Buffalo Billfold Company

06/05/2026

BUFFALO BILLFOLD DIARIES-ROADNOTES

The Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup is an event of uncommon merit. It boasts the largest American bison roundup in the world. A friend of mine, Chad Kremer, happens to be the herd manager of this remarkable collection of animals. Each fall, most of the herd is gathered, branded, inoculated, and culled. It is not merely entertainment for the public; it is a necessary part of managing and preserving one of America's great treasures.

Chad has taken on this responsibility with the seriousness it deserves. He possesses all the necessary credentials, including the curious and sometimes challenging task of managing the public. Along with the fine folks at Custer State Park, he helps oversee an undertaking that draws thousands upon thousands of visitors from around the globe, all eager to witness a free-ranging herd of bison being brought into the corrals each year.

There was a time, from the late 1870s into the early 1900s, when the American bison stood perilously close to extinction. Through conservation efforts and game laws, the species was pulled back from the brink. In the years that followed, it was the American rancher who dramatically expanded the North American herd by recognizing both its value and its potential. The public proved eager to embrace this indigenous animal as a traditional and healthy food source. Later, the movie Dances With Wolves helped propel that interest into the stratosphere.

It is 5:30 in the morning when we begin winding our way down narrow Lame Johnny Road. The road is closed to the public, but it serves as our only route to the vendor area reserved for us near the Custer Park corrals. A state park attendant waves us through after carefully measuring the clearance of our RV.

"The road doesn't get much traffic," he says. "If you think you're lost, go another two miles. You'll be at the back entrance to the buffalo corrals."

The sun is just beginning to rise as we roll along what seems less like a road and more like a grassy suggestion of one. It feels as though we are freelancing our way across the prairie, towing a trailer behind us and trusting the wisdom of strangers. After several miles, my wife suggests we may indeed be lost. I remember the attendant's advice: go another two miles. So we do.

Within a mile or so, we spot the peak of a large tent on the horizon. It rises from the prairie like a sail at sea, marking the event grounds and southern corrals of Custer State Park.

As we approach civilization, thirty or forty horsemen have already saddled up and are heading toward the distant hills. Their task is the final gathering of bison that have been driven from many miles away. They are seasoned riders who carry the Western mystique as naturally as they carry a saddle. Dust trails behind them as they disappear over a ridgeline. Real horses, real riders, real buffalo—all engaged in honest work. It doesn't get much more Western than that.

Our role in this enterprise is considerably less glamorous. We are artisans and purveyors of bison leather goods. The roundup is accompanied by an art festival, and while the park staff rounds up buffalo, we hope to round up a few tourists. Few places in the Upper Midwest attract such an international crowd. Over the years we have met visitors from nearly every corner of Europe. They arrive enchanted by the Western mythology they grew up reading about and watching on movie screens.

People begin arriving before sunrise carrying blankets and folding chairs. They climb the surrounding hillsides to secure a good vantage point. An hour or two later, the bison finally appear, cresting a distant ridge before pouring into the valley toward the corrals. Sometimes they are directed toward the spectators, who stand safely behind sturdy buffalo fencing. When the herd is large enough, the ground trembles beneath them. It is a sensation that few people in the modern world have ever experienced—a reminder that the earth itself occasionally notices what is happening upon it.

The work in the corrals lasts throughout the day. Buffalo are tagged, inoculated, and sorted. Calves receive their brands, and market animals are selected. The smell of singed hair occasionally drifts through the air as branding irons do their work. City folks receive a brief but memorable lesson on where food comes from and how ranching actually works.

The following day, the art festival is in full swing. Artists and artisans from as far away as Tennessee have come to display the fruits of their labor. An early autumn prairie wind arrives uninvited and immediately begins expressing its opinions.

The exhibitors have carefully arranged their displays beneath neat rows of ten-by-ten tents. By ten o'clock in the morning, nearly forty tents—about thirty percent of the festival—have been reduced to crumpled heaps of aluminum poles and fabric. We sympathize with our friends while secretly congratulating ourselves on years of experience. Surely we have learned a thing or two about prairie weather.

The prairie, however, has little respect for experience.

Without warning, the wind redoubles its efforts and joins us directly in the festivities. Display tables overturn. Merchandise scatters. Products that took hours to create suddenly develop ambitions of their own and go tumbling across the grasslands. We scramble after them like desperate sheepdogs. In a matter of minutes, we have ceased being spectators and become participants.

We carry a substantial inventory with us, and there is something profoundly humbling about watching your handiwork cartwheel across South Dakota while you chase after it in a cloud of dust. It causes a person to reconsider the romance of life on the road.

Even my eternal optimism is tested. We cling to tent legs that seem determined to become aircraft. Thoughts of the Hindenburg come to mind as we wrestle with canvas and aluminum. Fortunately, our tie-downs hold. Two thousand dollars' worth of tents are spared the indignity of taking flight and returning without proper landing instructions.

By noon, we want nothing more than to pack up and head home.

We have enjoyed a wonderful summer of festivals, but the comforts of predictable marketing—whether online or on Main Street—suddenly seem very attractive. The season has been long, and we are tired.

By late morning, our belongings have been hastily stowed in the trailer. Half the exhibitors have already surrendered to the wind and departed. I conceal my discouragement and work diligently toward our own escape.

Just as we are shutting the trailer doors, a past customer comes running up. She wants to purchase a purse she had admired the previous day. By sheer luck, it sits near the front of a storage container. Within moments, a sale is completed.

As I begin closing the doors again, another customer appears looking for a different purse.

Another sale.

Soon we have dragged a table and chair back out of the trailer and resumed business while the wind continues trying to relocate us to Nebraska. We stand there, half merchant and half weather victim, marveling at the absurdity of it all. The prairie is doing its best to shut us down, and yet customers keep arriving.

Our friends from Custer State Park stop by to offer assistance and encouragement. We thank them and assure them we're doing fine, which is mostly true.

As the afternoon wears on, the wind finally tires of its mischief. The skies clear. The evening settles into calm. A beautiful prairie sunset closes the day as if none of the turmoil had ever happened.

We quietly finish packing after the crowds have gone and return to our campsite. The following morning, long before sunrise, we point ourselves toward home.

Once again, our time in the great state of South Dakota has been rewarding. Like most worthwhile adventures, it left us with a few stories, a few lessons, and a renewed appreciation for our own beds. It was a fitting conclusion to another summer festival season.

Road Notes — September 2013

06/03/2026

Ties are tired. Leather Lasts. This Father's Day, give dad a gift he'll use every day for years to come. Shop our Father's Day Sale today and get the best deals on high quality, full grain leather, American Bison Wallets - Made in USA and built to last.

Shop Father’s Day gifts made in USA from full-grain bison leather. Wallets, belts, money clips, bags, and everyday leather goods handcrafted to last.

05/29/2026

Sometime Buffalo Billfold Kids get to fly airplanes! Congratulations Buddy!

05/23/2026

Our Memorial Day Weekend Sale starts now and goes through Monday! The perfect time to pick up some gifts or something for yourself!

https://buffalobillfoldcompany.com/memorial-day-sale/

05/20/2026

Our friend Rod Sather has been named National Bison Assoc. Member of the Year. It is no small award, Rodney encouraged Bill and Lauri to switch to Buffalo Leather over a quarter century ago. Today we also have bison ranging on his pasturage in western South Dakota (breeding heifers). We Salute Rod , He is a man of UnCommon Merit. billandlauri keitel Buffalo Billfold Company.

05/13/2026

SPIRIT OF THE WILD WEST

Crafted from the enduring spirit of the American frontier, Our chocolate Bison leather is a tribute to the rugged beauty of the West. Each hide is steeped in heritage—aniline dyed with rich, earthy tones and never masked with pigments, allowing the natural character of the bison to shine through.

Smoothed and polished on a state-of-the-art Italian machine, this leather gleams with an understated luster, echoing the hard-earned shine of a well-loved saddle. The grain remains honest and bold—American bison at its finest, tanned and finished on home soil.

As you carry it, wear it, or live with it, this leather tells your story. It develops a unique patina over time, shaped by your touch, your travels, and your way of life. Chocolate Bison is more than material—it’s legacy-grade leather, destined to outlast trends and stand the test of time. America's original hide, made to last a lifetime.

Crafted by people you know - BUFFALO BILLFOLD COMPANY
Except No Immitations

05/07/2026

THE PICTURES WE FORGOT TO TAKE - TED TURNER

We have been lucky in the company we’ve kept. The buffalo business has a way of gathering together a certain breed of people—ranchers mostly, and processors too—folks who measure wealth less by dollars than by rainfall, good grass, and calves standing healthy in the spring wind.

A few years back I was asked to speak at a National Bison Association winter conference. It was gathering of bison ranchers and the subject was “Event Development,” which is a polished term meaning: How do you get ordinary Americans to notice what you’ve been quietly doing all along?

There were maybe fifty ranchers in the room. I sat waiting to be called to the podium and looked around at the men and women gathered there. It dawned on me I was the only soul in the building who did not own twenty or thirty thousand acres of prairie. Some of those ranches stretched so far a man could ride half a day and still not find the back fence. Taken together, those ranchers controlled a remarkable piece of the American West—short-grass prairie rolling beneath a sky so large it could humble a bishop.

And it was country made perfectly for buffalo.

Over the years, one of the more curious acquaintances I’ve had through the industry was Ted Turner. Our paths crossed paths once or twice a year, often enough that a familiarity settled in between us, the way it does among people who keep returning to the same campfire.

Usually it happened at annual National Bison Association events. We’d have an exhibit set up displaying and marketing our products, and in the early morning Ted would come strolling through before the crowds arrived. He always traveled with companions, and he would politely introduce them all, including his “associate”—which, after a while, I learned was a gentler word for bodyguard.

By then he’d long since sold the television empire and become rich beyond the arithmetic abilities of ordinary ranch people. But when he talked buffalo, he sounded less like a billionaire and more like a man who’d discovered an old religion.
Most people remember Ted Turner from the Jane Fonda years: loud ties, yachts, headlines, America’s brash television cowboy. The Ted I encountered was older. Softer around the edges perhaps. We all age; even famous men eventually begin to resemble their uncles.

I sometimes thought it amusing that we shared a small and entirely unspoken connection through sailing. Ted had captained Courageous to victory in the 1977 America’s Cup, while years later I served as Vice President of U.S. Windsurfing, back when those little boards were becoming the fastest wind-powered craft on earth. It might have made for a fine conversation one day. Imagine with all the glory….being able to say to Mr. Turner “Congrats on the America’s Cup, but did you know that the windsurfer is faster?” But somehow we never got around to it. Buffalo filled every available inch of talk.
When Ted entered the bison business, he entered it the same way a thunderstorm enters Kansas—suddenly and over a great deal of territory. He began buying ranches across the West and stocking them with buffalo by the thousands. I sensed some ranchers were skeptical at first. Ranchers tend to regard celebrity with the same suspicion they reserve for early blizzards and government pamphlets.

Ted was not cut from the same cloth as most of them. He carried different politics, different manners, different notions of the world. But over time they saw that his commitment to the land and the animals was genuine. Through market crashes and uncertain years, he kept buying buffalo, kept investing, kept believing the industry mattered.
And that steadiness mattered too.

Eventually he opened Ted’s Montana Grill restaurants, which brought buffalo meat before millions of people who otherwise might never have tasted it. Ranchers who once rolled their eyes at the mention of his name gradually admitted—though usually not in public—that the man had helped move the entire industry forward.

I’ve met most all of Ted’s ranch managers over the years. (Seven different states and Argentina) Fine people. Real ranchers. The sort who know how to pull a calf at midnight in sleet and still shake your hand properly at breakfast. The thing that I noticed immediately is that Ted understood something many wealthy men never learn: you hire the best people and trust them, remarkable things tend to happen. All of his ranch managers were serious ranchers and they were also adept communicators.

Bison ranching is not work for the timid. It carries echoes of the old American West—not feedlots and spreadsheets, but open country, dust, weather, and animals that still possess enough wildness to remind humans not to become arrogant. Ranchers brand, vaccinate, wet check, weigh, sort, and cull. They ride fences in heat and snow. Every healthy herd is built on a thousand exhausting chores nobody sees.

And the buffalo themselves seem almost designed for the prairie. Properly managed, they restore native grasslands while producing lean meat for a country that too often mistakes excess for prosperity.

One memory stays with me more than most.
We were attending an annual National Bison Association conference in Denver. Our RV was parked beside a Planned Parenthood clinic, and throughout the day protesters gathered outside carrying signs and anger in equal proportion. More than once they stopped us on our walk back to the RV, mistaking us for patients or employees and demanding explanations we didn’t owe them.

That evening, after the crowds and shouting had faded into dusk, Ted came walking down the sidewalk with his associate. He noticed our RV and Buffalo Billfold logo on our trailer in the fading light and gave the RV a light tap with his hand as he passed by—a quiet little gesture meaning, Everything all right in there?
No speech. No politics. No entourage performance. Just a man out walking in the evening.

Then he continued on into the darkness, growing smaller against the Denver streetlights until he disappeared altogether.
And somehow that is the picture I wish I’d taken.

Buffalo Billfold Company / billkeitel

05/04/2026

THE TRAVAILS OF THE MUSIC ON THE ROAD.

In the tender, uncertain years of my youth—when a boy’s ambitions were larger than his wallet and twice as noisy—I had the peculiar good fortune to play in a rock and roll band. This was in a time when dances were plentiful, chaperones vigilant, and a fellow could make an honest weekend’s money shaking the rafters of a high school gymnasium.

Now, by some alignment of fate that I have since learned not to question too closely, we secured ourselves a bona fide booking agent—one Mr. Jimmy Thomas, a man of reputation across the Midwest, and not a little consequence.

He had, in his day, shepherded a band to national acclaim, which in those parts counted as near sainthood. As luck—or nepotism—would have it, his own son played in our band. And though I would not claim that this arrangement alone secured our success, I will admit we knew a chord or two more than the average garage outfit, and that never hurt matters any.

Our territory was not glamorous, but it was dependable. High schools from one end of eastern South Dakota to the other had dances to fund and restless youth to occupy—proms, snowballs, and junior high socials where the punch was weak but the expectations were high. We played them all.

Sioux Falls, of course, paid the best, being the nearest thing we had to a metropolis. But there were ballrooms too—grand in name if not always in structure—like the Showboat Ballroom in Lake Benton, where we returned every six weeks like a traveling circus with fewer animals and more amplifiers.

In our superior brains we decided not to open for Chuck Berry because we could make an additional hundred dollars/split six ways.

If our grades held steady—and this was a condition enforced with a firmness that brooked no debate—our parents permitted us these excursions. They drove us themselves, mind you, hauling guitars and drums in trailers hitch-fastened to station wagons, their headlights cutting across the prairie night. They were reimbursed for mileage, though I suspect most of them would have settled just as well for peace of mind and a thermos of coffee.

The money, modest by adult standards, felt princely to us. I earned thirty dollars a week teaching guitar at a local music store—respectable work for a schoolboy. But come Friday night, we could match that sum in a few hours’ time, and often do it again on Saturday. By our reckoning, we were men of means...times three!

And oh, how we fancied ourselves living on the edge of something grand. Songs like “Fire” Jimmy Hendrix..crackled through the airwaves, and others—less subtle—urged us to “Sock it to me baby” someone or other. One of our mothers, an English teacher with a sharp ear for mischief, raised an eyebrow at such lyrics and suggested we reconsider. We did, briefly.

Those years slipped by the way such years do—fast and glowing, like sparks from a bonfire. We thought ourselves free, independent, and just a little dangerous.

It wasn’t until we reached the sober age of thirty that it dawned on us: we had been chaperoned the entire time. Our great rebellion had unfolded under the watchful eyes of parents waiting patiently just fifty yards away in the parking lot.

And it is just as well. There were moments—quite wild ones—that might have ended differently without that quiet supervision.

Now, Dear Reader, we come to the present day, which is a different country altogether. The road is still there, but it winds through a landscape changed by time and technology. And yet, the traveling musician endures.

Not long ago, we had the privilege of hosting a group passing through on their way to Nashville, bound for the Grand Ole Opry—a destination that still carries a certain gravity, even in these modern times. Their route brought them near our corner of the world, and by a bit of good timing and gentle persuasion, we managed to bring them to Worthington, Minnesota, on a Sunday afternoon in May.

They called themselves The Cleverlys.

Word spread, as it does, and folks came from St. Paul, Fargo, Volga, and points in between. Four or five hundred souls gathered in the Memorial Auditorium—some seasoned listeners, others merely curious—and all of them left a little richer for the experience.

The band played with a skill and humor that reminded us that music, when done right, is both craft and calling.

I reflect on this not out of nostalgia alone, but from a place of understanding. I have known the road—its long miles, its uncertain paydays, its quiet motel rooms. Most musicians are not touched by the sacred finger of a great record label.

They are working people, plain and simple, who have chosen a trade that demands much and promises little beyond the chance to play again tomorrow.

And so when the show ends, and you find yourself lingering near the merchandise table, wondering if you ought to buy that T-shirt or CD, consider this: that small act may mean more than you know.

It is, in many cases, the difference between continuing down the road and turning back.

Your spare dollars, wisely spent, can make life more interesting—not just for you, but for those who bring a bit of light into small towns and scattered places.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce—once more and with proper appreciation—The Cleverlys.

Sponsored by the Buffalo Billfold Company - Gangnam Style