Three decades later, a large print hangs on the wall of her Western-style chalet near a mounted buck's head and a bear skin. In "The Privileged Few," a cowboy picks sticks from his saddle blanket as the Rogue Valley stretches behind man and horse, the very scene the little girl saw.

Schleigh, 45, lives with her husband and son on a ranch carved out of land that's been in her family since just after the Civil War. Her art seeks to tell the story of that life.

As a kid Schleigh was always drawing. She grew up on the next spread over, where they still run cattle. But by the time she went to Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, she'd become interested in cattle and put artsy things behind her. She spent her 20s and 30s cowboying, running cattle between Fort Klamath and Willows and Red Bluff, Calif., living in a 30-foot trailer the Schleighs called "the war wagon."

Today, drawers from the war wagon are built into the kitchen cabinets her husband made from timber on their land. They built the house -- she says it's a work in progress -- eight years ago, far from power and telephone lines and equipped with a generator.

Schleigh had little formal training, although she did study with Western artist David Bjurstrom.

Although she sometimes enlists her husband or 10-year-old son as models, she doesn't paint directly from life. "I have 100 ideas," she says. "There's always something that's eating to get done. They aren't things I've seen. They're a little from this, a little from that." She once thought all the years she spent cowboying were wasted. "But now I think it's an opportunity I'll never get again," she says.

Unlike armchair cowboy artists, Schleigh knows what's what and where it goes. She chuckles at cowboy art in which a rope will take off and not end anywhere, just go off into thin air. Or a guy who's famous for pictures of cowboy boots and spurs -- "but he always has them on the wrong feet and upside down."