An expedition was organized, with ranch foreman Billy Irwin in charge, to venture into the Sandhills and round-up the scattered cattle.

[3] On August 10, 1888, Bartlett Richards bought Bennett Irwin's filing near Bean Soup Lake in Sheridan County.

During the fall fireguards were plowed to prevent fires from spreading, as the pastures had dried by the summer and cattle were shipped by railroad to markets in Omaha and Chicago.

The Chadron Advocate reported in 1891," Bartlett Richards has received the beef contract at Pine Ridge Agency for the ensuing year.

[9] William Comstock stayed in the home valley of the Spade Ranch headquarters, which is approximately 25 miles (40 km) north of Ellsworth.

The ranch store featured staple groceries, clothing, supplies, and a place to pick up mail carried from the Ellsworth post office.

[13] Richards and Comstock were the first cattlemen in the area to use chloro-naptholeum, a livestock dip that removed lice, mange, Texas itch, and other external parasites.

In 1903, the Spade's Hereford cattle won the Grand Prize at the American Royal Stock Show in Kansas City, Missouri, for the best of any breed in both yearling and calf competition.

Richards testified in favor of the Bowersock Bill, making the following plea:[17] Here the United States has immense properties that are not improving, which we [cattlemen] have grown up with and have improved, and we ask you that while you have no better use for this land, that you will lease it to us at a reasonable rental, and that the moment you have any better use for it, for irrigation, for mineral entires, for storage reservoirs, for agricultural purposes, for forest reserves, for anything else which may come up and be the sense of Congress that it wants, that land shall be lifted out of the lease, and no recompense shall be made to the former leaseholder.Congress hesitated to pass a leasing act, and the United States Department of the Interior was determined to remove the fences.

By November 1902, the Rushville Standard reported that Bartlett Richards had been ordered to remove his fences in Sheridan and Cherry Counties.

[19] The Secretary of the Interior, Ethan A. Hitchcock, following the Roosevelt administration's direction, set out to enforce the 1885 Van Wyck Law, which forbade the fencing of public lands.

On November 13, 1905, Richards and Comstock were sentenced to the custody of a United States Marshal for six hours and a fine of $300 and half of court costs.

The Secretary of the Interior was upset about the news and fired District Attorney Baxter and Marshal Thomas L. Mathews, the officer in charge of Richards and Comstock's six-hour sentence.

On October 17, 1910, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals of Richards, Comstock, and their associates, and ordered them to pay the fines and prepare to serve their sentences beginning on December 7.

In June 1911 Richards was allowed to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for gallstone surgery and returning to the Hastings jail on August 10.

Bartlett Richards died while incarcerated at Hastings, Nebraska, in the early morning hours of September 4, 1911, before his wife could arrive by train from the family home in Coronado, California.

As they freighted past the Spade Ranch Store with milk cow trailing, the Spade Foreman Mike Peterson saw them from the front porch and laughed when he saw the family's piano in the wagon and said “I’ll just give them nesters six months.” Lawrence would later write, “Before the Petersons left a few years later, Mike sold me his homestead for $11 dollars an acre.” They chose the tranquil name of Cloverleaf Ranch for their new homestead but in the first year a rattlesnake bit their dog, James killed a wolf and a neighbor threatened to contest Lawrence's sister Ina's homestead filing unless they gave him a cow, calf and a spool of wire.

One afternoon Bartlett Richards yellow buggy approached, “He got out of his cart,” Lawrence wrote, “helped us turn the cow on her back, and said, ‘Hurry up, you kids.

I would have earlier but she was making $40 dollars a month and I wanted to be sure she had it all.” Through their union Lawrence and Eleanor bore two sons Larry Leonard in 1928 and James Daniel in 1929.

“When I got a chance to buy into the Spade land, Brass loaned me the money,” he said, “Eleanor cooked for the hay crews and everyone on the place worked hard.” In 1937 after E.P.

A man had to be able to handle draft horse teams, cable hay, pitch multiple stacks a day, chop ice on a twenty five foot tank and scatter up to a ton of cake.

Lawrence then, at the age of 52, purchased a Stinson 108-3 Flying Station Wagon of which he estimated himself to have flown over 100,000 miles on routine ranch duties.

Lawrence hosted fly-ins, rodeos, bbq’s, ballgames, and dances through the years and believed that a handshake answered better than words.

[30] Through Lawrence's efforts, including compiling a petition of 300 cattleman's signatures, in 1970 Bartlett Richards was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, Ok.

In 1980 Lawrence received news that six sections of the Spade Home Valley and numerous original buildings at the headquarters had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

This included the 1879 log cookhouse (moved from the Newman Ranch in 1888), 1889 horse barn and the 1889 Richards-Comstock House originally constructed of sod.

In addition to reviving the Spade Ranch, Lawrence Bixby also returned the Richards Home in Ellsworth, Nebraska to noteworthy status.

In 1954, Bixby donated $60,000 ($552,863.20 current USD) to help pave Nebraska Highway 27 from Ellsworth to Gordon, which passed by the ranch.

The original owners of the ranch, Bartlett Richards and William Comstock, were among the few who proved the Nebraska's Sandhills if handled properly, made good grazing land.

The Spade has been operated by Jim's son Bret Y. Bixby, a Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association Steer Roper, since 1990.