From The New West magazine

Cabela’s Country?

For decades, anglers and hunters made pilgrimages to Cabela's, their almost Mecca. They traveled hundreds of miles to places like Mitchell, S.D., to spend a half-day or more and hundreds of dollars on plastic worms, camo comforters, shotgun shell wastebaskets, and thousands of other items -- and, of course, devote an hour or two to lusting over firearms in the famous gun libraries or gawking at lunkers swimming in the aquariums. Between pilgrimages, they were sated by the massive catalog and www.cabelas.com.

One reason for the devotion was the sense of community. Cabela's aligned with the sporting public in conservation causes, and customers responded with rare one-of-us support usually reserved for members of the local rod-and-gun club.

But as Cabela's expanded over the years with more and bigger stores, it attracted a raft of competitors such as Bass Pro Shop's Outdoor World Superstores, Gander Mountain, Sportsman's Warehouse and Gart Sports. And then the guys in the boardroom either got worried looking in the rearview mirror or greedy, or both.

In The New West magazine: Design Showcase

The Big and Little of Western Building

In this "Design Showcase" piece from The New West magazine, two of the West's smaller homes stack up against one of the West's log mansions -- showcasing there are different interpretations of having your own "little" piece of the West.

First, is two microhomes in Montana's Mission Valley, 126 square feet apiece. Each cost about $10,000. Second, is a 9,700-square-food log house in the Yellowstone Club near Big Sky. With a lookout tower and guest quarters, it costs about $15.5 million.

Essay: In The New West magazine

From The New West Magazine: Tracks Across A Landscape

Even 200 years into the modern American West, it's easy, especially for newcomers to this landscape, to feel as if the grand open spaces are a blank canvas. It can seem, standing on a hillside of sagebrush and grass, as if nothing has ever existed but the ceaseless wind and sky.

In other parts of the country, and the world, the past is present, in ancient stone structures and centuries-old communities. By comparison, vast tracts of the West seem untrammeled, especially in the springtime when the snow has melted, leaving its particularly soggy mark on the grasses and naked soil. You can watch the imprint of your own shoe fill slowly with the shallowest film of water and, when you do, it seems no shoe can ever have stepped there before.

It's a seductive idea, that yours are the first sentient eyes to see this landscape, that your story will be its first, and that your imprint will be the one to endure.

In The New West magazine: Design Showcase

Have Your Ranch & Develop It, Too

The Sand Creek Ranch sits on about 850 acres of Wyoming prairie near the Big Horn Mountains and the small town of Buffalo. It's the kind of place a real estate developer might dream of slicing into pieces of Western paradise. The ranch, like hundreds of others across the Mountain West, is worth far more with cul-de-sacs than cattle.

John Jenkins, who 40 years ago helped his newly widowed mother downsize from a large spread on the Powder River to this smaller ranch, has a powerful reason to protect the property and to preserve a portion of its, and his, agricultural heritage.

"I want to keep it open. I cast my mother's ashes to the wind out there on the big meadow," says Jenkins, who recently retired after a career as an oilman and political consultant. "But, realistically," he adds, "because I'm a businessman, I know that its highest and best use is really as real estate."

In The New West magazine

Montana’s Cash Cowboy

If you didn't know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape -- and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile.

But the truth is, Foley isn't very good at leisure. He's got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can't seem to help turning everything into a business.

Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging "amenity economy" in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he's representative of the breed: a very rich man who's become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it.

Essay: In The New West magazine

The Family Farm, Version 2.0

I spread my sleeping bag on the floor and crumpled my coat for a pillow. I put the bag where my bed used to be.

The room still smelled the same. Aside from the echo, there was something homey, something warm, the smell of a vanilla candle still lingering in the empty walls. My brother and I were at the now vacant house for the night. It was Thanksgiving, and we wanted to stay somewhere familiar. The land had sold, but the house hadn’t yet, so we would stay the night on the floor in my old bedroom.

Facing me, in the wall, was a small hole about the size of a heel. My brother and I had been fighting about something teenagers fight about and, in a tantrum, my foot connected with the wall. My brother had laughed. I was 16 at the time.

I had forgotten about the hole, hidden by a dresser long ago. As I ran my fingers over it one more time, my brother walked in, shaking his head. He always told me I was too sentimental about this place. It’s just a house, just a farm. They’re just walls. It’s just dirt.

He didn’t believe it either.

In The New West magazine

Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out

It's 2:30 a.m., and Bud Boyce, 75, fumbles in the dim light of the pickup cab for the controls of the mounted spotlight.

Outside, the beam cuts the blackness, illuminating clouds of warm breath and glassy eyes as it pans from left to right, then back again across a herd of more than 250 Angus-Hereford cows, all pregnant and ready to give birth.

The cattle huddle in dark masses. Bud plays the light across them, carefully watching for a cow in labor or a newborn calf. With no signs of a delivery-in-progress and no new calves since the last check three hours ago, he wheels his pickup back toward the house and lurches down the frozen drive. In three hours, he'll do it again. Then, ranch hand Mike Horst will take over.

It's a grueling schedule, part of what makes ranching a lifestyle, not a job.

In The New West magazine: Project Watch

The High-End Real Estate Market: They Went Bankrupt?!?

The national real estate pullback and the credit crunch, combined with several years of sky-high construction costs, have some luxury developments in the New West on the ropes.

While bankruptcy is an imperfect prism through which to view the effects of the market slowdown, these five cases offer rich glimpses into the operations and financing problems.

More bankruptcies are undoubtedly on the way. The B-word has even been thrown around as a possibility at the vaunted Yellowstone Club, where the divorce of owners Tim and Edra Blixseth has compounded its woes.

In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho

Coeur d’Alene Tribe Rides the Idaho Boom

There's a certain optimism and sense of limitlessness to Chairman Chief Allan's air that explains, even better than statistics or testaments to his business acumen, just how the once-destitute Coeur d'Alene Tribe has become an economic power and political player in Idaho.

In his office the 35-year-old smiles boyishly. He's speaking about the tribe's immutable bond to the rolling Palouse region of North Idaho and his sense of mission as chairman: "We look at this tribe as a Fortune 500 company, but it's not ours. We're not doing it for us. We're doing it for our kids."

In the past 10 to 15 years the 2,000-member tribe has undergone an impressive turnaround. Tribal enterprises' total revenue surpassed $300 million in its most recent fiscal year, with about $100 million in earnings. With 1,400 people on its payroll, the tribe is the second-largest employer in Idaho's five northern counties. In 1989, unemployment among tribal members was close to 70 percent. This year, it's in the single digits.