A striking blonde with a vivacious personality, Lesher was 64, but she looked at least 10 years younger. Lesher had driven up from her estate in Contra Costa County, which encompasses the sprawling suburbs east of Oakland and Berkeley, with her groom Estel “E.L.” Mclelland. “If ’re looking this way, they’re probably headin’ this way.”Īs the wind whipped up, Margaret Lesher spurred her Paso Fino, a superior Spanish breed of horse. “We told ’em a lot about cattle psychology, which is not too complicated,” remembers Rosser. Rosser’s wranglers gave the greenhorn trail riders, who had paid $400 to $500 apiece and traveled from as far as Chicago, a lesson on the basics of cattle driving, the best ways to rope, herd, and generally make it to Marysville in one piece. There they would rumble past crowds of cheering townspeople and into the rodeo grounds. The plan for this, the third annual Twin City Slickers Cattle Drive, which would last five days, was to drive the herd 35 miles through the undulating scrub around the periphery of Beale Air Force Base, down into the old 49er goldfields along the Yuba River, and then straight into the heart of Marysville, a town of 13,000, an hour north of Sacramento. The trail boss, Lee Rosser, a veteran cowboy with a strawberry-blond mustache, glanced up past the brim of his buff-colored Stetson at the darkening skies.
The cattle, 160 head of rangy longhorns, were growing restless, lowing and scraping in their corral. The rain was already coming down hard as the five dozen trail riders, wranglers, and scouts gathered in a field of amber prairie grasses off Smartville Road that afternoon.
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