The Adventures of Ramblin' Rose: Ricky The Goathorse

Before becoming an energy healer and intuitive I grew up on a Dude Ranch in Montana and did everything from wrangling dudes and horses to cooking, cleaning and square dancing.

Here's the story of how I developed my Ramblin' Rose persona...(and if you've read this already, go ahead and skip on to the story about Ricky The Goathorse):

I grew up in one of the most beautiful places on the planet...the Montana Rocky Mountains. And I grew up in one of the most unusual businesses, unique to the United States...a dude ranch (i.e. guest ranch).

The dude ranch began in the early 1900's as folks from the East visited their adventuresome friends who had moved out West to try ranching. Teddy Roosevelt had a tremendous interest in the West and visited Yellowstone Park, setting the stage to bring lots of folks behind him. Gradually the Western ranchers began to see the possibility of a new business and began charging those friends money for staying with them.

Finally some intrepid adventuring souls branched out and built ranches specifically for these Easterners. Known as greenhorns or "dudes" because they didn't know how to ride or handle themselves out West, these fascinated-with-all-things-Western folks created the niche industry that became known as Dude Ranches. My folks bought one in Montana when I was four, and I have lived on this ranch part of almost every year since then.

In the 1990s I discovered my love of writing and began to write for a now defunct paper called The Trout Wrapper. I wrote anonymously under the pseudonym of Ramblin' Rose and shared many of my adventures of growing up on a dude ranch. Of course, living in a small community, everyone shortly knew it was me that was writing.

By the late 1990's, my life took a different turn and I left my Ramblin' Rose persona behind forever. I thought. But as that immortalized quote from Field of Dreams, says "If you build it, they will come." Seth Godin and others built Squidoo and that has provided the perfect platform for publishing these stories again.

I'm going to start off my Ramblin' Rose series with my five favorite stories, then I'll add one every three weeks or so. If you want to be notified about upcoming Ramblin' Rose stories, get on my fan club and you'll receive announcements about new editions.

I hope you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them. These stories are best when shared with a loved one. Read them to your kids, your parents or to an adopted grandparent in a nursing home. And then tell a story from your own childhood!