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30 my journey


F


Campfire at Island Guest Ranch


or a keen but relatively inexperienced rider, my ranch experience proved to be as


fun-fi lled as it was memorable. When I set about planning this trip, it felt right to start with a few days’ ‘work’ before rewarding myself with some time on the road. I fi gured that would be great context for a whistle-stop tour of Western and Native American history and culture – and I was right!


Horseback and history


The Moore Ranch in Western Kansas offers visitors a unique horseback experience. I’d enjoyed a brief overnight stay at the family-run ranch in 2013, and as I settle into my cabin this time it feels like coming home. At this simple but comfortable working ranch in Bucklin, each day’s work of raising hardy Texas longhorns is done the old-fashioned cowboy way. Sprawling across 1,400 acres and surrounded by 4,500 acres of rolling hills and prairies, it’s a wonderful choice for all levels of rider – from novice to expert horseman – but will especially appeal to the more confi dent. A regular day starts at sunrise with a hearty breakfast, before saddling up and riding out to tend to the cattle. Each supper is home cooked and served around the family table or occasionally outdoors, picnic style. It is a wrench to leave the Moore family and drive the 50 or so miles to Dodge City, but my time in the saddle has given me more than just a mildly sore tail. Although I have visited Dodge City before, I now have a much clearer mental image of what it must have been like for cowboys, coming off the Chisholm Trail after months driving their cattle north, delivering their cows to the new railroad and then getting paid. In store for them was a bath, a haircut (maybe even a visit to the dentist), food and drink in the


saloon and almost certainly plenty of ‘mayhem’. The old Dodge City has been painstakingly preserved – right down to having its own sheriff. But since I knew I’d be viewing plenty of ‘formal’ cowboy culture further on down the road, I was more than happy just to soak Dodge City up as ‘living history’.


Prairies and plains


The drive from Dodge City to Great Bend opens up frontier history if you stop at the atmospheric Fort Larned National Historic Site – an authentic army fort of old. There’s also outdoor spectacles along the Wetlands and Wildlife National Scenic Byway, with fl ora and fauna including migrating birds in their full glory. Great Bend itself offers small town arts and crafts, the Birdhouse Art Walk and the Kansas Quilt Walk


Bewitching Wichita


The cities of Kansas and Oklahoma are a revelation! The four biggest - Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and not least Wichita – are a glorious mixture of down home hospitality and cosmopolitan chic. In Wichita, en route to Oklahoma, I fi nd designer and colourful eclectic styles in eight distinct shopping districts and art and culture gracing no fewer than 28 galleries and 33 museums. And when the sun goes down I settle in a bar for some live jazz – but I could have headed for a musical, a symphonic concert or even the Grand Opera. Crossing the state line into northern Oklahoma, Ponca City and Bartlesville are two cities which were at the heart of the independent oil boom of the early 1900s. Vast fortunes were made, lost, and made again here by entrepreneurs like E W Marland and the Phillips family. Their palatial mansions and estates live on: they are breathtakingly luxurious and endlessly fascinating to visit. World-renowned architect Frank Lloyd-Wright, a favourite of mine, was moved to build his only skyscraper in Bartlesville. The Price Tower is an Art Deco extravaganza that today houses a quirky boutique hotel and an art gallery.


24 hours in Tulsa I head down to Tulsa,


the beating heart of Oklahoma’s rich music


the Mother Road lives on


sellingtravel.co.uk


Another full-on day in the saddle


My Kansas and Oklahoma journey


Matt Bates climbs into the saddle at two working ranches during a road trip in Kansas/Oklahoma that revealed the ‘true America’


My magical moments Sunset horse ride at Moore Ranch Gyrating fl ocks of birds in the air over the byway Laid-back atmosphere of a jazz club in Wichita Breathtaking Art Deco at the Price Tower Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center Magnifi cent art in OKC’s Western Museum


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