PVT FILE PHOTO Crowds enjoy the barbecue and music in the recreated Old West Village at Matheny's Old Ash Meadows Cow Camp. Advertisement

GOLDFIELD -- During most months of the year, on the Saturday closest to the full moon, dozens of people gathered at Ron Matheny's Old Ash Meadows Cow Camp for an old-fashioned western barbecue and music beside a campfire.

Those fun times will now be just memories. Matheny sold the 40-acre cow camp at the end of November to a church group, which he said plans to use the property near Peterson Reservoir for a retreat. "They're real nice people," Matheny said.

He is moving many of his western artifacts and memorabilia up to Goldfield, where he bought land on Columbia Street across from the Goldfield Hotel. He plans to hold a few events in Goldfield every year.

Matheny said he owned the property, which he bought from the late Nye County Commissioner Dick Carver, for 12 years.

"His dad bought it in 1936 or something like that. They weren't even sure where it was, I had to locate it. But there's another 160 acres across from it a guy's got for sale," Matheny said.

Matheny requested $700,000 for the property, which includes numerous springs. The cow camp made a list of Las Vegas outdoor attractions in the Las Vegas Leisure Guide, after a wagon ride around Crystal Reservoir.

The monthly barbecues traditionally included a game of chicken bingo -- betting on which square in the cage the chicken would poop.

Children could pet the assortment of animals on the property, which included an emu, a burro, a pig, rabbits and llamas.

After dark, when everybody finished their steak and corn on the cob, the crowds would enjoy a band or a guitarist strumming around the campfire. Those who wanted to sleep off the good time could rent a bunk.

Matheny admitted he sometimes second-guessed his decision to sell the place.

"Right now it's winter. When it's green and there's water flowing through it, you think, 'What are you doing?'" Matheny said. "I might do a couple things up in Goldfield. I'm going to keep working for the dairy also.

"I just wanted to move up to Goldfield. It got to be a lot of work keeping everything up, never being able to go anywhere on weekends," he said. "Everybody enjoyed it, the kids liked it. It was a lot of work for the animals but once you saw all the kids having a good time it was worth it. We all had a lot of fun there, young and old."

Western reenactment groups like the High Desert Drifters Gunfighters sometimes staged skits at the cow camp to the delight of a passing busload of German tourists escorted by Jurgen Mayer of Las Vegas Connections. It wasn't uncommon to hear a German tourist belly up to the bar and order, "ein Coors, bitte." (one Coors please). During a previous interview, Matheny joked that a few German tourists never saw corn in a husk before.

Matheny formerly owned the Short Branch Saloon in nearby Crystal. He began operating wagon rides to Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which led to the cow camp barbecues.

Matheny takes his chuck wagon barbecue to other events in Southern Nevada as well.

The collection of memorabilia has gradually expanded. The cow camp included a mock western village with a plank sidewalk, a mercantile store, saloon, telegraph office and a jail, complete with a hanging platform with a noose. Matheny scavenged some of the western memorabilia from various places, a store torn down in Lathrop Wells, or a discarded flea market on Alfalfa Street and Homestead Road in Pahrump.

Matheny said he has six 45-foot tractor-trailers already sitting in Goldfield, choked with his artifacts. His property across from the Goldfield Hotel has already been filled with 120 loads of dirt, big boulders, a 14-foot Joshua tree and a boardwalk.

"I'll do a couple (of events), two or three a year. It depends if people want to drive all the way up there," Matheny said of his new home in the historic town.

He'll have the Desert Drifters available in Goldfield for those western reenactments. Besides Goldfield, historic Gold Point is nearby, home of the popular annual chili cook-off over Memorial Day.

There are still more antiques out at the cow camp remaining to be moved, he said. Those he'll be moving up to Goldfield soon.

Though the site of the cow camp will now echo with the sound of merry church parishioners, with some imagination the smell of the tasty tri-tip barbecues of months past may still be detectable in the air.