Not Quite Home on the Range : Lawyers and Other City Slickers Round Up $1,000 to Play Cowboy

For $1,000 a head, Wes McKinley and Dean Ormiston take city folks on a five-day cattle drive across the prairies and through the canyons of the Comanche National Grasslands in southeastern Colorado.

The Western epic “Lonesome Dove” and Hollywood’s “City Slickers” gave the real-life ranchers the idea. And, as they soon found out, there are a lot of well-heeled dudes who want to play cowboy.

The dudes get a free cold beer if they don’t change clothes for the entire trip--and their attire can become quite aromatic after wrestling calves during the branding-iron session.

Steve Wallace, 17, was so caught up in the cowboy experience on a recent trail drive that he vowed never to change clothes--not even for the airplane trip back to Minneapolis. “I want my mom to see me,” Wallace said.

Others on the drive included San Francisco lawyer Dennis Brewer, who broke his left arm falling from a horse on the final day. But before that, he had competed in a three-mile horse race across rolling prairie. “I was flying. That was faster and more challenging than I thought I could go,” he said.

The raw life of the trail made a deep impression on Brewer. “Frankly, I can’t really think of one other person in my office who would want to do this,” he mused. “There’s a certain mentality in most law firms where maybe they feel they want to reach a certain level of refinement and they don’t want to go backward.”

Trudy Quance, 22, a factory worker in a small town in Canada, wrestled calves--and had a picture taken to prove it. She was impressed with the cattle bosses. “These people just make you realize you can be who you want to be and, if somebody doesn’t like it, who the hell cares,” she said.

Michael Connor, a pal of Wallace’s, summed up the experience this way: “You do it all yourself. You just feel like you’re a cowboy.”