Ever wanted to be a cowboy? Liam Stebbingvisits two ranches in Oklahoma and Kansas, where everyone seems to carry a gun and Barack Obama is a delicate subject
THE ARKANSAS RIVER is wide and slow as it passes Tulsa, on its way to join the Mississippi and flow, eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico. If you cross it on Oklahoma State Highway 97, then turn and head west by Fisher Creek, following the railroad track where double-stacked, six-engined freight trains that are two kilometres long wind through town, hooting their way from Chicago to Los Angeles, you come to the turn for Meadowlake Ranch.
Drive a few minutes past the trailer homes and the Baptist churches and you reach the gates of the ranch, which is almost silent at this time of year, with just the sounds of leaves rustling in the breeze and hawks screeching in the trees.
Al Rivers will meet you. He's the ranch foreman. You'll know him by his two-day stubble, worn jeans, spurred boots, neckerchief, leather cowboy hat and sunglasses - and by the fact that shaking hands with him is like clasping sandpaper. I'm spending the night in one of Meadowlake's rustic cabins, and he has driven down from his quarters in his pick-up truck to make sure I have everything I need.
The cabin, which has a steel roof and timber walls, has two rooms: a living space with a king-size bed, a large sofa bed and a kitchenette; and a bathroom with a deep whirlpool tub. "We're pretty informal around here," says Rivers, a wiry 41-year-old former marine who grew up in New England. "But if you want to smoke anything, you can do it outside." Which I guess is his way of saying: Welcome to the Wild West.
During the Oklahoman summer, when sunset, at 8.30pm or so, brings a little relief from the heat of the day, up to three dozen people stay here each night. They come to live like cowboys, whose way of life still beats strongly in this and neighbouring states, at the geographical and - their residents would say - spiritual heart of the US. Guests are free to roam Meadowlake's 150 hectares, a mix of open and forested land that is home to coyotes, possums and even the odd rattlesnake, or to take a rifle or a shotgun across the highway to hunt pheasant or deer on another 300 hectares that the ranch manages.
We saddle up to see Meadowlake on horseback. Or, at least, I do. Rivers prefers to go bareback. It's more natural, he says, and quieter when you want to track deer. He's right: my saddle, a tooled-leather western model with rawhide-covered stirrups, creaks loudly as we set off into the ranch's backcountry. We won't have much chance of creeping up on a buck today. It's my first time on horseback, but Rivers is a good teacher, and Bull, whom I'm riding, is a gentle beast, so it's easy to meander along trails that the horses know well, past hunting stands and the ranch's tepees, where hardier guests can spend their nights.
What would Rivers do if we came across a rattler? He'd take out his knife and throw it at the snake, he says. He has done it before, and he has a good aim. Then he'd take it home to cook, as he eats whatever he kills.
Rivers doesn't carry a gun. That makes him pretty unusual in Oklahoma. It certainly sets him apart from Meadowlake's owner, Tom Warren, who arrives at the ranch from Wanenmacher's Tulsa Arms Show, where he has spent the day selling off 20 or so guns from his collection of 100. He was there with his veterinary-student son, a "good kid" who "goes to church three times a week and wouldn't say 'shit' if he had a mouthful of it".
A large, sociable man who likes cigars, Warren is dressed entirely in denim, with a Stetson on his head and a pistol in his back pocket. He wants to show me how to throw a tomahawk before the light fades, so we tramp into the trees behind Meadowlake's dining lodge. Warren fetches three of the small axes from an equipment store that also houses bows, arrows and cattle ropes, and explains what to do. Stand with your back to the target board, then take five paces. Turn around, clutch the tomahawk as if you were shaking hands with it, raise it above your head and then swing your arm down, letting go of the weapon when your forearm is horizontal. I try it, and the tomahawk spins through the air before slicing into the target, a series of braced timber squares that looks like a giant chessboard. "You see!" cries Warren. "Works every time."
The tomahawk mastered, we move on to the bows and arrows. At today's arms show, Warren found a bow carved from bodark, which he says is the best wood for the job. Rivers can barely contain his excitement, and he grabs some razorcap broadheads: arrows topped with fearsomely sharp blades that would fell a stag, or anything else unfortunate enough to get in their way, within seconds. He fires a trio of them towards the trees, and their blades slice into a model coyote that serves as a target. I try it, too, with less impressive results.
Over a dinner of ribs with potato salad and corn, washed down with Scotch, I take a look at Warren's pistol, a Browning, then ask if he has ever used it. On animals, he says, but never on a person - although he wouldn't hesitate to defend himself. "I'd shoot somebody dead and then go and have a coffee. Well, that's what I think, anyway. I've never shot anybody, but I carry a gun and the district attorney would let me kill somebody who was threatening another person. It's called the make-my-day law around here: being killed is an occupational hazard of being a criminal."
He takes a puff on his cigar - a Rocky Patel Edge that he has asked me not to tell his wife he's smoking indoors - raises an eyebrow and asks: "Does that sound harsh?"
We walk over to look at a photograph on the kitchen counter. It shows Paul McCartney surrounded by Warren's family. It was taken a few weeks ago, when the singer stayed at Meadowlake, keen to be a dude for a day or two. What did Rivers think of him, I ask the next day over a breakfast of French toast and pork patties, before the foreman takes me down to the shooting range to try out a couple of guns. "I made myself pretty scarce. I'm not a celebrity kind of person. Truth be told, I couldn't care less."
Rivers, having spent four years in the military, is a pretty good shot. After pinging a volley of bullets off the range's targets, he hands me a single-action rifle. It takes .22-calibre bullets and is a bit of a baby as these things go. "It holds 14 rounds," says Rivers, "so in theory, you should be able to hit the three 25yd targets, the three 50yd targets, the three 75yd targets and the three 100yd targets, plus the two in the trees, with a single load." He has done it a couple of times. I hit about three targets with each 14-bullet load, mainly the 25yd ones. My safety glasses steam up, and although the rifle is light, my arms soon tire. I try a .22-calibre pistol. It's a devil to aim. Who knows where my bullets end up? They certainly don't trouble the metal discs I've been trying to hit.
Not being a fan of guns, Rivers has been sitting quietly, watching. As far as Warren knows, his foreman is here to stay, but Rivers is thinking of buying a horse and hitting the road. He started travelling after his divorce, a couple of years ago, when he sold his riding school back in Massachusetts. Now he wants to trek north, towards Wyoming and Montana - beautiful states, he says. Four months should do it. His eyes have a faraway look.
TIME FOR ME to hit the road, too. A few kilometres from the ranch, I pick up what used to be Route 66, which in these parts was an escape route from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. This is not the glamorous Route 66 of the song. The gleaming Studebakers have gone; instead, jalopies rust slowly in the yards of down-at-heel clapboard houses. At one point, an oil truck thunders by, its side daubed with a declaration: "Not every young man fights for his country - just the brave ones."
Another sign catches my eye: Stableridge Vineyards. I park and go in. A tasting session is getting under way. Tom, a short, squat Oklahoman with a white beard and glasses, is showing a Californian friend this part of the highway in a beat-up Honda Civic. "The wine is so much better than the last time I was here, three years ago," Tom tells Annetta Neal, Stableridge's winemaker. "I think what you're going to be able to do is produce really good table wine." Neal accepts the remark graciously. This is so like Sideways.
It's nearly time to go. "You'll never guess what," says Don Neal, Annetta's husband, before I leave. "Paul McCartney passed through a few weeks ago. He was travelling incognito - in a Ford Bronco, which is pretty low-profile, all right," he says with a snort.
My next stop is Stockyards City, a district of Oklahoma City where tens of thousands of cattle are auctioned each Monday and Tuesday. Anyone can sit in on a sale, and it's quite an experience. The auction room is at the end of a wooden walkway that sits on stilts above thousands of pens where the day's cattle are held. Cowboys in Stetsons and yellow sou'westers herd them one lot at a time towards the semicircular auction ring. The auctioneer's assistant presses a button, a metal door slides open and the young cattle skitter in. As the assistant swishes a long cane topped with a small blue plastic flag to keep the animals in place, the auctioneer starts the bidding. I have been warned not to rub my nose or scratch my cheek. The auctioneer is incomprehensible for the first few minutes. Then you realise that he's taking bids per 100lb of animal. On this lot, offers start at $80. It's over in less than 30 seconds: sold for $112 per 100lb, the results flashed up on TV screens. The assistant whooshes the cattle out, presses his button to open the door for the next lot, and it all starts again.
Stockyards City isn't pretty. As we leave the auction, a gargantuan pistachio-green cattle truck adds a welcome splash of colour to the road leading from the pens. (Apparently, it has featured on the truckers' version of Pimp My Ride.) Like many places around here, Stockyards City was built to do a job, which has left it looking functional.
Interstate 44, which I pick up to reach Tiger Mountain Ranch, is similarly inaesthetic. But turn off it for Tiger Mountain Road and you're suddenly on little more than a dirt track in the middle of the countryside. ("Mountain", it seems, is a relative term, for these slopes are high compared only with the plains of Oklahoma.)
After passing a few oil and gas wells, and just when you think you must have taken a wrong turn, you come to the ranch, a family-run business centred on a handsome 550sq m (6,000sq ft) waterside lodge.
Where Meadowlake takes a dude-ranch, back-to-basics approach to the western lifestyle, Tiger Mountain prides itself on welcoming you as one of the family. It also stresses the Native American lifestyle.
"Or Indian. We don't mind what you call it," says Moses Littlebear, one of the partners in the business, whose heritage is a mixture of Comanche, Cherokee and Chumash. "We can't let ourselves be offended by what you call us. You have to learn how to let it roll off you."
He'll show you how to track animals, or how to light a fire with a steel and flint, and even put on his regalia and perform some Native American dances.
The night I'm there, his wife, Anna, serves dinner while Littlebear gets changed with their son, Little Moses, in the TV room, where half-a-dozen or so La-Z-Boy recliners face a pull-down screen. They normally perform outside, but the weather has taken a turn for the worse, so they clear a space in the huge sitting room.
Littlebear is wearing a bustle and a headpiece made from golden-eagle feathers. In one hand he carries a fan made from golden-eagle feathers, in the other a stick mounted with a golden eagle's head. His son, who is taking a break from playing on his Nintendo Wii, is wearing even fancier regalia, with a buzzard-feather headpiece and a bustle that features two eagle's feet.
They do the crow hop, a dance that mimics the way the bird moves. This, explains Littlebear, is an example of Native Americans' appreciation of nature. The dance is energetic, and at one point his headpiece falls off. Were this a pow-wow, he explains, the dancing might grind to a halt in response to this affront to the bird, whose feathers should never touch the ground. He scoops up the headpiece, pushes it into his tied-back hair and carries on dancing. After several more minutes of hopping around this athletic, intensely happy man is short of breath. Little Moses, who is 14, is a less extrovert dancer. Perhaps he would rather be back on the Wii. But maintaining tradition shows respect for their ancestors, says Littlebear.
THE NEXT MORNING we walk over to Tiger Mountain's tepee encampment, under trees on the other side of the lake. There are cougars and maybe wolves and a black panther out there, says Littlebear. Rattlesnakes, too. (The mountain is named after a Native American family rather than the big cat.)
They don't allow guests out of the lodge at night - not, Anna quickly points out, because of the animals but because there are few lights on the property, which is three kilometres long and 1,500m wide, so if you get lost in the dark you'll probably have to spend the night outside.
Littlebear points out possum tracks, and we stop to watch a family of white-tailed deer skip through trees by the perimeter fence. He learned from his grandfather how to track, how to dance, the folklore.
Before I leave, he shows me how to use a bow and arrow Native American-style, which is quite different from the method we used at Meadowlake. We shoot from the hip, using home-made arrows with tips made from flattened nails. The point, says Littlebear, is not so much to be on target every time as to launch an onslaught. The arrows are much less accurate, and a lot less deadly, than Tom Warren's, but shooting them is also a lot more fun.
You could have a ball at Tiger Mountain in the summer, when families round off their days by jumping into the lake to cool down, perhaps racing from the deck just below the lodge's five bedrooms to a jetty across the water. Guests have the building to themselves at night; Anna or her friend and colleague Rose, who normally does the cooking (and whose husband, Kenney, is a cowboy who will also share his knowledge with you), will leave some food in the fridge if you fancy a midnight snack.
I'VE BEEN IN Oklahoma all week. Before I leave the US, I want to see a bit of Kansas, too, so I head for Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, in the Flint Hills. This, as Eric Patterson, the park's head ranger, says, is Little House on the Prairie country, at least in the popular imagination. In summer, the grass can grow almost two metres tall, although where the wind whips across the landscape - which, being in Tornado Alley, is hit by at least one twister most years - the blades manage only half that.
Cattle have lived here for about 500 years, since Spanish colonists introduced them. Pioneers rounded them up, regarding them as free for the taking, as they also regarded the land - although, as Patterson, whose degree is in American history, says, Native Americans might have something to say about that.
I drive into the backcountry with Jeff Rundell, another ranger. Cattle feed here for 90 days a year, from May until August, when they're shipped off to the huge feedlots of west Kansas to be fattened before ending their lives in a Chicago abattoir.
The rest of the time, visitors are free to hike, picnic or bus their way around the preserve's 4,000 hectares. You can stand alone on the prairie and feel what it must have been like to live here 130 years ago, in the middle of nowhere.
If you come in early spring you might see the grass aflame, as the rangers burn off any saplings and other unwanted flora. Within 10 days, the prairie will be covered in lush green grass again. That's Rundell's favourite time of year in the Flint Hills.
Suzan Barnes loves it, too. She owns the Grand Central, a boutique hotel in the tiny nearby town of Cottonwood Falls, whose charming main street, named Broadway, evokes the US as it must have been 50 years ago.
Barnes is steeped in cowboy culture. Her mother and stepfather ran a feedlot, and tomorrow, she's driving to Amarillo, nine hours away in Texas, to cheer on her son-in-law at a rodeo championship. She also keeps guns (and takes pride in the award-winning steaks that she serves in the hotel's grill). Perhaps unusually, though, she's a Democrat. "George Bush has ruined this country," she says. She's excited about the change that Barack Obama, whose mother grew up down the road, in El Dorado, might bring as president, and keen to hear what Ireland thinks of him. "You can't talk about Obama here," she says. "I wouldn't bring the subject up with people I know, anyway, as it wouldn't be a polite conversation."
Her friend Ernie Rodina, a horse-feed salesman who also presents Better Horses, a syndicated radio show, arrives for his usual fillet steak. He lets me try on his cowboy hat. "Suits you!" he exclaims.
I can't resist. On the way to the airport in Wichita, I stop at Hatman Jack's, whose owner, Jack Kellogg, helps me select a souvenir of my time in the Wild West. As he steams the felt to sit snugly on my head, he talks about the differences between shapes of hat, and about the time he fitted Luciano Pavarotti for a fedora (a style in which he has been doing a healthy trade since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out).
I leave to catch my flight wearing my hat, which Kellogg has told me to describe as a western style with a pinched crown, low tailwind and high bullrider - or a cowboy-style crease in the top and a brim that points up at the sides and down at the back.
A few other people at the airport have hats on, but we fly to Chicago in an aircraft that's too cramped for Stetsons, so they have to come off. By the time we reach the Aer Lingus desk at O'Hare International Airport, in Obama's home town, the only hats on show are White Sox baseball caps. It's as if we've landed in another country, or perhaps just back in the real world. Time for this cowboy to put his hat away.
Liam Stebbing was a guest of Kansas Oklahoma Travel Tourism. For more information about holidays, call 0044-1750-4222400 or see www.travelksok.co.uk.
Go there
Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) flies from Dublin and Shannon to Chicago, from where you can fly with United Airlines (www.unitedairlines. co.uk) to Tulsa or Wichita. United sells combined tickets for the same route. American Airlines (www.american airlines.ie) also flies from Dublin to Tulsa via Chicago. Delta (www.delta.com) flies from Dublin to Tulsa via Atlanta. Continental(www.continental.com/ie) flies from Dublin to Tulsa via New York or Houston.
Where to stay, where to eat and where to go
Where to stay
Meadowlake Ranch. 3450 South 137th West Avenue,
Sand Springs, Oklahoma, 00-1-918-4946000, www.meadowlakeranch.com. Ranch with four family cabins and some tepees, too. Dude breaks from $150 (€120) per person per night, including activities and meals.
Tiger Mountain Ranch. Tiger Mountain Road, Henryetta, Oklahoma, 00-1-877-6984437, www.tigermountainranch.com. A five-bedroom, 550sq m lodge sits at the heart of this ranch run by three families, including the Native American Littlebears. BB $150 (€120) per room, plus $25 (€20) per activity; or $1,750 (€1,400) per person per week, including meals, activities and airport transfers.
You can also book holidays for both ranches (excluding flights) through Ranch America (www.ranchamerica.co.uk).
Colcord Hotel. 15 North Robinson, Oklahoma City, 00-1-405-6014300, www.colcordhotel.com. A luxurious base from which to visit Stockyards City. Doubles from $159 (€127)
Comfort Inn Suites. 3101 North 14th Street, Ponca City, Oklahoma, 00-1-580-7652322, www.comfortinn.com. If you're interested in Ponca City's oil heritage, this is a good place to stay. Surprisingly comfortable. Ask for a room at the back, away from the road. Doubles from $92.95 (€74).
Grand Central Hotel and Grill, 215 Broadway, Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, 00-1-620-2736763, www.grandcentralhotel.com. Boutique hotel with tasteful but homely rooms. Excellent steaks in the popular restaurant. Rooms from $150 (€120).
Hotel at Old Town. 830 East 1st Street, Wichita, Kansas, 00-1-2674800, www.hotelatoldtown.com. Fancy a night in town before flying home? A good base for visiting Old Cowtown Museum. Suits from $152 (€117).
Where to eat
Cattlemen's Steakhouse. 1309 South Agnew, Oklahoma City, 00-1-405-2360416, www.cattlemensrestaurant.com. Go early and try the $8 breakfast steak, a five-ounce sirloin that comes with two eggs, hash browns, biscuit (an airy scone) and gravy and will feed you for the day. Feeling adventurous? Try the lamb fries: thinly sliced testicles, deep fried in batter. Diners eat a mountain of them each week.
Rusty Barrell Supper Club. 2005 North 14th Street, Ponca City, Oklahoma, 00-1-580- 7656689, www.rustybarrell. com. Great steakhouse, with a brick barbecue in the dining room and a good salad bar. The entrance is hidden down an alley behind a theatre, and you have to ring the doorbell to be let in.
Emma Chase Cafe, 317 Broadway, Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, 00-1-620-2736020, www.emmachasecafe.com. Good home-cooked food in simple surroundings. Sue Smith, the owner, sells some of her produce, such as apple butter, in the adjoining crafts shop. Live music at weekends.
Old Mill Tasty Shop. 604 East Douglas Avenue, Wichita, Kansas, 00-1-316-2646500. A great diner-cum-soda-fountain. Try the club sandwich or the meat loaf. Shakes, malts and sodas are mixed in front of you.
Where to go
Stableridge Vineyards and Winery. 2016 Highway 66 West, Stroud, Oklahoma, 00-1-918-9681769, www.stableridgevineyards.com. Stop off to try a range of wines, all made by the owners in the winery next door.
Pops. 660 West Highway 66, Arcadia, Oklahoma, 00-1-405-9287677. If you're on Historic Route 66, look out for this petrol station, which serves shakes and more than 500 kinds of soda. You'll know it by the 66ft illuminated steel soda bottle outside.
Stockyards City. Agnew and Exchange Avenues, Oklahoma City, 00-1-405-2357267. Worth a look even if you're uninterested in cattle. Head for the auction room on a Monday or Tuesday. Drop into Langston's (2224 Exchange Avenue, 00-1-405-2359536, www.langstons.com) afterwards for westernwear.
Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. 620 North Harvey Avenue, Oklahoma City, 00-1-405- 2353313, www.oklahomacity nationalmemorial.org. A poignant memorial to the 168 Oklahomans who died when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, on April 19th, 1995. Its creators have helped New York and Pennsylvania deal with 9/11 and its aftermath.
National Cowboy Western Heritage Museum. 1700 Northeast 63rd Street, Oklahoma City, 00-1-405- 4782250, www.nationalcowboy museum.org. Lots of western art, although the draw for families will more likely be the guns and movie memorabilia. John Wayne was the parade marshal when the museum opened, in 1965.
Marland Mansion. 901 Monument Road, Ponca City, Oklahoma, 00-1-580-7670420, www.marlandmansion.com. An outlandishly lavish house built with an oil fortune. Take a guided tour to appreciate the extraordinarily tangled personal lives of its inhabitants.
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Highway 177, Strong City, Kansas, 00-1- 620-2738494, www.nps.gov/ tapr. A taste of the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle. Take a bus tour of the prairie or follow one of the visitor centre's hiking maps.
Old Cowtown Museum, 1865 West Museum Boulevard, Wichita, Kansas, 00-1-316- 2191871, www.oldcowtown.org. A living-history museum that brings the Wild West to life. Make a night of it by staying for the Diamond W Wranglers' extremely entertaining Chuckwagon Supper and music show.
Hatman Jack's, 601 West Douglas Avenue, Wichita, Kansas, 00-1-316-2644881, www.hatmanjacks.com. The place to pick up a western hat. The owner, Jack Kellogg, will custom fit it for you.