How My Childhood Ignited My Cowboy Spirit
This month’s guest on Women Honoring the West hails from the beautiful state of Colorado. She’s a woman who loves the West and has a unique, fun style about her.
So let’s get to it and meet Stephanie West Allen.
My parents wondered how I got what I call my cowboy gene.
One of the early signs was my attraction to Western music. At the family cabin in the Sierra Nevadas was a cupboard of old 78 records. Nearby was a front-loading record player. To hear music, all I had to do was stick a record in the slot. As soon as I was old enough to grab a record and play it, my preference for what I called cowboy songs was, to anyone nearby, loudly obvious.
My parents preferred jazz.
Walking distance from the cabin were stables where horses could be rented. As often as I could, I’d pull on my boots, grab my western hat, rent my favorite horse, and ride. But other than summers, I grew up in a California Central Valley town.
No horses lived in the neighborhood.
As you can imagine, I still remember the fall day my grandfather called to tell me he’d bought me a horse. Except for summers when that pinto was boarded at the stables near the cabin, he lived at my aunt and uncle’s ranch, where I rode him as often as I could get an adult to drive me the half hour to him.
When I was in junior high, my family moved out to the suburbs, where we had a big backyard. I joined the local 4-H, planted a huge vegetable garden, built a hutch, and bought some rabbits.
Not far from my vegetables and big-eared livestock was our oversized dog run with a shingle roof. I often would climb up on the roof, especially early in the morning, and survey my part of the backyard, imagining the growth that was happening underground and hearing the rabbits rustling in their hutch.
Sometimes wearing my cowboy hat.
One morning, I wrote an essay called “Sitting on a Doghouse Roof.” Junior high English was the first time I turned it in. The next time was in my high school freshman English class. My junior and senior years of high school were at a boarding school, and once again, I turned it in.
All three times, I got an A.
Decades later, the cowboy gene in me is still strong.
As I look back, I have several very good guesses about its origins and see many life events that reinforced my cowboy spirit. And these days, as many of my friends know, I own a lot more cowboy hats and boots than did that kid on the pinto.
About Stephanie
Stephanie West Allen, JD, practiced law in California for several years, held offices in local bar associations, and wrote chapters for California Continuing Education of the Bar, including one on non-adversarial dispute resolution. She lived in Santa Fe for a number of years, and now lives in Colorado. She has been a mediator for over three and one-half decades.
She has written many articles on workplace and professional issues for such publications as Colorado Nurse, The Complete Lawyer, National Law Journal, Of Counsel, The Jury Expert, and Denver Business Journal. Stephanie co-wrote “The Human Factor,” a column on alternative dispute resolution for The Complete Lawyer and also wrote the column “Reading Minds” for the ABA’s Law Practice. She wrote Creating Your Own Funeral or Memorial Service: A Workbook,and is writing a comprehensive workbook to accompany programs she delivers.
Stephanie’s occupation history in addition to lawyer, teacher, workshop presenter, and mediator, includes waitperson, candy maker, director of training, and juvenile probation officer. She is a member of Association for Psychological Science, is trained and certified to administer and interpret the Highlands Ability Battery, and completed an intensive training in the Viola Spolin method of improvisation.
She’s on the WWW board and is co-chair of the 2026 WWW conference.
Stephanie loves to hear from readers. Go ahead, ask her a question in the comments.
