My cowgirl weekend in Fort Worth

No part of America is mythologised quite as much as the West. It is the land of cowboys, freedom, Yellowstone (the park and the TV show), American Indians, big hats and vast fortunes grafted from a merciless landscape. There is perhaps no state in the West so prone to self-mythology as Texas. And in Texas, nowhere holds on tighter than the monied cowboy town of Fort Worth. 

Cattle with horns wider than some New York apartments are still moved through the historic Stockyards district every day at 11.30am and 4pm to showcase the city’s cowboy heritage, rain or shine, past boutiques selling $3,000 cowboy boots. There are rodeos every week at the Cowtown Coliseum (Fort Worth having earned the nickname Cowtown in the late 19th century as a key stop for drovers moving cattle north), while the annual Stock Show & Rodeo, established in 1896, now stretches over 23 days in late January and early February. It draws in everyone from big-money bull riders trying to make it to the championships in Las Vegas to billionaire oil tycoons leaning against the metal railings of the VIP deck. 

I am a Western enthusiast. My favourite book (and the name of my WiFi) is Cowboys Are My Weakness. There is a pair of red cowgirl boots in my closet and sometimes I wear them in New York, pretending to be someone who slips them on as casually as Birkenstock sandals. I even thought I dated a cowboy once, though he turned out to be just a guy with a southern accent who voted Republican and drove a truck. 

I decided that if there was anywhere to understand the present state of the American cowboy, it was Cowtown USA during the Stock Show. This was not my first rodeo, but it was my first time in Fort Worth. 

My sister agreed to join me from Los Angeles as a supportive, more objective observer. On our itinerary: the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, dancing at a honky-tonk, eating a steak larger than my face, eating a corn dog longer than my forearm, procuring a hat and cheering at the rodeo on Friday night. We would stay at Bowie House, a new five-star hotel near the agricultural district, designed by a local businesswoman to appeal to the area’s affluent ranchers and cowboys.

Of course, this is not the open prairie — Fort Worth is a city with gleaming high-rise towers downtown, a 112-year old symphony orchestra and world-class museums. Yet it wears its Westernness right on the surface. Drive into town and even the ritziest bars are a sea of black hats and cowboy boots worn with suits and evening dresses. 

A five-minute walk from our hotel, I found myself at the Fort Worth Show Barns, nose to nose with a blue-ribbon billy goat that had — the judge shouted to the crowded bleachers — an exemplary rear end. Thousands of children and teens from agricultural clubs around the state compete each year in the city’s livestock shows with their plush rabbits, sheep or giant steers being walked on leads like dogs. 

After developing confidence in my ability to pick a winning ewe out of a line-up, I polished off my corn dog, walked five more minutes down the road into The Modern, one of the best contemporary art museums in the country, and contemplated a Rothko. 

My pilgrimage to Fort Worth came at a particular moment for the Western aesthetic. Texas native Beyoncé is releasing a country album this year, hinted at for months as she wore glamorous Western fashion to red carpets and events. After she wore a bolo tie to the Super Bowl, searches for the accessory on fast-fashion site Boohoo spiked 533 per cent. It was almost impossible to ignore how good her cowboy hat looked, and New Yorkers (me) began to wonder if they might pull it off (no). 

Yellowstone, the TV show about the billionaire ranching family outside Bozeman, Montana, with all its many spin-off series, continues to dominate ratings, and has turned writer Taylor Sheridan into a wealthy rancher in his own right. He now owns a 266,000 acre ranch, valued at more than $320mn, about three and a half hours west of Fort Worth.

Luxury house Louis Vuitton has gone Western under creative director Pharrell Williams, with models walking the runway in cowboy hats and raw denim with workman’s patches — styles previously found in tractor supply stores south of the Mason-Dixon line. Cowboy culture hasn’t been this zeitgeist since Marlboro Man billboards were plastered across New York, and Ralph Lauren was the king of 1990s fashion.

Meanwhile, ranchland has become one of the most desirable investments for America’s affluent looking for places to park money beyond traditional stocks and bonds — and perhaps to live out their childhood cowboy dreams.

A commanding presence with a deep Mississippi accent, Jo Ellard wears a champion’s silver belt buckle from an Aspen riding competition and an enormous turquoise-encrusted necklace that, when I look close enough, I realise is actually made from real two inch-long bear claws.

“There are more billionaires within a mile of this hotel than anywhere else in America,” claims Ellard over a $93 rib-eye steak in the restaurant of Bowie House, which she owns. “That’s who the ranchers are . . . It is very expensive to play this game.”

Ellard was the youngest person ever inducted into the National Cutting Horse Association’s hall of fame — a precision equestrian sport that originated from the skills cowboys needed to “cut” cattle away from the herd. She has more than $750,000 in winnings from competition (and sold her Dallas-based insurance business for more than $400mn in 2018). She built Bowie House, from foundation to silver-saddle napkin rings, in just two years, feeling that Fort Worth was lacking luxury hotels close to its arts and agricultural district and, crucially, the arena where the largest cutting horse competitions are held. Ellard was “hauling” all over the country with her late husband to compete, and wanted somewhere nice to stay. “I can’t sing, I can’t dance, but I can build,” she says. 

But the hotel was also a project born out of grief. In late 2019, Ellard’s son, his wife and two of their children were killed when the family’s private plane crashed into a hangar at an airport just north of Dallas. “I have to be busy. I can’t be idle,” she tells me. Building the hotel, “was a great challenge . . . It was very therapeutic”.

Bowie House is “ace-high”, which means top-notch in cowboy. It’s funky enough to feel like it could be New York or Los Angeles, were it not for the fact that everyone is wearing a wide-brim hat. Every surface is textured, painted, covered in leather or art. The hotel is a showcase for (some of) Ellard’s private art collection; the bar is a 200-year-old salvage antique she found. Even the hide-covered menus have hair. 

The clientele “aren’t rhinestone cowboys and cowgirls — it’s authentic.” insists Ellard. Still, guests are welcome to pretend, if only for the weekend. 

The first step in living out my cowgirl weekend was procuring a hat. The sun in Texas was strong, I rationalised. And dang it if it didn’t suit me. While cowboy hats are guaranteed to give you a bad hair day, they also ensure that no one will ever know you’re having one. 

A note on hats: like quiet luxury dressing in the city, there is a subtlety signalling true cowboy status. A beaver felt hat from the Aspen-based luxury hat brand Kemo Sabe is a sure-fire way to get outed as an out-of-towner. After a weekend in Fort Worth I could recognise hat brands like designer labels, and knew which unassuming roadside hat store a rancher’s startlingly expensive silverbelly was shaped in. We went to The Best Hat Store. I had to admire its branding. 

Shopping in Fort Worth, surrounded by people looking so natural in their rodeo finest, my personal aesthetic began to untether from reality. I considered spending a pay cheque on new boots and a fringed suede miniskirt to wear to the rodeo — and surely on many other occasions, I argued. This is when my sister’s utility became clear. She forbade it. 

The whole town hummed in anticipation of the rodeo that night, with the same giddy intensity of a Friday-night football match. We made our way to the Dickies Arena as the sun went down across the big, flat city. 

Under the floodlights, the rodeo came alive. The announcer called out the names of cowboys and cowgirls from every rural corner of the US and Canada, there to compete in riding bulls and broncs (bucking horses), calf roping and barrel racing. The adrenaline hung thick in the crowded arena, with its dirt floor and metal corral.

I forgot to breathe as giant animals of stunning athleticism, with names like “Six Shooter” and “Repo Man”, hurled themselves into the air, spinning in circles and leaping arcs across the arena to unseat their riders. The competitors, riding for a share of the $1.4mn prize fund, most closely resembled rag dolls and I could not imagine ibuprofen would be sufficient for their aches.

Barrel racers — riders on muscular Quarter horses who speed around barrels in a clover pattern — fought for fractions of a second on their course. The champion calf-roping team threw their lassos and finished in under four seconds. Then, when the last bull had run through the chute, and the last rodeo clown had taken his bow, it was over. Fans jostled to meet the cowboys, whose jeans were still covered in the arena dirt. We left buzzing on proximity to danger and tequila sodas passed around like water (trickily, called “ranch water”). 

The following evening, our last in Cowtown, we decided to stomp our boots around a proper Texan honky-tonk (rough translation: a bar with live country music). The White Elephant Saloon in the Stockyards, with the cowboy hats of beloved and departed customers nailed to the ceiling and walls, was packed on a Saturday night. We watched couples two-step hand in hand around the raised dance floor before “buckle bunnies”, the rodeo equivalent of groupies, flooded in to wait for the cowboys from that night’s contest. When they arrived many were still wearing their competition numbers to make themselves easier to spot.

I tapped my boot to the beat and longed for a cowboy dance partner of my own. My wish was answered in the form of an 80-year-old regular who danced like his boots were on fire. His wife asked for a break, so he extended a hand and asked if I might be his partner for a song. 

I was deposited back to my table dizzy and breathless after the double-time turn across the floor. My sister told me I recovered my rhythm after the second verse. As the band played the unofficial anthem, “God Blessed Texas”, I began to understand why the state’s self-mythology stretches right up to high heaven. 

Leaving Fort Worth the next morning, I learnt another truth of cowgirl life: a hat won’t fit in a suitcase, so you have to wear it on to the plane. The flight attendant asked to stow mine for me, for safety (its, mostly), returning it to me before landing. Walking out into the New York winter in my big black hat, feeling as if I had merely dreamt my rodeo weekend, I wondered if I looked more like a billionaire rancher, Beyoncé, or just another dime-a-dozen rhinestone cowgirl. 

More cowboy holidays — in the US and beyond

Paintrock Canyon, Wyoming Paintrock Canyon Ranch (pictured above) stretches across 80,000 acres of classic Wild West country in northern Wyoming — forests, meadows, creeks and high canyon walls. For riders of intermediate standard and above, its “pack trips” are a way to ride out deep into the backcountry. Guests stay for three nights in safari-style tents on the ranch, with four nights at a remote “mountain camp”. Days are spent exploring the surrounding creeks and trails, nights around the campfire. The trips run from August to early September 2024 and cost $4,200 per person, including meals and activities; ranchlands.com

C Lazy U, Colorado About 100 miles’ drive north-west of Denver, the C Lazy U ranch has been welcoming guests for more than a century. It runs year-round and specialises in family trips. Guests stay in luxurious private cabins and, aside from daily trail rides, activities include snow-shoeing, snowmobiling, skating on frozen lakes, swimming, trap shooting, fishing and much more. From $587 per adult and $392 per child, per night, all inclusive; clazyu.com

Estancia Mercedes, Chile In Patagonia, the bagualeros wear berets rather than stetsons and roam the wilds searching for cattle that have escaped from the area’s rugged ranches. At Estancia Mercedes, a 32,000-acre ranch just west of Puerto Natales, visitors can get an unvarnished taste of the bagualero lifestyle, riding out through the mountains, camping rough or staying in the remote, fjord-side ranch house. Abercrombie & Kent offers three-night stays at Estancia Mercedes, as part of longer itineraries through Patagonia, from £2,195; abercrombiekent.co.uk

El Encanto de Guanapalo, Colombia The Llanos grasslands of eastern Colombia have their own, longstanding cowboy culture, which visitors can experience at El Encanto de Guanapalo, a 22,000-acre reserve about 50 miles outside the city of Yopal. Guests stay on three hatos, or ranches, which offer rustic but comfortable accommodation (with hammocks hanging from shady verandas). They head out on 4x4 safaris, canoe trips or on horseback to herd cattle with the llaneros. Journey Latin America (journeylatinamerica.com) has a new 10-night off-the-beaten-track holiday to Colombia, including four-nights at El Encanto de Guanapalo, from £4,300 per person including excursions, most meals and domestic flights

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