Diary of a Dude Wrangler

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

By Jake Nichols

As a former dude wrangler, I’ve heard it all before.

“At what age do deer turn into elk?”

“When can we gallop?”

“What is my horse doing now?”

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Week to week, the dudes may change, but the questions never do. The charge of the wrangler is to answer all with the casual knowledge of a fourth-generation native while posting the trot and watching for wildlife. A wrangle must be a concierge, a historian, a veterinarian, a babysitter, a wildlife biologist, a psychiatrist and a movie star, all at minimum wage.

I caught the bug in the 1990s, spending summers at dude ranches in Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. The work was hard and the hours long, but the opportunity to throw a saddle on a horse every morning and call it a job was one I couldn’t pass up. I eventually ended up in Jackson Hole in 1997, working three summers at the Halpin family’s Lost Creek Ranch. I didn’t know it then, but I was joining a long line of wranglers that trace their tradition back to the godfather of them all, Struthers Burt.

The history of dude ranching
Burt was co-owner of Jackson Hole’s first dude ranch, the JY, which opened in 1908. He had a falling out with his business partner, Louis Joy, and eventually opened Jackson’s second dude ranch in 1912 with a Philadelphia doctor named Horace Carncross. They called their operation the Bar BC.

Burt and Carncross spent months searching for just the right spot for their ranch. The partners considered soils, terrain, prevailing winds, timber for building material and firewood, grazing range, water sources, hunting and fishing spots, even mosquito problems. They settled on a 320-acre spread with unparalleled views of the Tetons using the Homestead Act of 1862 to stake out their claim.
In his famous novel published in 1931, Diary of a Dude Wrangler, Burt remembers the hard work that lay ahead as he and his partner had two months to build cabins for their first six guests, expected to arrive July 1, 1912.
“We had to build a small town in the wilderness, complete and self-sustaining in every detail,” he wrote.

By 1922, the Bar BC would comprise 600 acres and 45 buildings. Single and double sleeping cabins dotted the landscape along with a main lodge consisting of two dining rooms, a kitchen, two sitting rooms, and two smaller rooms. Other buildings included a blacksmith shop, garage, saddle shed, granary, camp store house, three storage sheds, root cellar, office, ice house, outfit dining room, five bunkhouses, store, laundry, dance hall and four houses for the owner and foreman. There were four partners, three foremen and about 45 employees.
Because international travel was sharply curtailed during WWI, the JY and Bar BC ranches enjoyed decent business from East Coast tourists in their inaugural years. By the Roaring Twenties, the guest ranching business exploded in Jackson Hole and throughout the American West.

A March 1925 headline in the Jackson's Hole Courier proclaimed: “Dude Ranches Grow Popular.” The story reported that a total of 600 dudes vacationed at guest ranches in Jackson Hole in 1924 – more than all the hotels in Jackson combined. The tourist trade was on, as local ranchers found dudes wintered better than cows. Guest ranches like the White Grass, Bear Paw, Elbo, Danny Ranch, the STS, the Half Moon Lake, the Trail Ranch, the Double Diamond X, the Castle Rock, the Circle H, the Flying V, the Red Rock, the Vee Bar, the Triangle X, the Gros Ventre, and the Warbonnet all cropped up during the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The taming of the West was nearly complete, and the cowboy folklore played well in the big cities. Easterners had grown tired of civilization and embraced the chance to let their hair down, don a pair of chaps, and experience for themselves the allure of the wild and scenic American West. They didn’t care that most ranches had no electricity or running water well into the 1930s. They arrived by rail – Union Pacific was instrumental in running ad campaigns to drive business – to Victor, Idaho, where a bumpy wagon or car ride over the Pass awaited to take them to their ranch of choice.

In the early years, dudes were often the personal guests of ranch owners who usually hailed from the northeast. They would typically stay for a month or more, enjoying horseback riding, fishing, hiking and climbing. Many guests would return year after year and some even chose to settle in the valley, building their own ranches.

One such dude was famed novelist Owen Wister, who bought the now-R Lazy S in 1912 after staying at the JY a year earlier. Wister and his family had been at the ranch only two months when his wife, Mary, died giving birth in 1913. Wister could never bring himself to return to Jackson Hole.

Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson – the Countess of Flat Creek – arrived at the Bar BC in 1916 with eight trunks of luggage and a world of attitude. She was on the rebound from a failed marriage to a Polish count when she turned up at the Bar BC in a soaking rainstorm. Patterson’s saga is immortalized in the local play Petticoat Rules. She would eventually fall for Bar BC wrangler Cal Carrington who sold her his Flat Creek Ranch in 1923 for $5,000.

This and additional information can be found in Jack Huyler’s book That’s the Way it Was in Jackson’s Hole. Huyler’s father, Holter Huyler, started Bear Paw Ranch.

Present day guest ranching
Today, the term ‘dude’ is considered to be derogatory and undignified. Even as early as 1926, when the Dude Ranchers' Association was established, there was concern over the connotations. In Burt’s day, a ‘dude’ simply referred to any outsider who paid for lodging, riding, hunting, or other services and had none of the negative connotations that terms like ‘greenhorn’ or ‘tenderfoot’ might bear.
Lost Creek Ranch had its share of celebrities as guests. Wealthy CEOs and top brass from Fortune 500 companies around the world enjoyed a week away from the office. Danielle Steel’s best-selling novel The Ranch was drawn mainly from her stay at Lost Creek.

Ronald Reagan visited the ranch when he was in the valley, and I remember Boston Red Sox all-star Fred Lynn spending a week at the ranch in the late 90s. His handshake was bone-crushing.
Sometimes the wranglers were the celebrities.

I’ll never forget the day Chris Douglas walked into the bunkhouse and asked about openings for cowboys. He looked too pretty to be of any use in the saddle, and all us seasoned hands nearly fell off the top rail laughing at this dandy. Douglas looked more like a model than a cowboy.

It wasn’t long after Douglas was hired that the girls on the ranch recognized him from his Versace magazine photo shoots and his inclusion among YM Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful Guys. While they fawned over the new hire, the ranch men noticed Douglas’ mug in the Cabela’s catalog where he could plainly be seen modeling the latest in camouflage and fishing waders.

We also found out that Douglas was coming off a breakup with a singer named Jewel and he was, in fact, a pretty decent hand. He never shirked the hard work and forked a horse like a real buckaroo.

Douglas didn’t last the summer, however. He left when Hollywood called, taking a job on the soap “The Young and the Restless.”

A wrangler’s life
A wrangler’s day begins before sun-up. The herd, known as the remuda, has to be brought into the corrals from a night of grazing at pasture. Horse herds can total some 130 horses at the bigger ranches.

Each wrangler knows every horse’s name and habits: Lacey can only go at the end of a line. Banker is a solid kid’s horse, but hates water. Blondie prefers women riders only, and may buck early in the season.

Today, horses are generally leased from outfitters. Wranglers ride down the stock in the spring before the ranch opens, rating the horses in order to match each with a rider’s experience level.

The guests are paired with their horses on the first day of their stay.
“I’ve never ridden a horse,” one dude will inevitably say.
“That’s perfect because we’ve got one that’s never been ridden,” comes the predictable answer.

The gag at Lost Creek was to find the toughest looking guy in the bunch and introduce his horse as “Widow Maker.” That always seemed to knock him down a peg or at least make him laugh.

Every group has one dude that wranglers fear. He is easily spotted by his newly purchased ‘Western wear’ – boots too shiny and pointy or one of those asinine Shady Brady distressed straw hats made famous by Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride. Burt called these dudes “diamond-pointed.” They already know how to ride. They already know everything.

“I want a spirited one,” they blurt out.
First of all, a so-called spirited horse is not likely to reside in a ‘dude string.’ Horses wind up in dude strings because they are dead broke. For the 28-year-old, bombproof kid’s horse, a dude string is the last stop on the way to a Canadian’s dinner plate or Fido’s food bowl.
Wranglers are often mounted on the most challenging the ranch has to offer in the way of horse flesh. Young horses with bad habits are par for the course. They are called ‘knot heads’ and ‘dinks’ in the trade. The Appaloosa breed, in my opinion, is the most frustrating. I rode one such Appy in Colorado that wouldn’t know if he was on fire. The joke goes that the Nez Perce Indians were such fierce warriors because by the time they arrived for battle on their Appies, they were ready to kill anything.

As a wrangler, I've been lost countless times. Well, maybe not ‘lost,’ just experiencing periods where the ranch was temporarily misplaced, and I was ‘delayed,’ as Burt would say. I have seen black bear and grizzly close enough that the group was instructed their ‘walk ride’ was “fixin’ to hit a high lope.”

I’ve ridden through hailstorms and bee swarms, but nothing scares a wrangler more than a hyperactive seven-year-old with permissive parents. I remember one such boy who managed to mount his horse backwards, lose both cowboy boots somewhere on the trail, and whip his sister’s horse into a bucking fit with his dime-store lasso. Toward the end of the ride, when I was pretty sure I could bring ‘em all in alive and accounted for, I heard the boy say, “Mister, I'm not on my horse anymore.”

I was scared to look. Sure enough, his horse had ridden below a low-hanging branch and the boy grabbed on until old Flicka had walked out from under him. There he dangled for an impressive length of time. The father’s attempted rescue resulted in a train wreck they still talk about today around the campfire back at the ranch.

The future of guest ranching
The advent of the automobile drastically effected dude ranches by the mid-1940s. Guests’ average stay dropped from one month to one week. Expectations of dudes changed significantly over the years as well. Burt’s classic example of the trade in 1931 – “giving people homemade bedsteads but 40-pound mattresses” – is no longer viable. Guests are less vigorous and less self-reliant than their earlier counterparts. They demand more pampering and better food.

Joy and Burt would hardly recognize the high-end guest ranches of today. Spas, swimming pools and float trips have become the norm at places like Lost Creek Ranch –where a week’s stay can run more than $14,000.

All in all, the industry has weathered well, through economic slumps and the reinvention of Jackson as an ‘art and entertainment’ Mecca. Dude ranching continues to remain an essential piece of Jackson Hole’s tourism machine, according to the JH Chamber of Commerce.

“The guest ranch industry is such an integral touchstone to our tourism market,” the Chamber’s Heather Falk said. “Even the state promotes itself with the tag ‘forever West’ and Wyoming is branded as a Western state. People see the importance of our Western heritage and that essential element has never changed.” JHW

Courtesy of JAKE NICHOLS
The author with ‘Trixie’ at Lost Creek Ranch in 1998.

PERMALINK:
Diary of a Dude Wrangler | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

Leave a Comment