PASADENA - Despite Willie and Waylon's admonition ``Don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys,'' it seems that even in this day and age, there are those who want to recapture the romantic mythos of riding the range in the Old West.

At least that seems to be the driving force behind ``Texas Ranch House'' (8 p.m. Monday-Thursday, Ch. 9), the latest in PBS's ``House'' series of social experiments in which modern men and women are plunked down in reasonable facsimiles of life in bygone eras.

In previous incarnations, the show, co-produced by New York's WNET and Britain's Wall to Wall Television, has put moderns into Victorian times, the manor houses of pre-World War I England, the American plains of the 1870s and Colonial New England. But the four-night, eight-hour ``Ranch House'' is the most ambitious of the ``House'' projects.

Set on a 47,000-acre ranch near the southwest Texas town of Alpine, the show not only includes 15 people from various walks of life who volunteered to live the Old West life of 1867 but also 200 head of longhorn cattle, 20 horses, a bunch of burros, more than a few rattlesnakes and a swarm of flies that threatened to overwhelm the ranch at times. And oh, yeah, the temperature often got close to 110 degrees.

That part of Texas today ``can be a pretty unforgiving place, but just imagine what it was like 139 years ago,'' says Jody Sheff, the show's executive producer.

``In 1867, the Civil War was over, Texas was not yet back in the Union, and millions of unclaimed cattle roamed the range, ripe for the taking. The land was claimed by Native Americans and Tejano Mexicans, and into this mix freed black slaves and Anglo settlers arrived to stake their claims and make their fortunes.''

Sheff says the volatile era not only provided a colorful, if sometimes dangerous, backdrop to the series but also gave the producers a chance ``to investigate our fascination with the American cowboy.''

``Hollywood's version is a colorful mix of Roy Rogers, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. And it's a myth that `Texas Ranch House' debunks,'' she says. ``Our cowboys and ranchers worked their butts off. They endured a daily grind punctuated by hunger, saddle sores and setbacks.''

Talk to those cast members who played the actual working cowboys, and you get a sense that as brutal as the work appears on the show, it was even tougher in real life -- especially since most of them came to ``Ranch House'' without such necessary skills as horseback riding.

``I had not really ridden a horse before I got out there,'' says Jared Ficklin, a 30-year-old self-proclaimed computer geek who is one of the series' more engaging figures. ``A lot of us were not that good at working a horse, and a lot of us had even less experience when it came to ranch work.''

Nor were Ficklin and his fellow ``cowboys'' exactly cheered by the warnings offered by the real-life owner of the property.

``He told us, `This is not a benign environment. It is actively trying to kill you. It's not sitting there waiting for to you make a mistake. It's going to reach out and grab you,' '' recalls Ficklin. ``It's amazing that they ever put us out there. It was very, very difficult, dangerous work. And you really had to take it quite seriously.''

The one cowboy with experience -- Robby Cabezuela, a 35-year-old descendant of Mexican vaqueros -- admits that early on, he had his doubts about the project.

``When I first saw the guys out there, I was like, `Oh, my God. What are we doing here?' '' he says. ``But about the third day, I knew we could get this thing done, and I never gave up. I knew we could do it.''

(Some accommodations were made for the cast, including a cutback in the length of the cowboys' workdays. In addition, no one carried a gun -- even though a cattle ranch in 1867 would have bristled with six-shooters and rifles.)

As has often been the case on installments of the ``House'' series, some of the participants have problems adapting. Without spoiling too much of the opening episodes, tensions develop within the group almost immediately -- particularly after the arrival of the ``ranch owners'' (Bill and Lisa Cooke and their three teenage daughters, who live in San Ramon).

At one point, you get an idea why all the cowboy cooks in movie westerns are portrayed as cranky and out of sorts.

And in one early episode, a key cast member gets ``fired'' for violating the rules of the ranch.

``You're a very small group of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. So you can't go anywhere,'' says cast member Maura Finkelstein, a feisty 25-year-old who just started work on her doctorate in anthropology at Stanford. ``And if you don't like each other, it's not a very good situation.''

As in previous installments, the women found it particularly difficult to adjust to the roles women would have played in the Old West. Even Lisa Cooke, the owner's wife, talks about being marginalized in the ranch's operations.

Finkelstein says she really struggled in her role as the ``girl of all work,'' essentially the maid to the Cooke family. For one thing, she is an accomplished horsewoman and came to ``Ranch House'' as a better rider than anyone in the cast except Cabezuela.

``I've read accounts of women becoming cowboys in 1880, and I figure, the way women's history works in the U.S., if it was happening in 1880 and recorded, it was definitely happening in the 1860s,'' she says. ``So I do think that women were out there and they were working side by side with the men.

``So I was very angry. I actually thought that there might be the possibility of starting out as a cowboy and not necessarily the maid, so it was a disappointment at first.''

Still, the cast members feel they took something away from their experience.

``At the time, you're like, `Get me out of here. I want to go home right now,' '' says Lacy Cooke, 18. ``But looking back, it's just like, `Wow, I'm really blessed to have gotten the opportunity to do that.' ''

Even Finkelstein -- who eventually did become a ``cowgirl'' -- says, ``I think I walked away a little happy to leave this place and never return.'' But when she saw a clip of the show, she says she had ``this tightening in my chest when I was watching it and thinking I spent a summer in one of the most beautiful places in the world, doing a really romantic task.''

Texas Ranch House

** 1/2

Airing: 8 p.m. Monday-Thursday, Ch. 9

Contact Charlie McCollum at cmccollum@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5245. His blog on the world of TV appears at http://blogs.mercurynews. com/aei/