Former home of Nebraska cattle baron for sale. Asking price: $40 million.
CORONADO, Calif. – The tides were hungry in the winter of 1905, the waves relentless, and Bartlett Richards’ new mansion – his wife called it “Tranquillo” – teetered on the edge.
The wide, dirt boulevard that once separated his tidy front yard from the beach now crumbled into the Pacific. Neighboring homes stood on jacks, awaiting a horse-drawn retreat, and sweaty men in salty boots stacked 200-pound sandbags like hay bales in the surf. Seven thousand down. Twenty thousand stuffed and ready. The highest tide, newspapers reported, still to come.
For the most notorious cattle king in Nebraska history, founder of the iconic Spade Ranch and president of the Nebraska Land and Feeding Company, his family’s winter retreat wasn’t likely his main concern.
Just two years before, a federal grand jury had indicted the Spade for illegally fencing more than 200,000 acres of government land. His lobbying campaign to maintain said fences had withered in Washington. And he and his partner Will Comstock were now awaiting trial in the U.S. District Court in Omaha. All the while, a new wave of immigration – spurred by the Kinkaid Act and its promise of free land – was laying claim to what Richards and other Sandhills stockmen had long considered open range.
Richards’ empire, like Ocean Boulevard itself, was crumbling fast. And yet here he was, 1,600 miles from the ranch, fighting the tide all over again – literally.
He served with a committee representing property owners along the boulevard. He advocated for a sea wall constructed by the city of Coronado. And he offered $1,000 toward any such undertaking, which the city completed the following year by passing a bond and laying roughly 67,000 tons of granite by rail and crane.
As a result, Tranquillo still looms large today – twice as large, in fact. The mansion almost doubled in square footage. The boulevard was paved. New owners moved in. Old owners moved out. Celebrities wined, and lawmakers dined, and now this forgotten slice of Nebraska history — what many Coronadans consider the island’s most iconic estate — could be yours for a cool $40 million.
“Go tell Warren [Buffett] about it,” said broker Scott Aurich in August, standing in the horseshoe drive between two stone lions and his blinding white convertible, an Aston Martin DB9 GT Volante. “Tell him Bartlett Richards lived here.”
