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.

After riding a stagecoach in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in 1910, Princeton student Irving H. "Larry" Larom was determined to live a life in the West. Later that year, Larom made the first of four summer trips to Wyoming, where he was a guest at Jim McLaughlin's Valley Ranch, nestled in a scenic valley in the upper South Fork of the Shoshone River. Larom became so enamored of the magnificent wilderness environment and the prospects of becoming a dude rancher that he abandoned his life as a New York socialite. Partnering with Brooks Brothers heir and Yale student Winthrop Brooks, he purchased Valley Ranch in 1915.A welcome study of early dude ranch development, Dude Ranching in Yellowstone Country preserves the history of an important Wyoming ranch and the man who built it. W. Hudson Kensel recounts the life of Larom, whose East Coast connections to financial resources and wealthy guests enabled him to transform McLaughlin's small homestead into a major tourist destination and prep school on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. The purchase of Valley Ranch coincided with the opening of Yellowstone to automobile traffic and the onset of World War I. Valley Ranch benefited as western parks and dude ranches became destinations for weary city dwellers and travelers looking for a vacation alternative to war-torn Europe. Besides making the ranch a success, Larom became a civic leader in Cody, Wyoming, a nationally recognized conservationist, and a founder and longtime president of the Dude Ranchers Association. Kensel draws on Larom's papers, local and national newspaper coverage, records of the ranch's prep school, and memories of the citizens and pioneers of northwestern Wyoming to flesh out the story of Valley Ranch as a local and national institution with important influences on conservation, youth education, and the development of western tourism.