Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City

Wild Horses

Wild Horses We’ll ride them someday . . . —The Rolling Stones We were on a picnic in a far-flung part of the ranch, a thousand-acre pasture called Name Rock because of the many names and dates, some of them from pioneer days, that had been carved into the limestone bluffs at the property’s west end. My wife’s mother, Andra, was with us that day and had offered to watch our two children, ages eight and four, if Alyssa and I wanted to go for a ride together, something we had not been able to do since before our son was born. Living in Indiana, we visited the ranch only a couple of times a year. “Let’s go,” I said to Alyssa as soon as I had finished my sandwich. “The horses are right here. What do you say?” “I don’t know,” she responded. Petite and tightly wound, with piercing green eyes and the abundant, frenzied energy of a dervish, my wife was a force to be reckoned with under most circumstances. Now, however, she seemed oddly tentative and nervous. “Come on,” I said. “How often does an opportunity like this come up?” “Well, all right,” she finally agreed, getting up from the picnic blanket and walking alongside me to a place along the creek where I had the horses tied up. “But I don’t want to go far. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a horse.” “We won’t go far,” I assured her. It had been five years since we had ridden together, and I was anxious to get back into it. In the early days of our courtship, 1 6 5 ❍ W i l d H o r s e s Alyssa and I had driven cross-country from western New York to western Kansas, a distance of some thirteen hundred miles, to spend a few days riding together on the ranch. Perhaps I was trying to recapture the magic of that time. It was a summer of unusually abundant rainfall, and the plains were green and alive with wildflowers. Alyssa hadn’t ridden much before that; a few pony rides at Girl Scout camp was about the extent of it. After a couple of days on the ranch, however, her seat was almost as good as mine, and she had a calm about her that belied her lack of experience. Still, she was no daredevil and didn’t pretend to be. “I don’t care about going fast,” she said. “I just want to walk and take in the countryside. That’s enough for me.” As for me, I loved riding side by side across the rolling prairie, pausing here or there to allow the horses to munch on buffalo grass or drink water from the swollen creek. It made for a perfect excuse to lean across the space between us to steal a kiss. A couple of years after this memorable trip, we spent the best two days of our honeymoon on the ranch, walking and riding along the Sawlog, sending firewood up the chimney of the 1920s ranch house, drinking wine on the torch-lit front deck. My parents lived in a house in town, and so we had the place all to ourselves. One night, tipsy on champagne and wearing little more than an oversized T-shirt, Alyssa ran barefoot across the front pasture, crawled over a four-wire fence, and started up into the coyote-infested hills across Back Trail Road. When I finally caught up with her—I had stopped to pull a pair of boots onto my naked feet—and asked her what on earth she thought she was doing, she just laughed and said, “Getting closer to the moon and stars. Thanks for joining me.” That’s my girl, I thought. Wild and crazy. Of course, this being western Kansas, things were not always so idyllic. On subsequent trips to the ranch, we endured rattlesnakes and mosquitoes, scorching heat, fifty-mile-an-hour winds, a holiday blizzard so extreme that one couldn’t stay outside more than a few minutes at a time. Still we loved being there. And though my work meant that we always lived far 1 6 6 ❍ O f H o r s e s , Ca t t l e , a n d Me n away—in Buffalo at first, followed by St...