Our Bison Story

The latest news from Ron & T of The Buffalo Wool Co. at RATH Ranch. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

Hello and Good Morning Friends, and Happy New Year!

Hope you had a great 2025, and here is to making 2026 the best year yet! We have some fun plans in the works, and looking forward to sharing them with you as things come to fruition, but in the meantime, we have had a huge influx of new friends now reading these missives, and thought we would take today and introduce ourselves, tell a little about what we do and why we do it. If you have been around for a while, you most likely already know the story, but will stick in some new fun stuff here too.

This time of year, as things are selling/sold out, we get so many inquiries as to when "X" will be back in stock and why we don't have more Large Trekkers available... or whatever, this past month have literally had many hundreds such notes and calls, and I have to explain that we just can't go purchase bison fiber, and that it takes a year or so from harvest to shelf.

So, telling how we do this, and what it takes helps explain our processes and how things are made. Might have to split it into two or three parts, as I got started writing, it seems to be a much longer journey than I had in my head starting this today.

So, for all you new friends, just so you know, normally we don't talk about ourselves that much here, usually take this time/space and share fun stories about bison and maker/rancher friends doing interesting things. Will try and keep it brief today, there is fun to be had with family and friends.

We try not to just make these a weekly sales pitch, it's more fun telling other peoples stories and what is happening in the bison world, most of the time we only send one a week, unless we really have something important we need to get out to y'all.. new products or ??? The goal is to give you something fun, borderline funny, and hopefully educational to read on Saturday mornings.

Hope you have an amazing 2026. Make good choices and have some fun with family and friends!

Much love and gratitude from Ron & T, Cecil, Stacy, Paula, Little Piggy Wrangler and the crew here at RATHranch.

Good news, the America's Forgotten Prairie Documentary, on the native Florida bison has been fully funded, and is gonna happen, if you would still like to contribute though, you can here. Will just make it better.

From the beginnings..

Somewhere around 1986, My father, Cecil Miskin (commonly referred to as the Herd Bull here) got a couple of bison and they really made his little ranch look good. We didn't have a clue then what how much that was going to change the trajectory of our lives. I was still in High School, and really had very little interest in raising animals then... until he started putting bison steaks and burgers on the table, at the time, I was intending to be come a world famous chef, and obviously that didn't happen.

It's been a while, and there may be some minor factual inaccuracies, but this is how I remember it, and I am old, and do have a touch of CRS.

Fast forward a few years, and in the late 90's Dad had started up what ended up being called "The Brown Hair Project" gathering shed bison fiber from around our place. He had put a box of fluff that he had gathered around the ranch on Ebay, and after a frenzy of bidding from handspinners, a 3lb box of nasty dirty bison fiber ended up selling for over $400... and that sparked some interest.

Bison ranching at that time wasn't a "Get rich quick" scheme, it was more about passionate enthusiasts trying to bring back these big beasts to their rightful prominance in our country, and his re-discovering that the fiber had value (will share the story of the original 1870's Buffalo Wool Company soonish) back then, the hides back then were going for $5 or so and a lot of them just ended up in the trash, and with this new market, the thought that money that could be passed back upstream to the ranchers was exciting.. the more of the animal you use, the less waste and more profitable ranching could be. That was the original spark that started this 20+ year adventure.

FF to 2005, he had started gathering fiber from ranches, and was trying to figure out how best to utilize it. I had the opportunity to sell my share of our little restaurants and was looking for a new mission. He called me one day, and said that he was having 400 bison hides delivered to the ranch from a local processor, and asked if I could go down there and lay them out and salt them. Well, fresh raw hides don't do well in Texas heat, and by the time I got there, they were pretty rank and I spent a while laying them out, tossing my cookies every couple hides. It was pretty bad.

Well then a lot of experimenting and a huge learning curve on washing and cleaning, and separating the coarse guard hair from the fine soft down, and we got contacted by Linda Cortwright, publisher of Wild Fibers magazine, and long story short, she proclaimed that we had a legitimate business, and named it "Buffalo Gold" we were just selling bison fiber to handspinners, we did that for a while, as we learned the best uses and most practial applications for this amazing resource.

Somewhere in there, over the course of the next 5-7 years, we learned how to spin, weave, knit and blend fibers, and understand a little bit about the construction of garments and fabrics. It took a while, this was an evolution of our abilities and knowledge.

It wasn't till we were going to make a large batch of our "Lux" bison/cashmere/silk yarn that things really changed. We had invested pretty much everything we had in that batch of yarn... a bale of cashmere and one of silk weren't cheap (more than our house cost), and the spinning mill mistakenly plied it at 2 twists per inch instead of 7 and it was basically unusable for handknitting. Well, in a panic, thinking we were gonna lose the house, be homeless and be out on the street, I started calling knowledgable friends, and Scott Gray the yarn maker at Jagger Brothers in Maine suggested we make some socks out of it. That was a major tipping point for us. Still have a fresh pair of those bison/cashmere/silk socks on my desk here. They serve as a reminder of how this crazy stuff all started.

Then not long after, Dad had a chance to purchase a piece of Charles Goodnight's property in the Texas panhandle and acquire some of the decendant animals from the original Texas herd, and since it made sense, so we kinda split up the biz, and my wife Theresa and I started the Buffalo Wool Co, and Dad opened up the Herdwear retail store.

There is a fair bit more to the story and it actually gets to be more fun and funny, but I think it's been a long enough read for now, we will continue this on Saturday.. gives me something to work on over the next 48 hours.

From a friend... stress testing his Pro-gear socks. Loved this shot.