Aspiring cowpokes can polish their roping and rustling skills at today’s Cowboy Camp at the Plains Conservation Center in Aurora.
Kids will learn what daily life was like on the Great Plains for 1880s homesteaders and hear about the massive cattle drives that employed rough-and-ready cowboys during lengthy treks across the Western ranges.
Today’s Cowboy Camp will run from 1 to 3 p.m. Steve Weiner, a historical interpreter and naturalist for the center, will lead the event. Weiner will demonstrate and teach three basic cowboy skills: roping, branding and cattle driving. Kids can sit in a real Western saddle to practice the correct wrist-twist for lassoing a practice steer, then heat up branding irons at the blacksmith shop and learn how to stamp leather.
Weiner will also talk the campers through the highlight of the cowboy’s year — the annual summer cattle drives across the plains.
“The trains ended the true cowboy era around 1910,” Weiner says. “But prior to that, they would drive cattle from the big ranches down in Texas all the way to Kansas for shipment to Eastern markets.” These treks took up to three months and could include thousands of cattle and hundreds of cowboys.
“They needed about one cowboy for every 20 cows, and some of the big ranches supported 100,000 head of cattle,” Weiner says. “The cowboys could earn about a dollar a day.”
Long days driving cattle across the open range made for a pretty solitary summer for the cowboys, so Weiner stresses the importance of the nightly chuck-wagon ritual.
” ‘Cookie,’ the cook, took care of all the food, water and bedrolls, so the chuck wagon was the most important piece of the drive,” Weiner says. Cowboys would gather in the evening to eat and socialize over coffee, bacon, biscuits and beans.
Kids can sample the cowboy fare today, with pork and beans cooked over an open fire, and will have a chance to feed the chickens, sheep and steers that reside at the 1,100-acre site. The center includes two circa-1887 sod homes — wood was in short supply on the prairie. These host demonstrations of such daily homesteading chores as carding wool, weaving cloth and hammering horseshoes.
Volunteers like Weiner, who retired after 32 years of teaching high school history, add to the atmosphere by dressing in period clothing on the first two Saturdays of each month. Now the educator keeps busy by sharing his enthusiasm for the cowboy era with the next generation.
“It’s fading away,” he says of the cowboy way of life. “But it’s important to teach kids about the pioneers, the Cheyenne culture and why we should be preserving open land.”
Cowboy Camp at the Plains Conservation Center (21901 E. Hampden Ave.) is today from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.; $20 per child, ages 6 and up. Call 303-693-3621 to reserve a space, or visit .
