BILLINGS -- Kenneth Bauerly, now 93, watched his five great-grandkids squirming and giggling as they got matched to a horse for a trail ride just east of Billings.

Pilgrim, the Pinto, whinnied.

Banjo, the brown bay, swatted flies while he waited for a rider.

"Pappy" McNiven, who founded the Western Romance Co., smiled at 12-year-old Miranda Bauerly, who said she'd been taking riding lessons in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

"You're a good rider, aren't you?" he asked.

She said, "Yes."

So, the gray-bearded McNiven, clad in chaps that had beaten back tough brush and a leather vest dyed with sweat marks, brought over a buckskin horse. Montana stood rock-still as his little rider climbed the mounting block and settled into the saddle.

"Now you can say you've ridden in Montana on Montana," "Pappy" joked, putting her at ease.

Mallory Bauerly, 13, got the tan-and-white pony.

"He's the real tiger horse. He's a good one," she said.

Within 10 minutes, the Minnesota family of 11, including five teenage girls, was on horseback and ready for a trail ride along the muddy Pryor Creek. The rest of the Bauerlys rode in a covered wagon pulled by a pair of mules.

Thirteen years ago, "Pappy" McNiven and his wife, Norma McNiven, started Western Romance Co. to offer the Western experience to tourists and locals. Three years ago, they started a complementary business, Pappy's Cowboy Cookout. Western Romance first operated along Canyon Creek, then Fly Creek, and the family leases land along Pryor Creek.

When their son, Jonathan McNiven, returned to Billings after college, he talked to area hotel owners who didn't know about his family's companies. Instead, they were sending guests seeking horse thrills to Red Lodge, Absarokee, Chico or Cody, Wyo.

So McNiven started a Web site and began marketing his parents' camp. Business has doubled in the three years since they've been marketing and moved the camp to within 20 minutes of downtown Billings.

"What an idea. Let's keep the people here in Billings. They'll spend another night in town and spend more money," he said.

The Bauerlys take annual family vacations. And a decade ago, Jack Bauerly and his wife, Jeanette, floated 100 miles down the Amazon in Peru.

But this was the family's first horse vacation, tucked in after four days watching elk, bison, antelope and even a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. Despite that wildlife treat, the horse and wagon rides were the favorite part of the vacation for the five Bauerly girls, Jack Baulery said.

"We don't have anything like that around (the Twin Cities). They loved the location, up and down the hills, and the scenery," he said. "That's what they talked about all the way home."

Even cooking many of their meals along the way, the family spent about $3,500 for hotels, food and fun during their trip to Montana and Wyoming. The afternoon for 11 people at Western Romance Company cost $540 for nearly three hours with the horses, the covered wagon and a game of horseshoes.

Geeing and hawing

With some helping hands, Kenneth Bauerly stepped gingerly on the wagon tongue hanging below the mules' tails and plopped down in the shotgun seat.

Grinning in anticipation of his Father's Day present, he chatted about a chance to drive "Pappy's" mules, flashing back to memories of driving the eight-horse team on his family's central Minnesota farm nearly a century ago.

McNiven flicked the reins, commanding "Gee" (right) and "Haw" (left) to Jim and Joe, mules he nicknamed "Bad" and "Worse." Then he handed the reins to Bauerly.

After more than an hour on the trail, the ride ended at the campsite and Kenneth Bauerly was grinning.

"It's great. This is the best day of my life to get back on the bare lines," he said before recalling another 200-mile wagon-train trip from St. Paul to Itasca State Park.

The wagon and the nine horses followed Pryor Creek's cottonwoods, past the cluster of swallows hauling mouthfuls of mud to strengthen their cliff homes.

Jonathan McNiven and local wranglers Jim Peabody and Hannah Neel watched the riders while cracking jokes and telling tall tales.

A pair of hawks cruised overhead eying a possible dinner of rabbit, which occasionally dashed out from the green grass, unusually tall after heavy spring rains. The horses' ears shot forward in alert, but nobody spooked.

"I joke around a lot because we've never had a problem, but horses are unpredictable," Jonathan McNiven said.

At a walk, the Bauerly girls laughed at the horses' whinnying. Occasionally, they grew serious when a horse broke into a trot, the easiest gait for a horse and the hardest for a rider. Their bodies struggled to sort out "up from down" to avoid slapping butts to saddles.

For once, the rain clouds hung back. Waxy yellow flowers, half open, marked the prickly pear cactus.

On top, the riders looked north to the Bull Mountains, then southeast to the snow-touched Pryor Mountains, a view spanning more than 100 miles.

This scenery is what kept "Pappy" McNiven from finding a desk job.

At age 6, he was helping with the horses after his father, Fondell Scott McNiven, started one of the first hunting outfitting businesses in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

"That's all I've known my whole life. Western Romance is just a lifetime of my experiences" he said.

His life had centered around Western entertainment, including acting in 20 movies such as "Far and Away" and "The Ballad of Little Joe" and "A River Runs Through It."

Around the campfire, Norma McNiven started cooking steaks and beans to go with the fruit and potato salads. Homemade raspberry jam on fry bread finished off the meal.

A family from suburban Milwaukee traveling to Mount Rushmore came to Billings specifically for this cowboy cookout and campfire serenade. Wendy Zeller and her mother, Gloria Wiener, found Western Romance on the Internet and thought it sounded authentic.

"It had some reviews saying, 'It was the best thing we did on our vacation,' " Wendy Zeller said, watching as her sons, Jacob Zeller 8, and Benjamin Zeller, 7, took a short trail ride.

"The half-mile we rode was enough," she said. "Can you imagine crossing the West in a covered wagon? I couldn't."

Today, kids may worship space cowboys, "Pappy" McNiven said, but he's noticing a new craving for the old ways.

"I'm seeing a rebirth of the West. People come out here and explore this as if it's the greatest experience in their lifetime," he said. "They come out here and it's so tranquil. They get to slow down."

He's nicknamed his latest camp along Pryor Creek the "Garden of Eden."

"It's just so beautiful and there are so many green trees. The scenery is the key," he said.

During dinner, Noreen "The Outlaw Queen" Linderman strummed guitar and sang some of the cowboy classics:

"She rides and ropes. She leads the parade. She's the queen of the rodeo," she sang before slipping into a yodel.

As the sun set, "Pappy" McNiven and Linderman sang campfire duets as they have for more than a decade: "Rawhide," "Lonesome Cattle Call" and "Montana Lullaby."

"I love being in those big blue skies of Montana," he crooned. "It's a place that makes all my cowboy dreams come true."