Originally aired November 17, 1995  PERSPECTIVE Longhorns and Long Days: The Great American Cattle Drive Reported by Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent Every morning begins with a roundup. Impatient cowboys push reluctant cattle to regroup and head west. These are longhorns. They haven't been bred a lot these days. Even for a veteran ranch hand like Dick Kennedy, these animals are a different breed. [Dick Kennedy]"I don't think they ever bred the wild clear out of the longhorn. You know, the longhorn are a wild breed of cattle. You know, it's just a little bit of deer left in them. They ain't a whole lot different than people, I don't think. They all got their own personalities. And they will all step on you if they get a chance. So they ain't a whole lot different than people." Longhorns and long days make this cattle drive real. So does the weather and the riding and nearly six months on the road. [Dancer Davis] "If you look at it, no matter how we want to be awe-inspired by it, it's still a re-creation. There's no functional economic purpose to move these steers in this way. Obviously it's going to cost a lot more money than if we'd have stuck them in a truck." Dancer Davis, publisher of the Cowboy Gazette, became something of the poster child for this event. [Bill Kelly:] "Is it possible to do it the old fashioned way this time?" [Dancer Davis :] "Absolutely impossible. I think you do as many things as you can that way out of tribute or respect and pure enjoyment. Ahhh there's a lot to be said about after all, the old event. We could just put them in a truck and drive them up there and it'd be over. It wouldn't mean anything. But facing the challenges, the weather, enjoying the camaraderie that develops and the bonding that takes place after the hard times, that's what it's all about." [rider]"Morning." [Dancer- poetry :] "We left Texas on a wing and a prayer. It's a wave of public support that'll get us there. The part and days were wet and cold. And cowboys came from six states with hearts of bold. The endless days of constant saddle time will leave more memories awfully fine. Facing death with each step of the ride, our cowboy spirit we won't hide. Spurs will jingle, hats and faces will age, but somewhere, someplace our deed, our names will make a history page." Other riders would come and go along the way, hang up to $100 a day for a few hours of old west deja vu. There were ranchers and housewives and city slickers. [Minnesota rider:] "This is the Great American Cattle Drive, ladies and gentlemen. We're here from Minnesota. All these little ponies down here in the trailer, we're living our dream. So wherever you're at in your living room, you wish you were here with us. Eat your heart out, America." And from Switzerland a 20-year-old railroad agent named Sonja Steigard saddled up and road for nearly a month. [Sonja Steigard:] "I read about this in horse magazine and I said, Why not? I mean, it's a good experience to come over here and look at the job of a cowboy. And I always saw the old west -- wild west films. My real good friends they understand because they're riding horses, too. I mean, they understand, but the other ones they think she's crazy." Sonja and Dick and a score of other cowpokes real or otherwise road through Nebraska on a trip that a lot of people found difficult to understand. [Dancer Davis]"Why do it? That's a good question. I think it's because of the experience and then hopefully to draw attention to just what I had said earlier. There are things we have lost in our society by trying to do them the easy and convenient way." This was not the convenient way. [Steigard:] "In movies it always looks like happy and easy and let's have fun." [Bill Kelly]"And what is it like here?" [Steigard:]"What..? It is, too.. but, I mean, it's work. I mean, the cowboys have real hard work sometimes." [Dick Kennedy] "I don't know how to say this, but it's boring. This here is pretty much the same thing. You know, you round them up in the morning, you count them out, make sure you ain't got no sicks or cripples and head them down the road 12, 15 miles, then you lay up and take care of your horses and cattle and then the next day you do the same thing." At campsites borrowed and begged from farms and ranches along the way, the longhorns were moved to their one-night pastures. The wranglers go to work creating an instant cow camp. For trail boss Bud McAshland every night was a small victory of logistics. Feisty cattle were less a concern than itinerary headaches and shaky finances. [Bud McAshland]"Well, originally the biggest obstacle was credibility, of course. At first it was difficult to convince somebody that this could actually be done. And therefore, you know, it's difficult to convince a sponsor for their assistance or an investor for his assistance." Ford trucks signed on, so did Shearing Plow, Veterinary Products, Wild Turkey and John Deere and the maker of real cowboy coffee. The drive was still not breaking even. "And how many times have you woken up in the morning and said bud, you're a damn fool for even having tried this?" [McAshlanbd:] "Pretty much every day." [Cowboy cook:] "Come and get it before we feed it to the dogs." There's still food on the table for the cowboys every night. [Bill Kelly] "What's for supper tonight?" [Cattle drive cook:] "Well, it's a mixture of potatoes and meat and onions with a dressing on top. And we'll have a pie of some sort. And a vegetable. I'm not sure what the vegetable will be yet." Pablo is the chief chef on this drive. [Pablo] "You almost got to be a cowboy to be a cowboy cook. The main reason being you've got to know what it takes to be able to sit in the saddle seven, eight hours and eat a meal and get back on and do it again and not have problems." [Steigard:]"The food? Yuck." "What haven't you liked about it? [Steigard:]"Well, I don't know. The preparation of the food is much different. Most of the meat to eat -- the food is most spicy and hot and I don't like this. I don't like pancakes with syrup which isn't sweet. So I don't like it really." Every night no matter how small the town or remote the camp, a few cowboy fans stop by. They are quick to give total strangers standing as folk heroes. [Autograph hound reading her autographed shirt]"J.R. Lane and Dick Kennedy and Walt Seacrest." [Bill Kelly]"Your kinda treating these guys like movie stars." [Autograph hound]"Yep." No one feels like a cultural icon when they know the whole routine starts again at sunrise. [Davis] "Feels so good." Today the same old routine is broken. [Dancer Davis] "Queen of the cow towns -- Ogallala, Nebraska." Dancer Davis will lead the drive into Ogallala, the town known as the Gomora of the West at the turn of the century. Are you a little disappointed that it's not the Gomora of the west anymore? [dancer]Yeah, I guess in a way. When you've been on the trail about three months and there hasn't been a whole lot going on, you'd like to see a big paycheck and a whole lot of terrible fun. [Riders talking]"They call Ogallala the Gomora of the West. The old time deal? But they didn't say nothing about Sodom." Rider 2 talking]"I seen some of them women that looked like they'd been turned to stone." [Cowboy Dick]"These cattle like to run. They enjoy it. You can feel it. You can feel when they're going to run. When you round them up in the morning and get ready to head them out, you can tell. You hear all the cowboys -- everybody starts to yell "they're going to run today" and usually they do." [Cowboy lyrics musical interlude]"And the old horse are gone. And the drovers are gone. The comanches are gone. And the outlaws gone. And the lion is gone. And the redwood....is gone. Well, he cursed all the roads and he cursed the old road. ...to the cowboys." [Woman Cattle drive observer]"We like the cowboys in Ogallala... Yep." [Bill Kelly] "Why is that?" [Cattle drive observer]"Because they look good!" A lot of cowboys making this trip say they should have been born 100 years ago. At the turn of the century the average age of trail drovers was 18 years of age. The average age of the cowboys on this drive -- 45. [Dancer]"By the time we got to Nebraska and especially about the time we hit North Platte, these boys changed from cowboys doing a re-creation to inside their heart and soul and the relationship between each other. They actually changed into trail drovers." A running joke among these cowboys went something like this. We've all been saying all along this is such a great idea, we'd be doing the riding for free. Then they'd wonder aloud if they'd actually have to ride for free just to make the final leg into montana.