Why I call my company Nation Ranch
Long before Cottonwood Falls and Matfield Green became the preferred weekend destinations of well-heeled Kansas City cowboys, and before William Least Heat-Moon discovered Chase County, there was Nation Ranch.
Located in the heart of the Flint Hills, Nation Ranch is home to a double-wide that my great aunt and uncle used to own.
It’s a place where my family would gather for picnics and cookouts; fish for bluegill; hunt for fossils from the time of the Great Inland Sea; and spot the great blue heron that live in the trees high above the Verdigris River.
My great-grandfather, Jake Evans, purchased some land near Nation Ranch at the turn of the 20th Century and for 90 days a year it’s home to Brangus and Hereford cattle who fatten themselves on the native bluestem grass.
It’s also home to wild turkeys, prairie chickens, antelope, kildeer and crazy flying grasshoppers capable of leaping pickup trucks in a single bound.
I saw my first real cowboys at Nation Ranch, watching them drive steers to the Bazaar Cattle Pens where they were weighed ten head at a time, loaded onto trucks and shipped off to Emporia and eventually to Garden City and McDonald’s.
In 1976, two longhorn steers, Old Blue and Old Blackie, refused to go with the herd and ended up spending an entire winter in the pastures, at one point breaking into a barn on Nation Ranch to steal the horses’ hay, much to the chagrin of the ranchers.
Although both were eventually rounded up, they somehow got loose in transit from the trailer to the feed lot, ran amok through an Emporia used car lot, were ultimately apprehended, earned a reprieve and spent the remainder of their respective days in children’s zoos. True story.
Those days were full of my grandmother’s stories about a simpler time and a way of life that form a fair bit of what has become the Nation Ranch marketing philosophy.
In small-town Kansas during the Great Depression and Second World War, standing up for what you believe in, keeping your word and protecting your relationship with the customer truly meant something. In reality, it meant everything.
In today’s economy, you “give your word” daily through the messages and images that you choose to represent your company, and through the deeds of your executives and employees.
Your word is your brand. We help you give your word and we help you keep it.