BOWMAN - Nici Meyer Clarkson has won plenty of rodeo championships in her day, but she's never tried a court case.

She's about to become a full-time prosecutor and trying cases will be her main ride.

Meyer Clarkson, 26, fresh out of law school in 2001, was elected state's attorney for Bowman and Slope counties in southwestern North Dakota.

An expert barrel racer in one arena, she vaulted into the political arena and knocked off the incumbent in Bowman County and an attorney who'd had the job in past years in Slope County.

In rodeo terms, she goat-tied them both, something else she's expert in.

Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem had to clear up a procedural question in the situation. Monday, he decided the two counties could share the position, even though they hadn't formally made that agreement before the election.

Count that as an important victory, comparable to the election night returns.

Meyer Clarkson walked away with nearly a two-to-one advantage over Steve Wild in the Bowman County race and over Bruce Selinger in the Slope County race.

Hard telling what took place out there.

Meyer Clarkson figures she won because she campaigned pretty hard. Besides county fairs and parades, she went to nearly every house in several towns in the counties. She considered the sparsely populated and remote countryside too formidable to try the same.

Wild, the current Bowman County state's attorney, figures it another way.

In the 20 years he'd had the job, he's prosecuted more than 2,000 people. That's a lot of bad check writers, bar fighters, drunken drivers and the like to reckon with at the polls.

Wild said the explanation might be even more prosaic than that.

He'd never been challenged before and he thinks people might have thought along the lines of, "He's had it a long time and here's somebody new. Let's spread it around."

He can't count how many times people joshed him that he was being challenged by someone a whole lot better looking, too.

He plans to be a gentleman in the transition. No one will benefit if he's a jerk about it, Wild said.

Upstairs in the Bowman County Courthouse, Sheriff Rory Teigen is kind of scratching his head, too.

He said it's amazing that a woman hardly anyone had heard of before the primary election managed to beat out two well-known names.

Teigen will depend on her to take his arrests and criminal complaints to court. He won't hold her inexperience against her. "Everybody's got to start somewhere," he said. "It'll be new."

Selinger's got a practice in Dickinson and decided to run for state's attorney in Slope County, where he'd had the position before, when the incumbent didn't run. He said what happened to him can happen anywhere.

"Any state's attorney in the state is vulnerable to someone young and new," he said.

Selinger had been state's attorney in Slope County for 12 years prior to the last election, when he was beat by Hettinger attorney Jeff Rotering.

Rotering's moving on in his career and is just winding up his affairs while he waits.

Rotering figures the Slope County election went to Meyer Clarkson because people watched him prosecute for both Slope and Hettinger counties and realized one prosecutor can serve two counties and maybe do it better.

"With one county, you do a little of everything. With two, you do enough to get better at it," Rotering said. "It's a breakthrough. People realize it's not so bad."

Meyer Clarkson said she expects the two counties to add up to a full-time job. Each pays between $21,000 and $24,000.

Growing up, she lived and rodeoed in several towns around the state.

She graduated from Rugby High School, attended Miles City (Mont.) Community College on a rodeo scholarship and graduated from the University of North Dakota Law School in 2001.

She was hired as a law clerk for the South Central Judicial District at Dickinson. She met Garrett Clarkson, a South Dakota rancher, and married him in between the primary and general election. The two have a home in Bowman.

People don't become champions without hard work and discipline and rodeo isn't like other sports with teammates and a group effort.

In her case, there was a young woman, a horse and a stopwatch, good training for any competition.

Meyer Clarkson might be young and she might be a woman in an arena that's been dominated by men up until now.

She predicts a few bumps, but she's used to those.

"I don't think I have any disadvantages," she said. "I'm ambitious and I have a lot of support from people in the area."