![]() ![]() The following month she was sponsoring a charity event in Contra Costa County, and the cowboy’s act, she felt, would be the perfect entertainment. The high point of the 20-minute show came when the cowboy rode the buffalo up a steep ramp onto the roof of a long, shocking-pink trailer and there made the animal spin like a top.ĭown in the barn Margaret Lesher stood transfixed. Atop it straddled a cowboy who, to the guests’ amazed delight, rode the buffalo like a horse, turning it in circles, then making it first go down on its knees, then lie on its side. Into the night air charged a massive, 2,500-pound buffalo, fully six and a half feet high at its shoulders. The chitchat ebbed when the entertainment began. Long accustomed to such shindigs, Lesher, wearing a brightly colored, sequined western-style blouse, fit right in. Inside the ranch’s cavernous baby-blue barn they dined on grilled steaks and potato salad and listened to country music. barbecue the Rosser family was holding for local politicians, rodeo organizers, and volunteers. Once everyone had dried off, they joined a V.I.P. Reluctantly he ordered everyone to dismount, jump into a waiting convoy of cars and trucks, and head to his family’s Flying U Ranch. The trail riders were supposed to pitch their tents by the corral that night and start the drive the next morning, but as the rain beat down, Rosser realized the ground was becoming too muddy to camp on. Lesher, the publisher of the Contra Costa Times and 27 other small California newspapers, had died three years earlier. A striking blonde with a vivacious personality, Lesher was 64, but she looked at least 10 years younger. Lesher had driven up from her estate in Contra Costa County, which encompasses the sprawling suburbs east of Oakland and Berkeley, with her groom Estel “E.L.” Mclelland. “If ’re looking this way, they’re probably headin’ this way.”Īs the wind whipped up, Margaret Lesher spurred her Paso Fino, a superior Spanish breed of horse. “We told ’em a lot about cattle psychology, which is not too complicated,” remembers Rosser. Rosser’s wranglers gave the greenhorn trail riders, who had paid $400 to $500 apiece and traveled from as far as Chicago, a lesson on the basics of cattle driving, the best ways to rope, herd, and generally make it to Marysville in one piece. There they would rumble past crowds of cheering townspeople and into the rodeo grounds. The plan for this, the third annual Twin City Slickers Cattle Drive, which would last five days, was to drive the herd 35 miles through the undulating scrub around the periphery of Beale Air Force Base, down into the old 49er goldfields along the Yuba River, and then straight into the heart of Marysville, a town of 13,000, an hour north of Sacramento. The trail boss, Lee Rosser, a veteran cowboy with a strawberry-blond mustache, glanced up past the brim of his buff-colored Stetson at the darkening skies. The cattle, 160 head of rangy longhorns, were growing restless, lowing and scraping in their corral. The rain was already coming down hard as the five dozen trail riders, wranglers, and scouts gathered in a field of amber prairie grasses off Smartville Road that afternoon. ![]()
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