ones I saw when we first drove in.”
“Those were black Angus, and these are Hereford. They’re a deep red with white faces and white markings on their bodies.”
“They are so cute. And the horses?”
