Cook Ranch and the Silverado Set

Lumbering wagon trains heading west on precarious rutted trails, unforgettable wide-angle shots of horsemen galloping across an endless expanse of range land, their dust drifting into the backdrop of jagged mountains and piercing sky, endless skies are what enhance the lover of Westerns. These days another sensation can surface, too: a peculiar sense of dread that this gorgeous open territory may soon be swept up by the forces currently diminishing open space in the American West.

Bill and Marian Cook find this a cause for concern. "The West as we know it is rapidly changing," said Cook, a fourth-generation Westerner who has spent his life working with livestock. He is convinced that preservation of open range land is essential, and the way to do so is to explore other means of land use without resorting to subdividing property (when tax situations become unwieldy, or range agriculture is no longer cost-effective). The Cooks have discovered an ideal partnership between the film industry and cattle growing.

"It started to dawn on me, when I saw how eager these movie people were, that I could re-create range land for an alternate use that had some economic value," Cook said. The Cook's "stumbled into" their first film project. Coincidentally, in 1984, Larry and Mark Kasdan and crew were out scouting the area by helicopter, hoping to find the most suitable place to build the town of Silverado for the movie of the same name. Then one unexpected day, the location manager for the film appeared at the Cooks' door.

"As I remember, he knocked on the door and said, 'We'd like to do a little shooting here.' " At that time they wanted to build only two to three structures, offering Cook a "casual number" as a location fee. "There wasn't any great motivation for me one way or another, but I said okay. It just grew from that into a big budget movie and the Silverado set was built," Cook recalled.

Lonesome Dove, came along in l988. The Silverado set was resourcefully dressed and filmed for towns in four different states, depending on the view from the streets - mountains or prairie or the Galisteo River. Lonesome Dove also made use of locations farther within the ranch, a trend continuing to this day. A major reason for this is the unobtrusive network of roads enabling companies to get to remote areas, where you'll find anything from zigzagging arroyos to the foreboding Cerro Pelon to treacherous deep-cut slate and granite canyons, essential elements of true-to-life Westerns.

There are those endless airy vistas unique to the Galisteo Basin, an openness reminding one that this is a big ranch, 20,000 acres in all. Having a production-savvy ranch manager is ready to grade roads, wrangle livestock and pull stuck generators out of the mud with a log chain on a Caterpillar keeps things running smoothly.