Wichita ? Jason Rotramel sweated. He got dusty one minute, wet from rain the next. He was cold, sometimes freezing, as he grew anxious about where the cattle under his watch would roam next.

It was all part of the long days last week on horseback as he took part in a 65-mile longhorn cattle drive from Bucklin to Medicine Lodge.

And he’ll tell you it was one of the best vacations of his life.

“I have dreamed of doing this since I was kid,” Rotramel said. “When I go home, I’ll be able to say I drove longhorn cattle.”

Nancy and Joe Moore, who own the Moore Ranch near Bucklin, organized the cattle drive as a way to transport their 100 Texas longhorn cattle to the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Pageant.

Instead of trucking the cattle, the Moores decided to drive the cattle by horseback across the rugged Gypsum Hills with 11 ranching neighbors and guests.

While they have done cattle drives before, this one was different, Joe Moore said. In the spirit of authenticity, the ranchers traveled as much as possible over open range, going up rugged hills, through creeks and over miles of prairie.

A mule-drawn chuck wagon even followed for campfire meals, and the cattlemen slept in tepees as their horses and cattle grazed nearby.

Nancy Moore did the cooking, often rising at 4 a.m. and working until 11 p.m., fixing biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs, steaks, cornbread and chili.

Ranchers along the route gave permission for the herd and riders to travel on some of Kansas’ most scenic land. They offered hay and hauled water for the cattle and horses. The cowboys and cowgirls averaged 10 to 18 miles a day.

About 100 head of longhorn cattle move slowly across the hills west of Medicine Lodge, recreating the days of the cattle drives in the late 1800s. Joe Moore and a handful of friends this month herded the cattle from Moore's ranch near Bucklin to Medicine Lodge for the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Pageant.

“What I think is that in the 1860s and 1870s, the average size of a herd had between 5,000 and 10,000 head of cattle, and that they had the same number of people doing the same type of jobs that we do with this herd,” said Rotramel, the farm manager at Old Cowtown Museum in Wichita.

Carmen and Lloyd Odell, of Wilmore, pulled their 12-year-old son, Gratton, from school and let him ride with his horse, Jug.

“I think he’ll learn more,” Carmen Odell said. “This is an opportunity he probably won’t get again.”

At age 72, Jack Willis of Ponchatoula, La., was one of the oldest riders on the drive. Willis, who retired from the Navy, said he was looking for an Old West experience.

Jason Rotramel, from Wichita, lights a pair of kerosene lanterns at a cattle drive camp near Medicine Lodge. Rotramel was one of about a dozen people who worked on a 65-mile cattle drive this month in southern Kansas.

“I look at it as a rite of passage,” he said.

As gray clouds loomed overhead and bone-chilling winds blasted the sage- and grass-covered prairie Thursday morning, the cowboys drifted from their tepees, ate breakfast and saddled up.

“Some people think Kansas is flat and boring,” said Kathy Forred, of Harper, an emergency room doctor at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita. “But riding on these ridges, it seems like you can see for 50 miles around. It’s absolutely breathtaking.”