Calling all cowboy wannabes! PBS reality special - Texas Ranchhouse

[Dover]

Sign up to participate.
Learn to clear brush rather than do your presidential duties.


Where: The Texas Range
When: 1867
Who: Wranglers, Cowhands, Cooks, Vaqueros, Ranchers, and anyone interested in taking part
What: Going back in time to live and ranch on the Western frontier
Why: Experience the past first-hand and get the challenge of a lifetime!

All are Welcome - city slickers and cowpokes alike. Families and individuals. Giddy-up and apply now!

March 18 deadline.


http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ranchhouse/


The latest and most ambitious experiment in living history from the makers of Frontier House and Colonial House is TEXAS RANCH HOUSE. In TEXAS RANCH HOUSE we send a group of modern-day people back to the year 1867. It is the era of Western expansion, a time of rounding up and branding free-roaming cattle. It is a time of taming wild horses and sleeping under the stars. But Texas 1867 is also a time of hard living - long cattle drives, endless, punishing days in the saddle, chowing down on pork and beans, and surviving lonely nights out on the plains.

TEXAS RANCH HOUSE will allow you to follow in the footsteps of the visionary trailblazers of this time, men and women who initiated new industries, forged great wealth and created a new mythic heroism of the West. Modern America was built on the ambition, grit and phenomenal drive of these larger than life characters. Have you got what it takes to join the experience? Could you survive and flourish at the TEXAS RANCH HOUSE for four to five months?

Background
In the era of the open range, where millions of cattle roamed free, a new idea of ranching as a business was budding in Texas. To meet the demands of the burgeoning city populations, entrepreneurial ranchers, with the help of highly skilled cowboys, seized upon the opportunity to turn cattle into a national commodity by driving herds to distant markets. Tejanos (native Texans of mixed Spanish and Mexican ancestry), Anglo settlers, and newly freed African Americans were merging their complex cultures, innovating industries, forging wealth. Texas ranches were emerging - and with them the cowboys' and ranchers' way of life.

Participants
In Frontier House and Colonial House, shown on PBS in Spring 2002 and 2004, respectively, tens of thousands of people applied to travel back in time to live at key moments in America's history. Those selected struggled with a new set of values and had to redefine the way they lived their daily lives. The compelling stories that emerged painted a vivid picture of how far we have come - and showed a little of what we've lost along the way.

TEXAS RANCH HOUSE is looking not just for families, but for individuals too. In order to accurately represent the population of Texas in 1867, we are looking for a diverse group of people, but participants will have to be able to cope with the day-to-day rigors of this extraordinary challenge. Not only do our cowboys and ranch owners need to be physically fit enough to ride the open range, but they must be mentally agile enough to turn a profit on their fast growing business.

Right now, preparations are being made for filming in a beautiful but remote plain of Texas. There, our volunteers will be fully immersed in the inner workings of a ranch house: building corrals, rounding up and branding cattle, taming stallions, and preparing for a two week cattle drive - all the while tending to the daily needs of themselves and their livestock. Starting in Summer of 2005, we'll see how they fare. So saddle up and get ready to round up those dogies - Apply Now to join the TEXAS RANCH HOUSE experiment! Tell 'em Hoss sent you.

[Dover]

1. *

[xmas74]

2. I'd do it, except it's in Texas.

It would be a vacation for me.

[XNASA]

3. I've often thought that "Survivor" should just do a show in Texas.

Take a couple of dozen people and drop them off in the middle of Texas in the summer, with no AC. This sounds like the next best thing.

[Dover]

4. Yeah, it would likely be similar to the Survivor Outback that took place

in Australia.....but without the water.

West Texas is HOT and DRY. But real cowboys don't cry.

[XNASA]

5. And most real cowboys were......

...of Mexican, African or Native American descent.

Then, as now, minorities were given the difficult, back-breaking, menial jobs and worked for pennies.

The John Wayne types just sat back and collected the money, not tough enough to do any actual work.

[Dover]

6. Yep, most likely. And now the government is offering free land again

in the West. But few takers....ha!

Empty House on the Prairie
By BOB GREENE
Published: March 2, 2005, Wednesday

CHICAGO -- IF you and your family would like to move to Crosby, N.D., not only will the town give you a free plot of land on which to build your house, they'll also throw in a free membership to the Crosby Country Club.
If you and your family would like to move to Ellsworth, Kan., not only will the town give you free land, they'll also give you thousands of dollars toward a down payment on the house you build if you have children who will attend the public school.


If you and your family would like to move to Plainville, Kan., not only will the town give you free land, they will also drastically reduce the property tax on your house for 10 years, and the first-year tax rate will be zero percent.

The logical question, upon hearing all of this, is the one I presented to Plainville's mayor, Glenn Sears:

What's the catch?

Mr. Sears paused for a good seven seconds before answering, as if the question itself did not make sense. Then he said, ''There is no catch.''

But there is a requirement: that you pack up your life as you now know it, and start again in Crosby (population 1,100) or Ellsworth (population 2,500) or Plainville (population 2,000). The free-land offer is the result of one of the most significant American stories of the last century, one that has received sporadic attention because it has unfolded so gradually: the inexorable population flow out of rural areas, toward larger cities.

The tiny towns in the Great Plains and upper Midwest don't want to die. They are trying to keep their young people from departing, to beckon home those who have left, and -- more and more -- to think of ways to entice outsiders to come and build and stay. Thus, proposed tax breaks in Iowa; loans in Nebraska; land giveaways in Kansas and elsewhere...cont'd

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E5DF133DF931A35750C0A9639C8B63

[Bridget Burke]

7. They're looking for a "diverse" group for the show.

Too bad Shrub's too busy pushing SS Deform (& fightin' terrorism!) to take part.

I'd pay money to see him try to deal with the Real West. His business history suggests he couldn't even have done the "money collecting' bit...