Loping Along the Guest Ranch Trail, Dude
From Bandera, Texas, to Buffalo, Wyoming.
By: Johnny D. Boggs 05/01/2007
The 4x4 pickup slides in the mud as Patricia Chesser and I head toward the branding corrals on the Burnt Well Guest Ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico.
She has spent most of her life on this ranch, bringing up two children with husband Kim, who was born at Burnt Well. Kim’s daddy came here in the 1950s, later selling the ranch to his son. Burnt Well is a working ranch, but about four years ago, the Chessers decided to start taking in paying customers.
“We wanted some sort of income,” she says, “that wasn’t dependent on rain.”
Yep, the image of dude ranches is changing. Once conjuring up City Slickers heading west to play wanna-be cowboy, riding horses nose-to-tail, eating beans and going on hay rides with plenty of corny music, today’s ranches are as diverse as sheep and cattle. Sure, you can find those old-fashioned dude ranches catering to families. But you can also find ranches as fancy as a five-star hotel ... ranches that cater to the corporate retreat crowd ... and ranches that show you the real life, where guests may find themselves mending fences rather than punching dogies.
Like Stan Meador, of the X Bar Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, once told me: “It became kinda the joke in the coffee shop. ‘What do you have your tour doin’ this week?’”
Ain’t Just Whistling “Dixie”
The best place to start the Dude Ranch Trail has to be Bandera, Texas, the self-proclaimed Cowboy Capital of the World. Dude ranching came to Bandera in 1920 when Ed and Cora Buck began inviting paying customers to the Buck Ranch. These days, Bandera sports about a dozen guest ranches.
One of the best known is the Dixie Dude Ranch, celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Billie and Dee Crowell, along with William Wallace Whitley, opened the Dixie in 1937. Today, Clay Conoly, Whitley’s great-grandson, manages the 725-acre spread with his wife and two young sons.
Hay wagons, horseback rides, cowboy entertainment, duplex cabins and lodge rooms, home-cooked meals and longhorn cattle (plus cashmere goats and pigs) are all found at the Dixie, an old-fashioned throwback to the dude ranches of yesteryear. Its barn and corrals look as authentic as a ranch in a Will Henry novel. About the only thing missing in the barn is Gary Cooper waiting in the loft to gun down Lee Van Cleef.
X Marks the Spot
Eldorado’s X Bar Ranch Lodge & Nature Retreat is also authentic, with a history that dates to 1903 when Uncle Dink Meador established a ranch in Schleicher County. In the mid-1990s, bunkhouses were built for a hunting-lease operation, but when that didn’t pan out, the Meadors decided to develop a guest ranch business.
Sure, the 7,100-acre spread is a working ranch, and Stan Meador says “we won’t create work simply for our guests,” but the X Bar isn’t all cowboy. It’s birdwatching and biking, hiking and stargazing, swimming or just plain relaxing.
“Soft adventure is what a lot of people are looking for,” Meador says. “That fits our family.”
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