(FORTUNE Magazine) – ''Ranch owners compare very favorably with similar classes of capitalists in the East. A successful ((rancher)) must not only be shrewd . . . and enterprising, but he must also possess qualities of personal bravery, hardihood, and self-reliance to a degree not demanded by any mercantile occupation.''- Theodore Roosevelt

WHERE ON THE PLAINS of American business is there a figure to rival the cattleman for sheer romance? When Teddy Roosevelt -- himself a onetime rancher from the Dakota Badlands -- charged up Kettle Hill, he didn't do it with claims adjusters or upholsterers. No boy ever spent a dime at the Bijou of a summer's afternoon to see a movie about a singing banker. Do ranchers in the 1980s still measure up? They do. To run a large cattle ranch, even now, is to run empire. Collectively, the ranches on these pages embrace a land area twice the size of Delaware. On properties so vast, | anything can happen, testing owners with problems beyond the scope of business school curricula: floods, tick fever, attacks by mountain lions, rustlers. Rustlers? Last year alone, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association estimated that ranchers in Texas and Oklahoma lost $4.4 million of livestock to rustlers. In some respects the rancher's image is out of step with the realities of his business. Seldom, for instance, does he take out after mountain lions or bring rustlers to justice. His employees -- cowboys -- do that. Cowboys get their paychecks and their marching orders from ranchers. They wear spurs, ride the range, and seldom go to town. When ranchers ride the range, they do it more often than not in a Ford V-8 -- like the Old Cowhand in Johnny Mercer's song. Because they spend hours flying to such distant places as Washington, D.C., explaining why their domains shouldn't be turned into wild-horse sanctuaries or national parks, they don't wear spurs. Spurs set off metal detectors in airports. And unless they're under contract as Marlboro Men, they don't get paid for looking rugged. Ranchers get paid for guiding their businesses through the cattle industry's challenging cycles of boom and bust, each cycle lasting about ten years. In boom times, neophytes and optimists overexpand, going into hock to buy the spread next door. More experienced men tend to be conservative. ''Maybe we don't spend as much on pretty white fences as we should,'' says Nevada's DeLoyd Satterthwaite. ''But we support 13 families on this ranch. We've never been in the red.'' Even when prices are good, as they were last year, the most sophisticated operators, like Oklahoma's Ladd Hitch, hedge on the futures market to decrease their risk. ''It amazes me how others get by,'' he says. ''By balls and horse sense, I guess.'' Much of the time, a rancher's life is about as romantic as wool underwear. Like any other manager, he must contain costs, hire and fire, and second-guess markets. Is his job no different, then, from running a hardware store? ''The financing, the managing of people -- that's the same,'' says James M. Eller, whose Granada Corp. sells a million pounds of beef a year. ''But our inventory isn't on shelves. It's out there on those pastures that you see. It eats and it dies.''