Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
