Becoming Pardners--Wild West Style : Marriage: Nuptials with cowboy kick have become so popular one planner can hardly keep up with demand.

It was a shotgun wedding of a different sort.

The shotgun was fired, and the bride and groom came riding over a hill on horseback. They wore the traditional wedding outfits--plus cowboy hats and boots. The guests sat on hay bales.

Once hitched, the bride and groom left the ranch on a covered wagon.

Not your typical wedding. But Cory and Jennifer Everett, who are both 26 and both grew up on ranches, didn’t want it any other way.

“Being on a ranch and stuff, you just kind of live everything the old-fashioned way,” Cory Everett said. “That’s what we do for a living and we’re just trying to keep the West alive.”

So is Linda Bonham, whose Bonham Western Wedding Service helped plan the Everetts’ nuptials. Bonham said cowboy-style weddings have become so popular she can hardly keep up with the demand.

She estimates she’ll help plan at least 100 weddings from May through October, and offer advice over the phone for at least 100 more.

“What’s so nice about Western is it doesn’t follow the traditional etiquette,” Bonham said. “It’s so laid-back, easygoing and essentially you do what you want to do.

“What makes a Western wedding? As much as you want it to be Western or as little. You can take a traditional dress and put boots and hats with it and you’ve got the flavor.”

Bonham started her company after she tried to plan her own Western wedding two years ago but couldn’t find anything she wanted--not even a decent invitation.

“She found one with two little gophers with hats on,” said her husband, Bill. “She brought me to town to look at these things and I said, ‘No way.’ ”

Bill Bonham, a fourth-generation rancher near Cheyenne, suggested his bride start her own business.

So in January, 1993, she mailed a catalogue that offered 18 invitation styles. She received enough responses to follow up with a survey asking women what else they wanted.

The overwhelming answer: Dresses.

“Nobody made dresses they wanted,” she said.

Bonham did. She started designing simple denim, boot-cut wedding dresses with no trains to trip up a hoedowning bride. She also added miscellaneous wedding gear to her repertoire, like a $16.50 bridal garter with a tiny cowboy hat attached.

“The phone started ringing off the hook,” she said. Orders came from as far away as Europe, Japan and Australia.

Bonham attributes part of her booming business to the popularity of country music and dancing.

And to tradition. “A lot of people are trying to get back to their roots,” she said.

“I’m country and Western at heart. All the values that real cowboys have is what I was looking for in a husband and I got one.”