This prairie monument reflects the character of pioneer families on the eastern Colorado plains, where they shaped their world and were in turn shaped by the land, wind, rain, and snow. To escape the drought of 1950, the Conrad Schafer Ranch, begun in 1873 near aroya, made one of the last cattle drives along these tracks from its Hugo headquarters to pasture at river bend. Calves were weighed in the fall on this U.P.R.R. scale, built circa 1892, a single reminder of hundreds of others now lost to the past.