It's A Great Life: 11 - A Black Cowboy Hat
...I loved Don's black cowboy hat, its brim adorned with fishing flies. Somehow it was a hat with real character. He persuaded me to help with the horses, though I didn't really need any persuading...
Jack Merewood tells of good times in the "real'' West.
I had to meet the Nelsons of course, so one day we drove to Longmont. Mr and Mrs Nelson were most welcoming - and I met Bonnie and Patty who were even more glamorous than their photos. Mr Nelson showed me round his studio, and we also went to their very nice house and talked awhile. I couldn't believe all this was happening to me. I was in another world, and Huddersfield, flour and hot ovens were on another planet.
Dean's mother had died when he was four and his childhood hadn't been too happy, having been brought up partly by aunts and uncles as well as his father. But his father was a 'roamer'. He had had numerous jobs in Nebraska, then one day decided to move out to Colorado, established himself in Central City, and went prospecting for gold. Eventually Dean moved to live with his father, which entailed going to school on horseback, but when he came out of school he moved back to Nebraska.
Some of Dean's schoolday friends still lived in Central City; there was quite a gang of them, and the leader of the gang was Don Robb. Don had about ten horses which he kept in a corral in the town and hired out to tourists. One day we drove through Clear Creek Canyon, a distance of twenty-five miles, to Central City. Dean introduced me to his friends and I took to them, and particularly Don, straightaway. Jessie, Dean and I went to Central City a few times, and the three of us would ride Don's horses. One evening we were entertained by people square dancing in a huge barn to a marvellous fiddler. The boys were dressed in jeans and cowboy shirts, the girls in gingham gowns. The whole evening was one of excitement and laughter.
I was enjoying life with Jessie and Dean, but I was also intrigued with Central City and Don Robb. Then one day he invited me to go and stay with him for a few days. The buses up into the mountains were few and far between, but I caught one from Golden and then I felt I was among the cowboys. Central City, by intention, had not changed from the old days. There were the old wooden sidewalks, a Wells Fargo, a tavern with a sign saying that 'Buffalo Bill drank here', and it also had the oldest opera house in Colorado, built in 1878, where Jessie, Dean and I saw an exceptionally good production of Beethoven's Fidelio.
I loved Don's black cowboy hat, its brim adorned with fishing flies. Somehow it was a hat with real character. He persuaded me to help with the horses, though I didn't really need any persuading. If tourists weren't riding them, I got to ride them. In the evenings the horses were taken up out of the town to a meadow where they were left for the night and then collected and brought down to the corral in the morn-ing. I was absolutely in my element when Don enlisted me to help take the horses and bring them back.
