American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West

by Lynn Downey

Overview

Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America’s original western vacation, is much more interesting and deeply connected with the culture and history of the American West. In American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey opens new perspectives on this buckaroo getaway, with all its implications for deciphering the American imagination.

Dude ranching began in the 1880s when cattle ranches ruled the West. Men, and a few women, left the comforts of their eastern lives to experience the world of the cowboy. But by the end of the century, the cattleman’s West was fading, and many ranchers turned to wrangling dudes instead of livestock. What began as a way for ranching to survive became a new industry, and as the twentieth century progressed, the dude ranch wove its way into American life and culture. Wyoming dude ranches hosted silent picture shoots, superstars such as Gene Autry were featured in dude film plots, fashion designers and companies like Levi Strauss & Co. replicated the films’ western styles, and novelists Zane Grey and Mary Roberts Rinehart moved dude ranching into popular literature.

Downey follows dude ranching across the years, tracing its influence on everything from clothing to cooking and showing how ranchers adapted to changing times and vacation trends. Her book also offers a rare look at women’s place in this story, as they found personal and professional satisfaction in running their own dude ranches.

However contested and complicated, western history is one of America’s national origin stories that we turn to in times of cultural upheaval. Dude ranches provide a tangible link from the real to the imagined past, and their persistence and popularity demonstrate how significant this link remains. This book tells their story—in all its familiar, eccentric, and often surprising detail.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806180229
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	03/03/2022
Series:	William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West , #8
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lynn Downey is an independent writer, archivist, and historian and the author of Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, A Short History of Sonoma, Arizona’s Vulture Mine and Vulture City, and the award-winning debut novel, Dudes Rush In.

Editorial Reviews

The American West defies simple description. As my grandfather used to say, ‘The West is not a place; it’s a state of mind.’ As Wild West shows brought the West to the world, dude ranches brought the world to the West. Lynn Downey’s book fills a special place in an overlooked area of western history. This book helps us appreciate the region’s rich history and culture.”—Steve Weil, President and Chief Creative Officer, Rockmount Ranch Wear, and author of Western Shirts: A Classic American Fashion
 

“Lynn Downey has a passion for not only telling stories but revealing amazing historical facts too often buried by new trends. In this book she dives deep into the minute details that have made dude ranching what it is today. A great read showcasing an amazing industry.”—Bryce Albright, Executive Director of the Dude Ranchers’ Association
 

“An interesting, fun read for anyone that places dude ranching and dude ranchers in their proper place in the history of the West.”—Russell True, past President of the Dude Ranchers Association and author of Dude Ranching in Arizona and Dude Ranching in Wyoming
 

“In her highly entertaining and fact-filled American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey, a former historian at Levi Strauss & Co., gives a cultural history of the dude ranch phenomenon [and] profiles a uniquely American institution, one that for 150 years has sold the idea of a few days or weeks of the romance of the Old West.”—The Denver Post
 

“Without a doubt if you love the popular history of the Wild West you will want to read American Dude Ranch.”—True West Magazine

“The origins and development of dude ranches have generally been overlooked with regard to Western history, yet they have had a role to play for some 140 years, eventually becoming influential in the cultural path of the West…Lynn Downey has researched this subject extensively and followed very closely the history of dude ranching…– from clothing to cooking, the development of modern facilities, and not the least the noted Western hospitality. With the dude ranches the flavour of the Old West remains alive.”—English Society of Westerners
 

“American Dude Ranch provides a nice introduction to the history of dude ranching in the West and may inspire further research into its many cultural topics. Guests visiting such ranches will certainly find it interesting, as will general readers interested in the West, tourism, and cowboy culture.”—South Dakota History


 

“Downey’s narrative draws readers into an interesting history of dude ranches. Personalizing stories and people who owned, worked, and visited dude ranches keep the reader engaged while also providing important historical analysis.”—Chronicles of Oklahoma
 

“This is a deeply engaging book that effectively balances an accessible writing style with solid research, and it features an ample assortment of photographs, posters, and postcards.”—Kirkus Reviews
 

From the Publisher

2023-06-25
A historian explores the history and cultural impact of dude ranches.

The “thrill of the West” captured the imaginations of many wealthy Americans in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and it found expression in President Theodore Roosevelt’s embodiment of a masculine Western ethos and Buffalo Bill’s traveling shows. The fact that upper- and middle-class Eastern urbanites and Europeans flocked to the West to take vacations was due in large part to the existence of dude ranches. As travel destinations for “dudes” (a term that originally referred to “someone who isn’t a cowboy but wants to be”), these locations served as entry points into the West for neophytes. They changed not only American vacation habits, but also cultural perceptions of the West as a whole. This book explores the history of dude ranches as well as their impacts on American culture via travel posters, novels, and, later, television and film productions. Downey, the author of multiple books about the West and the former head of Levi Strauss and Company’s archives, has an intuitive sense of the power of advertising, and the book is full of astute analyses of Western popular culture and visual media. This is a deeply engaging book that effectively balances an accessible writing style with solid research backed by more than 150 endnotes, and it features an ample assortment of photographs, posters, and postcards. Although dude ranches, Downey notes, were intentionally cultivated as “white spaces,” she also argues that they were epicenters of diversity. She effectively emphasizes the experiences of Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Black people, women, and queer people, and these are among the book’s strongest elements. She points out, for example, that Black and Indigenous men competed in early rodeos and that gay men, such as Philip H. Cummings, worked at dude ranches; gay vacationers, she says, often registered as “friends” who “shared their cabins, with apparently no one the wiser.”

A well-researched study that successfully captures the allure, and the myths, of the West.

Kirkus Reviews