Wagons Ho!
By Sheryl Schmeckpeper
An excerpt of the story that appears in the Sept/Oct 2004 issue of Nebraska Life:
Russ Leger was just seven years old the first time he swung his leg over the back of a horse and kicked it into motion.
On steamy summer afternoons, he and his “outlaw” buddies would climb on their stick ponies and stake out the neighborhood milk truck. When the driver was out of sight, they'd steal a chunk of ice out of the truck's back end and hightail back to their hideout. While their stick ponies recovered, the boys sucked on ice chips and listened to the driver holler at them.
“We felt like we had robbed the stagecoach,” Leger said, laughing. “We were little outlaws.”
The year was 1956, back when Matt Dillon, Wyatt Earp and the Lone Ranger were everyday heroes, back when little boys dreamed of donning cowboy hats and six-guns and galloping off into the sunset.
Today, Leger is a respected wagon master, leading wagon train reenactments on historic trails in Nebraska and across the United States. As a boy, his Western sunset was the edge of Columbia, Mo., and the “Wild West” lay just on the other side of his dreams. But his dreams gave way to life's adult roles — school, career, marriage and children.
But dreams come back to haunt us at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. For Leger, they reappeared one summer night in 1991.
A graduate
of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the divorced father of two daughters
was running the Bellevue Vacuum Store, which has been in his family for more
than 50 years. On a whim one night, he bought tickets to a rodeo in Sidney,
Iowa. Not wanting to look out of place, he dusted off an old cowboy hat, bought
a Wrangler shirt, “boot cut” jeans, and a western-style belt buckle.
That was enough to “set a match to pretty brittle wood,” Leger said. After that came concerts by country-western musicians, evenings spent at country-dance bars and more rodeos. Still, something was missing.
“What about a horse?” he remembers thinking at the time. Checking the telephone listings for riding stables in the area, he talked to the owner of Park Place Arabians, who assured him she could teach him to ride a horse. But she didn't ask him what style of riding he wanted to learn.
“I have all my Western gear and these girls are wearing their helmets and riding English and I'm thinking, ‘Am I too old to want to get into this horse business?'”
Instead the owner dusted off a western saddle, led Leger to a horse named Cosmo, and gave him a hand up. He was hooked. Before long he was spending his weekends at the stable. His Western adventures were about to begin.
The complete story is found in the Sept/Oct 2004 issue of Nebraska Life magazine.
