dude ranch

A guest ranch, also known as a dude ranch, is a type of ranch oriented towards visitors or tourism. It is considered a form of agritourism. History Guest ranches arose in response to the romanticization of the American West that began to occur in the late 19th century. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner stated that the United States frontier was demographically "closed". This in turn led many people to have feelings of nostalgia for bygone days, but also, given that the risks of a true frontier were gone, allowed for nostalgia to be indulged in relative safety. Thus, the person referred to as a "tenderfoot" or a "greenhorn" by westerners was finally able to visit and enjoy the advantages of western life for a short period of time without needing to risk life and limb. Marshall Sprague in 1967 wrote that Griff Evans was running a dude ranch near Estes Park, Colorado by 1873, "thirty years before dude ranches were officially invented"; when Isabella Bird visited Evans that year, he already had nine men and women as guests. A dude ranch was near Medora, North Dakota in 1884 owned by the Eaton brothers, businessmen from Pittsburgh. It was likely fostered by the collapse of the free-range cattle industry in the late 1880s. Too many ranchers shared the open plains with vast herds of cattle, and in the hard winter of 1886 herds were decimated, with some owners financially ruined overnight. The Western adventures of famous figures, like Theodore Roosevelt, a neighbor of the Eatons in the 1880s, were made available to paying guests from cities of the East, called "dudes" in the West. In the early years, the transcontinental railroad network brought paying visitors to a local depot, where a wagon or buggy would be waiting to transport people to a ranch. Experiences varied as some guest ranch visitors expected a somewhat edited and more luxurious version of the "cowboy life", while others were more tolerant of the odors and timetable of a working ranch. By 1913 it was noted that ranchers had begun to dress as 'cowboys' and introduce pageantry such as an afternoon cattle round-up, to add to the expected 'glamour' of western life.