Becoming Western: Stories of Culture and Identity in the Cowboy State

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Author: Liza Nicholas

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Becoming Western

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Chapter 4 previously appeared in American Quarterly (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 54, no. 3 (September 2002): 437–65. © 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ⬁ 䡬 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholas, Liza, 1964– Becoming western: stories of culture and identity in the cowboy state / Liza J. Nicholas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-3350-8 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-3350-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Group identity— Wyoming. 2. Wyoming— Civilization. I. Title. f761.n53 2006 978.7'03—dc22 2005024224 Set in Trump Medieval by Bob Reitz. Designed by R. W. Boeche.

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For big Chuck and little Connie, as authentic as they made them.

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1. Jack Flagg and the Battle over “Westernness”

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2. The West, the East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse

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3. The West of Work and Play

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4. A Museum, Celebrations, and Yale

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5. Voting Western

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Illustrations Following page 32 “What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost” Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her statue of Buffalo Bill Larry Larom and female guests, Valley Ranch, circa 1925

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Wyoming’s Tourism Bureau sells a Wyoming past to recent visitors

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0.0pt PgV There are many people to whom I am deeply indebted for their help with this project, first and foremost my dissertation committee at the University of Utah. Through her own expertise and mastery of her field, Pat Albers constantly challenged my abilities and knowledge level; Eric Hinderaker’s professionalism, intellectual acuteness, and fundamental integrity taught me great lessons not only about being a good historian but an intellectually honest and professionally admirable one at that. The sheer breadth of Paul Johnson’s historical knowledge and his great affection for history’s characters inculcated a great desire in me to learn and tell stories about the past. Dorothee Kocks consistently encouraged me to think outside the box, and Mary Strine opened up new and exciting intellectual ideas to me every time I walked into her classroom or office. You all made graduate school a wonderful experience. Thank you. I’d also like to thank Tom Harvey and Elaine Bapis for their support, friendship, and intellectual companionship; Phil Deloria and Susan Kollin who both read and commented on sections of this book; Bob Goldberg, J. C. Mutchler, and the faculty of the University of Utah History Department; the University of Utah

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Humanities Department and the Steffanson Cannon committee for their generous funding of this project, as well as the American West Center at the University of Utah and the Floyd O’Neil Scholarship in Western American Studies. I thank the peer reviewers for both the University of Nebraska Press and American Quarterly for their help and advice. The staff at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center’s McCracken Library, the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, and the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Utah were all of vital help to me in completing this project. And, finally, I extend very sincere thanks to the University of Nebraska Press and Elizabeth Demers, Jeremy Hall, and copyeditor Paul Bodine for their support for and help with this book.

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0.0pt PgV In her poignant memoir, Riding the White Horse Home, Teresa Jordan recalls the story her grandfather told about his father, J. L. Jordan, the family patriarch and founder of the Jordan ranch in southeastern Wyoming. To the Jordans, writes Teresa, that story was the family legend, “a story as important to my grandfather as a creation myth is to a Mandan Indian.” The story her grandfather told about his pioneer father followed the outlines of countless other well-worn tales of hardy pioneers seeking their fortune in the great West. J. L. worked his way across the country, settled in Wyoming, homesteaded a plot of land, and through his determination, grit, and stalwart independence gradually put together the impressive Jordan ranch. Over the years Jordan proudly and frequently told the story of her legendary great grandfather’s life. There was only one problem: it wasn’t true. J. L.’s adventure, it turns out, was never the independent saga of western myth. Rather than his determined independence, it was family connections and financial assistance that built the Jordan ranch. Jordan’s grandfather, she writes, turned his father into “an orphan cast into the Western wilderness alone; a prodigal who returned to his familial home only in triumph . . .


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who raised his own fatted calf, branded it, and shipped it east in a railroad car.”1 Jordan’s grandfather knew the tale his father should have lived, and he simply adjusted the narrative to fit it. As in J. L. Jordan’s “legend,” the stories we tell about ourselves are rarely, if ever, free from the narratives that circulate around us, that work their way into our consciousness to become fact— to become simply “the way it was.” Westerners in particular have had vivid and familiar stories from which to weave their own origin tales. From James Fenimore Cooper’s iconoclastic Leatherstocking to Owen Wister’s quintessential Western icon, the Virginian, westerners have been endowed with an abundance of rich fodder to color their biographies. In Wyoming’s short history, its residents certainly bandied about more than one story, identity, and mythology from which to make meaning of their lives. However, the historical circumstances of the state’s quest for identity encouraged the privileging of one particular narrative that would come to dominate the state’s own self-image. Wyoming served from the 1880s on as a sort of cultural colonial outpost for the eastern elite. As late as the 1890s, Wyoming remained relatively unsettled and uncultivated, which created the perception of a convenient blank canvas from which the native presence was erased and on which those searching for the “true” America could paint their vision. 2 The state wasn’t lucky enough to be endowed with silver, gold, or copper, like its neighbors Montana and Colorado. As a result, it failed to attract the population— and tumultuous labor movement—of its western neighbors. Its wind and aridity discouraged farming, and its remoteness hampered transportation links to the greater West. Wyoming, then, was open to interpretation; and relatively few other western stories would interfere or compete with the one that came to dominate the state’s biography, the saga of the American cowboy. The state’s representational icon was born of the Gilded Age economy of the late nineteenth century, which fed on the West’s resources and nourished the cattle boom that drew the wealthy, speculative East to America’s hinterland along with their picturesque hired help. Wyoming’s open, uncluttered prairies perfectly met the needs of the great cattle barons whose ranching

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enterprises relied on vast expanses of unsettled public domain. If Wyoming’s lack of development frustrated the ambitions of civilizers and cultivators, the barons were only too happy to postpone such evolution. And the very lack of attributes that created economic challenges for the “civilizers” only enhanced Wyoming’s cultural appeal, for many of these same Eastern elites who found Wyoming ripe territory for economic investment also yearned for a purer, nostalgic, more “American” space in an America that they viewed as besieged by immigrants, industrialization, and urbanization. The primitiveness many of these easterners perceived in Wyoming made the state the antithesis to an East they believed was overly cultivated, crowded, and corrupted, an East from which they sought refuge. 3 Wyoming drew such formative shapers of the western myth as Frederic Remington and Owen Wister, both of whom utilized this imagined space to construct “western” types that they in turn used to assert their vision of true Americanness. Those who came to consider themselves Wyomingites didn’t immediately embrace the identity that the eastern establishment shaped for them. At least initially, perhaps before the mythic tales about them became firmly embedded in the local and national consciousness, some Wyomingites resisted their ordained role. In the late nineteenth century, in fact, Wyoming was the scene of a violent argument between these eastern barons and myth makers and those who wanted Wyoming to be more, not less, like the East, with all the assumed accouterments of progress an eastern image promised. The 1892 Johnson County war, was, in many ways, a conflict over what kind of story Wyoming would tell about itself. In the years after the war, the booster, prosettlement narrative coexisted with that of the rugged individualist. However, it was the latter image, symbolized by the cowboy, that would become ascendant in the state’s portrayal of itself. At a point quite early in their young history, Wyomingites took note of the powerful cultural tales circulating about its region and articulated this popularculture view of the West through a tourist industry that highlighted the cowboy, the Old West, and the “western” character

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traits of self-sufficiency and independence. By the early twentieth century, Wyoming had emerged as the “Cowboy State,” the land in which Remington painted his truly American cowboy and Wister found his Virginian. The state’s role in our national consciousness as the epitome of westernness became both assumed and valued. 4 The cowboy narrative of independent self-sufficiency that came to dominate the state’s identity imparted a story of individualism, masculinity, and Anglo-Saxon mastery. This fin de siècle understanding of westerners as individualists who were more symbolically American because of their independence and ruggedness eventually framed the thinking of not only many Wyomingites but of many westerners as well. This conception set the ground rules, or defined the terms, about which western authenticity and realness could be talked and reasoned about. It both influenced how people living within the space behaved and how people who didn’t thought about them. This shared understanding of Westernness manifested itself across a range of events, celebrations, and institutions in twentieth-century Wyoming, if in slightly different ways at different times. It informed the debate over a statue of Buffalo Bill, the message of a local museum, and university studies programs. It even infused itself into the winning campaign of an American senator. More importantly, this idea of Westernness helped Wyomingites, westerners, and Americans clarify and interpret their world and each other. And to some extent, the symbols and ideology of the mythic West—indeed, the very process of “becoming western”—came to function as a point of connection among groups formerly divided by class, income level, and education. In five episodes that span almost the whole century of Wyoming’s settlement, this book explores how a variety of westerners used this discourse of westernness as a source of knowledge and meaning—from the turbulent era of the Johnson County War in the late nineteenth century, which pitted a recalcitrant cowboy against the eastern myth makers; a tale about Buffalo Bill’s horse that signaled the acceptance of both Wyomingites and Easterners of this assumed western identity; and dude ranching, which simultaneously embodied American values while masking

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regional and class hierarchies; to an American Studies program and a western museum that imparted a message about anticommunism conflated with notions of western values; and, finally, to late-twentieth-century western politics that merged antifederalism with ideas about authentic westernness. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, then, at a particularly turbulent time in American history, a notion of the West took hold in the national consciousness that both drew from existing notions of the frontier and imbued other, newer symbols with resounding meaning. Wyoming thus satisfied not only the economic hunger of the nation but also the cultural desires of a battered Gilded Age America searching for identity and stability, a role that both the state and the West have continued to play throughout the twentieth century. During an era in which many Americans often made sense of the world in evolutionary terms, the West, and Wyoming in particular, came to be seen as a primitive space that could forge independent, self-sufficient Americans. The cowboy became the shining star and main attraction in this notion of the West, its most famous and meaning-laden symbol. By the early twentieth century, it seemed simply natural, assumed knowledge to most Americans and westerners that the West was a land defined by its rugged, self-sufficient individualists and that their embodiment was the cowboy. It was simply the way the West was. In many ways, these pervasive cultural tales of the West became America’s narrative as well, the stories that made us distinctly and uniquely American. 5 The very western symbols that Wyomingites came to profess as their own undergirded a powerful and enduring national mythology. As Brian Dippie writes, “The myth and the anti-myth are the keys to the western past and the western present that can also unlock the American past and the American present.” 6 To explore how westerners became “western” is also, I would argue, to explore how Americans became “American” and the powerful ideologies that shaped both identities. As William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis write, “the West has often been the legitimating source and sanctifying ground of American authenticity.” 7 Wyoming can act as a synecdoche for

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not only the ways in which the West itself engaged and adapted these symbols attached to it, but also how its symbolism gave life to American values and identity. In this book I have raised the question of how the meaning Americans have made of the West influences the thought and action of those being thought about—how myth instructs westerners, and even Americans, in who we are and how we live. In Virgin Land: The American West and Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith examined how the stories and assumptions about the West have illuminated the national experience, and how the notion of the West as an agrarian utopia and the “garden of the World” implanted itself firmly into the imagination of nineteenth-century America. In his trilogy about the myth of the west and its various incarnations, Richard Slotkin explored the social functions of myth in American history and culture. The western myth in the years before the Civil war portrayed the West as a garden waiting to be peopled by whites, and that settlement came through violent conflict with the Indian tribes who already inhabited that space. In The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, Slotkin argues that intellectuals during the post–Civil War years adapted the existing frontier myth and its rhetoric of Indian fighting to the racial and class tensions of the industrial era. An adapted late-nineteenth-century frontier myth emerged, then, that was both racist and class biased and in which soldier aristocrats like George Armstrong Custer appeared as the heroes. Both Slotkin and Smith, for the most part, rely on readings of literary sources for their analyses of myth and how it functions in American culture, and less on the intersection of lived life and representation. In the 1980s, the so-called New Western History focused on a particular myth, that articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier narrative. It sought to excise that myth and replace it with another explanation of history that privileged conquest, diversity, and environmental degradation. As a cultural history, this work does not propose to replace one narrative of the west with another, but seeks to examine the merging of myth and actuality, stories and history. Myth turns the cultural and historical into the natural, the taken-for-granted. Myth

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unifies and reduces a variety of things (language, representations, rituals) to certain, naturalized meaning. Myths explain the world to us in particular ways at particular times, in part by creating opposites and imbuing them with understood meanings: authentic and inauthentic, western and eastern, real and artifice. The project of this book posits that the late-nineteenth-century takenfor-granted narrative of the West as a place of rugged individualists and independent cowboys, and the conversations about that narrative, have instructed westerners in how to be authentically western. I would argue that they have even, in some guises, instructed Americans how to be American. Historians’ search for what “really” occurred in the West, then, perhaps becomes no more important than how individuals and cultural groups made historical meaning out of what occurred. Historical actors are not removed from their own cultural tales. Rather, individuals are shaped by and react to such narratives, which often determine their behavioral options. As Michael Kammen notes, “what people believe to be true about their pasts is usually more important in determining their behavior and responses than truth itself.” 8 The turn-of-the-century discourse about the West produced not only an idea of the authentic, real West but authentic westerners as well, who made sense of themselves within those myths, those taken-for-granted meanings about the West. The myth not only produced a truth about the West and thus westerners, but through the tourist trade, westerners themselves became the perpetuators of the power and knowledge of what the authentic West was and should be. This book endeavors not only to take apart these stories, but also to understand how and why individuals embraced, resisted, benefited, and were often handicapped by them. In looking at how Wyomingites, westerners, easterners—Americans all—negotiated this pervasive view of the American West, it’s necessary to go beyond literary figures and pull actual historical players—the lives and experiences of western men and women—into the spotlight of scholarship. How did this knowledge about the West and the authority of truth born in discourse play itself out in actuality? How did this knowledge in fact have the authority to make itself true? How did westerners make their

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own history and shape their own identities, even tell their own tales, but in conditions not of their own making? To find out, it is necessary to examine how the discourse about the West constructed a place for its subjects, who in turn made their own sense of, negotiated, at times even undermined, their place in the conversation. This book’s project, then, assumes that the meaning that historical actors gave to the western past shapes the western future. This book seeks to provide a better understanding of the enduring legacy of the western myth, and it is written with the hope that an informed consciousness of that mythic legacy can work to shape a hopeful western future.

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Jack Flagg and the Battle over “Westernness”

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0.0pt PgV Owen Wister and Jack Flagg were both twenty-five years old in the summer of 1885. Flagg was a working-class iconoclast from the South, Wister was an eastern elite, but their lives would nonetheless come together to shape the West’s stories about itself far into the future. Flagg rode Wyoming’s ranges as one of the cowboys with whom Wister would become so enchanted. Wister’s documentation of Flagg’s likeness in popular fiction would bring the author worldwide acclaim and shape thousands of readers’ impressions of the West and its inhabitants. 1 In the spring of 1885, with a new degree from Harvard, Flagg’s future chronicler boarded an outbound train at Boston destined for Wyoming. Wister suffered from the nineteenth-century ailment neuralgia, the symptoms of which included headaches, nightmares, vertigo, and hallucinations. Wister’s was a common complaint among middle-class men. It was thought to be a symptom of modern civilization, the result of excessive brainwork and the nervous strain of the professional classes. Neuralgia was a cross that men of Wister’s class and status had to bear, and Wister hoped the West’s dry climate would improve his health. 2 He spent his first summer in the primitive West at Major Frank

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Wolcott’s ranch in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. For Wister, the West presented a rejuvenative, primitive, and empty space. “Each breath you take tells you no one else has ever used it before you,” he wrote to his mother, “[the scenery] is wild and desolate.” Wister determined to chronicle—to define—the exotic land to which he bore witness. He wrote in 1885, “The details of life here are interesting. Wish I could find out all about it—and master it— theoretically. It’s a life as strange as any the country has seen.” On his return to Wyoming in the spring of 1891, he wrote, “the only thing I do is to jot down all shreds of local colour and all conversations and anecdotes decent or otherwise that strike me as native wild flowers. After a while I shall write a great fat book about the whole thing.” 3 Wister reveled in Jack Flagg’s rugged world, and he went on to interpret it for a worldwide audience in his 1902 classic, The Virginian. For a time, Jack Flagg lived the mythologized life of a cowboy in the West’s open-range era, a lifestyle that popular culture would colorfully and eternally iconize. Flagg was from a well-todo family in West Virginia who had fallen on hard times in the aftermath of the Civil War. He arrived in Wyoming in 1882 with one of the legendary cattle drives from Texas, and he later gained local notoriety as a prominent figure in a range conflict on the western prairie. Flagg was more than a simple cowboy, however. His life in Wyoming reveals a much broader discussion over the role of the West and its inhabitants’ images in the national consciousness. In 1890, the dominant story Wyoming would tell about itself was still up for grabs. The state was sparsely settled, with little or no industry, mining, or labor presence to influence its core narrative. 4 A “conversation” about this narrative—about what Wyoming’s predominant image and identity would be—took place in the state in the late nineteenth century. When that discussion waned, the cowboy emerged as Wyoming’s representative icon. As the perennial home of the cowboy, Wyoming would come to be imagined as the last bastion of true Americanness. The vision of the West that Wyoming embodied could serve as a balance, then, against the degenerate, emasculate, foreign influences so many

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late-nineteenth-century Americans, Wister among them, believed were increasingly in control of America’s cities. Jack Flagg was a Wyoming cowboy who refused to play the role of the hero as Wister and others would write it. His own western vision was of an agrarian democracy of small farmers, and it collided with Wister’s ideal in dramatic and violent ways, for Flagg’s was a vision he was willing to fight for.5 And so he became, somewhat unintentionally, an uncooperative player in a western narrative that eventually identified Wyoming as the eternal home of the Wild West. Wyoming became the place where East met West, and it proved to be a lengthy and long-lasting relationship. Despite Flagg’s own efforts, the enduring image of the cowboy that ultimately came to dominate the public mind is considerably more familiar than the one he was determined to script for himself. The western image that commands our consciousness is the ubiquitous, rugged, heroic figure who stares down from innumerable Marlboro billboards—the cowboy whom most of the world envisions when conjuring up visions of the West or, for that matter, America. This image of the West was largely the creation of easterners who sought a figure that could symbolically stand, as Jane Tompkins says, as a “bulwark, a fortress against dangers from without and within.” 6 Jack Flagg was not only completely uninterested in playing this role that Wister and others imagined; he actively tried to subvert it in outspoken and dramatic ways. The story of the rise of the cowboy image and its power in American culture has been told often and well. Frederic Remington and Owen Wister receive much of the credit for engendering one of the world’s most beloved and well-known iconographic images. Like many other products of the Ivy League–educated eastern establishment, both Wister and Remington reacted powerfully to the tumult—and, in their minds, decay—of the latenineteenth-century urban East. Wister, Remington, Teddy Roosevelt, and others of their social group, attributed the cataclysms that rocked the security of their upper-middle-class world—the Haymarket Riots in 1886, the Homestead Strike in 1892, the Pullman Strike of 1894—to the behaviors of uncontrollable, “alien,” and unrepentant working classes and recently arrived immigrants.

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This impression of an America on the verge of a cultural Armageddon surfaced in Remington and Wister’s work. The West, and Wyoming in particular, represented for both men an uncorrupted space in which they could imagine and create the sort of cultural icon needed to thwart the power of the problematic, “unAmerican” working classes and their bothersome politics, especially populism. Like many others of their class and status, Wister and Remington harbored fantasies about reshaping these problematic working classes and foreigners into the mold of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, after their own embattled class. 7 “You can’t glorify a Jew—coin loving puds, nasty humans,” wrote Remington; “I’ve got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins I can get my share of them and what’s more I will.” Wister hoped the West would produce “real Americans two centuries hence.” One of his characters in The Virginian proclaimed, “[Wyoming] is the newest part of a new world.” Wister believed that “rioters, Populists, and anarchists could fundamentally change the United States from something he loved to something he was certain he would despise.” 8 The cowboy hero was their answer to this radical, “foreign,” element. “I feel more certainly than ever that no matter how completely the East may be the headwaters from which the West has flown and is flowing, . . . it won’t be a century before the West is simply the true America, with thought, type and life of its own kind,” wrote Wister in 1885. “The West is going to make us an institution. I wish I could come back in 200 years and see a town full of real Americans. And not a collection of revolutionary scions of English families and immigrants arrived yesterday from Cork and Bremen for that is what our eastern cities are today.” The impending question of the era was how Americans could be spared yet another turbulent crisis, perhaps even a war between the classes. And for Remington and Wister, the West represented a repository of safety and traditional values. Michael Kammen notes that “Wister’s Anglo Saxonisms had the effect of locating Wyoming, at least culturally, somewhere between East Anglia and Mount Vernon.” 9 Wister’s and Remington’s version of the West was Turnerianism interrupted, a West in which Frederick Jackson Turner’s

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famous, and inevitable, march of civilization, settlement, and progress proceeded only so far. They were unabashed champions of white civilization, but their ideal Wyoming conveniently paused right after the Indians had been subdued and before the settlers and their civilizing agenda invaded their pure and sanctified space. According to Wister and many of his contemporaries, the formative western experience that carved out independent masculine Americans depended on a primitivism that only an unsettled frontier space could provide. Solutions to social and economic problems in the nineteenth century were often viewed in evolutionary terms, and many assumed that those who could survive elementary conditions justifiably emerged as the more fit to rule. So only in a primitive Darwinian arena removed from the emasculating development of eastern urban centers could the cowboy hero properly develop. 10 Most Americans who moved west with the intention of settling equated progress with increased democracy, free land, more opportunity for the masses, and settlement. But for those who assumed that the frontier’s brutality forged “real” Americans, progress was an unwelcome, if inevitable, step in the stages of development. Such things interrupted the kind of primitivism that both Remington and Wister’s flattering selfimages required. 11 Only a return to the “elemental conditions of the frontier,” Remington theorized, “would restore the AngloSaxon martial spirit.” For Remington, the West’s development sounded the death knell of America’s last great hope for saving itself from the eroding influence of the foreign, urban masses. 12 Both Wister and Remington gloried in the wildness of Wyoming’s open spaces, but Wister openly disapproved of any attempts by westerners to “civilize” either themselves or their environment. He despised the egalitarian attitude exhibited by Wyomingites. Wister wanted either civilization and refinement as the East defined it, or unbounded ruggedness. The murky middle area between the two he found distressingly distasteful. 13 He scorned the “ugly little towns sprinkled haphazardly along the railroad tracks” and “women who swore and went without stockings,” who reminded him of the poor classes of New York from whom he was trying to escape. Wister feared that the prairies

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would slowly make room for “your Cheyennes, Chicagos, and ultimately inland New Yorks . . . everything reduced to the same flat . . . level of utilitarian civilizations.” These new fledgling communities represented the utter hatefulness of the kind of democracy and egalitarianism that Wister loathed. 14 Wister dutifully chronicled with disgust the evolving Wyoming towns and settlements he encountered on his travels: “June 11, 1891: There stands Douglas like a pillar of salt,” he wrote, “a monument to the reckless animal spirits of the American vagrant. There was absolutely nothing that could possibly make Douglas a real place.” Only two days later, Wister experienced another disappointment: “June 13: In Casper. Hotel food, vile. Town of Casper, vile.” And finally, Wister pronounced judgment on Jack Flagg’s future pride and hope, the town of Buffalo: “June 17: the town of Buffalo, of course, is something beyond words . . . a general litter of paltry wood houses back to side to back at all angles seem to have been brought and dumped out from a wheelbarrow.” 15 Wister derided much of the settlers’ determined existence that he encountered in Wyoming. Throughout the territorial period, the streets of Wyoming’s few towns were mostly little more than filthy muddy troughs or dusty paths in which people dodged pigs and cows. Wyoming’s new citizens were busy building their dreams, and it was often a dirty and a decidedly unglamorous pursuit. One Wyoming woman in the late nineteenth century recalled: “My story is perhaps more than one-half of the women on the ranches in those early days . . . I fought bedbugs and flies all summer, scrubbed rough plank floors and mingled my tears with the suds. I learned to make butter and raised chickens.” 16 This life was certainly primitive, but not the kind of romantic primitivism favored by Wister, who wanted wide-open spaces and masculine adventure, not inadequate attempts to be “civilized.” For both Remington and Wister, the West’s value and uniqueness lay in its distinctiveness from the East, and they viewed the West’s attempt to become more “eastern” as not only pathetic, but a dangerous threat to the last hopes of the Anglo-Saxon. 17 By the mid-1890s, Wister had made several trips to the alien West, and he merged the experiences garnered in these travels

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with his quest for a uniquely American icon. He collaborated with Frederic Remington, whom he had met in Wyoming in 1893, in producing “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” published in the September 1895 issue of Harper’s Monthly. In the article, Wister linked the western cowboy to the heroic knight of English history through their shared Anglo-Saxon superiority. The piece represented, in effect, Wister’s legitimization of the cowboy—an explanation of why this rough working-class westerner should be viewed not with disdain but racial recognition and admiration. Remington’s accompanying illustrations included “The Last Cavalier,” which showed the cowboy as the last in an evolutionary line of noble horsemen—Mongols, Crusaders, and a cavalier; and “What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost,” which depicted the destructive aftermath of a dispute over an unmarked cow. 18 In this story of western Anglo-Saxon mastery, Wister defined and essentialized the cowboy identity and thrust on his hero’s strong shoulders the formidable role of saving America from itself. With Remington’s input, Wister presented a West untainted by immigrants or “foreign blood,” for “to survive in the clean cattle country requires spirit of adventure, courage and self-sufficiency.” As a result, he maintained, “you will not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews in that district.” Wister carefully crafted the cowboy role: courageous and “plucky” individuals, “lean men of few topics” who were “all of them uneasy about corpses and the dark.” 19 Wister’s western heroes were as contradictory as the artist’s West itself. Both Remington and Wister believed, much to their chagrin, that these potential American heroes were fast disappearing. Wister believed that progress was to blame for the destruction of his living, breathing, heroic cowpunchers. By 1895, he reported that they had gone the way of “elk, buffalo, as all wild animals must inevitably be dispersed.” He equated progress with the “exhausting of the virgin pastures,” populism, and wage-earning cowboys who had turned their backs on “independence.” Progress and its convoy—“slow crawling wagons with their white tops and long teams, a woman riding straddle, several other women and any amount of children . . . a miserable population”—became the vil-

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lains in his narrative of the West. That the cowboy might no longer exist in the flesh made it all the more imperative that Wister and Remington chronicle him. “I knew the wild riders and the vast land were about to vanish forever; and the more I considered the subject the bigger forever loomed,” Remington recalled of the end of the frontier. “I saw the living, breathing end of three American centuries of smoke and dust and sweat and now I see quite another thing where it all took place, but it does not appeal to me,” he lamented later in his life.20 If progress and its minions had killed the cowboy, both men made sure that their depictions remained to perform the cowboy’s esteemed role, which Wister equated with a high sense of duty and obligation. “I can think of no greater or more evil for our democracy,” he wrote in 1894, “[than] unthinking sons of the sagebrush [who] ill tolerate . . . discipline, good order, and obedience.” Wister also liked cowboys, he noted, because they worked and played hard, and “they don’t go on strike.” The kind of democracy that was amenable to Wister was one in which citizens, especially working classes, knew their place and kept up good manners. 21 His literary representations of cowboys would prove much more dutiful, and in the end, durable, than the actual sons of the sagebrush roaming the Wyoming range. In fact, Wister went on to create the quintessential western “type,” his famed “Virginian,” in his 1902 bestseller. Wister’s cowboys acted as frustrated if temporary resisters to progress, farmers, and settlement. As historian Earl Pomeroy has noted, “no other symbolic form better represents an antagonism toward the settler than the cowboy.”22 Obedient, stoic, loyal, racially pure, and “naturally,” if not genetically, aristocratic, the persona of the Virginian became the standard to which all other real and representational western heroes would aspire and by which they would measure themselves. The cowboy might disappear, but Wister’s own demurral of the future would stubbornly live on through his representation of this working-class icon. 23 Wister and Remington were not the only men of their economic class, region, and social background to hope for the postponement of Wyoming’s development. The West of the late nineteenth century had economic as well as cultural allure for many men of

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their class. The cattle boom of the 1880s attracted many wealthy easterners to the western plains to “fill their sacks.” Millions of acres of free grass on the public domain, recently cleared of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, meant that the only significant investment would-be ranchers had to make was in cattle. These new Wyomingites required an unsettled Wyoming with empty public ranges to maintain their newfound lifestyles, fortunes, and romantic ideas of themselves. 24 In 1884 the secretary of the Wyoming Stock Growers asserted that, “Nine-tenths of the surface [of Wyoming] is unfit for the plow, even under the most favorable conditions of capital. The stockmen utilize it all. Displace him and his capital and fifty years must pass before these plains can be made to provide the same taxable wealth in any other form.” 25 Another prominent cattle baron, Moreton Frewen, bemoaned the advance of “irrepressible hordes . . . which [are] about to engulf all of [us] in a common disaster.” 26 The cattle barons’ vision of the West neatly merged with “official” representations of the western space, which Wister and Remington increasingly promoted in the national press. Though motivated by slightly different reasons, these “Establishment” artists shared with the cattle barons a powerful conception of the West, one that would ultimately dominate the public consciousness. As Louis Owens notes, “The West of Wyoming [for Wister] is a landscape settled by the East and used for extractable profit and as a vacation resort for big-game hunting, fly fishing and rejuvenation just as Wister himself used it.” Earl Pomeroy has noted that such eastern investment gave the cattle barons “no direct stake in seeing the West fill up with farms and cities on the Eastern model, but rather more in seeing it remain as a wilderness.” “The New West,” said Lippincott’s magazine in 1882, “is largely peopled today with the sons of families in which learning and culture have long been hereditary.” 27 A stint in the primitive West was not an uncommon formative experience for upper-class men who came of age in the Gilded Age. 28 The Honorable Horace Curzon Plunkett, third son of the sixteenth Baron Dunsany of Ireland, was typical of the Lords of the Prairie who sought out Wyoming in the latter third of the nineteenth century. Plunkett came to Wyoming in 1879 for his

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health and established a “ranche” on a tributary of the Powder River. 29 The exotic West also lured Hubert Teschemacher. After “Teschie” graduated from Harvard (with classmate Theodore Roosevelt) in 1878, his parents awarded him with a trip around the world. Teschie had read of the wonders of the West in an English newspaper while at his parents’ home in Paris. After a subsequent hunting trip to Wyoming, Teschemacher and classmate Federic DeBillier undertook ranching and eventually ran twentyfive thousand head of cattle on the public range. 30 Fellow Wyoming cattleman John Clay wrote of “Teschie”: “notwithstanding his western experience and his love of Wyoming, he was an eastern man in his utmost soul and a strong Harvard man at that.” Edward G. White reports that Teschemacher and DeBillier were Harvard classmates of Owen Wister and that the author spent one of his western summers “co-managing” the Teschemacher and DeBillier Cattle Company. Teschemacher frequently vocalized his belief that “the almighty had intended to create Wyoming as cattle country and the government should recognize such wisdom and lease all land to cattlemen.” 31 William Irvine, yet another Harvard-alumnus- turned-Wyoming-rancher, rose to the powerful position of president of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association. 32 Mari Sandoz wrote of these new westerners: “Never again would such a display of wealthy young men turn up in the Territory of Wyoming . . . to spread themselves around Cheyenne, to ride out like the Lords that some of them were, observing their minions conduct the rituals and the dispensations of the roundup.” 33 It was of such men that Jack Flagg commented with disapproval: “Some of the barons were at the roundup in 1884, Englishmen in knee breeches accompanied by their general managers, buggy bosses and valets, rode around with an air of lordliness which was ridiculous.” 34 Although such barons professed a love of the rugged Wyoming life, they denied themselves little while roughing it in the primitive West. They called their cowboys “cow servants” and spent the off-season in their Boston brownstones or the south of France. They were seasonal westerners, for the most part, who wanted to observe and experience the West’s ruggedness without having

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to endure its hardships or be defined by the region’s lack of refinement. Accordingly, in June of 1880, these elite graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Columbia organized their own private club in Cheyenne: “A good club on an eastern basis . . . the Somerset moved west and barring Beacon St. and Indian China . . . with the same advantages that are found in eastern clubs so far as the capabilities of Cheyenne can compass it.” The famed Cheyenne Club operated repletely with tennis court; requisite copies of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the Boston Sunday Herald in its library; and liquors and delicacies shipped direct from Park and Tilford of New York City. Club president William Sturgis wrote out the meticulous orders himself: “The last [sherry] we had of this was not at all what we had previously,” he chastised; “It lacked almost entirely the fine bouquet of our earlier purchases and was by no means clear.” One of its members reflected that more high-priced liquor was sold in the Cheyenne Club in its heyday than to any other club in the country. The club also provided overnight accommodations so its members would not suffer the indignity of staying at ordinary hotels on their trips to and from their ranches. 35 Invitations to membership read: “We shall have rooms for a limited number, a good restaurant for all, billiard room, reading room, etc. . . . The members are limited to fifty to the end that they may be selected with great care.” The entrance fee for club membership was fifty dollars, later raised to one hundred dollars, and the annual dues were a steep thirty dollars. Eventually, the club had over two hundred members who could afford its hefty membership fees, which far exceeded the wages of their employees, who were fortunate to make thirty dollars a month. Applicants had to be sponsored by a member in good standing, and even then they could be blackballed in the final balloting. A young easterner who stayed at the club in March 1887 wrote home to “Dear Momie,” assuring her that he and his poodle were doing quite well, had access to leading newspapers, and did not feel shut off from the “outside world.” 36 A reporter for The Cheyenne Leader wryly commented about the club, “There if I am a member, I take mine ease in mine inn. If not, I just look in, you know.” 37

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Jack Flagg was one who might “just look in,” and he had little use for its elite members, whom he viewed as impediments to progress, settlement, and his vision of Wyoming and the West. “They built fine ranch houses at a great expense, fitted them out with furniture from the old country, including pianos etc., laid in stocks of wines and whiskies and valets to attend to their every want,” he reflected, “[and] brought their families out in the summer to enjoy the bracing air of the mountains to recuperate their energies, wasted in the crowded cities during the preceding winters.” 38 If the monied East that Flagg ridiculed required Wyoming to stay empty, undeveloped, and primitive beyond the doors of the Cheyenne Club, he did not intend to assist them in their agenda. He noted that the cattlemen were “foolish enough to think they could arrest in its course the march of progress and civilization,” a march Flagg had intended to lead.39 He was, in fact, the Virginian gone awry, Wister’s future creation grown uncooperative. Flagg never quite saw himself as the tight-lipped, stoic westerner of frontier legend. He enjoyed expressing his opinions, as frequently and unselfconsciously as possible. He was a devout Democrat, but in 1894 he nonetheless referred to President Grover Cleveland as “the pin-headed, bull-necked fisherman who rules over the destinies of this great nation.”40 Flagg, however, reserved his most vitriolic criticism for the political opposition: “Every settler who votes for continuation of Republican rule in Wyoming, throws himself in front of a juggernaut which shall crush him out of existence,” he definitively declared in 1892.41 Flagg carried with him to Wyoming a very clear and impassioned vision of the future of the state and his place in it. He viewed himself as populist, educator, member of the temporarily downtrodden and the underdog, and harbinger of Jeffersonian principles and Turnerian progress. Flagg’s vision of himself and the West would bring him into direct conflict with the vision held by most visitors to the Cheyenne Club, which would demand that he play a much different role than the one he had scripted for himself. So it is ironic that Jack Flagg seemed to have all the requisite characteristics of the rugged western protagonist. Jane Tompkins writes that to unify the old “Americans” across class lines, Wister

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needed a hero who was “one of those stronger breeds identified with the men of the South and the West, who are uneducated, antireligious, agrarian, and populist.”42 Flagg came very close to this ideal. Although well educated, he was Southern, very probably antireligious, agrarian, and populist, and, like his future paradigm, he was a gambler with black hair. So it was not, then, that Flagg wasn’t fit to play the role of the western hero but that his own invented traditions and myths prevented him from doing so. Jack Flagg was born in 1860 to an old-stock Southern family that belonged to the upper middle class of Jefferson County, West Virginia. 43 In 1846, Flagg’s grandfather bought Richwood Hall, an imposing “Flemish Bond brick house,” as one source described it, and 261 acres. He recorded his worth as $23,000 in the 1850 census. Ten years later, when Jack was born on his grandfather’s property, the estate’s assessed worth had risen to $39,500. 44 The Civil War swirled around the Flagg family. In 1864, Richwood Hall was the scene of a battle involving Sheridan’s Federal forces and Confederate lines, and the close shots fired during the fight forced the family to vacate the house. 45 Jack’s father was a devout Southerner, a Confederate, and, necessarily, a Democrat, who had risen from private to the rank of first lieutenant in the famed Stonewall Brigade. 46 Jack lived at Richwood Hall until he was twelve years old, when his father sold the farm and became a political appointee and boarding-house owner. 47 Flagg was no doubt infused with the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, Southern cultural mores, and a certain sense of entitlement. 48 He had attended a private boarding school in Charlestown, where he received a broad education that included lessons in Latin and Greek, typical for his family’s class. 49 Despite his somewhat privileged upbringing, when he was eighteen Jack became a cowboy. The West’s free land provided him with a perhaps irresistible opportunity to live out his Jeffersonian dreams of egalitarian, independent yeomanship. And so, just as for the young elite of the Cheyenne Club, the vast public domain of the West sustained Jack Flagg’s image of himself better than could the battered and beaten post–Civil War South. Like thousands of other young men of the Gilded Age, Flagg moved south and west. He

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found work on a cattle ranch in Texas and taught school during his downtime. Moving north with one of the legendary cattle drives of western lore, he arrived in Wyoming in 1882. 50 Flagg was a good cowboy, but from early in his career he refused to remain in the social station the job demanded. Not long into his vocation, Flagg participated in, and may have initiated, a largely unsuccessful strike over a five-dollar-a-month wage reduction in the spring of 1886. Flagg noted that “As soon as the owners could get men to fill their places the strikers were fired or compelled to have their wages reduced.” 51 One manager in Wyoming recorded his reaction to such displays of proletarian awareness: “A crowd of cowboys who had been lying around the ranch waiting for the roundup moved out, which was a great relief.” When the manager joined them on the roundup, his anxiety returned, and he vented a decidedly nonheroic description of his cowboys: “They were not cordial at all. They have been talking about shooting me all winter because I have been made the scapegoat of the attempt to reduce wages. I expect I shall live through it, but it is unpleasant being scowled at and talked at by the blackguards.” 52 Flagg fully realized he was just a wage laborer in Wyoming’s cattle industry; he simply didn’t intend to remain one. Whether out of desperation or a sense of destiny, by fall 1886 he had decided it was time to act on his ambitions. He bought a brand, the hat, and along with four other cowboys set up a ranch operation on the Powder River. He settled down, married a divorcée two years his senior who had five children, and began fulfilling his sense of place in the world. Flagg saw himself in the same terms as those he later praised: “On most every creek large enough to furnish water for 160 acres of land could be found a rancher, with from one to fifty head of cattle; they did not have much of this world’s goods, any of them, but their cabins were their castles, and they were as much ‘Lords of all they surveyed’ as any of the cattle barons.” By Flagg’s own account, this is when trouble began in earnest. “One of the rules of the cattle barons in those days was that no man could work for them who owned cattle,” Flagg maintained. According to Flagg, cattle baron Horace Plunkett agreed to boycott “all the boys who had gone to ranching and had produce of any

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kind to sell. That spring I was blackballed and not allowed to work for any of the outfits because I had bought cattle and taken up government land.” 53 Flagg’s own Jeffersonian-infused western myth depended on free land for small independent farmers. As such, it was simply incompatible with that other western vision of open, wild uncultivated space. 54 When he moved beyond his designated role and acted on his own self-image, he incited the wrath of the allpowerful Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, whose members relaxed at the elite Cheyenne Club. In 1884, the state legislature passed the infamous Maverick Law. The term maverick referred to any unbranded cow found on the open range. In the 1880s, the ranchers who ran cattle on the public domain organized huge roundups in the spring and fall. Each outfit’s cowboys gathered any remaining unbranded cattle that had missed being branded the previous year. All the largest outfits would have a relatively equal opportunity to acquire these unbranded cattle. As the range became more crowded with upshot cattlemen, however, gathering a maverick or two early in the season became an increasingly common way for a cowboy to elevate himself from hired hand to stock owner. The 1884 law was an attempt by the large stock owners to curb such practices. Not only did the exclusive Stock Growers’ Association legally govern mavericks, they controlled the roundups as well, and so prohibited anyone on the range from branding stock before the date the Association set for the spring roundup. Roundup foremen took up the mavericks on behalf of the Association and sold them at auction to the highest bidder— which, in most cases, meant the calf ended up in the possession of the foremen’s employers. Shut out of the process, angry homesteaders, Flagg prominent among them, increasingly embraced the more radical ideas of populism and united against the cattlemen.55 “It was impossible,” Flagg declared, “for an employee to buy a cow.” 56 By 1889, Flagg had had enough of the frustrations of participating in roundups controlled by the larger ranchers, so he began his own on the northern Wyoming range, flagrantly ignoring the instructions of the Stock Growers’ Association. “We each of us

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owned a string of horses,” he explained, “and we had a team and a wagon and so, as we only had to hire a cook, we concluded that the cheapest way would be to put a wagon on the roundup.” 57 By acting on his own notions of “independence,” Flagg brought on a confrontation of opposing mythic forces. In his pursuit of his own independence and a role greater than mere hired hand, he unintentionally collided with another narrative of the West then fermenting in the minds of elites like Wister and Remington. Though the centerpiece of their story was the cowboy, Remington and Wister’s version did not exactly behave like the living and breathing Wyomingite Jack Flagg. Events on the ranges of Johnson County unfolded rapidly as the conflict over unbranded calves quickly became a battle over image. The wealthy cattlemen in Cheyenne maintained that they simply could not get a fair trial in Johnson County, where rustlers and small settlers dominated the juries and repeatedly, so groused the cattlemen, let guilty men go free. The hat outfit was probably a legitimate source of irritation to the cattle barons. The hat cowboys “found” and branded as many maverick calves on the open range as they could—but then, so did the big outfits. As Mari Sandoz has written with some bitterness: “In the West, the bounties were on predators of cattle. The settler or small rancher moving onto the free range country, whether rustlers or not, was considered the most predatory of all.” 58 In the spring of 1892, the cattlemen decided to take matters into their own hands to halt the march of progress as most residents in Johnson County viewed it.59 The most prominent and beleaguered members of the Stock Growers’ Association began to compile a “hit list” of unruly thieves, a list that prominently featured Jack Flagg’s name. The Stock Growers’ Association detective in Johnson County, Frank Canton, noted that he was “confident that the gentleman [Flagg] is crooked. [He] is an old timer here and is a hard man; he is cunning and it will take some good work to send him over the road.”60 The large cattlemen circulated their own version of Flagg in which he was cast—especially in publications outside Wyoming—as the potential hero gone awry. A cattleman who passed through Chicago apparently supplied a

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colorful account of the “boys” to the Chicago Saturday Blade. In his story about “Four Bad Men,” which included Nate Champion, Jack Flagg, and Lee West—who apparently did not even exist— the reporter wrote: “Jack Flagg has been longer notorious as a stock thief than perhaps any other member of the present great Wyoming rustler organization. He was one of the most active of the famous Avery gang of range bandits, operating some years since in the Sweetwater Valley. . . . Flagg is endowed by nature with unshaken nerve and great sang-froid.” 61 If Flagg would not follow the script for the obedient western hero, his detractors intended to fashion a new one for him that would simultaneously explain his uncooperativeness and dismiss his grievances against them. The cattlemen continued to describe to select newspapers Flagg’s apparent imperviousness to his social position and detailed his arrogant, if not outright subversive, behavior: As an instance of the characteristic coolness and impudence of this western range robber, John Durbin, one of Wyoming’s leading cattle growers, relates that on one occasion several years ago he was following an annual spring cattle round-up using for that purpose a light road wagon. Jogging along one day in his wagon, on his way to the next roundup camping ground, Mr. Durbin’s attention was attracted to a small column of smoke escaping from a hollow in the prairie a short distance off. Investigating the matter, Mr. Durbin drove up on Mr. Jack Flagg in the very act of placing a maverick brand on a big calf belonging to Mr. Durbin himself. As Mr. Durbin reached the scene of the range robbery the robber looked up from his task and recognizing the newcomer, coolly exclaimed: “Hello Mr Durbin. Glad to see you. I have a fine calf here which belonged to you a few moments ago,” but, finishing the branding and turning the animal loose as he spoke “it belongs to me now” and mounting his horse Mr. Jack Flagg rode off adding as he did “ta-ta Durbin, come and see me again.” 62 The Stock Growers’ Association sent a complete, detailed, and rather personal list of rustlers to the Chicago Herald that was

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topped by none other than Jack Flagg. “Jack Flagg, West Virginian, came to this country in 1882 as a cowboy, top hand and had good positions,” the article maintained. “He became a mavericker in 1884 and has been at it ever since, and has been a leading spirit in opposition to the law, and is credited with being the brains of the outlaws. He drove away a man from the country and took his wife and four children. He makes plenty of money but gambles it away. He teaches school in winter and is farmer, fighter and politician.” Obedient and loyal cowboys were supposed to be cowpunchers, not farmers or politicians, and the cattlemen castigated Flagg for assuming otherwise. 63 What happened next is the stuff on which Hollywood westerns would later thrive. In April 1892, a clique of cattlemen, led by none other than Wister’s former Wyoming host, Major Frank Wolcott, hired twenty-five Texas mercenaries to purge Johnson County of suspected rustlers. On the morning of April 5, a train with the mercenaries aboard pulled into the Cheyenne station. If a train with the blinds pulled down in its passenger coach was not enough to draw the attention of locals, the procession of cattlemen who marched down from the Cheyenne Club and boarded the train certainly was. By the time the train left Cheyenne, the impending invasion was the worst-kept secret in the state. This extravagant expedition threatened to foil Jack Flagg’s vision of the future of Wyoming and his place in it. However, the “invaders” botched it badly. On his way to the Democratic convention as a delegate, Flagg himself discovered the cattlemen and their hirelings as they laid siege to the ranch of his cowboy friends and fellow accused rustlers, Nate Champion and Nicholas Ray. Flagg approached the siege with his seventeen-year-old stepson, who was driving two horses and a wagon. When the mercenaries and cattle barons who had dug themselves in around the ranch discovered Flagg, he escaped their gunfire in a getaway dramatic enough even for Wister and Remington: [The cattlemen-mercenaries] began to jump for their guns, which were leaning against the fence and called on me to stop and throw up my hands. I did not comply with their

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order but kept straight for the bridge. When I got to the nearest point to them a man whom I recognized as Ford, stepped from the row and taking deliberate aim at me with his Winchester, fired. They all commenced firing, I threw myself on the side of my horse and made a run for it. The seven horsemen followed me. When I overtook my wagon, which had my rifle on it, I told my boy to hand it to me, which he did. I then told him to stop and cut one of the horses loose and mount him. The seven horsemen were following me and when I stopped were 350 yards behind, but as soon as they saw I had a rifle, they stopped. 64

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ment. Federal troops marched to the invaders’ rescue, saving them from the wrath of the inflamed citizenry of Johnson County. In August 1892, the cattlemen pleaded not guilty to the murders of two “rustlers,” and when Johnson County could no longer afford the cost of jailing the invaders during the trial, the court case was dismissed. 65 Those prominent cattlemen who took part in the invasion adjusted to its aftermath in a style befitting their station in life. Hubert Teschemacher left the West shortly after the debacle and resided with his parents in Switzerland until his return to the United States. On his death in Boston in 1907, Teschemacher left the bulk of his fortune to Harvard University. Frederic DeBillier became deranged while in the Laramie Jail and, on instructions from the governor, was released in order to remove himself to a “lower altitude,” where he could, DeBillier explained, “receive treatment by specialists.” DeBillier fled Wyoming and, after an

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apparently full recovery in New York, spent three years traveling through Europe, ending his days in Nice, France. 66 Flagg believed that the collapse of the invasion meant an end to the reign of the cattle barons and their class. Flagg attributed the cattlemen’s failed attempt to control the open range to their interference with what he believed to be the natural progression of things. He reflected that although the cattlemen had “reigned supreme, no obstacle, with their money and influence, was too great for them to surmount,” in the end they had lost. 67 The cattlemen, Mari Sandoz writes, “had attempted to return to the wilderness days of twenty five years ago, when those marked for extermination were only Indians.” 68 Their failure, Flagg assumed, would make it easier for him to transform himself from rugged westerner to civilized Wyomingite. In the aftermath of the invasion, Flagg took the opportunity to vocalize his political ideals, which he assumed would help Wyoming slough off its “western” singularity and achieve equality with all things eastern. He largely withdrew from cowboying and turned journalist and politician. He won the position of county clerk in the 1892 elections that took place soon after the invasion, after a campaign in which he vilified the cattlemen for all he was worth. He also bought one of the two existing papers in Johnson County, the Buffalo Echo, renamed it The People’s Voice, and began to express himself. From the outset, Flagg echoed the sentiment of the small settler in Johnson County: “Bravely did our people and our neighbors respond to the cry of the oppressed,” he dramatically boasted. In reference to the death of Nate Champion at the hands of the invaders, Flagg described “the agonizing wail of that poor man . . . surrounded by a howling mob of blood thirsty cutthroats, with no hope of assistance arriving.” Flagg had been a member of Champion’s funeral procession and had led Ray’s and Champion’s horses behind their caskets, their stirrups hooked up over their saddle horns. In stark contrast to the empty unsettled Wyoming sought after by the eastern elite, Flagg welcomed development, settlement, and equal access to land. To settlers like Flagg, the true wealth of the West lay not in unoccupied grazing land but in the Jeffersonian democracy that that free land

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promised, a democracy he passionately believed was the key to elevating his own social status and net worth. 69 In the months that followed the invasion, the residents of Johnson County united behind Jack Flagg’s vision of the West, sustained by a sense of identity forged against the “foreign,” “alien,” and wealthy cattlemen. In the days immediately after the invasion, the Johnson County newspapers referred to the community as the “people” and the cattle barons as the “capitalists” who had attempted to stand in path of the county’s progress. Even Flagg’s competition, the Buffalo Bulletin, proclaimed: “The Bulletin deems it its duty to contradict all slanders sought to be cast upon this law abiding community by the selfish desires of alien murderers and their sympathizers.” 70 In their pursuit of common goals and identity, Johnson County residents even embraced the accused disorderly in their midst . . . if temporarily. The Bulletin claimed the rustlers “were a class of men,” who, like most westerners, “are not out here for pleasure only.” For a time the Bulletin openly advocated the cause of the cattle thieves and pledged to join with them “in defiance of the large owners.” Taking a position in favor of progress and civilization the Bulletin editorialized that the “rope and Winchester policy won’t work in this part of the world.”71 The paper also responded in kind to the defamations emerging from Cheyenne, even flaunting its image as an insurgent under the headline, “Impressions of the Anarchists”: “The better element of the party, the same element by the way that The Cheyenne Sun calls the Cheyenne thieves and rustlers, are not idle, seeking the best interests of the masses. The feeling among the working classes is one of the condemnation of the cattleman and the officials in power who tolerated, aided and abetted Wyoming’s disgrace.” 72 The Johnson County papers went so far as to equate their own local class struggles with the struggles of the laboring classes in the East. “The only difference in the situation [in Pennsylvania] and in Wyoming,” the Buffalo Bulletin opined, “was that Wyoming was invaded by a band of hired assassins from other states, Pennsylvania was invaded by 260 Pinkerton toughs from other states.” 73 In the heated aftermath of the invasion, regional papers also

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weighed in with their own populist or Turnerian editorials. The Cheyenne Daily Leader noted the “Un-American spirit of dominance which would ride roughshod over the weaker elements and force them to immigrate or crawl, cowed and subdued, at the feet of a fierce and implacable oligarchy.” 74 The Rocky Mountain News equated the invasion to the “old fight between the toiling many and the monied few. The rustlers, or nesters, represent the newer Wyoming. They are the actual settlers. . . . Mining came first, cattle raising next, and farming follows.” “The old times in Wyoming are gone forever,” chimed in the Omaha World Herald. 75 For many westerners, cowboys represented a phase of the West’s childhood that they were all too anxious to outgrow, and the barons became vilified as “capitalists” because they refused to let them outgrow it. In 1892 (shortly after the invasion) the aroused Johnson County citizenry sent off a lengthy resolution to President Harrison that announced, “We do solemnly affirm that contrary to all law of God and man an armed body of capitalists with hired war men have entered our country with the open and avowed intention of taking possession of and controlling the same in their own interests. . . . The band comprises all of the wealthiest people of the state.” 76 It was not the romantic cowboy of Wister’s imagination who these editors and westerners embraced as the ideal Wyomingite but the local citizen—the shopkeepers and the boosters proud of their new street lights and progressive ambitions. Both Flagg and his neighbors clearly had their own opinions of what Wyoming should look like, and it wasn’t the rugged western training ground championed by the eastern elites. They aspired to more for themselves than faithful emulation of the tough, colorful western characters whom Remington and Wister delighted in seeing. It wasn’t so much the threat of violence that bothered residents as that the invasion had sought to interfere with their quest to lose Wyoming’s “western” singularity. Residents voiced long-assumed ideas of themselves as dynamic participants in the progress of the West through its “natural” stages of development. Come hell or high water, they were not going to be denied what they assumed was their own evolutionary fulfillment. The Buffalo

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Bulletin, for example, declared home seekers to be “that great body of people whom history will remember as the advance guard of civilization.” 77 Residents clearly preferred the role of civilizer and cultivator to the rugged role of “westerner,” as defined by the West’s would-be representers. If Remington and Wister and their like sought to preserve the distinctive qualities the West possessed, Johnson County residents saw success as the dissolving of difference—class, cultural, and social—between east and west. Local settlers aspired to enjoy the same cultural status that the East and the barons possessed. Sameness, in their eyes, equaled equality. Being a national emblem of primitivism kept Wyoming mired in the past, and they much preferred a national role that diminished regional distinctions, for they seemed to discern, if unconsciously, that an identity based on distinctiveness invoked an implicit social hierarchy. Buffalo residents would obviously implement their own community hierarchies, but at least they would be ones of their own choosing. Jack Flagg shared the booster enthusiasm reflected in the editorials of so many western papers after the invasion. Indeed, he used his own, The People’s Voice, as a running advertisement for Johnson County: “Our soil is rich and productive, our mountain streams carry an abundance of water for irrigating purposes; coal in quantities can be obtained with very little labor, and our mountains are rich in precious minerals. With these inducements, the homesteader, the miner and the sheep owner will surely come and,” he added hopefully, “at no distant day.” 78 The Voice promised no less than “free range, free water, free wood, free air, free thought, free people, freedom.” Flagg even welcomed gawking visitors, for they would undoubtedly admire Buffalo’s progressiveness while taking in the western scenery. “Tourists and artists!” Flagg proclaimed, “The most delightful scenery in the world, no tongue can describe the beauties, come and see. . . . Invalids and broken down business men! Here you can eat, sleep and grow fat. We invite you all.” And, he asserted, “You will be treated white.”79 Flagg drew his vision for Wyoming from Republican free-labor ideology, which insisted that a white man must have an independent economic existence to be truly free, tinged with pop-

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ulism and a healthy dollop of Democratic racism.80 If Remington’s and Wister’s West demanded distinctly scripted roles, so did Jack Flagg’s West: Flagg simply preferred the ingredients in his own rendition. Flagg’s own self-fulfillment depended on the occupation of all those empty, open spaces so valued by Remington, Wister, and the cattle barons; and he was in full agreement with many in his community in anticipating progress. But Jack Flagg was even more virulent in his politics than many of his aroused fellow westerners. In the elections of 1892, Flagg advocated the fusion of the Democratic and Populist parties, and his own rhetoric leaned toward the more radical sentiments of the populists: “The blood of Nathan Champion and Nicholas Ray,” he reminded the community, “call louder to the people of Wyoming for redress than the evils of protection.” 81 When Jacob Coxey organized his “living petition” of unemployed workers to descend on Washington dc in 1894, Flagg sympathized with Coxey’s army: “Coxey was forced into the Black maria with a lot of negro prisoners and taken to jail,” he reminded his readers. Flagg advocated continued federal ownership of the public lands (as opposed to state ownership): “We don’t want our lands to be owned by a lot of squeezing capitalists who, when a poor man comes here looking for a home, will say to him ‘You are too late to get government land.’ ” Flagg supported his working-class brethren in the cities, and maintained that the labor organizations “are making the greatest and what will prove the final struggle for justice at the hands of capitalists and corporations,” though he lamented their turn to violence. Flagg also advocated the coinage of free silver and increasing the money supply, declaring in 1896, “without immediate relief the crash must come. Appearances indicate that revolution is inevitable. The money power has the industrial world by the throat and it will never yield an inch until an aroused people, will grapple and destroy it.” He even appeared receptive to Eugene Debs’s proposal to colonize western states on a cooperative basis. “There is no harm in Mr. Debs trying to make a success of the enterprise,” Flagg conceded. “Whatever the result he is apparently inspired by a high and noble purpose.” 82 Flagg was far from the compliant

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cowboy of Wister and Remington’s imaginings. He was, instead, a western radical. Two opposed eastern visions of the West competed for ascendancy during the 1890s in Wyoming. Many westerners, the Johnson County settlers and Jack Flagg among them, viewed themselves very differently than the westerner enshrined in Remington and Wister’s narrative. The settlers’ vision of the West, in which they saw themselves as virtuous small landholders, was just as fueled by nostalgia as Wister and Remington’s version. 83 But the settlers counted on their mythic dreams to bring progress and civilization that would take them optimistically forward into the future. In contrast, Remington and Wister, like many artists of the West after them, looked back toward something finished and permanently unspoiled for inspiration in their work. 84 In many ways, their need for the West to remain open and unsettled previewed the preservation arguments of the twentieth century, which would advocate a nonutilitarian agenda for large parts of the western “wilderness.” In an era of immigration and industrialization, Wister, Remington, and men of their class viewed progress as a harbinger of decline—the demise of their own fortunes and degeneration of their identities. As Roderick Nash points out, in the late nineteenth century, Americans looked for ways to retain the formative influences of the wilderness for themselves and the nation, influences that, as Frederick Jackson Turner famously maintained, had forged the American character. Easterners, as a result, did not want the West to change. In contrast, Flagg and the settlers viewed progress and population as their tickets to happiness and prosperity. Progress was something to which they were entitled, not something to be feared. 85 This debate about how the West should be put to use, and who should benefit, would continue into the twenty-first century. Flagg’s resistance to this unsettled West wasn’t entirely a conscious act; his own mythic notions of the West simply required him to object to it. He acted on his self-images as the tamer, civilizer, and yeoman, a strand of the western myth that predated the heroic, individualist cowboy. 86 He had little use for Wister and Remington’s version of a legitimate westerner and refused to

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conduct himself according to it. To remain a cowboy, however heroic and romantic his depiction of it was, meant stasis and failure to Flagg. He could not satisfy the needs of one emerging western myth without forfeiting his own mythic visions, and he could not bring himself to concede that loss of power. Resistance to the powerful forces of culture had its price, however. When Flagg frustrated his representers’ vision of Wyoming and his place in it, they viewed him as little different than the immigrant urban swarms whom Wister’s and Remington’s cowboy representations were intended to counter. “The rustler in Wyoming is only another type of the anarchist of Chicago and Paris,” commented one loyal cattleman. “They are of the same tribe, and have thoughts alike.”87 In his determination to fulfill his own western destiny, Flagg readily abdicated the cowboy role and identity that would later make Wyomingites famous and valued in a larger cultural context. The cowboys represented in Remington’s paintings and Wister’s writings remained faithful fantasies reflecting their creators’ needs and desires. To their creators and employers, cowboys had value if they cooperatively lingered in their ordained roles, and retained their difference from their creators. Only by remaining distinct and separate as symbolic—and wage-earning— primitive forms could they do their cultural work of soothing anxieties about the disappointing present. The role of primitive is a delicate one, at once dangerous, irrational, and worthy of fear and yet also fit to be idealized as noble and worthy of emulation.88 The cowboys’ representers and employers viewed themselves as patrons, of a kind, who bestowed on their dependents their approval and endorsement when obedient, and denounced and upbraided them when they roamed too far from their appointed stations. In 1891, a year before the invasion, Wister noted with disapproval: “I begin to conclude from five seasons of observation that life in this negligent irresponsible wilderness tends to turn people shiftless, crude, and incompetent.”89 The cowboy might be rugged and colorful, but only under the cattle barons’ and representers’ rules and supervision. Privileged easterners like Teddy Roosevelt, Wister, and Rem-

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ington saw the western cowboy as true American nobility, AngloSaxon sons of the soil. 90 But when Flagg, and others like him, defined themselves as westerners in a way that reflected his employers and representers back upon themselves in an unfavorable light, they simply adapted westerners to suit their needs. 91 Roosevelt, for example, maintained that cowboys, unlike workers, had no sympathy for unionism or strikes, and the final version of Wister’s Virginian would be a decidedly “deferential” cowboy. A cowboy was supposed to identify with his own Anglo-Saxon race, not his class or caste. 92 Wister turned the Virginian into a mannered and well-read Easterner, who, as Louis Owens notes, served “as a very effective tool for the corporate ranchers in controlling the cowboy working class.” One outspoken cattleman declared: “Men who were receiving from $35.00 to $100.00 a month and who usually managed to spend that money in the larger towns in debauch are now after a few years, proprietors of very respectable herds. So, when men who were formerly never known as owners of cattle now represent themselves as cattle proprietors, there is an enigma.” Men like Jack Flagg who decided to define themselves, became, in the process, beyond definition—at least as “legitimate” westerners—“men with the bark on,” in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous phrase. 93 Flagg became “illegitimate” as a heroic westerner in the eyes of his employers and representers when he transgressed from the “western” role he, as a cowboy, was supposed to play. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the voice of the cattlemen, the Cheyenne Sun, hardly let a day go by without vilifying Flagg and his ilk and accusing him of no less than ungentlemanly behavior. “Flagg stopped Mrs. Frank Laberteaux on the road to the fort and with insulting language ordered her back to town,” the paper charged. The prospect of disobedient former employees gaining some authority in Johnson County evoked cries of distress from Cheyenne. “The other side of this rustler question is rapidly coming to the light and the fact is becoming every day more apparent that a more godless, thieving, lawless set of hypocrites never were allowed to breathe on God’s green earth than the pirates that have dominated Johnson County for the past few years,”

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the Sun wailed. 94 In the course of three months, the Cheyenne paper, reflecting the cattlemen who controlled it, characterized Flagg as a “range pirate,” “the Mikado of Johnson County,” “one of the few remaining desperados of the frontier,” a “blackhead and scoundrel,” a “nincompoop,” a “blaterskite,” and “the Bulldozer of Buffalo.” “The County is in the hands of outlaws,” The Sun maintained, and worse, “they boast of their triumph and power.” One cattleman articulated a view directly in opposition to Flagg’s: “The unoccupied lands in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and part of Dakota are best fit for grazing. . . . [The cattlemen] give employment to a great many people . . . they certainly are the benefactors of the West.” 95 In a clear attempt to place the Johnson County residents alongside the rabble-rousing working classes of the East, the defenders of the cattlemen accused Johnson County residents of flying the red-and-black flag symbolic of European anarchy and socialism, a charge Johnson County residents denied. 96 Jack Flagg had followed his own script, and for doing so was roundly condemned by the elites who resented his independence of thought and action. Johnson County residents’ class-based vision of themselves as the “people,” forged in opposition to the cattlemen, eroded in the years after the cattlemen’s invasion. Personal differences illuminated political differences, until little remained of the community’s proletarian bravado. 97 But for a short period, the Johnson County community forged a self-image as “The People,” and the western vision they propagated was egalitarian, even radical. They united behind their shared self-identity as civilizers in the pursuit of progress, development, and equality. At the turn of the century, however, the representers of another western vision had already been busy creating their own version of a western narrative, one that would eventually transform Wyomingites from resisters of the regional “westerner” tag to embracers of its heady new cachet. By 1900, both Remington and Wister had represented the West and westerners in numerous sculptures, stories, and paintings, but Wister’s tour de force was The Virginian, published in 1902. Some have said that Jack Flagg was the Virginian. His granddaughter reportedly remarked, “I always thought of Jack as the Gentleman

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Cowboy. If you’ve ever read Owen Wister’s book, The Virginian, you’ve read the perfect description of Jack Flagg. Flagg and Wister were good friends and I’ve always believed Wister’s Virginian and Jack Flagg were the same man.”98 How much of her remembrance is factual and how much influenced by Wister’s own interpretation is difficult to know. And it probably doesn’t matter, for if Flagg was the inspiration for the author’s hero, Wister simply appropriated what he needed from his life and image to create his image of a cowboy and authentic westerner. The novel, set in Wyoming during the Johnson County war, finds the hero firmly on the side of the ranchers against the small settler, “on the side of privilege, in opposition to democratic processes.” Wister’s version of the cowboy was loyal, obedient, and decidedly dependent on the largesse of his employer. 99 Both Remington’s and Wister’s work spoke to a larger constellation of social forces—a broader American audience—that responded to their heroic images. By the end of August 1902, a hundred thousand copies of The Virginian had been printed. Wister’s literary triumph not only topped the national bestseller list in 1902 but remained in the list’s top five in 1903. 100 A review in the Atlantic Monthly noted that the book’s hero constituted the “final apotheosis of the cowboy.” The Bookman remarked that “with his recently published The Virginian, Mr. Wister has driven into the soil of Wyoming a stake which seems likely to remain for a long time to come.” 101 Wister’s and Remington’s work had engendered a national myth. But they also supplied Wyomingites with an invented tradition that westerners would creatively and profitably put to their own ends for many years to come. The public acceptance and enthusiasm that greeted Remington’s and Wister’s images promoted a “fixing” of western identity in the eastern mind. Scribner’s magazine noted that “It is a fact which admits of no question that Eastern people have formed their conception of what the Far Western life is like, more from what they have seen in Mr. Remington’s pictures than from any other source.” The representers of the West created acceptable national icons worthy of emulation. They successfully took the experiences and characters of what was to them a type of subordinate

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social life, the cowboy, and ordained him with cultural legitimacy and worth. They could perform such feats because they promoted an image and myth that Americans were ready to receive and to which they responded with much enthusiasm. Sarah Burns comments that the American public, “looking for Remington’s version of the western scene . . . edited their own perceptions to conform with his.” 102 Wister and Remington also belonged to a class, artistically, economically, and socially, that enabled them to successfully authenticate such a stereotype. A 1902 article in The Bookman described Wister as “the product of Philadelphia’s highest civilization for more than two hundred years, and who came under the spell of the West and subsequently succeeded better than anyone else in communicating the impression made by the great sand sea.” 103 Wister’s friendships at Harvard reflected this social and cultural power. They included William Dean Howells, novelist and future editor of the Atlantic Monthly; the elder and younger Oliver Wendell Holmes; and Theodore Roosevelt. 104 Remington and Wister also “knew” the West. Wister may have been known in eastern circles as a Philadelphia gentleman, educated in Europe and at Harvard, but he could write stories about the West because he had been there—he had seen it and could chronicle the “truth” about its inhabitants for the rest of the nation. As early as the 1890s publicity material from Harper’s Publishing House noted that “the building up of the West formed an era that is past; but the scenes have left [Remington] upon the stage, with an enthusiastic memory filled like a storehouse with accurate notes.” Wister remarked in 1894, “I value accuracy more than any other quality in such stories as I write. I don’t care how effective they are, if they’re false, they’re spoiled for me.” 105 Remington and Wister created the truth about the West for much of America. And while Flagg’s mythic dream came to Wyoming and ushered in settlers, “progress,” and uniformity, Remington and Wister’s myth triumphed too. For they provided future Wyomingites with a truth about themselves, a collective memory that happened to be of national import as well. As representers of the West, Remington and Wister chose certain features of the era and incorporated them, with great success, into their

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way of knowing and representing. In the process, of course, they repressed—or left out entirely—other features of the region in the late nineteenth century, features that were much more to the liking of their unruly prototype, Jack Flagg. By 1902, the cowboy hero was reflective less of the wage laborer of the cattle boom era than of the power of his representers to successfully make him into an “authentic” form that sustained their own cultural agenda. Neither Flagg’s vision of a Jeffersonian collective nor the eastern elite’s Anglo-Saxon cowboy West were organic to the region. But the western radical—the persona that Flagg took on and lived —was something else entirely. That western idea of authenticity truly held the potential to shape the future of Wyoming and the West in interesting and dramatic ways. But that more rebellious notion of authenticity was, by 1902, already largely a fading probability. Remington and Wister’s West was simply too appealing, pervasive, and rewarding. One Wyoming cowboy reflected on his life in the 1890s thusly: “I had a liking for the girls, but when I went into town with my rough clothes on they wouldn’t pay any attention to me. . . . Owen Wister hadn’t yet written his book The Virginian, so we cowhands did not know we were so strong and glamorous as we were after people read that book.” 106 Wyomingites would profitably re-create this West, with the heroic cowboy as its symbol, far into the future but at a price, perhaps. As Richard White notes, “to tell so many stories of this kind is to cut off the telling of other stories, other narratives, other imaginings,” including ones in which Jack Flagg would be considered a legitimate and ideal westerner, not because he was a cowboy, but because he was a radical. 107 Jack Flagg never did pay much heed to notions of his own western authenticity and instead doggedly pursued his own mythic visions. From 1897 on, he assumed a kind of transitory existence, working as a blacksmith, hauling lumber, and again teaching school. While westerners, and all Americans, familiarized themselves with the cowboy hero that Wister had lionized in the pages of The Virginian, Flagg struggled to support both his family and the self-image he had come to Wyoming to cultivate. He moved with his family (now including four children of his own)

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around Wyoming, first to Pinedale in 1904, then to Boulder to work on an irrigation canal. Flagg eventually moved to Susanville, California, during World War I, working at a lumber mill and then as a truck farmer in Lodi, California. Flagg’s death, in September 1925, found him in Reno, Nevada. There, he had returned to the role of cowboy he had for so long tried to transcend.108 His obituary mourned him as one who “aided materially in changing Wyoming from a vast cow country held alone for private gain to the wonderfully developed and great Wyoming of today.” Twenty odd years after the Johnson County war, the Buffalo paper mourned Flagg as hero of the masses: “Had [32], (32 Jack Flagg shown a flash of cowardice . . . and surrendered to the enemy,” it eulogized, “it might have changed the status of this whole country and it might still be submitted to the rule of a few Lines: 1 privileged rich.” 109 ——— Flagg saw no contradiction between his own identities as a * 81.85p westerner and political radical. His vision of western identity was ——— a far cry from westerners’ later self-perception as rugged individNormal ualists who defined their independence not against an enigmatic * PgEnds: “money power” but against furtive bureaucrats and a federal government they perceived as dangerously intrusive.110 As westerners [32], (32 increasingly identified themselves as the last defenders of true “independence,” their view of their own authenticity would come to depend on clearly distinguishing themselves from all things federal, eastern, and at times, progressive. One wonders what Flagg would have thought of the fact that the role, and station, of wagelaboring cowboy he unsuccessfully tried to escape all his life was the very one for which he would, in a cultural sense, achieve the most respect and notoriety. It would be left to future Wyomingites to reap the rich economic and cultural benefits of “western authenticity,” as Remington and Wister indelibly defined them.

“What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost,” 1895: Frederic Remington’s version of a range war. (Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Thomas M. Evans, B.A., 1931.)

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Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her statue of Buffalo Bill. (Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming, P.69.185.)

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Larry Larom and female guests, Valley Ranch, circa 1925. (Charles Belden Collection, #598, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.)

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Larom and little dudes, Valley Ranch, circa 1925. (Charles Belden Collection, #598, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.)

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Wyoming’s Tourism Bureau sells a Wyoming past to recent visitors. (Courtesy of Barnhart Advertising. Letterform design: Michael Doret/MichaelDoret.com.)

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The West, the East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse

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0.0pt PgV In June 1924, an equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill was unveiled on a picturesque site on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming. Against an appropriately vast western outline of red buttes and stark bluffs, ten thousand locals joined by eastern notables braved the drizzling rain and cool temperatures to watch the statue’s unveiling. The statue, “The Scout,” captured Buffalo Bill in his younger days, replete with his buckskin scouting regalia. His rifle held high above his head in signal to his fellow scouts, the twelve-foot-high, thirteen-foot-long, thirteen-ton statue depicts Cody restraining his excited horse and scouring the path below him for Indian tracks. Of the dedication, the local paper noted: “In a true western setting midst the rock and sagebrush, while a gentle rain like a benediction from Heaven falling upon the largest crowd ever assembled at Cody, the heroic equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill was dedicated with proper and impressive ceremony.” 1 Buffalo Bill’s equestrian likeness represented much more than a local tribute to a western hero, however. In fact, powerful cultural ideas about nativism and regional identity have circulated around it ever since the statue’s unveiling. The townspeople of Cody celebrated the statue as a source of regional pride, a proud expression


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The West, East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse

of their western identity. To its national fund-raisers, however, it represented something even broader. To many in the crowd that day, the statue of Buffalo Bill held the potential to tutor recent arrivals in the ways of America. To them, Buffalo Bill symbolized not just westernness, but true Americanness, the embodiment of independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom. These were the attributes they hoped the statue would impart to those Italians, Slavs, and Greeks who had been flooding onto America’s shores in recent years and who represented threats, the fund-raisers believed, to the already disappearing America that Buffalo Bill incarnated. The statue gave westerners a national role as emblems of how America “used to be,” and through Buffalo Bill’s commemoration, the values the statue embodied became naturalized in westerners’ own identity as individualistic symbols of the nation’s past. The statue of Buffalo Bill and how it came to be illustrate that identities and memories, as John Gills writes, are things we think with and not just about, a phenomenon that makes the memories we choose all the more significant. 2 The two people primarily responsible for the creation of this potent representation of the quintessential western male were both women. As author, newspaper editor, and determined promoter of the “Old West,” Caroline Lockhart devoted much of her life to guaranteeing that cowboys, ruggedness, and the past would forever be associated with Wyoming. As Frederic Remington and Owen Wister had before her, Caroline Lockhart promoted and represented a distinctive western identity, one that would come to dominate the public’s notion of Wyoming. Like Miss Lockhart, the heiress and famed sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney employed western symbols to further her own artistic career. In doing so, she assisted Caroline Lockhart in her quest to promote the West in the nation’s consciousness as a place distinct from the East, forever untamed and representationally American. In their partnership to commemorate Buffalo Bill, these two American women perpetuated a western image that was traditionally associated with masculinity and its accompanying traits of primitivism and domination. 3

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Caroline Lockhart arrived in Cody in 1904, and from that moment proceeded in conscious, determined fashion to secure the town’s association with the kind of distinctive West that had been represented by western artists before her. By the 1920s, many Wyomingites were voluntarily performing their role as distinctive westerners through the tourist trade for visiting easterners. 4 The boosterism and vision of progress that Jack Flagg fought for in the 1890s hummed right alongside the narrative of the rugged West propagated by Remington and Wister. But by the time the town of Cody welcomed the statue of Buffalo Bill in 1925, it was the rugged cowboy-filled narrative of the West that Codyites promoted—the popular culture vision of the West that Americans had digested through literature, artwork, and Wild West performances. It was a narrative that Caroline Lockhart had been promulgating for years. As the daughter of a wealthy Kansas rancher, Caroline could in fact have claimed a ranching heritage, although she later always excluded Kansas in her own imagining of the West. Lockhart attended school in Pennsylvania, and then in 1889 at the age of eighteen began a career as a news reporter for the Boston Post. When the Wild West show visited Boston, her editor assigned her a story on Buffalo Bill, and both the flamboyant showman and the show itself made a lasting impression on her.5 She moved on to the more prestigious Philadelphia Bulletin in 1902, where she wrote about her adventurous exploits as a girl reporter under the name “Suzette.” After a trip west, she published an article entitled “A Girl in the Rockies” for Lippincott’s Monthly, and from thereon, most of her short stories and novels would be about her adopted region. Like so many other representers of the West before and after her, Lockhart found in Wyoming a space where she could both reinvent herself and escape what she believed the East to be. “The world off there to the East . . .” she wrote in Lippincott’s, “off there where the Great Northern starts, where miners are entombed by the hundreds, where there are riots and cowardly murders, burglaries and social and political wars, that world where all these things happen, is, to the small and isolated communities [in the West], like a myth.” 6 In her colorful depictions of Wyoming

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in novels like Me-Smith, Caroline Lockhart would become the voice for the West. “Becoming western” enabled her to move away from a more traditional female role, which in the late nineteenth century was frequently characterized by moral authority and sentimentality. 7 In her promotion of a masculine, hierarchical, and uncivilized West, Lockhart found a professional place for herself as a “New Woman.” 8 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was the privileged daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, one of the richest men in America, and she was the great granddaughter of the infamous “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, entrepreneur, and self-made man. She married Harry Payne Whitney, the scion of a prominent and wealthy family, in 1896. Whitney was a Yale graduate, polo player, and safari hunter—the ideal model of the “strenuous life” championed by Teddy Roosevelt and other cultural commentators of the era. Gertrude’s marriage to Harry ensured that she would remain within the exclusive social domain of their upper-class world. Her granddaughter noted, however, that within the limitations of her life as a socialite, Gertrude Whitney “yearned to do rather than just be, but in her day almost all doors were closed to women, especially women in her social position.” 9 Within a few years of her marriage, after bearing three children, Gertrude’s frustration over her husband’s chronic promiscuity prompted her to explore art as a way to transcend the strictures of her life. Whitney recorded in her diary: “You have controlled yourself for so long and held check on yourself to such an extent that you can no longer express any feelings or be sympathetic to anyone. . . . [A woman] must be untrammeled and free before all her faculties can work.” 10 Painting became an avenue through which Whitney could express herself. But despite much evidence of talent or training, she eventually decided to reinvent herself as a sculptor. She studied with the Scandinavian sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen and then later at the Art Students League. Whitney’s husband and family were somewhat alarmed at her new pursuit, especially when they realized that Gertrude might be exposed to nude male models in her art classes. Whitney complained that if a man of her station had embarked on an artistic career it

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would have caused no alarm, but when she tried she was “greeted by a chorus of horror-stricken voices.” In 1910 she exhibited a number of statues under her own name, and by 1915 some were heralding her as the country’s “most gifted woman sculptor.” 11 Gertrude Whitney’s art opened up to her a world of artists, models, and artisans, and through this new life she freed herself from many of the cultural constraints of her class and status. By 1917, she had begun the Whitney Studio Club for American artists who had difficulty getting their work shown in an art community that tended to privilege European art. The club welcomed men and women on equal terms. Eventually, it would evolve into the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931. The demand for war memorials after World War I provided Whitney with abundant material to sculpt, but her most famous sculpture until Buffalo Bill was the Titanic Memorial, which she completed in 1919. 12 Ultimately, Whitney’s most important role, of course, would not be as artist, but as patron and champion of American art. Her biographer notes that by the early 1920s, Gertrude Whitney had “helped to enhance the image of being at once rich and American, an artist and a woman.”13 Her commemoration of one of the most famous symbols of the American West, Buffalo Bill, would go a long way toward advancing her goal of promoting and representing thoroughly “American” artwork. When the statue of Buffalo Bill arrived in 1924, Cody had emerged as the model western town, where cowboy-seeking tourists satisfied their quest for western veracity. However, like Wyomingites themselves, Cody had to first become western before it could receive Mrs. Whitney’s testament to its western identity— and it took a while for Cody to discover its westernness. When Caroline Lockhart came to town in 1904, Cody was only eight years old, having been established well after the frontier had been proclaimed closed and “civilization” had presumably tamed the Wild West. She nonetheless quickly helped the local residents understand the unique value of their western distinctiveness. Lockhart presented herself as the epitome of what she believed to be western authenticity, while she simultaneously tried to make Cody into a western place. Like Caroline Lockhart, then, Cody

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would establish a place for itself in the national culture by “becoming western.” The commemoration of Buffalo Bill as a western icon in Cody in 1925, in fact, depended on the idea that the town represented a distinctly and ideal western space. Cody did not even exist as a place when the cowboys of the open range roamed the Wyoming prairies, or even when the settlers in Johnson County, Jack Flagg among them, fought for their agrarian, Jeffersonian vision of the West. In fact, the impetus that gave birth to this future epitome of westernness was much more a component of Jack Flagg’s West than Frederic Remington’s. In 1893, investors interested in promoting irrigation, including Buffalo Bill’s son-in-law, explored the Big Horn Basin. When the investors formed the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, they included Colonel Cody in their plans. Buffalo Bill himself appeared in promotions for the canal project, which promised “the ultimate ownership of both the canal and land by settlers with the abundant water supply [which] gives the cultivators of these lands security and independence not always enjoyed by irrigators.” 14 Colonel Cody diligently advertised the area and its attributes, taking pains to note its proximity to Yellowstone Park. The Burlington Railroad subsequently established a town site, and in April 1897 ditch water from Buffalo Bill’s irrigation project trickled into the town along the Cody Canal. 15 The new little community that owed its existence to faith in the progress and “civilization” that irrigation and farming represented, quickly set about establishing itself as developed and sophisticated. In 1900, the ladies of the town formed a literary and cultural society for the “matters of advancement of this nature,” and the local newspaper editor complained of the “senseless practice of shooting up the town.” Three years later in 1903, the “Cody Commercial Club” dined on distinctively un-western “oranges al Chevirngy, French Sardines a la Huile, Demi tasse and Cafe Noir.” The main entertainment during the Fourth of July celebration was not bronc riding, but a minstrel show (albeit put on by the “Cody Cowboy Band”). 16 The editor of the local newspaper, the Park County Enterprise, established by Buffalo Bill, proclaimed:

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[We endeavor] to produce a paper that exhibits the wonderful progress that has blessed this marvelous region in the past three years. The Enterprise . . . conveys the information pertaining to the rapid development that has transpired and is rapidly pushing forward to a happy culmination of the desired ends, but without being apologetic and considering the environments of a place that a few years since was in the exclusive possession of thriving sagebrush and undisturbed wild beast, the showing of it very far removed from the discouraging field. The town . . . has a community of highly intelligent people, pushing every moment to enhance the progress and increase the prosperity of the town. 17 The Enterprise hoped to diminish any regional distinctions that might differentiate their town from one in the East. The newspaper insisted in 1911 that the community “is developed and beyond the point of pioneering” and noted its electric lights, water works, and sidewalk. “The spirit of progress predominates with its citizens,” it assured readers. The editor praised those in the community “interested in [Cody’s] advancement.” In fine Turnerian fashion, the newspaper insisted that “there are thousands of worthy families in the large cities, many of them thrifty foreigners, who little realize the opportunities that await them in this great commonwealth.” In 1902, The Enterprise even praised a former cowboy who had turned his back on the past, moved to town, and started a business. “Since his coming,” the paper noted, “he has conducted a quiet, orderly place of business that is a credit to himself and to the town. . . . He is vitally interested in [Cody’s] advancement and always stands ready to help along the cause of municipal development.” 18 Jack Flagg would no doubt have approved of this ex-cowboy’s “evolution.” In those early days of Cody’s existence, the town’s citizenry had yet to claim ownership of their own distinctive westernness. An initial resident remembered the early-day dances when “cowpunchers always dressed in their best clothes—eastern style—for any large occasion, and it was not until the tourists came that the ‘cowboy’ dress became so popular for all occasions.” 19 In the

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first decades of the twentieth century, the citizens of Cody would become increasingly aware of themselves as remnants and cultivators of the wild and western, and less as instruments of progress and civilization. In 1911, The Enterprise still prominently displayed an advertisement in its pages addressed to farmers, but also prophetically noted that “Tourist traffic opens Thursday with a rush.” When the Prince of Monaco visited Cody to hunt with Buffalo Bill, local Codyites put on a western display with cowboys, cowgirls, Chief Plenty Coups, and local Crow Indians. 20 Increasingly, the East, especially the monied East, came to know Cody and it them. The Enterprise reported on a group of Vassar girls on an expedition through the Yellowstone and Cody country: “The membership of the party includes young ladies from some of the most cultured and wealthy families of the East and the success of their trip will mean similar parties in the future over the scenic route to Yellowstone.” As the East sanctified Codyites’ western identity, the community’s desire to emulate the East subsided. As Robert Athearn notes, even small towns like Pinedale, Wyoming, let it be known that it was 105 miles from the railroad, “a fact that would have been buried in another day.” 21 And though they might still be beholden to the East for approval about some things, Wyomingites increasingly claimed their own authority as to what was western, an authority they would later claim to hold Buffalo Bill’s sculptress accountable for. 22 When she covered a story on the Blackfoot Indians in Montana for the Philadelphia Bulletin, Lockhart made a detour to Cody and decided to make the town—and the western identity, which would become one and the same—her own. Not long into her residence, she distinguished herself from her fellow females in the town through her independence, financially and sexually. She proceeded to position herself firmly on the side of all that was nontraditionally female. She took on temperance, suffrage, “Methodists,” and everything and everyone she perceived to represent the move to “civilize” the West. 23 Along with Buffalo Bill, she was the town’s major claim to fame, and she relished her new role. Lockhart noted that “Cody here is my workshop. I go East to play and enjoy it twice as much as though I lived there all the

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time.” 24 Lockhart took on numerous lovers, spoke her mind on many topics, and felt more at home drinking with the men than playing mah-jongg with the ladies of the town. Lockhart’s desire to be the “best known woman in the West” certainly contributed to her literary ambitions. While in Cody, she continued to write bit pieces on western types and characters for the Philadelphia North American. In a 1907 article she explained the West’s distinctiveness to readers in the East: Superficially, the far west is raw, crude, and grotesque sometimes in its dress and speech and manner; but underneath it is simple and natural, and on the square. . . . Even the women of the dance halls are shown certain deference [by western men]. Hospitality is another trait which is marked in the western man. . . . [T]he real Westerner is self reliant because he must be. . . . [T]he simple, self reliant western life is, I think the natural one, the one which appeals to manly men because its tendency is to broaden and develop rather than to suppress and contract. 25 * She deplored the “settlers from the middle west who bring with them their customs and their hopeless mediocrity to ruin whatever remains of the picturesque features of the frontier.” 26 As a writer and individual, Lockhart had so associated herself with the West that if it as a region lost its distinctiveness, she feared she might also. In 1911, her first novel, Me-Smith, was published to generally favorable reviews. Most of Caroline’s stories contained strong, independent female characters, many not unlike herself. But in the end, the vast majority of her novels and stories differed little from the hundreds of morality tales and romantic and melodramatic stories popular at the time. In the tradition well established by Owen Wister, she filled Me-Smith with essentialized western characters and traits. A reviewer for the Chicago Daily News in fact compared the work to Wister’s: “The strongest, most consistent story of the West which has appeared in years, and in many points excels The Virginian.” And the New York Times likewise

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equated it to Wister’s prototype, noting, “As a delineation of western life [it is] at once realistic and picturesque.” 27 Caroline wrote about a romantic West of clear values, strong and noble men, and true women (who in the end usually conformed to societal values). Her literary West, however, was rarely as complicated a place as her own life. Although in her personal life she strove to be the “exception” to the rules of her gender, she ultimately confirmed a very traditional western narrative in her work. Ironically, the popularity of Lockhart’s confirmation allowed her the financial independence to act out her own cultural rebellion. She was, however, constantly negotiating the perennial dilemmas that plagued the western romantic: the rough, western men she created in her novels she also endowed with a bit of “eastern” sophistication and refinement. And she could never bring herself to marry one of the cowboys whose company she kept and who were, in actuality, far more rugged and less sophisticated than were her literary inventions. She felt the need to claim at one point that “nearly half of the cowpunchers of the early eighties were Harvard or Yale men, or young men from good eastern families.” Lockhart had a difficult time accepting cowboys on their own terms and so, like western writers before her, she took the best qualities of the eastern gentleman and the rugged westerner and melded them together to capture the perfect man.28 In a sense, the conflict and desires in her own life reflected the West’s own ambivalence over its identity: whether to be progressive or rugged, civilized or the last bastion of primitivism in an increasingly modern world. 29 In 1919, Lockhart joined the staff of the Denver Post to report on the colorful West and its characters. The Post asserted enthusiastically, if none too accurately, that “Caroline Lockhart is of the West and for the West. . . . She has ridden the range with cowpunchers, herded sheep over the vast expanse of Wyoming’s grazing land and always lived in the open. . . . She knows little of golf and polo and bridge, but she can ride a bucking bronco or trail a grizzly.” Lest the wrong impression be given to its readers, the Post, as had the Ledger, assured readers that “she is a thoroughgoing woman, with a woman’s instincts and a woman’s

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heart.” Caroline returned the compliment, declaring “The Post is distinctly western. I like it above all other papers.” 30 Caroline frequently lampooned the East in her reporting. She noted, for example, her discomfort at walking down Fifth Avenue dressed in the latest fashion from Billings, Montana, although her dismissal of eastern fashion belied her own power to choose to disregard it, for she certainly had the power and sophistication to conform to such standards if she wished. Three of Lockhart’s novels went on to become motion pictures, and the Cody newspaper approvingly noted her success: “Our local authoress is to be congratulated on her sudden rise to fame, which is a fitting reward for her continued and honest efforts to place before the public a true depiction of the real westerner.”31 In her championing of the masculine West, Lockhart had cleverly, if not perhaps wholly consciously, carved out a place for herself in a traditionally male profession. 32 With Buffalo Bill’s passing in 1917, Lockhart became Cody’s main promoter and celebrity. With a number of other Cody residents in 1917, Lockhart helped found the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association, which would ultimately solicit Gertrude Whitney to sculpt the quintessential western icon, Buffalo Bill. The purpose of the group was “to establish and maintain a historical society for the preservation of the history and antiquities of the country, the town of Cody, the County of Park and the state of Wyoming: to build, construct and maintain a historical monument or memorial statue in honor of and to perpetuate the memory of our late lamented fellow townsman, Buffalo Bill.” 33 The local committee invited Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Pulitzer, the King of Spain, and Sir Baden Powell, British commissioner of the Boy Scouts, to become members. 34 Apparently, they all declined. The work of turning Cody into the kind of rough-and-ready western town that Caroline demanded involved her in a number of positions, which included that of full-fledged promoter. In 1920 with three local men, she bought the local Cody newspaper that Buffalo Bill had founded in 1899. Lockhart explained that “I thought it might be an outlet for my superfluous energy,” and she believed she could “inject a little color and life” into the small

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town paper. She also gained a platform to voice her passionate opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1919. 35 After a year Lockhart became the editor as well as part owner, and she used her position to voice her advocacy of all things “western.” She also became president of the Cody Stampede Organization, whose philosophy was to “preserve some of the Old West that we love.” The group’s objective was “[keeping] alive the spirit of the West and [to] perpetuate the memory of our late honored townsman, Col W. F. Cody.” Lockhart explained that the necessity behind this annual “Old West” celebration was because “the old west, with its sport and feats of daring, has almost passed. Now everywhere the honk of the scissor bill’s Tin Lizzie has replaced the yips of the cowboy. . . . Yet some of that old West that we love we can hold a little longer, if we make the effort.” 36 The local newspaper described the purpose of the staged frontier event thusly: “so that the spirit of the Old West to be preserved and the Yip of the Cowboy to Drown the Honk of the Tin Lizzie for Three Whole Days.”37 Now that it had achieved some semblance of “civilization,” the Cody community seemed determined to disregard it. As the president of the Stampede Organization, Lockhart cultivated the requisite western types so they would be on full display for expectant observers. She recruited the cowboy actor Tim McCoy to make an appearance at the first stampede, apparently to demonstrate to the local crowd what an authentic westerner looked like. 38 “Surely,” she wrote, “there is no more fitting place in America for Exhibitions of cowboy skill and valor than right here in Buffalo Bill’s town at the foot of the Rockies.” 39 Lockhart kept up insistent and successful pleas to the Crow Indians to travel south from the reservation to make an appearance at the stampede. “They are one of the chief attractions to tourists and lend much color to our celebration,” she commented. The stampede would also feature model cowboys and cowgirls, for Lockhart insisted that “the girls who enter the cowgirls races must be dressed western and not come in looking like jockeys or circus riders in bloomers or trousers.” 40

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“Wash your shirt, olde timer,” Lockhart commanded in the Enterprise in 1922, “and get ready for the Cody Stampede parade. . . . Everyone is in the right mood and has the same feeling—to ‘put her on wild’ and let the world know that the west has not passed in Cody, Wyoming.” 41 Under Lockhart’s resolute tutelage, Cody became the epitome of what was western, and she was determined never to let the locals forget the role this demanded of them. When the time for the annual Stampede Ball came around, Lockhart took a cue from the generator of western authenticity himself, Owen Wister. She reproduced a scene taken directly from Wister’s Virginian in her announcement published in the Enterprise that a baby wrangler and a room for herding tots would be provided so mothers could dance. In 1923, once again, Lockhart’s instructions to her fellow citizens (in the Enterprise) were explicit: “This year too, the Stampede Committee wants it to be a real Stampede ball with western folk in western clothes, bright shirts, gay handkerchiefs, high heeled boots—men and women, boys and girls.” And she scolded: “Last year we forgot to say anything about this, and first thing we knew there was Joe Jones dressed in his best blacks and his hair slicked back . . . in fact we did not know there were so many store clothes and evening gowns in the country until the last Stampede Ball and we hope it won’t happen again.” 42 No more would Cody residents be allowed to dress eastern for their western celebrations. Lockhart’s orchestration of the Cody Stampede and her insistence on playing up the cowboy identity responded adeptly to expectations that had taken root in the minds of many easterners. Within fifteen years of the new century’s birth, travelers had very clear ideas of what they expected to see in the West, for Americans had certainly had ample time to become intimately familiar with Wister’s writings and Remington’s paintings. As Emily Post commented, “It was the West, the great, free, open West we had come to see. Ranches, cowboys, Indians, not little cities like sample New Yorks.” 43 And Lockhart was clearly not alone in her vision. Cody successfully emerged as a western destination and one of the most popular actual “imagined” spaces in America.

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Tourism held both economic and cultural appeal for Wyomingites in the 1920s. Over eleven thousand cars carrying 58,109 people traveled through the Cody gateway to Yellowstone in 1925. 44 The proprietor of the Cody Trading Company testified that “The Cody Stampede means more to us than the tourist business of the entire summer.” Lockhart herself, astride a horse and outfitted in hat and chaps, hawked silk and satin stampede shirts in a 1924 advertisement for the Trading Company. 45 Remington and Wister’s West of cowboys sold, and sold big. Codyites accordingly recognized and responded to eastern expectations of an imagined West. A local society of Cody writers, including Lockhart, was formed in 1923 to preserve “the adventure and fascination of the West—by brush, note, letter, lens or pens,” as well as to promote Buffalo Bill. 46 This embracing of a western identity certainly reflected an abundance of cultural and economic pragmatism. Throughout the 1920s, agricultural prices across the plains crashed after the boom years that preceded World War I. Despite Buffalo Bill’s dreams of a green, cultivated basin, farming in an environment that receives less than ten inches of rainfall a year often brought hardship, frustration, and feelings of defeat. To be valued for being “western” undoubtedly held appeal at a time when those who worked the land began to feel more and more undervalued in an increasingly industrialized and modernized America. 47 In accepting these culturally sanctioned western distinctions, Wyomingites in the 1920s—and indeed many westerners—may have avoided much of the cultural bitterness, resentment, and value conflicts between city and country that plagued much of the rest of rural America. 48 In 1923, Tom Ames, a local dude rancher, made the case for this distinctive, regional identity and the importance of meeting eastern expectations. “All you have to say to the average easterner is that you live or come from Cody,” he pointed out, “and he will begin a rapid fire of questions as to the wildness of the locality, the number of Indians in the vicinity and will want to know just how wild everything is out here. . . . Cody should be more as it used to be, with more riders, Indians, big hats, etc., and a general wild and woolly atmosphere.”49 He agreed with Lockhart’s assessment

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of those who looked forward to Cody’s move away from regional distinctiveness: “[The wild and woolly atmosphere] may sound a bit fiction-like to some of the town who have come here from the middle west and have tried to make people believe that Cody is no different from any town in Iowa or other semi-western states, but which nevertheless is known as an undisputed fact that the western idea is what attracts easterners and the summer tourists who annually pass through Cody.” He pragmatically asserted that “the big hats, blue jeans, and chaps are what the visitor is interested in seeing and such things are what induces them to linger longer while here, and later to return home to talk about finding the West as they had hoped to see it and to send their friends or come back year after year.” In his rush to embrace regional markers, Mr. Ames enthusiastically insisted: “Let’s keep them satisfied instead of disappointing them and give them what they want and keep their money coming in to the one town above others which certainly should have it. Let’s keep Cody on the map and put ’er on wild each summer!” 50 The rancher acknowledged that there was really nothing to separate Cody from every other little town in Wyoming “excepting the name and what the world in general expects to encounter about Buffalo Bill’s old stomping grounds and when people come and find nothing distinctive about Cody, they go away disappointed and have nothing to say on our behalf.” It didn’t much matter that some of the western characters the easterners expected to see would have to be imported. “The cost of the hire of a few men to do the wild stuff would be very light,” the Enterprise editorialized. “A calf a week would keep four or five families of Indians who could come over from the Crow reservation and parade up and down, blankets clad, about the main streets of Cody.” 51 Thanks to the success of Lockhart’s efforts, by the 1920s Cody had emerged as a distinctive western place. To become what Americans cheered on screen and in literature seemed to hold an undeniable appeal when contrasted to Jack Flagg’s aspiration for equivalency with all things eastern. Ames and Lockhart were not alone in their enthusiasm for a distinctive western identity for Cody. Many westerners began

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to realize, as Elliott West has noted, that the “myth” could be conveniently converted to income in the West even though it had originated elsewhere. 52 A Cody woman, June Little, wrote to the Enterprise in breathless support of Ames’s vision and of the importance of meeting eastern expectations: What you said to the Cody Club about big hats and highheeled boots and western atmosphere being a great attraction is perfectly true as those of us who have lived in the East know how these things appeal to one getting off a train and how disappointing not to find some signs of the old west just a saddle pony or two or a pair of chaps makes a lot of difference because most easterners think of Cody and cowboys and Injuns in the same breath and if we had more men of the town wearing two gallon hats and more riders jogging down the street tourists who stop en route to the park would linger longer and later to talk about finding the west as they had hoped to see it and those of the town who might object and I can think of several to being termed wild could easily be persuaded because after all it doesn’t take such a terrible bad man to wear a large hat even you and I. Mrs. Little also suggested that Cody take a cue from Hollywood and duplicate a movie set, down to false fronts, hitching racks, saloons, and “hired riders to put on a show near the depots to meet the anticipated gaze of the incoming tourist.” “Surely,” she insisted, “it would be better than to see some westerner rolling down the street in a Ford trying to appear like Fifth Avenue which naturally appeals not at all to those from Fifth Avenue who come to spend money in our midst.” At least in Cody, distinctions based on notions of a Wild West regionalism had become preferable to tried and failed attempts to emulate an eastern identity. 53 This push for a Wild West identity did not go unchallenged, at least initially. Her rival newspaper, the Northern Wyoming Herald, editorialized on its vision of the Old West: “Perpetuity of the spirit of the West is a noble sentiment and should never be lost.” But the paper’s editor then went on to define the spirit of the Old West in its own way: as “the age old urge to do things . . .

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to build roads and bridges and construct railroads.” He no doubt had Lockhart in mind when he asserted, “small thinkers regard the byproducts of the pioneer days as the ‘spirit of the west.’ To them the spirit of the west means a carefree life, no regard for the rights and liberties of others, license to do things which in civilized communities would be taboo.” No matter. Despite its valiant attempt to independently define the Old West spirit, the Herald nonetheless soon found itself caught up in the enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill, the lure of the tourist trade, and the appeal of western distinctiveness: “The Herald refuses to quarrel over the tourist business. The combined energies of all the state should be devoted to selling its scenic attractions on a seasonal basis.” It conceded: “As time goes on apace, the name [Buffalo Bill] blends into the romance of the past. Buffalo Bill remains the central figure. It is ours to use as he would wish. To play up and use it as a magnet to draw the east to the west would be in line with his thinking and desires. . . . It is a stellar role, let’s play it.” The Herald even conceded that Lockhart was the “spirit and the life of the [Cody Stampede].” 54 The selling of a distinctive and coveted western identity proved exceedingly difficult to resist. Westerners were also encouraged to keep the West distinctive by influential easterners who, in turn, effectively legitimized the western space to an eastern audience. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Buffalo Bill himself had familiarized wealthy visitors with the Yellowstone and Cody country as a hunting guide. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, easterners with money and time increasingly bought ranches and summer homes in the country around Cody. Millionaire William Robertson Coe and Colonel Arthur W. Little, chairman of the printing house J.J. Little and Company, were both easterners who lived part of the year in the West. For many of these eastern visitors, the West no doubt served, both in their imaginations and as an actual location, as a space in which to work out the tensions of an emerging modern culture. 55 The Big Horn Basin remained largely unoccupied by white settlers until the turn of the century, and so it perhaps more easily

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conformed to the needs and the imaginations of visitors than other western locales whose images had already been defined. 56 Thus, by the mid-1920s, Cody became known as the place to go to experience the West, and the town was ready to receive the icon of its famous namesake. Although the Burlington Railroad continued to circulate publicity pamphlets to potential settlers stressing the area’s capacity for agriculture, community life and schools, good roads, and churches, it was Lockhart’s version of an open, wild, romantic West of the popular imagination that attracted the East and that many westerners preferred to advertise. A 1925 article on Park County in Wyoming Roads magazine, for example, focused on its “western” character: “[Park County is where] the dude, dudene and dudelet of the East meet the natives of the West,” it noted. “The Buffalo Bill country is a picturesque scenic land dedicated from time immemorial, not to the growing of peas and potatoes, but to the recreation of mens’ souls, their very lives. The West is a state of mind, and cannot vanish,” the magazine declared. 57 Other colorful Burlington brochures favored this same imagery: “In Wyoming the spirit of the old West still glows. The west of Jim Bridger, John Coulter, Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill and Custer remains new and youthful, crude, heroic and cordial— in Wyoming.” Civilization and settlement would not bring the tourist dollar, but what would was “the memory of the covered wagon, Indian warfare, buffalo stampedes, pony express, and the wild, free life of the unfenced open range [which] still hangs as a romantic halo over this old-new land.”58 And who better than from Buffalo Bill to have learned how to use the western past to survive in the western present? So, by 1924 with the arrival of Gertrude Whitney’s statue, Caroline Lockhart’s vision of the West had become increasingly dominant, and westerners accepted regional distinctions previous generations had sought to diminish. Together, then, the East and West had “discovered” “The West.” 59 The production of the statue of Buffalo Bill took time. Yet in its evolution, this relatively newfound western identity became increasingly crucial to the ultimate message the statue’s most powerful patrons sought to impart. In 1917, the Buffalo Bill Memorial

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Association, in which Caroline Lockhart served as a member, suggested a statue of Cody’s namesake. In 1921, the Wyoming legislature claimed Buffalo Bill as a regional hero and allocated $5,000 for a Buffalo Bill Memorial. Caroline then contacted Buffalo Bill’s niece in New York City, Mary Jester Allen, to serve as a kind of an eastern go-between in this effort to memorialize Buffalo Bill. Mrs. Allen had previous experience with American icons, both as publicity agent for her uncle’s Wild West show and as promotional director of the National Republican Committee. 60 She had also served as secretary of the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association, whose agenda was to reconstruct Theodore’s birthplace in New York City. In 1921, Mrs. Allen turned her attention to commemorating her uncle. She found inspiration in her recollection that Buffalo Bill had once told her that he wished to keep his memory fresh for posterity by “teaching the youth by seeing history.” 61 Committee members in Cody, including part-time Wyoming resident Colonel Arthur W. Little, suggested that the famed American sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney create the statue. 62 Lockhart apparently also called on William Coe to woo Mrs. Whitney. Coe, a Long Island acquaintance of Mrs. Whitney’s and an easterner of considerable wealth, was also a devout Wyomingphile and owned Buffalo Bill’s old te Ranch south of Cody. Lockhart announced the proposal in her Enterprise and conducted a personal survey to determine if the citizens of Cody would be receptive to the idea. She then wrote to Mrs. Allen and suggested that she meet with Mrs. Whitney to try to persuade her to accept, which Whitney did. “I told of Uncle Will and his dream,” Mrs. Allen recalled, “and before I was finished, Mrs. Whitney had caught the fire of far-flung vision and was walking about the room selling me the West.”63 Mrs. Whitney’s biographer, B.H. Friedman, attributes her receptiveness to Buffalo Bill’s “uniquely American character.” “I have always wanted, more than anything else, to have my work distinctly American,” Whitney told an interviewer, “and [Buffalo Bill] is certainly the one man whom we think of as representing the most romantic and adventurous period in the history of the West. . . . In that country, nothing can be small or elaborate. It is

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a great responsibility to be the first person to sculpt Buffalo Bill.”64 Mrs. Whitney visited Cody in the summer of 1922, accompanied by her son Cornelius. She reported to the Cody Club, the local booster organization, that Buffalo Bill would be mounted on a “typical western horse as has been immortalized in the drawings of Remington and Schreyvogel.”65 Whitney, then, would continue in the representational vein already outlined for her by these two earlier chroniclers of the West. This was perfectly fine with Caroline Lockhart, who launched into action and dutifully published in the Enterprise everything and anything to do with Mrs. Whitney and her statue. “This statue will mean more to Cody than is yet realized,” she declared. “It will bring tourists who might otherwise use another of the Park entrances. It will be a Mecca for the thousands of hero worshipers throughout the world to whom the Colonel was the typical American.” With her usual mix of pragmatism and devoutness she declared, “It will attract others purely as a work of art.” 66 The financing of the statue was the only barrier to Whitney and Lockhart’s vision. Mrs. Whitney had estimated that the cost to create the statue would be $50,000, which she soon increased to $250,000. With the $5,000 contributed by the Wyoming legislature, that left a daunting sum to be raised. The local Codyites mobilized to raise the necessary financial support, and the Sammy Girls and Boy Scouts were among the first groups to launch the campaign for funds for the Buffalo Bill Memorial. 67 Lockhart acknowledged in her Enterprise that $50,000 was “rather appalling,” but suggested that a plan might be worked out whereby the financing of the statue could be made a “national affair.” And so it was. The creation of the statue of Buffalo Bill became a national undertaking, and correspondingly, its meaning would assume a sense of profound national importance, in accordance with Gertrude Whitney’s own views. “All good art must have a distinctly national flavor, national in point of view, national in subject matter,” she told an interviewer. “For that reason, I have taken especial delight in modeling the Buffalo Bill Memorial.” 68 Mrs. Whitney did, in fact, eventually take the matter of financing her statue into her own hands, organizing the Buffalo Bill American Association

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in New York City for that purpose. The organization included such illustrious citizens as General John J. Pershing, the World War I hero and son-in-law to conservative senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, as its chairman; General Cornelius Vanderbilt, Gertrude’s brother and World War I veteran, as vice chairman; and Robert D. Dripps, Philadelphia’s director of public safety, as executive secretary. 69 The committee would later include frequent Wyoming visitor Winthrop Brooks of the famed New York City Brooks Brothers Clothing store, who wrote to his partner, Larry Larom, in 1923, “I have just spent most of the morning with Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney at her studio looking over the statue [53], (21) of Buffalo Bill, which is near completion. I think it is very good as do other members of the committee. In this respect, it would Lines: 132 to probably amuse you to know that at a meeting of the national committee of the Buffalo Bill Memorial yesterday, I was elected ——— 70 * 21.0pt Pg Chairman.” The association located its fund- raising offices at ——— 469 Fifth Avenue and held its initial national fund-raising dinner Normal Page at the Biltmore Hotel. 71 * PgEnds: Eject The organization enlisted the national narrative of the heroic pioneer for its publicity pamphlet: “The purpose of the Buffalo Bill [53], (21) American Association,” it explained, “is to keep alive the spirit of the American pioneer.” Decreeing that “[we] have adopted Buffalo Bill as the symbol of the pioneer spirit,” the pamphlet proceeded to outline its substantial goals: [The Buffalo Bill American Association] is a national association, open to every American. It is interested in no propaganda. It proposes to make the pioneer, frontiersman, scout, vivid and living, in order that we may realize the part which he played in the development of this country and its permanent significance. It proposes to remind the individual American citizen that freedom of opportunity and the right of individual initiative. It believes that this spirit can be liberated, not by compulsion or propaganda, but first, by each one of us individually holding before our eyes the way the early pioneers lived it and applied it, and second, by seeing

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the pioneers of our own day in all the varied circumstances of modern life succeeding and serving by this same spirit. The statue was laden with ideas of who Americans are and should be. In its publicity material, Buffalo Bill materialized as the model westerner and the Old West as the key to national survival. The symbolic meaning of the statue would educate, or Americanize, both new arrivals and Americans who had slipped off the path of “independence.” 72 “The campaign to erect as symbol of this movement the heroic equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill will of itself be of national service in educating our people as to the underlying basis of our American institutions, the part which the pioneers played in our national development, and the need today of the spirit which they possessed,” the organization asserted. They confidently theorized that “The renewed attention to the pioneer, centered about the statue, and growing out of the campaign for its erection, will undoubtedly serve as stimulus for emulation, so that new pioneers—men of an equally fine caliber— will be more likely to appear throughout the country, and so that the youth of America will be more apt to develop into men of initiative, strong individuality, and patriotism.” The publicity pamphlet echoed the concerns of a group of Americans who were alarmed at the transformations they witnessed around them—immigration, labor strikes, political and economic reforms—which they equated with change, turbulence, and loss of control. 73 The association’s agenda responded to the concerns of corresponding groups, such as the National Security League and the American Legion, which preached 100 percent Americanism to the great mass “neither speaking nor thinking American.” 74 Gertrude Whitney’s statue of Buffalo Bill wasn’t about exclusion, however. By indoctrinating certain “American” values into the new arrivals, it became a potential instrument for stabilizing an America that its fund-raisers felt was slipping out of control. It also became a way of including these new arrivals in the American experience . . . once they were sufficiently educated. In a 1925 article, the Christian Science Monitor reflected on the necessity of assimilation and hoped that quota restric-

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tions would help “efforts to inculcate . . . the right conception of American political and social standards, and the advantages and responsibilities of citizenship.” 75 If there was no more frontier— that elusive barrier that had made settlers “American”—to tutor new Americans, this artistic embodiment of the frontier could now live on to accomplish the same thing. 76 The statue also provided a means by which westerners could ally with easterners in a shared cultural memory of and longing for the past. The Philadelphia Ledger referred to the statue’s national meaning in noting the Pennsylvania roots of Buffalo Bill’s mother: “Conservative Philadelphia and the old rip roarin’ west—they are linked by an unbreakable bond in that national and international character Buffalo Bill. . . . The monument, which is going to rise splendidly against the clear skies of Cody, Wyoming, is going to be Philadelphia’s monument too.” 77 Memorializing the West as America gave Wyomingites a powerful role to play in the national consciousness. And for the East that also claimed Buffalo Bill, the statue, and perhaps Wyoming itself, represented a more American, romantic past. The statue and the state became symbols of America’s potential—perhaps dimmed but not yet extinguished—its spark still alive, if only in the way the past was remembered and preserved in Cody. The Buffalo Bill American Association directly addressed these shared cultural values, which they assumed connected East to West. “The antithesis of the pioneer or frontiersman is not the city man or the town dweller,” it maintained in its publicity, “it is rather the man who is always waiting to take advantage of what others do, never taking the lead himself.” The character enshrined in Buffalo Bull’s statue, then, wasn’t just a western one but an American one, captured in a western symbol, that many Americans feared new immigrants lacked. “A large proportion of those who come to our shores as immigrants are filled with the same faith and hopefulness and willingness to endure hardship and the same longing for freedom and individual initiative that constitute the frontier spirit,” the association conceded. It warned, however, “today, for a variety of reasons, many of our immigrants seem to lose this spirit and instead of becoming an asset, in many cases,

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constitute a serious obstacle to the proper functioning of our institutions.” 78 Buffalo Bill’s symbolism, and thus the statue’s appeal, resonated across regions. For the Codyites, the statue represented their own importance in the national memory and the public culture. For both them and their eastern benefactors, it represented a powerful conduit of Americanness. The “new immigrants” to which the association responded were indeed a potent force. Between 1901 and 1910, a wave of 6,300,000 immigrants arrived in the United States, many from southern and eastern Europe. By 1920, up to three-quarters of the residents of many American cities were foreign born. Through[56], (24 out the early part of the twentieth century, Americans engaged in a debate over socialism, strikes, Bolshevism, and Red Scares. Lines: 1 Education, and in particular “Americanism,” which as Nell Irvin Painter notes, often was little more than “an unquestioned accep——— * 21.0pt tance of conventional patriotism,” emerged as a way to restore ——— order. Buffalo Bill and the West could, ostensibly, bring these Normal newcomers into the American fold. 79 * PgEnds: The statue’s fund-raisers drew a direct line from the Old West to Buffalo Bill to American values. And as the incarnation of the [56], (24 Old West, there was no better place than Cody to provide a distinctively western setting for the memorial to an American icon. The statue presented a symbolic way to indoctrinate the new arrivals with values of self-sufficiency and “freedom,” by which its promoters predominately meant independence from the federal government: We must also note the gradual process which has been going on during the past few decades, looking toward an increased centralization of government, and involving the gradual unloading on the government of functions, of duties and responsibilities, which had always been regarded as resting upon the individual citizen. We must realize that if this continues, then, whether for good or bad, not only our Government, but our national character will be entirely different from what it was in the years immediately following the


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adoption of the constitution, and a thing quite distinct from what our forefathers intended to create. 80 The association effectively utilized and promoted the West and taken-for-granted “western” symbols as instruments by which to impart and secure its own vision of America, a vision in which westerner and easterner came together in a shared sense of American exceptionalism and Anglo-Saxon anxiety. 81 While the organization diligently promoted American values, Mrs. Whitney continued to sculpt their conduit. Cody’s family sent her Buffalo Bill’s hat, gun, and saddle to ensure authenticity in her representation. By the end of 1923, her first model of “Buffalo Bill—the Scout” went on display at the Wildenstein Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Devotees of Wyoming, including Winthrop Brooks, were given a private showing before the model was shown to the public. The event was by invitation only and was of interest to the press more as a social event than an artistic one. 82 Although Lockhart ran the headline “Whitney Design Not Rejected by Cody Memorial Members” in the local Cody paper, the Codyites were not entirely satisfied with Mrs. Whitney’s initial efforts. The Cody Memorial Committee stated: The committee, knowing Mrs. Whitney is not the sort of woman to take offense at honest opinions, has done so, speaking from the viewpoint of Westerners. It was thought that the horse of the design looked too eastern and that it should be more of the cayuse type, the range horse which Buffalo Bill undoubtedly rode at the time he was scouting. Also it was suggested that when a western horse is pulled up as sharply as the horse in the model, it bunches its feet to stop, rather than throwing them forward. The stirrup, too, is eastern rather than the larger leather covered stirrup of the western stock saddle. 83 Lockhart remarked that from the viewpoint of westerners, the horse was “too eastern and the position strained and unusual.” She quoted Lloyd Coleman, the Cody Stampede director and

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“world champion rough rider” to bolster her own view: “That horse Buffalo Bill is riding is not western. It’s a society animal and that won’t do for Buffalo Bill. He’s got to have a regular heman horse. This horse could get by people in the East, but in the West, they’d laugh at it. No matter how I looked at it, it was an eastern horse. . . . [A] western horse doesn’t put one of his hoofs straight out in the air when he stops. That’s a trick, I guess, of one of the eastern horses.” 84 The eastern press exaggerated the conflict, making much of the fact that westerners objected to the horse because of their western sensibilities. “Did Mrs. Whitney Go Wrong on Buffalo Bill’s Horse?” headlined the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Out west, they will let you mistake varieties of automobiles, if you like, but any funny talk about a horse might get you into serious trouble.”85 The New York Sun weighed in as well:

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Cody hasn’t any pretensions to authority in sculpture. If, ——— for example, the Venus de Milo were to step down from her Normal pedestal and wander out to Cody, the ranchmen and other * PgEnds: residents would likely refuse to comment on her proportions pro or con and would wrap a blanket about her and let it go [58], (26 at that. But when it comes to horses the situation is different. Cody knows a horse through and through, particularly a western horse. Does the world think that the Codyites are going to permit a fat eastern horse of Central Park to stand in perpetual bronze out on the trail leading to Yellowstone Park, as a representative of the pioneer animal that carried Buffalo Bill and his fellow scouts in pursuit of the hostile red man? 86 “Buffalo Bills Horse Kicks Up Big Argument,” quipped the New York Telegraph. 87 The New York Sun noted, “Out in Cody, they don’t so much object to the horse’s pose as they do to the plumpness of the animal. Even the show horses of the East are rounded in comparison with the rangy western horses, and from the first, the westerners have been afraid of getting an eastern horse in the sculpture.” 88 The East, it would seem, could concede such


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points about horses and western authenticity to westerners, if little else. 89 Mrs. Whitney regrouped, recruiting an “authentic” cowboy from Cody and an authentically “western” horse, Smokey, from Buffalo Bill’s former ranch (owned by F. S. Groves Jr. of Philadelphia). A placated Lockhart wrote of Smokey, “He is the best type of western horse, being part thoroughbred and part native,” and she assured readers that his ancestry could be traced back to the twelfth century. She reminded them of the necessity of such an example, because “the Buffalo Bill Committee . . . was of the opinion that the horse in the former model was too much of the [59], (27) polo pony type.” 90 Mrs. Whitney apparently even had a motion picture made of Smokey in Central Park in every possible pose so she could refer to it whenever she was in doubt as to a position to Lines: 195 to 91 ensure absolute authenticity. ——— Mrs. Whitney’s new efforts placated the westerners. Caroline 14.0pt Pg ——— approvingly noted that “Photographs of the new model for the Normal Page statue of Buffalo Bill . . . have been received and I have to say that * PgEnds: Eject it is an improvement of nearly fifty percent over the old model. . . . It now has the wiry, muscular look of the western horse. America [59], (27) should be proud of the woman who has produced this representative and truly American work of art which will rank with the best that the world has to offer.” 92 It was the assumption that the statue represented what was purely American and authentically western—and that what was authentically western was purely American—that imbued the statue with its most powerful meanings, precisely because it seemed so natural. 93 In their vocal displeasure over the horse, Codyites had not been objecting to eastern fund-raisers claiming a local symbol for their own ‘Americanizing’ agenda; they simply wanted assurance that their place of prominence and power in that narrative was secure, even it was represented only by something as seemingly trivial as the accuracy of Buffalo Bill’s horse. In the “conversation” over the form of the statue’s horse, there was an unspoken acceptance by Wyomingites, if not westerners, of Wyomingites’ role as the repository of national public memory and the last sanctuary of

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American values. It was an acceptance that would impact the meaning of their past, present, and future as well. 94 The initial viewing of Gertrude’s second effort took place in Central Park on June 11, 1924. The statue measured twelve feet high and thirteen feet long, the largest statue ever created by a woman. The enthusiastic crowd included Campfire Girls outfitted in Indian costumes, Boy Scouts in uniform, and the Hebrew Boys Home band, which played the national anthem. 95 The president of the U.S. Steel Corporation, Judge Elbert Gary, addressed the large crowd: “This beautiful statue will mean a great deal not only to the far West, where people knew Colonel Cody so well . . . but it will mean something for this entire country. This great statue actually represents what America stands for. It is typical of this country which leads all other nations in the forward stride.”96 What the statue said, in affect, was that Wyomingites could turn their shame at being less cultivated than the East into pride at their ruggedness, at least as long as that “ruggedness” was a vital part of a national mythology. After its viewing in the East, the statue was put on a New York Central Railroad flatcar and sent west to Cody. The Cody Enterprise commented in anticipation, “The Buffalo Bill who made western history is long since gone, his body lies in a sepulcher . . . overlooking the vast plains where so daringly he defied appalling perils that civilization might advance, but the spirit of him is still a glowing inspiration.” 97 In accordance with the wishes of the Buffalo Bill Association, the Boy Scouts held a position of honor within the crowd, and the association predicted the statue’s dramatic effect on the young men: “Inspiration to be strong men literally will surge into their hearts at that awesome moment, there to make its abiding place and mold their futures.” 98 The entire population of Cody and thousands of people from the surrounding area were on hand at the unveiling, and Caroline Lockhart led the parade in salute of the memorial. 99 And despite Codyites’ regional claim to Buffalo Bill, the ceremony that welcomed the statue from Central Park to western Wyoming emphasized less the statue’s western roots than its value as an American symbol. “That note of preserving what is left of the old West—

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or barring civilization forever from the wonderland now set apart as the heritage of all the people, ran through the speeches of the day,” the Enterprise pointed out. The ceremony took place with the notes of the Star-Spangled Banner in the background, and the Enterprise noted that “the ceremonies concluded and the thousands who made their pilgrimage to the shrine of frontier patriotism winded [sic] their way back to Cody, better Americans for having witnessed the expression of true appreciation by a grateful people.” 100 The Enterprise did not understate the impact and significance of the statue: “High above the heavens, while the ceremonies were taking place, an aeroplane hovered, bringing to all who saw it the thought of the progress that had taken place since Buffalo Bill rushed through the storms of day and darkness of night on his spirited steed.” One poetic memoriam trumpeted: “He quelled and conquered long duress of desperate disorder: He broke the grim, forbidding press of barrier and border, he came with courage that prevails o’er all dread odds of chance, and blazed the gleaming, teeming trails of vanishing romance!” Amidst the elaborate salute to the progress Buffalo Bill had helped to usher into the West, the superintendent of Yellowstone Park nonetheless used the occasion to appeal for a perpetuation of the wild western identity. “Let us whenever and wherever appropriate wear the costume of the old scout and the bygone cowboy,” Superintendent Albright suggested. Let us hold each year celebrations that will be so colorful and picturesque as to keep up our own interest in this conservation of the spirit of the old West, and also for the purpose of spreading to the people of every state of the union the feeling that this spirit of the pioneers must be preserved if America is to be home of Americans and this nation the moral leader of the World. . . . We [the United States] must be the guardians of the spirit of discovery, pioneering and progress; and this spirit can only be preserved by maintaining here forever at Cody and in Yellowstone Park . . . the picturesque customs and costumes of a day that is gone. 101

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Such sentiments were a bit of a backhand compliment to Buffalo Bill, for in celebrating Buffalo Bill and his accomplishments the Codyites venerated the death of the Old West that they now ritually resurrected through the tourist trade. “No one thinking of the contrast of the past and present,” the Enterprise concluded, “could help but admire the spirit of the famous scout whose brave deeds helped in such a large measure to make a savage wasteland into a home for grateful people.” 102 The statue of Buffalo Bill ultimately performed the rather difficult cultural task of saluting the seemingly contradictory attributes of progress and primitivism. Gertrude Whitney’s creation captured the narrative of the nostalgic, racially pure premodern West, so loved by Caroline Lockhart, and also responded to the values of progress, civilization, and settlement that early Codyites had claimed. The statue gave these deep-seated beliefs about what true Americanism was— individualism, self-sufficiency, and initiative—“a concrete form in public space.”103 It was a taken-for-granted representation of the western narrative that also managed to reconcile that narrative’s contradictions: that character is created by the frontier, but the frontier must inevitably end; that the wild and untamed are precious but must ultimately be sacrificed for civilization; and that progress inevitably begets nostalgia. If the frontier could live on in symbols and memories of western heroes, the danger of losing it in the first place might be lessened. 104 For Wyomingites, the price to be paid for a place in the national memory, if in fact there was one, was that they had to reconcile their goal of equality with all things eastern with their quest to embody westernness. And the catch was that only through eastern eyes could Wyomingites ultimately gain their legitimacy as westerners.105 When local cowboy Lloyd Coleman went east to pose for Gertrude, he was shocked at the amused reaction to his “western” appearance. The Enterprise reported that “his hat blocked traffic every time he stepped out of a cab in Philadelphia,” but added, “his nerve is still good and he means to come back in it unless the authorities stop him from wearing it.” 106 Coleman admitted he “felt like a side show in Chicago. Philadelphia was fierce, the prettiest girls I ever saw used to get in front of me and giggle as

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if I didn’t have any feelings. Gosh, sometimes I felt like taking a smash at some of those chaps in little hard boiled dicers that’d laugh at me.” 107 The westerners’ identity, while proving to be profitable at home, was but a sideshow in the East; and eastern approval still mattered. Cody boasted that President Harding and Theodore Roosevelt sent telegrams congratulating them on proclaiming “Cody Day” a state holiday. 108 Being western was well and good, but it mattered little if the East didn’t recognize and appreciate those differences. Like Buffalo Bill, Cody would have to be perpetually western to be fully worthy of its role in the national memory. And in that respect, in their commemorative role Codyites set the conditions for their present, if not their future. As David Middleton and Derek Edwards write, “Commemoration silences the contrary interpretations of the past,” for “it is not just that ‘he who controls the past controls the future’ but he who controls the past controls who we are.” 109 Memories are powerful influences and our choice of them fateful indeed. Increasingly in the twentieth century, a taken-for-granted idea about the distinctiveness of the West and westerners as individuals took hold in the public mind. 110 In the commemoration of Buffalo Bill, two women performed important roles in reinforcing these notions of the West.111 Ultimately, both women perpetuated and affirmed a masculine and traditional version of the West. Nonetheless, in an era in which women had few professional opportunities, the western identity, however clichéd and masculine, allowed Lockhart and Whitney a cultural space in which to create their art, and in the process shape memory and construct western identity. 112 Whitney’s statue continued to resonate with symbolic meaning for the town and the West well after its initial dedication. The 1925 Cody Stampede program cover featured Lockhart’s image astride her noble steed and a photograph of Whitney’s statue on the inside. In 1931, the Cody Club adorned its brochure with an etched drawing of the statue. Cody used “The Scout” to sell itself for years to come and reminded potential tourists that “the spirit of Buffalo Bill is portrayed in the bronze statue by Gertrude

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Vanderbilt Whitney—that spirit which shows the temperament of adventure and daring which is so inherently in the blood of the American people!” 113 Mrs. Whitney missed the final dedication of the statue on July 4, 1924, as she was sailing for Europe. She became one of the most important benefactors of American art in this century, endowing the Whitney Gallery in New York City in 1930 and loyally supporting American art until her death.114 The Whitney family maintained a long association with the West, Cody, and Buffalo Bill. In 1950, Cornelius, Gertrude’s son, who had gone west with her in 1922, endowed the Buffalo Bill Museum with a gift of $250,000 to create a Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Western Gallery of Art. He wrote to Cody’s niece, Mrs. Allen: “I am certain that what you are doing is important for future generations, so that they may know of our country’s early history and be aware of their heritage. This is a gift from one easterner who loves the West and would like to see its art, history and institutions preserved.” 115 Eventually, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center grew up around the horse statue, a whole institution to commemorate the West as America. The statue of Buffalo Bill confirmed westerners’ cultural power as symbols of America. In becoming the perpetual frontier for the nation’s psyche, Wyomingites could fill a powerful cultural role by helping to resolve the central paradox of the western narrative— that the frontier forged Americans, but progress had killed the frontier. They had spent years carefully conforming to an identity and then, in their dispute over a horse, based their authority on it. But the western story they told about themselves would often serve as a lens through which they made meaning out of their own experiences and others made meaning out of them, with decidedly mixed benefit. 116 Lockhart lived out the rest of her life in the Cody area and rode her horse at the head of the Stampede Parade every Fourth of July until age forced her to fulfill her role in a convertible, one of the signs of “civilization” she so hated. She continued to lament the passing of the Old West to which she was never really a witness in the first place. “She sees the spirit of the west dying fast,” a Billings Gazette interviewer reported in her later years. “ ‘I

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wouldn’t try to define what you ask when you want me to answer the question “what is the spirit of the west.” It is too difficult a topic,’ ” she commented. “ ‘But that spirit is going fast. People, conditions, and things are all different. In the old days, people thought more of their word and held reputations for being square, but now, things are different,’ ” she said, perhaps with a sigh. 117

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0.0pt On the afternoon of May 7, 1937, a group of New York’s social elite gathered in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. 1 Their host had instructed them to dress western, and encouraged them to don colored handkerchiefs and their “best ranch duds.” “The more color and atmosphere the better,” he had noted in his invitations, imploring, “If there’s any special doings going on in your locality that date, like a country club party or a horse race, skip ’em and call it a horse holiday.” And he promised old songs like “Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tail” and “Strawberry Roan” to complete the western theme. It would be a day, he noted, of “Moving the West East.” 2 Irving H. Larom (known as “Larry” east of the Mississippi) acted as host to these socialites attired in boots, colored scarves, and buckskin chaps. By 1937, Larom had become the “western” liaison of choice for the New York social set. In celebrating the West, his guests extolled a common past, certainly, and no doubt also a bit of pure Americana. But to Larom’s guests the West was also a novelty, a fun idea. Larom continued the tradition of imagining a Wyoming that articulated “American” culture and values, codified in cowboys and western landscapes. He marketed his



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West not by chronicling its disappearing vestiges, but by selling the meaning that his guests read into it. Larom sold Wyoming as a nostalgic script that people of a certain class could seasonally access, and act out, on demand. In the early twentieth century, the dude ranch became a source of amusement and recreation to upper-class easterners—another sanctioned component in the customary sphere of the social register set. This Dude Ranch West, of which Larom became such a vital part, marketed a version of the West that was clearly informed by popular culture. Dudes came west to experience something distinctly un-eastern, and when they got there they expected to see all the requisite western characters that stories and movies about the West had told them they should see. This gave cowboys, Indians, and other forms of “local color” a privileged status in Larom’s Dude Ranch West. The more a person or an event was considered authentically western, the more in demand it was among easterners on the lookout for western specimens to complete their western vacation experience. As such, Larom’s West was a weirdly democratized place. On the one hand, it provided significant status for both working-class icons like cowboys and the work they performed. In a Depression era that saluted the cultural importance of working Americans, dude ranches lauded physical work as the key to personal happiness, even for socialites, and Larom consistently promoted the dude ranch as a celebration of manual labor. 3 On the other hand, dude ranches represented exclusivity of the most extreme sort, for only people of means could play at working hard. Larry Larom was the ultimate host, an interpreter extraordinaire, for the people who could afford his version of the working West. Larry Larom was born in New York City in June 1889. His father was a partner in the leather goods retailer Mark Cross, and Larry grew up at the prestigious address of 277 Park Avenue. Larom explained years later that his father’s employment gave his family an entrée into the social register crowd, “the money crowd.” 4 He attended private schools until he entered Princeton in 1909. It was during his years at Princeton that Larom made the acquaintance of another young man of impressive background,

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Winthrop H. Brooks, a student at Yale whose grandfather had begun the venerable New York firm of Brooks Brothers Clothing. Larom first came to Wyoming in the summer of 1910, staying with a local rancher who guided guests and hunters. Larom acknowledged that the potent forces of popular culture had piqued his initial interest in the West. In his youth, a print of an Albert Bierstadt painting had hung in Larom’s bedroom in his New York City home, and Larom attended several shows of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” where he was introduced to Cody and other members of the cast. One of the shows included a huge painted canvas backdrop that portrayed the mountains near Buffalo Bill’s Wyoming ranch, which held particular fascination for Larom, and his desire to experience the actual scenes depicted in the canvas helped to draw him west. 5 The legendary Buffalo Bill still frequented the town of Cody in 1910, and Larom was among his guests and awed students. Larom returned east after his first foray west and embarked on a prolonged sightseeing excursion in Africa, Europe, and Egypt. He recalled that, while on a trip to the French Riviera and Egypt in 1912, the Grand Duke Michael of Russia had persuaded him and his father to postpone their return to the United States. They did, thereby escaping a sail home on the Titanic. 6 After graduation from Princeton, Larom returned to Wyoming in 1915 accompanied by his friend Win Brooks, and the two purchased the ranch at which Larom had been a guest five years earlier. It was forty-three miles south of Cody on the south fork of the Shoshone River, near Colonel Cody’s famous te Ranch. The young easterners entranced with the West now owned a piece of it. They called it “The Valley Ranch.” 7 If Brooks and Larom had any grand plans to make it as ranchers, they soon faded. They quickly realized that profitability in the ranching business would come by charging room and board to their eastern friends, who continually came west to investigate the curious and rejuvenate themselves. Larom recalled: “The purpose of [the ranch] in general was to give my friends in the East with homes on Long Island and Newport and all over the chance to get away from the social cocktail party group and come out

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here and enjoy the “simplicity of living.” That was my slogan, “simplicity of life. . . . And there were none of the contaminations of the usual social life in the East.” 8 Dude ranch life contained none of the “contaminations” of the eastern social life, except, of course, the very people who made up the social set. Nonetheless, Larom’s cultivation of his relationship with the eastern social class made a financial success out of his Valley Ranch. For years, Brooks Brothers Clothing facilitated this connection by providing the ranch with office space in its Madison Avenue offices. “Being a New Yorker by birth, a member of the social register and all that, I had a background which, with the West added to it, as a ranch owner out here, gave me an entre which a lot of these people didn’t have,” Larry noted. 9 Larom utilized his social status and the popularized romantic view of the West to help create, in the Cody country of Wyoming, an ersatz Hamptons, Newport, or Park Avenue. Larom’s Wyoming provided the elites with a space beyond “civilization,” separate from their daily world, in which they could pretend to escape social obligations and roles. Dude ranches enabled their guests to articulate what they believed America should be by acting out the West’s well-known script, complete with its cultural heroes and their western work. An editorial noted that “Dude ranching is the joining of the sophisticated east to the unknown and unappreciated West, into a oneness of understanding America. Without pretense and convention, humankind lives in an atmosphere of simplicity and naturalness it never knew before and likes it.” 10 In the 1920s, Larom was one of the earliest promoters of a dude ranch world that created its own strange manifestation of simplicity, exclusivity, work, and democracy. The Valley Ranch could not have marketed itself and existed as it did had not the popular versions of the West created by Wister and Remington, and perpetuated by the fledgling western tourism industry, already permeated American culture by the mid- to late 1920s. For Larom undoubtedly realized, if unconsciously, that in bringing easterners west, and the West east, he had to satisfy well-drawn expectations of what the West was, of what his guests knew the West to be. They knew because they

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had already seen it, even though they had perhaps never yet been west of the Mississippi River. 11 The majority of the ranch’s guests had no doubt envisioned that same West that had drawn both Larom and Caroline Lockhart to Wyoming, the West of Remington and Bierstadt, the Wild West show, and Wister’s romantic heroes. It was this discourse of popular culture that dominated, fascinated, and intrigued the public mind by the 1920s, touching easterners and westerners alike. A writer in the Dude Rancher magazine reflected as follows on this complex interconnection between popular culture, performance, and identity: “It is not a coincidence that in the past year motion pictures put out by the big producers . . . have used the dude ranch for their names or their motif . . . . These stories, books, society pages, magazine covers, build the background—create the dude ranch atmosphere and the desire to come out to the open spaces.” 12 And if dude ranching influenced Hollywood, dude ranches, in turn, conformed to popular culture notions of the West. This resemblance was in fact the very point of their existence. Collier’s magazine noted that dude ranches existed in country “immortalized by Owen Wister and Fred Remington.” 13 The Ladies Home Journal enthused, “Romance! The ability to live the things one has read about and dreamed about—to see and talk to the kinds of characters that have existed from childhood as super beings: bowlegged cow punchers, old trappers, pioneers. More than that, by simply donning another type of clothes to become one of them yourself—that is the lure of the dude ranch.” 14 A writer for Town and Country magazine exclaimed with delight that, once she was outfitted in her ranch clothes, several sightseers “avid for a glimpse of the real West, made audible comments about me as a picturesque daughter of the ranches.” 15 Pretending to be a wage laborer in the middle of a dry, bleak, western prairie was one thing. Pretending to be a cowboy under invigorating western skies was something else entirely, and popular culture had made the distinction between the two dramatically clear. Hi Stranger! The Complete Guide to Dude Ranching pointed out that “A [sheepherder] plodding his way in the wake of a bleating horde of sheep lacks the glamor and dash of the big hatted cowboy on a pinto horse. I

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never have heard of a dude ranch appealing to prospective visitors by emphasizing the fact that it is a sheep outfit. For most people, horses, cows and cowboys are synonymous with the West.” 16 Larom made his guests’ performance easier by selling the requisite western costume at the Valley Ranch’s trading post. On arrival, he suggested that a well-outfitted guest should purchase a fishing rod, cowboy boots, shirts, a pair of buckskin gloves, one cowboy sombrero, a pair of chaps, and a lariat. 17 Dude Rancher magazine reminded its readers that “At some of the boarding ranches they offer, in addition to sport, a taste of ‘real ranch life’ as read about in books, with an interesting roundup every afternoon at three o’clock, the cowboys dressing and playing their well rehearsed parts as advertised in the booklet printed in colors, turning out daily the same spontaneous enthusiasm exhibited by members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.” 18 Playing the West on a dude ranch was far better than living the original. It was more fashionable for one thing, hospitable, generally more controllable, and considered just as “real.” The Dude Rancher magazine reminded its readers of what a “Dude Wants on Vacation:” “An escape from the artificiality of city life. . . . They want to wear overalls and a loud shirt and a pair of cowboy boots and rough it (not too roughly of course. . . . [T]hey still want baths, nicely served meals and clean, pleasant surroundings).” The magazine reminded dude ranchers that the dude ranch was nonetheless a very western experience: “We can give people the spirit of the Old West even if we have added baths, electric lights and a lot of things the Old West never saw.” 19 And popular magazines continually informed their readers that in dude ranching they would experience the “authentic” West, at least as defined by dude ranching. Collier’s assured readers that dude ranching was indeed a legitimate form of ranching: “to be sure, the other kind did exist once, to a certain extent, but it has passed away with the open ranges and the good old days, meaning in some cases pretty bad ones, though they have already been canonized by literature and so wear the halo of romance.” 20 Hi Stranger! The Complete Guide to Dude Ranching noted that “If you come seeking the true art of living as it exists in cowboy country, you are sure to find it

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at the genuine dude ranch.” 21 Larom would sell one version or the other of this West for over fifty years. His obituary in Dude Rancher memorialized him as one of the “Keepers of America’s West.” 22 Larom and Brooks were, in fact, a bit ahead of the curve in selling time-shares of the West to the East, for dude ranching fully captured the public consciousness in the 1920s. 23 In its now traditional role, the West served as a connection to nature, an escape from “reality” and civilization—not unlike other imagined, exotic spaces for twentieth-century American and European travelers. One editorial gushed, “Dude ranching joins hands with Mother Nature. Within her warm embrace she holds the weary of mind, the tired of body, the downcast of spirit and at her breast nourishes the soul . . . [S]he points the way to higher endeavor and to age through her eternal heights and verdant forest confirms the hope of immortality.” 24 Brochures published by the Burlington Northern railroad advertised the West as new country, where “the call of the wild is insistently audible. The Indians still live nearby. . . . [T]he opportunities to rest and recreate are boundless.” 25 Whatever the West’s meaning, for the Dude Ranch West to have any legitimacy it had to be distinct from the East. And westerners, true westerners, would only disappoint if they were spotted in fashionable clothes and “eastern” hats. One dude rancher, who was also president of the Wyoming state senate, implored Wyomingites to “dress in the picturesque garb which easterners have attributed to residents of the West . . . for the purpose of providing the atmosphere which easterners anticipate they will find in the state.” 26 Railroad executives explained that because easterners lived in a land of unreality surrounded by glass palaces, dudes vacationed on dude ranches to get back to “reality.” In their literature, they urged ranchers to capitalize on the history, traditions, and legends of the old days and castigated them for having buildings or decorations that didn’t look “western.” 27 That the “reality” they championed had to be teased out of their hired help and local color doesn’t seem to have bothered, or occurred, to them. One of the first articles to chronicle dude ranching appeared in a 1920 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The word dude, the

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author explained, “is a sexless word, and ageless, applying equally to children and adults. It has nothing to do with bearing or attire; it simply implies that one lives somewhere else. This application of the term originated a number of years ago in the country adjacent to Yellowstone Park,” precisely the locus of the Valley Ranch and Larom and Brook’s fledgling enterprise. By 1920, Wyoming had been successful in advertising itself as the most western place in the West, and so it made sense that, if you were going to play western, you’d do it in Wyoming. Nearly all of the West’s dude ranches in the 1920s were within fifty miles of Cody, Sheridan, or Jackson. 28 Now a dude could pay for monthly installments of the West’s famous rejuvenating benefits, and be virtually guaranteed to rub shoulders with cowboys, Indians, and grizzled pioneers, all attired to satisfy expectations to boot. In the early 1920s, Larom and Brooks capitalized on their peers’ fascination with the West and increased the ranch’s accommodations to handle more than seventy people. They advertised it as being “equipped with modern bathhouses with tub and shower, hot and cold water, electric lights and swimming pool,” and insisted, “You’d enjoy wearing ranch clothes, the cowboys, the ranch work, the saddle leather of the place, visiting neighboring ranches and the Cody Stampede.” The Valley Ranch was, they declared, “a company of young spirits living a new and glorious kind of life.”29 And they weren’t the only ones in the Cody area to see the opportunities in the East’s fascination with the West. The local Cody paper remarked that “The years have changed [the old ways]. The calf crop no longer interests us nor the price of wool. . . . Where woolies browsed and white face grazed, the dude with his camera is now rampant.” The Enterprise, however, did distinguish between the visiting easterners who were playing at being cowboys and the local town folk who were simply dressing up like them. “The ranch house swarms with folk in weird costumes and strange ways while the erstwhile rancher has a hunted look— the look that comes sooner or later from wrangling dudes,” it commented. Dude ranching became so common that beginning with the 1934–35 academic year, the University of Wyoming even offered

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a bachelor of science degree in recreational ranching through its College of Agriculture. The venerable Cody Enterprise editor Caroline Lockhart pointed out that “Cody identified with Buffalo Bill is an asset, as is also the fact that the town and the surrounding country still retain something of the western atmosphere which tourists expect.” “While their ways startle us, and sometimes irritate us,” she declared, “we have come to like our dudes, and even to love them.”30 The Enterprise’s editor verbalized something that westerners had long since realized: being western was of very little use unless you had an audience who perceived you as being authentically so. Larom and Brooks often put their own version of authenticity on full display and would enthusiastically play the roles of westerners themselves, dressing up as cowboys with six-gun shooters or as Indian chiefs in huge headdresses. Larom and Brooks led the dude-ranching trend, and continued to buy out surrounding ranches until they controlled some ten thousand acres and eighty-three buildings, one of which they named the “Little Waldorf.” 31 The guests who could afford to spend their time in Wyoming ensconced in the Little Waldorf were understandably a select group. Larom recalled that his father had advised him to “make your guests measure up to your standards,” and Larom and Brooks upheld an unwritten guarantee that the Valley Ranch clientele would be required to associate only with those of their own class, in addition, of course, to the delegated and requisite local color. 32 (Larom assured his dudes in “Corral Dust,” the monthly publication of ranch events, that in Wyoming, unlike the East, their kids could “play around with the people working for the outfit without ketchin’ cholera, morbus or some other ailment that’ll affect their social standing.” 33) Until the early 1930s, special Pullman and dining cars brought guests to Cody direct from New York, and by 1923 the Cody Enterprise was noting that the Valley Ranch dude parties “included among their numbers representatives of some of the most prominent families in the East.” 34 The dude ranch, at least initially, was a destination of distinction. Collier’s magazine assured readers that “At the dude ranches, one finds the sort of people most desirable, business and professional men, artists and

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men and women.”35 Larom advertised in high-end magazines like Town and Country, Sportsman, Country Life, and Polo and was in the habit of using stationary with the heading, “Valley Ranch: Winthrop H. Brooks (Yale) Irving H. Larom (Princeton).” 36 His guest list read like the New York Social Register and included the likes of Noel Coward, Clifton Webb, and Tallulah Bankhead. 37 The distinctiveness of the Dude Ranch West was best manifested in the preparatory school that Larom and Brooks began in 1922. After receiving numerous requests from their eastern associates to take their sons during the fall and winter “so they might benefit from longer contact with ranch life,” Larom and Brooks, with their friend and new associate Julian Bryan (Colgate), began recruiting boys of the best families to provide an “eastern type education in a western environment.” 38 The school opened in October 1922 with five students. The ranch embodied Frederic Remington’s ideal of the western space as purer, more masculine, and less tainted than the effeminate East. As headmaster and director, Larom hired a staff from Harvard, Princeton, and other eastern schools to teach English, history, math, physics, Latin, German, and French. The inspiration behind the ranch school was to combine academic work and discipline with outdoor activities “indigenous to the West,” including shooting on the rifle range, horseback riding, trapping, fishing, mountain climbing, and football, with the addition of the most popular, and highly nonindigenous, activity: polo. The charge for each student was $1,550, which included tuition, housing, and the use of a horse and saddle. 39 The prep school appealed to numerous eastern families who also held faith in the supposition that the western space could foster masculinity and individualistic traits in their sons. 40 By 1925, the Valley Ranch school enrolled thirty students annually who were instructed by a faculty of six men, and its graduates matriculated at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown. Larom promoted the ranch by stressing the health benefits of a western environment: [There is] a necessity of considering the healthy angle as

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well as the educational. A ranch school is designed to furnish both by combining a regular eastern prep course of Instruction with the vigorous wholesome life of the West. [The boys’] minds are more active, their bodies stronger, building up resistance to colds and grippe. This does not mean that Valley is inviting any invalids [but] the clean bracing air of the Wyoming Rockies does the rest. Wyoming is essentially a man’s country, the development of character, straight talking, clean living and the ability to govern themselves are as necessary to young fellows of today as education and health. The environment of Valley provides all three. 41

[76], (11 And, in fact, Larom noted that students under his charge “learned to ride ’em with all the thrill of genuine cowboys.” The attire and lifestyle was self-consciously informal, although Larom noted that several “dress up” dinners at his residence gave a welcome change from the informal ranch clothes. 42 The school consciously cultivated a thoroughly western theme. It published its own annual or yearbook called The Round Up, which recorded such things as polo matches and the beginnings of terms (for example, “January 9, we return to the wilderness”). The Round Up featured photographs of the log-cabin classrooms, where desks were positioned next to rock fireplaces adorned with moose and elk heads, and also of the boys from New Jersey, Delaware, and New York in their western duds, replete with big hats, boots, and western vests and gloves. The students recorded their preferred colleges in The Round Up’s “List of Favorites,” unsurprisingly citing Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley as their preferred schools (with Palm Beach and Monte Carlo as their favorite resorts). They narrowed their choices for “Favorite Boy’s name” to Percy, Archibald, Rollo, Adelbert, and Joseph. The Round Up bestowed students with “western” nicknames to accompany their western photographs—so Charles became Chuck, Gustav, Gus. The students put on plays titled “East Is West” set in saloons and other Wild West locales. Larom divided the students into two clubs, the Lazy Js and the Lazy Ds, through which they competed in soccer, rifle shoots, and polo. The club

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that had the most points at the end of the year had its name engraved on a silver cup. 43 The school’s distinction, of course, was not its curriculum but the ability of its students to derive the cultural and environmental benefits understood to be inherent in such a western locale. In addition to the Valley Ranch prep school, Larom catered to the children of his eastern friends by providing summer pack trips for girls and boys from “select” families. Youngsters would board their Pullman cars from New York City and travel directly to Cody. Once there, they would outfit themselves in cowboy hats, chaps, and boots; take part in the Cody Stampede; and view the [77], (12) spectacle of the rodeo perched in box seats. The trips cost $850 for a forty-five day adventure, and administrators from Ivy League institutions would counsel and chaperone both the boys and girls Lines: 66 to (which once included a young Jacqueline Bouvier). One parent ——— testified to the trip’s benefits for her daughter, writing Larom that 14.0pt Pg ——— “Phoebe enjoyed her trip in every way and I consider it a wonNormal Page derful experience for her. I can only praise the way you managed * PgEnds: Eject everything and the fine ideals you required them to live up to.” 44 Larom required personal and professional references for all appli[77], (12) cants, as well as offering his own to concerned parents (Winthrop Brooks, Horace Albright, and the editor of Field and Stream). He assured parents that the ranch accepted members of only the “best Christian families.” 45 After his father’s death in 1926, Brooks returned to New York to take over the family business, and Larom bought out his Valley Ranch interest. Brooks would visit Wyoming almost every summer, however, and continue to provide the Valley Ranch with office space in the Brooks Brothers offices on Madison Avenue.46 The same year that Larom became sole proprietor of the ranch, he was also elected president of the newly formed Dude Ranchers’ Association, whose mission was to promote the “western way of life and the old customs and traditions that deserve to be preserved.”47 Larom held the office until 1944, and during his tenure, and in fact up to his death in 1973, the Valley Ranch provided a sophisticated and socially appropriate western version of Palm Beach or East

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Hampton for his eastern protégés, continually adapting itself to meet the cultural demands of the times. The 1930s tested Larom’s exacting standards of selectivity more than any other decade. The Valley Ranch’s “Corral Dust” mailings continued to convey the visits of those worth noting, but Larom increasingly realized that keeping the Valley Ranch financially afloat might require him to modify the standards for entree into his West. He remarked in 1932 that a neighboring ranch had sufficient guests, but that “Mill Creek is booked full, Jews.” He acknowledged that due to the Depression, “for one reason or another, the Ranch’s old clients can’t make the grade . . . . This leaves me to feel that the only business we can expect will be from new people who are financially able to travel. Our old group is busted 100%.” Larom welcomed guest referrals from his railroad connection but lamented that one such recommendation was “unfortunately . . . a Jew . . . although with the highest social rating. I notified him beggars could not be choosers. . . . [T]his means letting up a bar which has been held nearly 18 years but considering conditions surrounding this I feel we cannot turn down ten people under the circumstances.” “This does not mean,” he assured readers, “we will promiscuously take Jews.” And in a 1932 letter to his associate Julian Bryan, he wrote: “enclosed is an inquiry from a man named Cohn. Suggest you find out whether he is a Jew or not. It is a hundred to one that he is, but sometimes this name when spelled without the e is non Jewish.” 48 Larom drew a straight line from Wister’s and Remington’s Anglo-Saxon, heroic representations of the West through Gertrude Whitney’s iconization of the all-American Buffalo Bill to his own Valley Ranch. The exclusivity of the Valley Ranch was simply in keeping with the tradition that saw the West as a purified “American” space. 49 In its studied western vernacular, issues of Larom’s “Corral Dust” lamented America’s political climate throughout the decade, noting in 1933, for example, that “the Germans [are] trying to chase all their Jews over here to help our Jews take what little we got left, no white man ought to make his family traipse on into that dog fight. Sufferin’ cats!” 50 In early 1938, the “Corral

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Dust” commented that “Old 37 was quite a relief after six years of the blues, everybody . . . acted more human, in spite of sit down strikes, Mr. Lewis and some of the other gang back east who think it’s smart to upset the apple cart as soon as it gets rolling.” 51 Larom and his clientele certainly resented and worried about the social changes and personalities transforming the nation, and they clearly attempted to escape them in the “purified” space of the West. The Dude Rancher explained: The West doesn’t start until you leave Nebraska on the east and doesn’t end until you pull out of Nevada and Idaho on the West. It isn’t a mass of toiling and moiling beet field workers, nor is it marching bands of IWW’s. The West isn’t anything like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. The myth that the old West is dead is indeed a myth. The old West won’t die until the traditions of this great country die. The West has little in it that is exotic. It is simon pure America, the America whose tradition is the tradition of the pioneer. When the rest of the US can succeed in leveling its standards up to the spiritual nobility and simplicity of the western rancher, it will have resuscitated its birthright. America is safe as long as the West hangs on to its traditions . . . and stands aloof from the self pitying beggar psychology of disinherited races. 52 As the place where the present was always someone’s version of the past, Wyoming once again provided an “all-American” refuge from the threatening change and ethnic diversity that was shaping the pre—World War II, urban East. 53 Larom’s Valley Ranch was clearly an exclusive place, but the exclusivity of his West was complicated. Although Larom might turn away Jews as potential guests, the dude-ranching culture invited the “folk” and their world of work into its social universe, if in specifically prescribed roles. Revering the West and its “fine ideals” meant that dude ranches had to somehow address those who circulated socially around its edges but were culturally vital parts of the western experience. If guests expected to see their cultural icons in all their grizzled glory, the dude ranch had to

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incorporate them into its world, and the work these westerners performed became as iconized as they did. Established versions of “play” and recreation were already the mainstays of a dude ranch vacation. One slightly altered version of “Home on the Range” went, “Oh give me a home, where the dude wranglers roam, where their guests and their kinfolk all play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and living is carefree and gay.” 54 Dude ranches almost always promoted “rest” and outdoor activities like mountain climbing, hiking, trout fishing, and horseback riding. 55 However, work, namely “western” work, now merged with play to become prominent and cherished parts of the dude ranch experience. In an article titled “Work or Play? For the Most Part It’s All the Same,” Dude Rancher magazine asserted: It is a coveted privilege to be permitted to get up at 4 a.m. to go out with the horse wrangler and help bring in the saddle horses. Was it work, you ask? While it has all the earmarks of a real hard day, if you ask them, they will say, ‘We had the time of our lives.’ . . . To the cowboy it has been another day’s work, but to you it was the most fun you ever had. . . . This sort of activity produces physical tiredness and induces restful slumber. When the body is completely relaxed the mind naturally is rested. 56 Larom promised that at the Valley Ranch his dudes would “go down through the meadow to watch the hay cutting, help shell peas for dinner” and that a ranch stay would include ranch work and cowboys.57 In its article “Day on a Dude Ranch,” Country Life magazine maintained that “there is nothing like work to keep one happy, and not the least part of the fun on a dude ranch are the daily chores.” 58 Some dude ranches even housed their dudes in the former bunkhouses of hired help but assured potential guests, “they are a long way advanced over their counterparts of yesterday and you’ll be glad of that.” 59 And Ladies Home Journal writer Courtney R. Cooper recalled a conversation she heard between a Park Avenue matron and her dinner guest. When asked about a Sioux headdress on display in her home, the matron replied that she’d brought it back from a dude ranch vacation: “ ‘I spent the

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summer there.’ ‘A dude ranch? Is it something out west?’ ‘Quite.’ ‘But, ah, with horses and cowboys and that sort of thing?’ ‘Exactly that sort of thing.’ The dowager stroked a feather of the flowing headdress. The guest appeared amazed. ‘But you really did enjoy it? What on earth did you do there to pass the time?’ The dowager smiled. ‘Shelled peas. And loved it,’ she said.” 60 Work, precisely someone else’s work, became another form of western entertainment. The West provided dudes with an opportunity to partake in the kind of physical labor and celebration of the folk that American culture championed in the Depressionera 1930s. Programs like the Civil Works Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and Public Works Administration employed people in an attempt to remove the stigma of providing relief. Franklin Roosevelt himself noted that work was the key to “selfrespect, self-reliance, courage and determination,” and workingclass life became much a more integral feature of contemporary novels and films. Much of the era’s art and literature cast workers as heroes, including James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan and John Dos Passos’s USA. Carol Sandburg’s poem proclaimed “The People, Yes,” and films like Our Daily Bread conveyed a sympathy for workers. One character in the play Class of ’29 declared that “Work is essential, more essential than love.” The wpa sponsored artwork, including that of Diego Rivera, that depicted people at work.61 And dude ranches gave socialites, New York writers, and Hollywood actors a way to participate in this celebration of working-class work. The full dude ranch experience accordingly required the on-site presence of the quintessential working-class icon, the cowboy. The power of the cowboy in western mythology was so dominant as to be central to the dude experience. This status gave this most celebrated of representational westerners an empowered cultural role that he would most likely have been denied in other situations. Long before they arrived in the West, dudes drew notions about cowboys from literature, art, and other forms of popular culture. The Dude Rancher speculated: “[Some] like to imagine the wrangler as the son of the owner of the outfit . . . romantic, picturesque in his Stetson, Justins, Levis, and leather

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chaps, with a large gun on his thigh. [The wrangler] advises you of laws written and unwritten of his section of the country.” 62 The magazine promised the expectant dudettes plenty of “he-men” who “blush under their ten gallon hats” and reminded its dudes that the “American cowboy is tops in permanent public acclaim throughout the world. There are more poems, pictures, stories, songs and dramas woven around the cowboy or with the cowboy as the central figure than there is around any other character.” 63 The Saturday Evening Post marveled: “The man who adjusts the dude’s stirrup straps in the morning may have toured the countries of the world with a Wild West show and topped off bad ones in the presence of kings and queens. The man who unsaddles for him in the evening may be an ex-champion roper of the world or perhaps he is the famous ex-marshal of a frontier camp. Exchampion bulldoggers, ex-bronco fighters, ex-trappers prospectors and college graduates, ex-everything under the sun all are enrolled in the growing ranks of the dude wranglers.” 64 Larry Larom even published an article in Arts and Decoration magazine in the voice of a dude wrangler, which included the line, “I savvy now why we corral hands have to hold [dudes] down on fannin’ their horses into a gallop all summer.” 65 Cowboys and dude wranglers clearly had the cultural cachet for even the social register set to aspire to emulate them. And in offering their dudes an Old West atmosphere, dude ranchers felt compelled to provide assurances that guests would deal with “real” westerners, not “drug store cowboy buckaroos.” 66 Only cowboys deemed “real” were of value, “[men] who have grown to manhood here in this vast country and lived in the saddle and ‘know their stuff.’ ” 67 The cowboy’s role as the centerpiece of the West in most peoples’ imaginations required the dude ranches to provide an appropriate social place for him, one fit for an icon. “This was the only resort he had ever seen where the guests deliberately sought the servant’s quarters for recreation,” noted a Saturday Evening Post article: The dude wrangler does not consider himself an underling in any sense whatsoever. He has his full quota of self-respect and feels that he meets his dudes on a footing of equality

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and does his best to show them a good time. . . . One of that brotherhood feels that he’s as good as any man that lives, but not a damned bit better. . . . On the dude ranch the order of things is still further reversed, for instead of being the servant of the guests the wrangler is to a certain extent their boss. And to many this is a new sensation, which they really enjoy and to which they submit for the sheer novelty of it. 68 That the western icons on the dude ranches were hired help further reinforced the notion that the West was the most egalitarian of all America’s regions, a place where true and natural aristocracy could bloom and flourish. Dude ranches were, in that sense, egalitarian places, for the cultural stories that informed them necessitated that they find a place to accommodate their toiling idols. Dude ranches promoted an image of the West as inherently democratic, distinctly at variance with an artificial, hierarchical East. Literature and articles repeatedly referred to dude ranches as the last repositories of “democracy,” “where human beings are judged by what they are and not by what they have, and ranked by how well they can do a thing, rather than how much they make by it.”69 Sunset magazine quoted one dude rancher as saying, “We encourage our dudes to dress up, even carry a full stock of wild clothes at our ranch store. . . . It helps the Senator and the Missus Senator and all the Senator kids forget their dignity. They begin to use first names about the time they make the big break and buy spurs.” 70 Larry Larom declared that the style and atmosphere of the Valley Ranch was “essentially democratic . . . old clothes and the ability to fit into the surroundings are all that are necessary.” His “Corral Dust” noted that the ranch didn’t have time to explain to its dudes that they were on a ranch, not at the Ritz, and that “all folks stand on their own two feet in Wyoming and are judged by their actions instead of their cash.”71 The Dude Rancher maintained that in the West “Health and happiness count more than money and that friendly fashion of meeting man to man on equal common footing, recognizing each other as fellow man

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without prying into his inner soul or bank account is the natural procedure.” 72 Even the “western” vernacular that Larom and his staff used in writing issues of “Corral Dust” suggested a sort of democratized speech as a somewhat contrived effort to mimic “western” sensibilities. That the West could be an egalitarian place was undoubtedly reassuring, for if the West were not democratic, then how could America itself be? In the Dude Ranch West, dudes could have their cake and eat it too. They could maintain their privileged segregation and reinforce their belief that American egalitarianism and democracy were not only tenable, but thriving. This was, no doubt, especially valuable in the turbulent 1930s, when alternatives to the status quo were often nothing short of frightening. The programs advanced by Huey Long, Dr. Francis Townsend, and Charles Coughlin for economic justice were radical, popular, and alarming to America’s upper class. 73 The West’s celebrated democratic demeanor and natural aristocracy were no doubt heartening. Ensuring that guests actually witnessed the West’s celebrated “natural aristocracy” presented its own challenges. Larom admitted that in communicating the dude ranch’s attributes “fiction is allowable to a limited extent because it tickles the dudes; but misrepresentation and lying are wholly taboo and not a part of the business.” 74 And if there were any doubts about the dude wranglers meeting guests’ expectations, Larom assured his guests that the cowboys who would guide them “are just about the finest, cleanest and most reliable group you could find anywhere . . . they are mostly family men with a sense of responsibility.” 75 Local icons, however, weren’t always as attentive, or perhaps aware, of visitors’ expectations or their own roles as regional royalty. Arthur Holman was one of these more problematic icons, though he seemed to fit the mold of heroic cowboy to a T. He was born in Kansas in 1884 and, as a two-year-old, came west with his parents. Holman’s widowed mother homesteaded in Cody country, which gave Arthur the upbringing of a tried-and-true son of the West. In the late 1890s, Art hired out to Buffalo Bill when the cultural icon still owned a ranch south of Cody. Homan broke horses on Cody’s te Ranch, and when his prowess at riding eventu-

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ally became known to Cody the Colonel asked Holman to join his Wild West Show. He toured with the “Wild West” across Europe, riding broncs for $60 a month, and paused along the show’s route to strike a dramatic pose on horseback in front of the Eiffel Tower. On his return to Wyoming, he made a living ranching, guiding, and carrying mail by team and buggy. 76 One of the places he delivered mail was Larom’s Valley Ranch. Larom and Holman established a business relationship that would last some forty years. In May 1932, Larom wrote to his associate, Julian Bryan, that “Art Holman called me up from Buffalo. Says that he is losing his ranch and is very anxious to get a job immediately. Told him no chance on this and probably nothing doing this summer.” The reason that Larom turned down Holman’s request for employment was not for his lack of skill. Larry acknowledged that “as far as wrangling goes, of course, Art is hard to beat,” and Larom’s partner conceded that “Art is such a good horseman he knows [Yellowstone] Park like a book.” They also remarked, “Like all the Holmans, he is always in a lot of hot water.” 77 Art Holman would play the role of the authentic icon, and get paid for it, but he definitely tinkered with the script. Holman didn’t conform to the role of authentic westerner any more than Jack Flagg had. Julian Bryan wrote to Larom: “We let a couple of boys wrangle with Art every day and put the responsibility for getting the horses into the next camp on time directly on the shoulders of the boys. . . . On this particular day Art thought it would be a great idea to give the two boys a fifty mile ride and get them lost. About nine that evening, they came into camp absolutely worn out and had nothing to eat since breakfast.” Beyond leading uninitiated young dudes on wild-goose chases, Art also, according to Bryan, “cussed out” the camp cook in front of the guests. And that was not his only breach of script. Bryan confided to Larom that “The biggest fault I have to find with Art is that he always pals up with three or four of the younger boys and is always telling them secrets. He devotes the entire summer to roasting Carl, Jonesy, Ernie and myself to these younger boys and for a number of summers these youngsters have come east with no respect whatsoever for the rest of us and it hurts the business.”

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Bryan concluded that “in short, Art roasts the outfit on the qt to these younger boys and creates a very bad impression in their minds. . . . I personally feel that he needs a right good lesson.” 78 Bryan, apparently fed up with the “help,” vented, “I think we had better run our own business and if some of those birds don’t want to work for us on our terms, let them go to hell.” 79 Whether Art learned his lesson and conformed to his script, he nonetheless continued to guide for the Valley Ranch for fortyodd years. A 1951 issue of “Corral Dust” recorded his recent pack trip, and in 1968, at the age of seventy-three, Holman was killed in the mountains west of the Valley Ranch while guiding a group of geologists from Princeton University. 80 The gulf between guests’ romantic expectations of heroic locals, shaped by popular culture, and their flesh-and-blood manifestations could be wide indeed. Nonetheless, dude ranch life provided a place for the Art Holmans of the West and, in fact, needed their presence for its own legitimacy. Holman had a skill and persona on which dude ranch culture placed a high value, and he took full advantage of it. Dude ranches reconciled ideas about work and recreation in a way that would inform the debate over federal lands in the West in future years. And since much of the western experience centered around a reverence for the West’s laborers, the Dude Ranch West provided status and legitimacy for the “hired help.” In the end, that status was limited because the work these westerners performed defined them—and that work was a necessity, not an amusement. The fact that on a dude ranch vacationers could choose to play at someone else’s vocation—that westerners’ necessity became the dudes’ amusement—only emphasized dudes’ own economic and cultural power. 81 Larom’s West was clearly dependent on the categories of “East” and “West,” but it was perhaps more dependent on who could afford to play at them and who could not. Westerners of means could certainly access Larom’s Dude Ranch West and increasingly did, in the 1940s and 1950s. By roping, riding, and shelling peas on a dude ranch, and paying for it, guests showed that they really did not have to do any of those things. The locals they pretended to imitate could not show the same contempt for necessity. It was less their status

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as “westerners” that separated them from the eastern dudes than that they remained dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies. It was the locals’ necessity that gave the dudes’ frivolity its meaning, and if dudes were going to continue to give their own identity meaning through the dude ranch experience, then its working icons had to remain wage laborers. The Dude Ranch West may have seen itself as evidence that the West was as democratic as its myth, but by performing westerners’ work dudes defined their identity as members of the eastern social elite. In the end, the Dude Ranch West signified not a shared and reconciled mass culture but a class-defined and often class-conscious cultural sphere. This distinction was perhaps the price Wyoming, and to some extent the West, would have to pay for selling an effective idea of itself to the rest of the country. The dude ranch’s reconciliation of work and play would perhaps make it more difficult for nonwesterners to understand why work and play were at cross-purposes, especially later in the century, when disputes over federal land use made working-class westerners seem increasingly as if they were bothersome impediments to play. Notions of work and play, recreation versus making a living, would inform the debate about the use of the West for the rest of the twentieth century. Larry Larom died in 1973, but a life-size cardboard cutout of him still resides in the halls of the Buffalo Bill Museum. The cutout captures Larom replete in his western outfit, embroidered shirt, and pants tucked into tall cowboy boots. One wonders if occasionally an uninitiated tourist comes upon his likeness and gleefully mistakes him for a genuine son of the sagebrush. Larom would certainly have mixed feelings about such a characterization, just as Wyomingites themselves would for years to come.

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isolated frontier condition to a civilized end. Mrs. I. S. Bartlett recited the following poem: If we look within the future, our prophetic eyes can see glorious views unfold before us of joy, wealth, prosperity. We can see the sons of Science, Music, Poetry and Art, coming to our grand dominion, in our growth to take a part. We can see the iron monster, rushing fiercely to and fro. We can see the sky over spread with smoke from furnaces below. We can see Wyoming mountains giving up their hidden stores. Tons on tons, by millions pouring, of the base and precious ores. See her towns and cities rising, where the bison used to roam. And along her streams and valleys many a farmer’s peaceful home. We can see great halls of learning well endowed and nobly planned, monuments of taste and culture for the children of our land. We can see the spires of churches, pointing upward to our gaze; chiming bells, harmonious sounding, calling us to prayer and praise. See the plains, now dry and barren, where the sage and cactus grow, desert plains, no longer barren, then shall “blossom like the rose.” Thirsty lands no longer thirsty filled with moisture wisely stored, bounteous to the happy farmer, noble harvests will afford. Mrs. Bartlett’s was a vision that Jack Flagg might have appreciated but that Wister, Remington, and Caroline Lockhart would have viewed with considerable consternation, for in 1890, it appeared that instead of a state identity dependent on a “western” past defined by heroic cowboys and rugged individualists, the distinguishing characteristic of Wyoming, its sobriquet, would become guarantees of equality and progress. Mrs. Bartlett’s fellow speaker, Judge M. C. Brown added: “As descendants of the AngloSaxon, we view again with proud delight the field of Runnymede, and the English barons wringing from the grasp of a reluctant king the magna charta of human rights. . . . Look again along the line of progress. . . . It was ordained by the people of Wyoming that each citizen of the state should enjoy the same right guaranteed to every other citizen, whether high or low, black or white, male or female.”1 It would be these lofty principles, now boldly set into

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law, that would separate Wyoming from eastern states mired in complacency and old traditions. But, for all its loftiness, this was a self-definition that would, in the end, have a very short life indeed. By 1897, Cheyenne residents again celebrated their distinctive local attributes, but they found inspiration not in the future but in Wyoming’s past. The original 1897 Cheyenne Frontier Days program noted: It is especially appropriate that Wyoming, one of the youngest of our states, should celebrate “Frontier Days.” The frontier line of advancing settlements has already disappeared like misty shadows vanishing before the Sun’s rays. The varied and adventurous life of the early explorers, the hunters and trappers and Indian fighters, the dangers and privations of the first settlers, and the thrilling incidents of their struggles on mountain and plain, are now but the dissolving views of memory, like the “passing of ships in the night.” 2 Only seven years after statehood, the stories Wyomingites began telling about themselves through pageants, parades, and celebrations, became increasingly nostalgic, localized, and consistent. Wyomingites institutionalized westernness in the myriad of ways they remembered and represented themselves, and their expressions of self-identity became a source of knowledge about not only the West but “authentic” America itself. In 1925, for example, Wyoming Roads magazine reminded its readers that Frontier Days was not a show, but an “institution, and viewed in this light it takes on more than local significance—it becomes a Wyoming institution, a powerful influence in making men mindful of the meaning of ‘Winning the West,’ in keeping alive the spirit and traditions of this country.” 3 As the twentieth century wore on, the local memories and stories that Wyomingites claimed as their own came increasingly to be seen as quintessentially American too, and academic institutions and elite art museums used them to institutionalize a distinctive national identity. By the 1940s and 1950s, a regional identity that highlighted individualism and self-sufficiency became particularly useful in expressing a national ethos. Wyoming’s local

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images and institutions were employed to save the country from nothing less than the threat of communist insurgency during the anxious era of the Cold War. In the years before then, Wyomingites utilized the past in order to create a shared sense of memory and tradition that centered on, and in fact depended upon, remembrances of a singular western past. In the middle of the Johnson County war of 1892, the Buffalo Voice had boasted of its town’s new signs of sophistication— streetlights, newspapers and waterworks—and prophesied that the things of Wyoming’s past—cowboys, cattle, and lawlessness— were progress’s just victims. Thirty years later, Buffalo residents enthusiastically reenacted the very past that they had once so eagerly anticipated leaving behind. The community’s local American Legion reconstructed “Bad Man’s Gulch as it was in the days of ’76,” according to the Buffalo Voice. The local image that had been the source of their embarrassment in 1890 became, by 1924, custom, tradition, and common heritage. In an outright rejection of Progressive axioms, the Buffalo Voice declared: Ever since the advent of women’s suffrage and the prohibition of things we love so well, we have day by day in every way been slowly dying from inactivity. In order to save the people of this great commonwealth from such dire disaster, the American Legion and the Spanish War Veteran’s of Buffalo decided to again save their country by founding Bad Man’s Gulch, the reproduction of the good old days in the early west when Roulette was not thought to be something to eat and Tom and Jerry was not thought to be the name of a team of mules. The local members of the American Legion opted for nostalgic memories of the town’s “wild” past as their central narrative over the story of Wyoming as the fountainhead of equality. The “Good Old Days,” proclaimed the Voice, were when “Western men were red-blooded he men and could take their likker straight without so much as the echo of federal agents hoof beats in the offing and if you happened to covet your neighbor’s wife she had long hair by which you could drag her to your dug out without consent of

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clergy. And if a man got in your way, bang! . . . . That’s the idea! A time that men look back upon, some of them, and smack their lips. ‘Ah boys, them were the days.’ ” So much for Wyoming as the domain of equality, warmth, and patriotic devotion. The Legionnaires performed a “dramatic reproduction of life in the west in the early days . . . in the minutest detail possible,” which included the requisite frontier barroom and dance hall. Shared memories of the “Old West” both unified the community and supplied an opportunity for a small rebellion against the Progressive agenda. Buffalo residents not only rejected the mandates of Progressivism, they pragmatically used the funds raised in the celebrations to construct a community building, which the Voice pointed out would “prove an invaluable asset to the community.” 4 By 1924, shared memories in Johnson County about the Wild West apparently mattered more than what side you had been on in the 1890 war over just what kind of west Johnson County would represent.5 For all their reliving of a wild western past, Wyomingites did not reject their devotion to progress. Progress was, after all, their progenitor. The tears they shed over the death of the old, true, and authentic West were perhaps real, but it was an ambivalent mourning at best, for it was their memories of a lost West that gave Wyomingites traditions, culture, and a reason to celebrate in a unified grief in the first place. Their emerging culture of nostalgia enabled them to enjoy the Old West’s doom as they lamented its loss. 6 The Frontier Days program in 1897 pointed out that it was the very danger of Wyoming becoming too “artificial” and too much like older states that necessitated the annual return to a reenacted past: “Few comprehend the marvelous and rapid transformation of the Mountain States from the rude life and privations of pioneer days to the brighter phases of modern civilization. . . . The evolution of the sagebrush desert and the cactus plains into . . . fields of wheat, orchards of fruit, blooming and beautiful gardens . . . makes the wonderful contrast between old frontier days and the environments of this new generation.” Wyomingites could celebrate their past, the program assured, because they now possessed “all the conveniences, luxuries and refinements of the world’s highest civilization.” Because they were

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endowed with such things, it was all the more important to be “duly thankful we still have the scenery and atmosphere if not the life of the ‘old days.’ Let us treasure the old days in our memories, and, as far as possible, revive the thrilling incidents and pictures of life that may be reproduced.” 7 The 1923 advertisement for Frontier Days promised “A Peerless Presentation of the West’s Pioneer Past. Nothing like it elsewhere. America’s Greatest Spectacle, Real and Genuine and True to Life . . . Out where the West is.” 8 Wyomingites simply blended the narrative of Turnerian progress with the story of the Wild West of Buffalo Bill, and then proceeded to blithely celebrate them both. 9 The past that Wyomingites remembered in the numerous pageants they put on throughout the 1920s and 1930s was a wild, character-forming place whose inhabitants were independent, self-reliant, and always courageous—traits that their grandchildren would presumably inherit. Wyoming Roads magazine reminded visitors to the state that it was the freedom of the West that made “big men, and men real.” 10 The final scenes in frontier pageants, however, always reemphasized the fruits of progress. In 1924, the State Tribune complimented one “Wyoming pageant” on its portrayal of “Wyoming’s evolution, from its creation to its present highly civilized state, good acting was supplemented by grace, beauty and fine costuming.” The pageant depicted Wyoming as a beautiful young woman, Vedauwoo, and followed a predictable storyline: Episode I, the creation of Wyoming; Episode II, the genesis of the Indians and the passing of the range when the “cowboy bid to Wyoming a sad farewell, giving to [Wyoming] the witchcraft of his spirit” (his demise was apparently attributable to the “Insane Sheepman,” who, the article notes, was played effectively by Arthur Peterson); and Episode IV, which depicted the coming of culture. 11 In yet another “pageant of progress” in 1926, progress led “pioneer” adventure and “world service” from a small Pennsylvania town into the virgin West. 12 The cast of the Wyoming State Training School’s historical pageant in 1922 in Lander consisted, where possible, of actual pioneers or descendants of pioneers and followed the familiar format of progress: Epoch I— Primeval conditions: Tribes of Indians roaming the plains; Epoch

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II—Pathfinders and explorers; Epoch III— Immigration; Epoch IV —military occupation, cowboys; and Epoch V— Statehood, which included an agricultural float showing the progress of the valley.13 The storyline of the “Coals of Newcastle Historical Pageant” was more succinct: “Prologue: man settles the earth; Act 1: the coming of the White man, scene two: Gold, the masses move west; Act 2: the coming of the Train; the community prospers; Finale: All sing the National Anthem, Fireworks! (Indian braves and women played by locals.)” 14 By 1937, the town of Casper was one of the intermountain West’s most thriving oil communities, where oil stocks were traded feverishly in the lobbies of downtown hotels. Casper nonetheless held a pageant in which “the days of the scouts and pioneers will be remarkably epitomized in . . . the four-mile parade through Casper.” The pageant showcased “Old Time” costumes in store windows so the “glorious, dramatic, and colorful era of the trappers, covered wagon pioneers . . . and their courageous women” could live again.15 Sheridan’s annual parade took place during the rodeo weekend, depicted the “Old West,” and featured “Miss Frontier.” 16 Similarly, Lusk merchants and businessmen dressed up as Indians and soldiers during the annual “Legend of Rawhide,” whose program enticed: “see the discovered wagon train come surging over the hills to the east. . . . see the Indian village scene when a hunting party led by Chief Nata Ska makes camp. see the Indians on horseback attack the train, burn a wagon. You’re so close to the action you will seem to be a part of it. see the Indians triumph and skin a man alive.” The pageant’s climax arrived when the white man who had incited the attack by shooting an Indian girl got his just deserts and was promptly “skinned alive” by pharmacists and local ranchers in war paint and feathers. “You’ll live this stirring tale for years because of its true-to-life incident of the frontier days,” concluded the program. 17 Food even became an instrument for the articulation of localism. The Gillette Woman’s Club held its “Annual Wyoming Products Dinner” and served ham from the Sheridan Meat Company, peas from Big Horn Canning, and honey made in Buffalo. Devil’s Tower was the main theme of the dinner. The club’s secretary explained: “This was

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carried out in the program’s salad which consisted of jello molded in cheese glasses and surrounded by small pieces of pineapple and marshmallow to resemble the tower and rocks.” Following dinner, members of the Woman’s Club and their husbands portrayed historical characters in costume and performed a recitation of Wyoming history. “We planned to use towers made of plaster of Paris as centerpieces and have little trees around the base with a gravel road leading to the tower, but our materials did not arrive in time,” the secretary lamented. 18 The fact that by the 1920s and 1930s the Wild West had been sanctified in the popular culture of romantic novels and Hol[95], (8) lywood movies also contributed to the character of local celebrations. With the rising prominence of the Western in popular culture, westerners discovered that being a hick, at least an “auLines: 58 to thentic” western one, wasn’t such a bad rap after all. Movies ——— not only verified their own local identity but also helped to in14.0pt Pg ——— struct them in the details of being authentically western. Thomas Normal Page Cullen, whose father was a union representative, attributed all the * PgEnds: Eject fights in his school years in Rock Springs to the influence of cowboy movies, to which he and his schoolmates were “addicted.” [95], (8) Cullen recalled the considerable time he and his friends spent building a cabin in his backyard that emulated the outlaw cabins and secret passages featured in the countless cowboy movies they watched. 19 Wyoming residents took great pains to ensure that the stories they told were correct in detail, although this accuracy perhaps had less to do with their ancestors’ experiences than with what they wanted to believe about the past. And what they wanted to believe about their history was, in no small way, influenced by popular culture representations and the demanding expectations of those who observed them as specimens of the authentic West. Since the stories they told were irrevocably interconnected with the stories told about them, this made “accuracy” a somewhat convoluted achievement. 20 Americans, after all, knew the West from movies and literature, and they knew what it should look and feel like once they actually got there. Wyomingites got better

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and better at becoming what America already knew them to be. As a newspaper account of the Fort Caspar Pageant noted: Suddenly taciturn, serious ranchers became wild west riders; clerks, secretaries, and housewives are transformed into savage Indians; students, merchants, and salesmen became inspired actors. “Thank you,” the tourist said, finally, then turning to the children in the back seat he said, “See kids? I told you we’d see real Indians in Wyoming!” . . . No doubt they will return home with tales of the wild n’ wooly West where people still open beer cans with a .45 . . . and where history is more exciting than a Wild West show! 21 In 1925, Wyoming Roads magazine assured visitors that westerners had in fact preserved their famed traditions. It proclaimed Cheyenne the “Beginning of the West . . . in the heart of the territory where the savage red man made his last stand, and having preserved the traditions and landmarks of these early settler days, there is aroused in the tourist visitor a natural interest and desire to see first hand the various points of interest of which he has read and studied in history.” 22 The Cody Enterprise in turn implored Codyites before its annual stampede to dress right for the Gala Occasion: “[T]he localities will be urged to don their eight-gallon hats and buckskin vests and ‘go western’ for the summer. All of these things help much in creating the proper atmosphere for Cody Stampede and also will add much to western appearance of the town during ‘dude’ days.” 23 Sheridan’s advertisements for their rodeo noted: “Visitors to Sheridan are constantly thrilled by the western and colorful atmosphere of the streets of Sheridan. The lean, sun-burnt riders of the range unhesitatingly wear their big hats, the high-heeled boots and all the picturesque garb of the cowboy. Whole families of Indians can be seen going up and down the streets, their sharp eyes missing nothing. . . . The Sheridan rodeo has the same standing in western entertainment circles as Notre Dame has in football.” 24 Lander’s Wyoming State Journal warned the community before its annual rodeo to “Go Western or Else,” and admonished: “Western togs became the vogue on Main Street Friday with the word quietly disseminated that a dunking

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party would be staged at five o’ clock for the ‘hold outs.’ The party didn’t materialize but the threat was there and yesterday more out-west clothes adorned Lander business men and their employees. . . . Scoop Schultz stuck out his chest and showed thru his shirt five cracked ribs from 1939’s great battle and says nothing short of death will be the penalty of enforcement of the Go West or else.” 25 In 1940, Casper held a “go western” celebration and instructed everyone in the community to wear “western garb.” “The go western movement,” the Casper Tribune Herald proclaimed, “will be exemplified in the western garb, bright shirts, and handkerchiefs and other habillments of the Old West which will be another keynote of the afternoon. . . . The mayor said with the support of the general public go western day will impress our tourist visitors in a manner never to be forgotten.” The mayor demanded: Storekeepers, hotel managers, bankers and all business people to make appropriate show window displays: that our citizens wear western regalia, a ten-gallon hat if possible, a bright kerchief, a brilliant shirt, any distinctive “western touch” will serve the purpose; the erection of hitching posts in front the old post office building and in front of the new city hall, to hitch suitable horses; for citizens of Casper to hail tourist cars and give a rousing, western goodwill greeting to the tourist visitors and offer any desired information, and to attend the patriotic gatherings during the day and evening. 26 The local chamber of commerce elicited communitywide participation to go all out for “Wyoming atmosphere.” It was sometimes necessary to distinguish “Going Local” from “Going Western,” however, for Wyomingites were not exactly imitating themselves, just imitations of themselves. The Casper newspaper noted: “It was not suggested that the citizenry of Casper wear the same outfits as a cowboy working on a ranch. But a ten-gallon hat, a bright kerchief, a bright shirt, any distinctive ‘western touch’ will serve the purpose.” Junior chamber officials privileged appearances over lived experience, and announced that they welcomed

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the assistance of every citizen in the community in giving Casper the western atmosphere, which “truly is its heritage and which visitors from other sections of the country expect to find here.” Chamber president W. G. McNamara assured Casper residents that “With the support of this public, Casper can go western this summer in a way which really will impress our tourist visitors.”27 Obviously, it was not Wyomingites’ habit to “dress Western” or else they would not have to be implored so constantly to do so. To sustain an image of an imagined West circa 1880 required constant devotion by the community to the task of re-creating the illusion that it was, in fact, frozen in time. 28 Wyoming was, in fact, not frozen in time. Change had come in the decades since Wister stepped off the train in Cheyenne in 1885. Even by 1920, towns like Gillette, Casper, and Rock Springs were far more representative of the urban frontier than of the Old West, and Wyomingites found their fate familiarly controlled by eastern and foreign conglomerates. By the early twentieth century, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Company was in the hands of two Parisians and three Londoners. A Dutch company brought in a substantial gusher at the Salt Creek field outside of Casper in 1908, and the ever-present Standard of Indiana wielded increasing economic power. 29 In the face of such national and international forces, it makes sense that Wyomingites would search for a modicum of control through expressions of localism. Wyomingites’ celebrations reflected both the desire for a better way of life and a need to identify with a romantic, nostalgic past. Many “locals” welcomed what change and progress brought. A poem in the Campbell County Record greedily anticipated the benefits of the elusive, ever sought-after boom: When Oil is struck in Gillette: When derricks tall stand all around Dotting up the familiar ground, When tanks are scattered thick and wide, With tank cars switched up on the side. Then goodbye corn bread, soggy spuds, Then hello pound cake, finer duds. Goodbye old shoes so rough and wore; Won’t have you on my feet no more. . . . The place to live, a place worth while. Jim Boyle will sell the horse

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no more. For he will then have heaps of Dough. And autos round his office thick. And may all this come on us quick! 30 Wyoming communities’ devotion to the Old West narrative did not mean they couldn’t reconcile the benefits of change with a steadfast devotion to a nostalgic past. They simply incorporated their new realities into their nostalgic celebrations. In the midst of its pioneer festival in 1937, Casper sponsored a competition between the pipe-laying experts employed by Stanolind, Continental, Sinclair, and the Illinois Oil companies to exemplify “the industry for which Casper is famous.” The paper pointed out the great strides in the development of North Casper and called for every civic, fraternal, service, and patriotic organization in Casper to participate in the festivities. And although the 1940 Lander Pioneer Days were billed as “A Rootin’ Tootin’— All but Shootin’ revival of the REAL OLD WILD WEST In All Its OLD TIME GLAMOUR—INDIANS COWBOYS, COWGIRLS. BE SURE TO SEE THE BIG COLORFUL PARADE, PORTRAYAL OF THE WINNING OF THE WEST,” one of the most popular draws of the weekend was the midget auto races.31 In 1941, Casper combined its observation of Flag Day and a “new era of progress” with its “Go Western” celebrations. 32 Even Cheyenne’s venerable Frontier Days served double duty. A local publication noted that in “Frontier Days, the tremendous exhibition which has for its purpose the keeping alive of western tradition, the opportunity presents itself, of making known to friends from eastern states something of the facilities in the way of well improved highways radiating in all directions from Cheyenne.”33 Baseball games were a prominent attraction at many frontier celebrations, including Moorcroft’s “Frontier Celebration” and Lander’s “Pioneer Days,” which featured a game between Lander and the Rock Springs Slav team. 34 Local identity and celebration in Rock Springs were particularly complicated. In 1920, one-third of the residents of Sweetwater County were foreign born. 35 Over forty languages and dialects were spoken at one time in the coal mines of Rock Springs, and the town included a Greek bakery, a Chinese restaurant, and

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Jewish market. The local Lion’s Club sponsored an International Night for some years that consisted of a variety show that featured hometown talent and dramatized the multiethnic aspects of the town. Local celebrations also included carnivals, baseball games, and competitions between local Union Pacific Coal Company miners and out-of-town teams. Even the multiethnic community of Rock Springs was not immune from the influence of a western identity, however. Thomas Cullen remembers singing “Cowboy Song” in school during the annual celebration of Wyoming history—which one year ended in a melee after a play between “Kit Carson,” “John C. Fremont,” “Buffalo Bill,” and various “Indians.” Rock Spring’s biggest community celebrations took place in the first week in April in honor of the eight-hour day (observed by the labor-dominated town) and in the first week in September for Labor Day. And Labor Day in Rock Springs meant rodeos and parades. These annual “Days of ’58” celebrations also included a mock kangaroo court to which bearded posses brought culprits who had failed to grow beards in accordance with the frontier atmosphere. Teno Ronaclio, a local politician, played the “typical frontier judge.”36 The Rock Springs Miner recalled in 1930: “With a last, lusty whoopee it was all over—the happiest, nappiest buckingest Labor Day Celebration and Rodeo in Rock Springs attended by some 10,000 people. For two big days, royalty of the Old West had held center of the stage as organized labor of this section of Wyoming celebrated its own national holiday. [The] members of the Central Labor Union committee and many other interested citizens of Rock Springs were right down there on the grounds all the time to see that every little thing went off smoothly.” 37 Rock Springs miners blended their identities as laborers, westerners, and Irish, Slavs, or Italians in unselfconscious celebration. Although this west was not exactly reminiscent of the purified story of Wister and Remington’s Anglo-Saxon West, it was, in fact, the way twentieth-century westerners adapted it. Despite such acknowledgments of local realities, when the Casper Tribune Herald reported on the pipe-laying competition, it could not resist pointing out that “no state in the Union has

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had a more colorful or a more thrilling past than has the pioneer state of Wyoming with its rugged, picturesque plains and mountains and its background of covered wagon emigrants, trappers, and traders . . . . Just the word Wyoming alone spells romance and romance.”38 The unique expressions of individual localities served their purpose, but it was the shared consciousness of a western image that gave the state an identity, a unity, and sense of itself. 39 And this western identity was perhaps never more systemized than in an institution itself. The Buffalo Bill Museum and its Whitney Gallery of Western Art told the same narrative of the Old West that Wyoming communities had been reenacting for decades. The museum simply weeded out the more “local” and eccentric interpretations. It was the legacy of devotees of the West from across the country, and as such, it strived to articulate not just a local narrative but an American one. As a result, the Buffalo Bill Museum told a story that would hold wide appeal for those living far beyond Wyoming’s borders. What eventually became a prominent and national institution was originally borne of local efforts. The Cody fixture, Mary Jester Allen, founded the “Buffalo Bill Museum Association” in 1926. Local and prominent Codyites held office, and a number of the town’s leading citizens sat on committees. The community staged carnivals, held teas and rummage sales, and floated bond issues to fund the fledgling museum. Local women even divided the town into sections and went door to door to solicit contributions. 40 The museum received wpa funds during the Depression, and early memberships sold for a dollar apiece. Its initial collection included Chief Yellow Hair’s scalp and the ubiquitous twoheaded calf found in local museums across the West. The small log-cabin museum building attempted to duplicate Buffalo Bill’s te Ranch house and also included a local Codyite’s prized taxidermy collection, historic firearms, and as much Buffalo Bill and “western memorabilia” as Mrs. Allen could stuff into the few small rooms. She also set aside a small room at the museum where local artists could display their art. Mrs. Allen solicited westernphile groups all across the nation for funds while they dined on “Essence of Buffalo,” “Buffalo Grass

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Salad,” and “Boots and Saddle Ice Cream Cakes” during “western”-themed fund-raisers. Easterners, in turn, responded to the American themes that the museum embodied. Robert F. Abercrombie, of the New York City Abercrombie and Fitch clothing store, was a member of the “Buckskin Men,” a New York group dedicated to “the preservation of the historical West,” and also a supporter the fledgling Buffalo Bill Museum. He noted: “I feel that part of the story [of the Buffalo Bill Museum] is the tremendous interest exhibited in the Center by easterners. . . . A great portion of the romance and constant fascination of the West for people in other parts of the country is still very much tied to the figure of Buffalo Bill.” By the mid-1930s, when many eastern notables wrote out their annual philanthropic checks they wrote them not only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but also to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming. William Robertson Coe was one of the most influential of these lovers of the West and served as an honorary member of the museum’s board of directors. 41 Coe was an Englishman who came to America in 1869 when he was fifteen years old. He obtained a graduate degree from Yale University and then went on to make a fortune in the insurance business. He also married the daughter of Standard Oil tycoon Henry Huttleson Rogers, who bequeathed his children $150 million at the time of his death. Coe first came to Wyoming in 1908, and in 1911 he purchased Colonel Cody’s famous te Ranch and built one of the greatest showplaces in the entire region. Though he also owned the four-hundred-acre Planter Fields estate on Long Island, he spent much of his time in the country south of Cody where he filled his home with western Americana. 42 The Yale Bulletin noted that “behind this collection lay [Coe’s] profound belief in the American pioneer virtues. As one who had grown up abroad, Mr. Coe never regarded the American tradition as something to be taken for granted. Instead, he cherished it with the zeal of the convert, and he was deeply concerned that Americans should be aware of their own tradition and meaning.” 43 The Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody remained a “local” museum for over twenty years, notwithstanding its connection with Buffalo Bill and William Coe’s periodic donations. This localism

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changed forever in the 1950s, however, when the museum board committed to a grand expansion plan that included an “education shrine dedicated to the memory of Buffalo Bill and presenting for the benefit of the public . . . the history and development of . . . the ‘Old West.’ ” By 1954, Cornelius Vanderbilt was also a prominent museum supporter, and donated, as mentioned in chapter 2, $250,000 for an art gallery addition to the museum, which would be named in honor of his mother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. 44 Both the industrialist William Weiss and the philanthropist Armand Hammer donated collections of Montana artist Charlie Russell’s work, and the Coe family acquired the Remington Studio collection from the Knoedler Galleries in New York City and donated it to the new Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Gallery of Western Art. The Remington collection also included Indian clothing, cowboy gear, and all kinds of “western” objects that the artist had used as models in his eastern studio. These specimens of the “real West,” which Remington had used to duplicate it, would now be incorporated into the museum’s narrative of western authenticity. The Remington paintings served as the museum’s primary collection when it opened on April 25, 1959 (postponed from the original date of April 1, so C. V. Whitney could attend the Kentucky Derby). Museum visitors beheld one artistic reproduction of the Old West after another in the just-finished, picture-filled halls. A New York Times reporter commented: “It is fitting that the collection should be shown here because Cody is pure west, cowboys, mountain men, Indians, trappers, and the covered wagon pioneers all frequented this place. . . . The Gertrude Whitney Gallery . . . is a magnificent documentation of a dramatic subject . . . pure west. . . . There has never been a more comprehensive exhibit of western Americana anywhere.” 45 The Whitney Gallery and its narrative of the physically rigorous and morally pure West had its roots in the convictions of Remington and Wister, and not only because Remington’s paintings were its primary narrative. It was a space that told an American narrative of heroism, individualism, and conquest. The Dude Rancher magazine noted, “The gallery marks the establishment

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of a suitable national repository for a comprehensive and factual pictoral record of the Old West as it actually was in the days when American history was being made on the Great Plains.” 46 The museum became a way to experience America’s definitive national culture and moral heritage, and it was this narrative that was of particular interest to William Robertson Coe. 47 Some years before the opening of the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, William Coe had become involved with another Wyoming institution and for a similar purpose. Through the University of Wyoming’s American Studies program, Coe empowered the university to utilize the “western” credos of individualism and self-sufficiency to “save America from itself”—a turn reminiscent of Remington himself. In 1954, he donated $760,000 to the university to operate the School of American Studies. Coe dictated that the program’s purpose was to meet the “threat of Communism, Socialism, Collectivism, Totalitarianism, and other Ideologies opposed to the preservation of our System of Free Enterprise.” The program promised that it would “inculcate in students a desire to uphold and promote those principles that were fostered by our forefathers and exemplified by the development of free American institutions.” 48 The director of the program, as well as the faculty connected with it, were to be guided by the “belief that a thorough knowledge of the American tradition must be an integral and essential part of every American citizen for increased knowledge of our heritage and sources of liberty will flow into a deeper appreciation of the capitalistic system and the American open society.” 49 The program’s students were to learn the “basic ingredients of American freedom,” and Coe believed there was no better place than the West for Americans to learn about America. The American Studies program announced that students “will learn more about a free America developed from the pioneer spirit which expresses the principal that men must depend upon themselves, their own vigor and initiative, and must not surrender their liberties to government.” Wyoming was the perfect locale for such a national center for American studies because, as Coe believed, it was “still fresh with the pioneering spirit.” 50 Wyomingites’ “invented traditions” and the American Studies program both cel-

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ebrated the pioneer spirit. As an academic institution, however, the University of Wyoming made it possible to institutionalize a western ethos in a far more structured manner than had Wyoming’s local celebrations. Some years before, Coe had also endowed the more prominent and prestigious American Studies Program at Yale University. However, he grew to have doubts about the devotion of the Yale faculty to his patriotic message. In 1943, Coe had donated his large collection of western Americana to the Yale Library, and in 1950 he donated $500,000 to Yale to launch a program of American Studies that would serve “as a safeguard against Communism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and for the preservation of our System of Free Enterprise,” just like the later University of Wyoming program. Coe also stipulated that the professor to head the program “shall always be one who firmly believed in the preservation of our System of Free Enterprise and is opposed to a system of State Socialism, Communism, and Totalitarianism.” Michael Kammen points out that one reason communism was feared so much was that it seemed to repudiate and break with the past: “Therefore ‘Amercanism’ came to connote a love of continuity and respect for the past, even though Americans are supposed to be wildly in love with progress.” 51 Yale’s announcement of the donation noted that “throughout his life, [Coe has] been a devoted believer in the American pioneer spirit and the importance of preserving individual initiative and freedom of enterprise as bulwarks of American strength and independence.” 52 Coe’s American Studies programs were clearly manifestations of these beliefs. Coe simply took the accepted notion that westerners were, in fact, all of the things they celebrated about themselves and put such characteristics to work on a national scale to tutor his fellow Americans. When the president of Yale at the time of the donation, Charles Seymour, addressed the Yale alumni, he declared that because of Coe’s donation “Yale has thus become the center for advanced study of the extension of the western frontier out to the Pacific. He puts us in a position to launch our whole program of American Studies and to exploit the great Coe Collection [of Western

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Americana] in the Library.” Yale even began a teacher training program for foreign students. Seymour explained that the import of the program was that the “aiding of young foreigners intent upon teaching careers to study in America forms a crucial phase in the defense of the free world.” 53 President Seymour echoed Coe’s belief that the West and its values were the cure for the ills that besieged America’s educational system and noted his concern over the neglect of American history in school curricula: There is serious danger that foreign ideologies of various kinds have found a foothold which would not be possible if American citizens really understood the privileges which have molded our development as a nation. At various times, I have commented on the prevailing drift away from the spirit of independent self-reliance characteristic of the founders of the republic and the pioneers who carried the frontier westward to the Pacific Ocean. This drift can be counteracted only by education—only thus can the youth of today and tomorrow be brought to realize that the freedom bequeathed by our ancestors cannot be maintained by the devices of paternalistic government. 54 Seymour concluded that “not merely Yale but all thoughtful citizens will be grateful to Mr. Coe as he shows the way to meet positively and intelligently the menace of foreign philosophies and starts Yale in this path with material assistance.” 55 Various publications heartily approved of the donation, and the New York Journal warned that “the historical illiteracy of so many Americans is an indictment of the educational leadership of the U.S.” 56 Nostalgic recollections of the “independent pioneers” who had forged America’s way west provided the foundation for the philosophy of American studies, both at Yale and the University of Wyoming. Coe was apparently satisfied in the Yale faculty’s delivery of his message until the publication of William F. Buckley’s book God and Man at Yale in 1951. Buckley mocked the American Studies program at Yale and called it a “half-hearted effort [by the Yale Administration] . . . to pass [it] off as a concerted effort to restore

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the balance, to imbue students with respect for the free enterprise system.” Buckley acknowledged that Coe was an “unflinching individualist” but disparaged the program’s purpose as stated in the Bulletin of Undergraduate Courses: “The aim . . . in American Studies is to assist the student to gain an understanding of the civilization of his own country. The principal institutions of American political, economic and social life, the ideas and policies surrounding them, and the achievements of American literary and artistic expression are studied both historically and in terms of the present in an effort to present the total cultural picture.” Buckley charged that it is “nonsense to assume that the instructors of the course dedicate themselves to affirming a ‘belief in the validity of our institutions of free enterprise and individual liberty,’ ” as Mr. Coe had requested. Coe wrote Buckley that he shared “his opinion as to the necessity of cleaning out the pinks and subversives from the faculty, but I differ from you about the method of doing so.” 57 Buckley’s accusations left Coe more than a little vexed, and he promptly asserted that the final course description in American Studies should more faithfully follow his original wording, namely, that it was a “program based on the conviction that the best safeguards against totalitarian developments in our economy are an understanding of our cultural heritage and an affirmative belief in the validity of our institutions of free enterprise and individual liberty”—a description to which the University of Wyoming would be much more faithful. 58 The administration at Yale played the situation pragmatically. New Yale president A. Whitney Griswold patiently explained to Coe that catalog references to courses of instruction “never make promises of particular moral or political results.” He further maintained that the way to strengthen American Studies was to staff the program with superior teachers and scholars “whose intellectual and moral integrity and devotion to our country is unquestionable.” 59 The Yale librarian, James T. Babb, wrote to President Griswold: “I know what [Coe] wants us to say is that the course is set up to fight communism and I know we can’t say that, but if we handle him properly, I’m sure we can appease him. . . . The main thing is to let Mr. Coe have his say.” 60 Coe was stalwart in

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his demands for a more faithful representation of his intentions and expressed concern to Griswold that a “very large percentage of scholars are leaving the schools with pronounced Socialistic ideas and with a desire to get ‘Something for Nothing.’ ” Coe inundated the Yale president with numerous articles concerning the threat of socialism in education, including E. B. Gallaher’s Clover Business Letter, which warned that “the public is beginning to realize that it has been duped—drugged by the opiate of Socialism and has been electing Socialist gangsters to run the country.” Under an article entitled “Subversive Teaching . . . . How Can It Be Eliminated?” the Clover Letter insisted that “if the alumni demand the removal of a subversive teacher, he will be removed, make no mistake about it.” Coe forwarded to President Griswold a U.S. News and World Report article that examined “How Communists Try to Influence American Teachers” and that admonished “There can be no academic freedom until this Soviet conspiracy hidden in our schools and colleges is exposed to the light, and the rule of Moscow over its adherents in the educational world is broken.” He also suggested increased circulation of the “Patriot’s Edition” of Your Rugged Constitution, which Coe himself had published through Stanford University Press. 61 The Yale administration continued to placate Mr. Coe, without quite giving in to him. The exasperated assistant to the president wrote his boss: “I am taking on a labor of love, in return for which I ask a favor of you. The labor of love is to try and get Mr. W. R. Coe off your back. To that end, Jim Babb and I are going down to Oyster Bay to have lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch with him. . . . I hope that I can divert some of Mr. Coe’s enthusiasm for correspondence and controversy from your shoulders to mine, although I warn you there is not a chance that he will go steady with me thereafter.” 62 Throughout the 1950s, the Coe Foundation continued to support the American Studies program at Yale, but with his increased frustration at his alma mater Coe became more interested in funding American Studies programs elsewhere. Like Remington and Wister before him, Coe turned to the West in his quest to find a

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“purer” America to serve as a pedagogical template for the rest of the nation. He became especially drawn to the University of Wyoming at Laramie in the heart of the “real West,” whose president Coe admired as a “staunch conservative.” 63 Beginning in 1952, the University of Wyoming had held an annual five-week summer conference on the study of American “heritage and history” for selected high school teachers, taught by Yale faculty. Coe apparently believed that, even in the more “American” West, it was nonetheless important to remind the next generation of westerners about their vital role in preserving the American character. Yale history professor David Potter agreed that “we must not content ourselves with training citizens at Yale. We must train the teachers of the millions of citizens elsewhere.” 64 As the American Studies program noted, “foreign ideologies and faculty understanding at home threaten our values, and it becomes doubly imperative that we educate our youth in our heritage and its significance.” Coe proudly shared the letters of gratitude he received from the participating teachers: “Thank you for making it possible for me to do a better job in the all-important task of giving young people an understanding of and an increased respect for American institutions and ideals,” one Wyoming teacher wrote him. Mildred McFarland wrote him that “I promise to take the American message back to Cody.” 65 Coe also turned to westerners to “tutor” the Yale easterners in the finer points of American character. He recommended that President Griswold read an address given by a Wyomingite, Milward Simpson, president of the University of Wyoming’s board of trustees and a prominent member of the Buffalo Bill Museum Board. Simpson was a future Wyoming governor and U.S. senator who had published a booklet, Americanism, Our Schools, Our Laws, that echoed Coe’s opinion of the dangers of socialism to the American educational system. The Cody, Wyoming, newspaper noted that “the straightforward Americanism expressed by Mr. Simpson in a plain, honest and fearless manner on the education of our youths, carries a deep lesson.” In his address to the Association of Governing Boards of State Universities, Simpson warned:

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There is a struggle going on in America today for two things: 1) For the minds of the youth of American and 2) For America. . . . [T]he fine heritage we have, and the dearest possessions we have, our children, are being subjected to the teaching of ideologies that, because of our inactivity, is not being thoroughly understood. . . . THE LITTLE RED SCHOOL HOUSE IS REDDER THAN YOU THINK!! . . . As President of the Board of Trustees of the little University of Wyoming . . . I announced that I was asking that an investigation, an examination of textbooks be made. . . . THE TROUBLE WITH AMERICA TODAY IS THAT WE HAVE [110], (2 TOO FEW TELLING WHAT IS RIGHT WITH AMERICA, BUT WE HAVE MANY WHO LOUDLY PROCLAIM WHAT Lines: 1 IS WRONG WITH AMERICA. WHY DON’T WE EXPLAIN THE MESSAGE OF AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL, INSPIR——— * 21.0pt ING MESSAGE OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICA? ——— Normal Simpson called Coe a “great Patriot” and praised Yale University for being “on the way to teaching the glories of America in * PgEnds: this America of ours.” (Simpson also recommended reading Your Rugged Constitution, which he pointed out, thanks to Coe, the industries of America were distributing.) 66 Coe wanted to access that legendary “freedom” in the West that made “big men, and men real” and inculcate it on a national scale. The western characteristics of independence and self-sufficiency that Wyomingites had been celebrating as a state for years now became valuable attributes in fighting the Cold War and its nemeses, socialism and communism. The nostalgic western identity that had unified Wyomingites was put to work to bring the country together in a shared heritage. It was an odd sort of dance whereby easterners had, at one time, clarified for westerners the details of being authentically western, and now westerners turned around and used their “western” attributes to instruct the rest of the nation about being “American.” When Coe agreed to fully fund an American Studies program at the University of Wyoming in 1954, the university’s pres-

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ident expressed little hesitation in carrying out Coe’s agenda. He wrote to Coe: I speak for the entire staff of the University of Wyoming, the people of our great State and also the citizens of the Rocky Mountain region, when I say that your generosity in making it possible for the University of Wyoming to develop a Program of American Studies on a permanent basis fulfills a great need in higher education. . . . [W]e unequivocally accept the terms of the agreement for the Trust Fund as set out in our letter. . . . Our aim and steadfast purpose will be to establish the William Robertson Coe School of American Studies as a citadel of freedom and inspiration in the Rocky Mountain region and eventually throughout the nation. We consider this a sacred obligation. 67 The publicity program for the University of Wyoming American Studies program promised that students would learn “more about a free America developed from the pioneer spirit which expresses the principle that men must depend upon themselves, their own vigor and initiative and must not surrender their liberties to government.” 68 William Coe drew an unlikely if straight line from the Frontier Day celebrations in Moorcroft, Wyoming, to New Haven and Yale. For the American Studies programs did basically the same things that Moorcroft’s Frontier Days did—celebrate the West’s pioneer spirit and the taken-for-granted “American” narrative that the West’s evolution so obviously exemplified. Coe simply concentrated on the western credos of individualism and self-sufficiency and made them specific to his own time and needs. 69 When Coe passed away in March 1955 he divided a substantial part of his multimillion-dollar estate among Yale, the University of Wyoming, and the Buffalo Bill Museum. The Coe family continued to be very involved with the Buffalo Bill Museum and its Whitney Gallery of Western Art. Their involvement with both American Studies and the museum made sense, for both spoke to the same cultural mores and the same “American” identity of rugged individualism. Coe’s foundation, administered by his son

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William Rogers Coe, continued to play an active part in all three institutions and funded a new library building at the University of Wyoming. Yale librarian James T. Babb traveled from New Haven to Laramie in 1954 to comment on the Coe Library’s progress. Babb reflected that, although the frontier was gone and there was no more room to move west, there are still great areas to be developed and opportunities for the ambitious and virile American. . . . [T]he fundamentals of our economic life and government can, and I believe should, be based on the principles set up by our Founding Fathers and which, carried into the wilderness by rugged and self-reliant pioneers, conquered the frontier. That is why Mr. Coe is so liberally supporting your program here, and giving it so handsome an endowment as well as a somewhat similar gift to Yale together with his great and rich collection of western Americana. 70

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——— Normal The Coe Library dedication took place in the fall of 1958, and * PgEnds: symbolized Coe’s presence at and vision for the University of Wyoming. The Englishman Coe had become the unlikely tutor [112], (2 in Americanism to some of the nation’s most prominent institutions, and the West was his central primer. Coe cast around in the West’s past and came up with a saving ethos for Cold War America, which he preached through America’s foremost institutions of higher learning. Wyomingites searched the West’s past and found an identity—a shared memory of themselves that they could celebrate. In their pageants, parades, and rodeos, Wyomingites had celebrated not only a local identity but a national ideology. Wyomingites, the Buffalo Bill Museum, and William Coe himself through the American Studies programs—all told a story of America using the tautology of the West. Wyomingites reinvented an old western story about themselves that helped unite them through shared memories, and they changed and adapted the story just enough to mask that changes had indeed taken place in Wyoming. The contradiction was no matter, for the mixture of popular culture, celebration, and history


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that they called memory ensured that Wyoming would always epitomize the authentic West. Coe took this story about the West as the birthplace of American character and used what passed for history to fight the Cold War realities of the 1950s. 71 In the 1950s, the Buffalo Bill Museum and Whitney Gallery of Western Art used the West’s most famous representations to tell the deep cultural stories about the West. These stories articulated a well-worn American identity that visitors from all over the nation could understand and partake in.72 The Buffalo Bill Museum and the American Studies programs accepted the story of the West as the spawning ground of individual initiative and self-sufficiency. 73 To view the West as the “real” America allowed Coe and other Americans to assume that America’s enemies were the opposite: dependent, subservient, and perhaps illegitimate. The heroic tale of pioneer strength and virtue united not only Wyomingites, but helped to tell a story of the West as America. And that story served as a powerful, even determinative national narrative in the era of the Cold War. Wyoming’s symbolism, then, held not only local and national significance but had international implications as well.

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0.0pt In small towns all across the West, farmers, ranchers, business owners, and other locals frequent the community coffee shop to discuss the state of the world and their own communities. Coffee shops are places where localism is articulated, and it is in conversations such as these that common sense is made, and enemies and identities are constructed. In the fall of 1976, in towns like Lusk or Newcastle, Wyoming, locals appraised the upcoming election and the Wyoming candidates for the U.S. Senate. One candidate had deliberately staked out an identity as a local. He conscientiously expressed common-sensical, “local” sentiments in his campaign speeches, and he consistently identified the same enemies and frustrations as did the voices in the coffee shops. That candidate, Malcolm Wallop, demonstrated his localism and “westernness” not only by what he said but through the symbols he incorporated into his campaign. Wallop unabashedly ran as a cowboy and rancher. These labels resonated with local voters because the cowboy had long since become ingrained in the cultural fabric of Wyoming’s identity. Wallop put the cowboy’s iconic imagery to work to impart a message of individualism and selfreliance, ideals that Wister had embodied in his “Virginian” years


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before. Such attributes had become a sort of western, cowboy creed in the ensuing decades, and Wallop skillfully utilized their “natural” association with westernness to lay claim to his own authenticity and localism. And by voting for him, Wyomingites could also express a pride in their western authenticity, in their own invented traditions. Such local symbols had especially powerful resonance in the 1970s, a time of significant regional change. In Remington’s and Wister’s era, cowboys moved herds of cattle past the outskirts of quiet little towns like Lusk or Newcastle on their way to northern pastures. By the 1970s, cattle had been replaced by coal, and the click of the coal cars became ritual daily disturbances for many Wyoming communities. The trains transported ten thousand tons of these mounds of blackness across the silent Wyoming prairies to power plants far out of state. Wyoming’s coal supplied warmth and light to thousands of suburban residents living in landscapes far different than the serene Wyoming hills. That Wyoming capitalized on her natural bounty was certainly nothing new. Its high prairie grasses created the cattle boom of the late nineteenth century, which sustained the state’s cultural icon, the cowboy. In the twentieth century, its uranium, oil, and coal supplied the rest of the nation with fuel. The daily disturbance of the coal cars passing through the solitude of the eastern Wyoming hills has its origins in the mid-1970s. When opec curtailed production of the world’s energy in 1973, Wyoming sat on billions of tons of low-sulphur coal, just the kind that would satisfy an environmentally conscious America suddenly desperate for cheap energy. The state that saw itself as the eternal keeper of the cultural symbols of the “true” West became the site of a new western phenomenon. In the mid-1970s, the Cowboy State emerged as the epicenter of a new frontier, the western energy frontier. The population growth in the state’s working-class industrial pockets produced by Wyoming’s central place in the energy frontier threatened the state’s traditional identities and quality of life. Malcolm Wallop encouraged Wyomingites to reclaim these traditional identities and the common cultural heritage they implied. Wallop’s campaign celebrated what he termed a “Wyoming way

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of life” that symbolized a common past, a shared set of values, and a clear adversarial vision. Some eighty years before, another Wyoming cowboy had also articulated a populist agenda. Jack Flagg’s populism demanded an economic equality that would both help him to transcend his own cowboy identity and propel Wyoming beyond its “western” status. Wallop wasn’t interested in such a transcendence, far from it. He conspicuously trumpeted his identity as a cowboy and rancher and Wyoming as the eternal steward of western values. In a decade when Wyoming was never more at the economic mercy of powerful eastern corporations, Wallop pointed to another, more oppressive “Other”—the bureaucrat and the federal government. In doing so, he appealed to Wyomingites’ shared sense of tradition and blurred the line between the “haves” and “have-nots.” His campaign put the cowboy image to work in order to draw a clear distinction between Washington and Wyoming, a contrast that clearly spoke to the concerns of the coffee drinkers in the local coffee shop. The energy frontier set the context for this invocation of cultural identity. Although Wyoming favored the cowboy as its cultural icon, the coal miner had a long history in Wyoming. In the nineteenth century, the Union Pacific lost no time developing the coal beneath its huge Wyoming land grants. Coal production doubled between 1898 and 1910, when Wyoming had forty-two coal-producing mines, mostly in the southern half of the state. Coal mining and oil production continued to be important to the state’s economy and, by the mid-1940s, had surpassed agriculture in economic importance. Nonetheless, by the 1950s and 1960s, Wyoming remained one of the least industrialized states in the Union. 1 And even though Wyoming contained 936 billion tons of coal, or one-quarter of all of America’s coal reserves, only twentyfour mines operated in Wyoming by the mid 1950s. 2 The energy crisis of the mid-1970s changed all that. Coal lay under more than 40 percent of the state’s land, and seven of Wyoming’s twenty-three counties became significant producers. In 1888, an average Wyoming miner mined 602 tons of coal; his counterpart in 1974 mined more than 14,000. At the height of

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the energy boom, Wyoming miners took out 100 million tons of coal per year, making Wyoming a “worker’s paradise” and towns like Rock Springs, Gillette, and Green River modern reflections of the raucous Wild West of legend. 3 As one historian put it, the development of coal reserves in the West “promised wealth far greater than anything rural westerners in the plains and Rockies and Great Basin had ever seen before.” 4 Thousands of Wyomingites and westerners poured into communities near the coal mines to grab up jobs that often paid 80 percent more than the minimum hourly wage. In a decade when the rest of the nation suffered through gas lines and high unemployment, Wyoming’s economy boomed, and its unemployment rate dropped to 3.5 percent or lower, compared to 8 percent and higher for the nation. Wyoming’s right-to-work laws permitted nonunion workers to refuse to pay union dues and made it even easier for inexperienced blue-collar workers to join the ranks of Wyoming’s employed. 5 A description of Gillette, Wyoming, by a New York Times reporter in 1974 hardly recalled the booster self-image that Jack Flagg had favored for Wyoming in the 1890s: “It is a raw jumble of rutted streets and sprawling junkyards, red mud and dust, dirty trucks and crowded bars, faded billboards and sagging utility lines, and block after block of house trailers squatting in the dirt like a nest of giant grubs.” He discovered that 42 percent of Gillette’s population lived in trailer homes. Gillette tried its best to spin its own self-description, proclaiming hopefully on a billboard that it was the “Sharpest town in the West,” but the disenchanted reporter left town apparently unconvinced. 6 “Gillette Syndrome” and “Boom Town Bifurcation” became social science designations for the depression, divorce, alcoholism, and delinquency that beset communities on the energy frontier. 7 By the early 1970s, the population of Rock Springs, Gillette’s sister boom town in the state’s southeastern corner, had doubled in four years, sending crime rates and housing costs through the roof. A Wall Street Journal reporter described Rock Springs as “one of the ugliest and most despoiled towns in the West.” 8 Rock Springs became the kind of place one took in with morbid fascination while passing

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it on the interstate on the way to a safe and comfortable room at Little America, a deluxe truck stop in the middle of the Wyoming desert. Perhaps the best example of the growth of the energy frontier was the creation of the town of Wright, thirty-nine miles south of Gillette in the Powder River Basin. Coal was the sole reason for Wright’s existence, and its founder was a corporation, not local boosters. The heavy hitters in the corporate energy world—Exxon, Kerr McGee, Sun, Texaco, Mobil, Shell, Standard, and Atlantic Richfield—were all major investors in Wyoming coal. The Powder River Basin may have been the legendary open-range grassland of Jack Flagg’s time, but by the late 1970s it was where Atlantic Richfield (or arco) decided to spend $17 million to build the town of Wright to house workers for its huge Black Thunder coal mine. The corporation bought more than three thousand acres of ranch land from Lester and Faith Wright to build the self-contained town, a “slice of suburbia in the sagebrush.” 9 The company’s planned urban layout included the 56,000-squarefoot Latigo Hills Shopping Mall and the Cottonwood Trailer Park, which some five hundred arco employees called home. 10 Coal was not the only fuel source Wyoming dug up and shipped out to the nation at large. It contained a considerable supply of uranium, which had been first discovered and mined at the height of the Cold War. That initial uranium boom was short lived, but by the 1970s Wyoming’s uranium enjoyed a new popularity and began to serve the nation’s energy needs the same way its coal did. As a result, the population of the uranium boom town Jeffrey City increased from 750 early in the 1970s to 2,500 by 1977. Before the energy boom, Jeffrey City was little more than a collection of house trailers, remnants of a boom of former times. By the late 1970s, the town included a gift shop, credit union, newspaper, car wash, Montgomery Ward, and three gas stations. 11 Wyomingites met such growth with profound ambivalence. The booster enthusiasm of Jack Flagg had a long history and a necessary prominence for the state. Making a living had never been easy in Wyoming for exactly the same reasons that the dudes and westernphiles adored it. It was dry and remote, and as a result

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vast tracts of it lay uninhabited throughout the twentieth century. Almost 73,000 Wyomingites lived on farms and ranches in 1940. By 1977, only some 20,000 remained. Beginning in 1960, oil and gas brought in as much money each year as agriculture and tourism combined, and Wyoming’s mineral stores brought more jobs and prosperity than cattle ever had. In 1967, Wyoming ranked twenty-fourth in the nation in per capita income, 4 percent below the national average. At the height of the boom, the state ranked fifth in per capita income, 13 percent above the national average. 12 An editorial in the Casper Star Tribune trumpeted, “We Choose Prosperity”: “Wyoming today is a veritable worker’s paradise. There is more work than people and it’s not a flash-inthe pan affair like Alaska recently experienced to its misfortune. The jobs available here today, whether or not they are in industry, sciences, education, services, or recreation, will be here tomorrow and for many years down the line.” The editor reminded his fellow residents of the state’s former and temporary economic euphorias: “Memories can be short but the dream defies reality. [The] boomtown growth the state is experiencing brings with it problems but it’s better to have this type of pressure than the body-andsoul deadening effects of unemployment still stalking much of the nation and the world.” The editorial acknowledged, however, that “Today, there is a real desire to go back to the old days.”13 The state’s residents remained skeptical of their new, unfamiliar status as the economic envy of the nation. One Wyomingite equated the impact of the state’s growth to the story of the eight-hundredpound gorilla: “Where does he sleep? Anywhere he wants.” 14 A Gillette resident decided her hometown was “a good place to be from, a long way from.” Gillette became “informally segregated” between its new residents and its more permanent population of merchants, ranchers, and farmers. 15 The economic livelihoods that had for so long undergirded the state’s identity were now clearly subsidiary to Wyoming’s mining industry. And despite the state’s pride in its individualism and self-reliance, encapsulated by the cowboy figure that now adorned its license plates, the individual played a largely subservient role on the energy frontier, where capital, out-of-state

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corporations, and even far-off Middle Eastern countries set the economic agenda. A University of Wyoming professor wondered, “Wyoming, Still the Cowboy State?”: “Counties that once had ranching as a primary concern now send representatives to Cheyenne that appear more involved with mineral matters. Ironies abound. As someone recently suggested, the ranchers are something like Indians now, fighting a society that seems to know increasingly less about them, fighting a culture that feels as though their land can be put to some higher, better use.” 16 This tension between a remembered past associated with individualism and independence and a present influenced by uncontrolled growth and change played itself out in the senate campaign of 1976. By the election of 1976, Wyomingites were poised to rally around a candidate who could clearly pinpoint the sources of their perceived loss of control. And the root of their problems turned out not to be a banker, a corporation, or economic cycles controlled by faraway markets. As one longtime resident observed: “It looks like somebody in Washington just looked at the map and decided that this region is going to be a national sacrifice area.” 17 In the summer of 1976, candidate Wallop came, literally, galloping to the rescue. Malcolm Wallop was a forty-two-year-old rancher from Big Horn County who had run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1974 on an environmental platform. He lost in a close race, but two years later he captured the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. In the general election that fall, he faced Gale McGee, a fifty-eight-year-old former University of Wyoming history professor who had first been elected to the Senate in 1958. McGee was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska; attended Nebraska Teacher’s College; the University of Colorado; and the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in American history. During his tenure at the University of Wyoming, McGee occasionally acted as a “visiting expert” in foreign affairs at Brookings Institution seminars in Chicago and Denver.18 Wyoming historian T. A. Larson described McGee as “the most gifted public speaker and debater the state had ever had, its greatest expert on foreign relations, and the man who had channeled more federal appro-

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priations to Wyoming than anyone else had ever done.” 19 McGee wore flashy suits and had a flashy smile. Wallop often dressed in cowboy hat, boots, and jeans. Wallop’s press release described him as the third generation of a pioneer Wyoming family. Except for his years of schooling, it pointed out, Wallop had lived all his life on the family ranch outside of Big Horn, where he acquired his “love of the land and the state of Wyoming.” The release maintained that Wallop was a “part of Wyoming; his children are the fourth generation of Wyoming Wallops. Malcolm Wallop still has a Wyoming point of view.” The press release quoted Wallop as promising: “A care for and a current view of Wyoming’s need is what I represent.” 20 Wallop’s current view of Wyoming addressed Wyomingites’ uncertain opinions on their prominent place in the West’s energy boom. Wallop identified his own agenda with the “good life” in Wyoming that “so much of America has so thoughtlessly let slip away.” 21 An article in the National Observer described Wallop’s campaign as “anti-Washington, anti-bureaucracy, sometimes seemingly close to being anti-growth. A sense of nostalgia for the pre-boom days seems to be creeping over the state.” 22 His own campaign literature declared: “Wyomingites have a right to live here in a society of decency, morality and concern where those who grow up here live work and play here, can also grow old here assured of their place in society. I don’t oppose growth in Wyoming. Growth can be a very positive experience for Wyoming if it is the product of conscious decisions made by the people who live here, based on our own specific values.” 23 By articulating local control, Wallop’s campaign responded to much of the anxiety and uncertainty that beleaguered many Wyomingites. If “local” meant boosterism and economic opportunity to Jack Flagg in the 1890s, by the height of the energy boom it often translated into limited growth. 24 “There’s something special here in Wyoming: our uncrowded recreational opportunities, quiet family neighborhoods, something much of America has lost and just begun to miss: roots,” Wallop reminded voters. 25 And Wallop’s campaign made perfectly clear who the antithesis to “local” was—it was powerful, eastern, dominant, and anyone who

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opposed it was welcome in Wallop’s “Senate Drive.” However, this antithesis of localism was not arco, Exxon, or any of the other multinational corporations that had the power to render Wyoming economically prostrate. Wallop maintained that there are “two distinct factions: those who believe the federal solution is the only matter of dealing . . . and those who believe that, given the opportunity, the priorities set at the state and local level are much more responsible to the needs of the people.” He identified Wyoming’s main problem as its loss of control over its “resources, water, and people to the federal bureaucracy.” 26 Wallop offered a clear explanation for Wyomingites’ frustration: “We now bend the needs of the state to fit the forms or the format of the federal government. And frequently it ought to be the other way around.” 27 The National Observer noted, “Wallop cleverly marries the state’s concerns over energy development with those broader anti-government feelings that have occupied the attention of the commentators this year.” 28 Politicians in Wyoming had long used a quixotic rhetoric when referring to the federal government. Although Republicans generally controlled the state government, even the state’s Democratic leaders often preached antifederalism. Candidates for office usually campaigned for decentralization of federal authority, reduced federal expenditures (except for defense and reclamation), and states’ rights. In the 1962 gubernatorial election, for example, candidates of both parties supported states’ rights and criticized federal aid. And the federal government was a powerful presence in the Wyoming economy, even by the standards of western states. That the government owned the mineral rights under 72 percent of the land and owned 48 percent of the surface was a constant and frustrating reminder of Washington’s significance in Wyomingites’ lives. Washington was both westerners’ deliverer and overseer, and they resented its beneficence and its authority. An anti-Washington sentiment that had been building in the West for years peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s. Wyoming historian T. A. Larson notes that the favorite pastime of editorial writers in Wyoming during the 1970s was criticizing the federal government. 29

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In the midst of economic and social change, the Wallop campaign tapped into this resentment and courted Wyomingites as if they were a rather noble assemblage, not one bounded narrowly by class, occupation, and place of origin. His campaign portrayed the antagonist of these noble Wyomingites as undemocratic, selfserving, impractical, and condescending. “For too long,” Wallop maintained, “we have allowed our lives to be dictated by the unaccountable world of the federal bureaucracy. . . . [T]he federal machine is that great army of decision makers whose every action affects our lives, not through laws we can change, but through regulations we cannot even interpret.”30 He accurately echoed the primary tenants of populism: a deference to the ordinary citizen for their conventional wisdom and superior intuition—for their basic “common sense.” The “people,” Wallop asserted, “are the deserved authorities about Wyoming, not the government experts or trained specialists, not any of the ‘elites.’ ” 31 Many editorials echoed Wallop. The Cheyenne Tribune maintained that “No one can make any estimate of the billions of dollars in public spending that have been loaded on the taxpayers of America by zealous bureaucrats in pursuit of regulation, or in the alternative, the ruse by legislators particularly in Congress to dream up ideas that will ‘save’ people from some imagined fate.” 32 If “Americanism” meant understanding and obeying the will of the people then Wallop was as American as they come.33 And he had the chaps and hat to prove it. In an environment in which corporate and federal power and influence often dictated the economic cycles of life, Wallop presented Wyoming voters with “local” cultural symbols that resounded with associations of individualism and self-sufficiency. “I offer a philosophy that expresses a faith in the good judgment and ability of Wyoming’s people to resolve the problems of their state at home and not in Washington,” he promised.34 The cowboy image was Wallop’s chosen symbol to articulate such values, and he often personally projected this image of localism and individuality. He frequently campaigned in his boots, hat, and western suit, for example, and his rhetoric matched his apparel.35 “If we all have to be grouped and cared for under some federal program, then

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the energy of this country will disappear,” Wallop reminded his audiences on the campaign stump. “Self-reliance, individual mobility, and the chance to take risks and fail are all important, and they are disappearing under the liberal attitudes we see around us now. . . . [T]he people of this country need to look more to themselves for self-reliance and less to the government.” 36 Wallop’s message depended on a mutual understanding with Wyomingites that it was these qualities—self-reliance and independence, not dependency and “weakness”—that were the true determinants of western authenticity. One of the campaign’s most memorable television advertisements featured three cowboys in a rural setting, saddling their horses. “A Wallop Senate Drive begins here,” a booming voice announces, “Three cowboys with a proclamation.” The advertisement could be mistaken for a Marlboro advertisement: a tight shot of a grizzled cowboy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. To the tune of “Rawhide,” a deep voice sings, “Come Join the Wallop Senate Drive, the Wallop Senate Drive, It’s Alert, It’s Alive, It’s Wyoming to the Spurs, the Wallop Senate Drive.” Then, in a scene remarkably reminiscent of the Remington painting “A Dash for the Timber,” the camera pans up the legs of galloping horses to riders in cowboy hats, including Malcolm Wallop in full western regalia. The western riders merge into a present-day parade scene, with fluttering American flags and Wallop leading the procession. Elderly women in the back of a wagon wave “Wallop” flags, as the booming voice continues: Go forth for Wyoming, Malcolm Wallop. Tell them in the U.S. Senate that the people of Wyoming are proud of their land and life and that a Wyoming Senator will fight every intrusion upon it. That you, Malcolm Wallop, will serve the nation best by serving Wyoming first, the very special needs of this great state, and by doing so, share its blessing with America . . . Come Join the Wallop Senate Drive, Malcolm Wallop for the U. S. Senate. Ride with us, Wyoming! In this one commercial spot, Wallop collapsed representations of Wyoming’s past with its present by overlaying visual images of

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Remington and Marlboro men with everyday working Wyomingites. Wallop not only embraced Wyoming’s exceptionalism, he became its protector. Wallop, the ads screamed, was a local—a fact that his hometown newspaper did not let go unremarked: “Wallop has a tradition going for him. . . . He is the third generation of a pioneer Wyoming family and his grandfather served in the 10th Wyoming legislature.” 37 Wallop’s campaign message to voters not only presented them with shared symbols but also responded to “common sense” notions of how democratic government should work. 38 “The state and the people have a stronger feeling about the truly unique characteristics of the state than would any administrative branch of the federal government,” Wallop proclaimed. “My own philosophy on the role of government is that it should remain as close as possible to those whom it affects, that government should have faith in the common sense of the governed.” 39 Many Wyomingites agreed that the biggest threat to genuine democracy was Uncle Sam himself. “Malcolm Wallop has demonstrated from the very beginning a real concern about individual freedoms. About getting things out of Washington D.C. that rightly belong here in Wyoming,” a Sheridan man opined. “What is the single most important political question from a domestic standpoint in America today?” asked an editorial in the Cheyenne Tribune: “Big Government.” A Casper man wrote: “the most urgent issue in this campaign is how do the American people stop the growth of the federal government in all aspects of their lives.” Another woman wondered, “What can we as taxpayers do? Let’s vote for men this election who will represent the American taxpayer and vote for lower taxes and less government.” “The Americans are being taxed to death now and many of us would resent paying more taxes to treat people who haven’t enough self-control to say no,” proclaimed a Casper woman. “As a matter of fact, the taxes we’re paying now are enough to drive a person to drink.” Even the predictably Democratic Casper Star Tribune railed about the excessive regulation of federal lands within the state’s borders: “Who knows better, a federal bureaucrat or those who live on and with the land? When regulation and action seem to be the product

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of a tormented bureaucratic mind without the remotest concept of the situation is dictated and must be cleared through Washington, the necessary flexibility and speed is seldom available. Wyoming must be able to react at its own speed, without waiting for others far removed from the scene.” 40 Wallop’s campaign both reflected and reinforced Wyomingites’ concerns about these “common-sensical” notions of what was wrong with the state and the nation. “The farther removed from the people government becomes, the more it becomes the master and less a servant,” Wallop proclaimed. “I feel the cynicism toward government is being caused by an isolation of the people from the decision-making process.” 41 Candidate Wallop continually insisted that whatever the issue was, the people of Wyoming were entitled to a choice in prioritizing their own lives. His campaign flyers insisted that what he could give Wyomingites was “ability to control their resources, their water, and their lives.” Wallop told members of one audience: “I don’t want to see Representative Bella Abzug, Senator Jacob Javits, or Senator Barry Goldwater making policy that concerns Elk Mountain or the Grand Tetons or downtown Rawlins.”42 Wallop’s commitment to getting the federal government out of Wyomingites’ lives held the promise of a return to a time when citizens maintained power and control over their own existence— a time when “real” democracy operated. “The farther removed from your home, the more [government] becomes your master. Our country was not founded on such,” he reminded the public. “I offer a philosophy that expresses a faith in the good judgment and ability of Wyoming’s people to resolve the problems of their state at home and not in Washington. I propose to offer a clear choice as to what the role of government should be and at what level it is most responsible to the people.” 43 As the federal government’s most egregious transgressions, Wallop pointed to recent Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha) regulations, which in one case required farmers and ranchers to supply portable toilets and water fountains in every quadrant of their fields. It was reasonable to conclude that such a requirement in a state where the average rancher possessed

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more three thousand acres would likely be understood as beyond the boundaries of common sense. The local column “The Wyoming Intelligencer” in the Casper Star Tribune revealed to its readership that one Wyoming ranch would need five thousand privies to comply with the new regulations. The column quoted the ranch woman as follows: “We will have to devote our entire ranch income for the next 126 years to comply. Can you imagine standing on an overlook and seeing these fiberglass mountains to bureaucracy stretching away to the horizon?” The Star Tribune noted that the ranch’s facilities would also require proper toiletpaper holders and locks on the doors to ensure privacy to boot. An editorial in the Sheridan Press also weighed in on the issue. It noted that taxpayers paid $500,000 for the osha advisory pamphlets and, more pointedly, that “the epa still provides subsidized parking for its employees as do many other federal agencies.” 44 Wallop’s television spots once again responded to such frustrations with local symbolism. In one advertisement, a cowboy buckles his chaps and saddles his horse. “Everywhere you look these days, “the narrator says, “the federal government is telling you what you think, telling you how you ought to do things, setting up rules you can’t follow.” The cowboy straps a portable toilet on his horse and rides off, with the words: “I think the federal government has gone too far. Now they say if you don’t take a portable facility along on a roundup, you can’t go. We need someone to tell them about Wyoming. Malcolm Wallop will.” Wallop demonstrated his own localism through his ability to criticize the “idiotic opinions laid on us from above by people who understand nothing of the ramifications of the real problems out here, especially at a time when everyone is making money, or expenses at least, but agriculture.” 45 If many Wyoming voters believed the government was working against them, Wallop demonstrated that the government was simply absurd. The campaign continually trotted out the cowboy as a representative local image and then juxtaposed it to his opposite, that minion of the federal government, the bureaucrat. Wallop labeled his Democratic opponent, Senator McGee, as one of these cogs in the wheel of the federal juggernaut who took power away

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from Wyomingites: “McGee represents the essence of the liberal Democrat federal solution to everything . . . and is a major part of this ridiculous overextension of rules and regulations.” 46 McGee served as chairman of the Senate Civil Service Committee and was the fourth-ranking member of the all-important Appropriations Committee. He had Washington clout. Despite the incumbent’s success at bringing the bacon home to Wyoming, Wallop pegged McGee as the alternative to localism and empowerment, and many voters agreed. A Casper man wrote to the Casper Star Tribune: “Senator McGee represents the federal establishment and he thrives on greater federal domination of the American people.” McGee, Wallop accused, was “part of the federal bureaucracy that has over-committed and over regulated the American people.” The Wallop campaign charged that McGee had been away from Wyoming too long and that the majority of his contributions originated with out-of-state contributors who were not necessarily “aligned with the best interests of the state.” 47 McGee, Wallop assessed, supported a directed and regulated society in which the people in control were not accountable to the public. If Wallop’s campaign presented the cowboy as the ultimate local symbol, then McGee, the smart-dressing university professor–Washington insider, was his antithesis. And Wallop offered himself as the local choice against a candidate beholden to the “establishment.” McGee tried his best to present himself as the protector of Wyoming’s interest in Washington dc and attempted to align himself with the supporters of local control against an unreasonable and unbarring federal presence. “Congress spends half its time in Washington undoing the latest brainstorms of bureaucrats who might have good ideas to solve the problems of New York City, but which are as practical here as iceboxes for igloos,” he admitted. 48 McGee’s attempt to paint himself as the local candidate was an uphill battle. Still, the Rock Springs Miner endorsed McGee and saluted his clout: “It is apparent at a glance that it is Gale McGee who does the actual work in obtaining funds for Sweetwater county as well as the state of Wyoming.” When the traditionally Democratic Casper Star Tribune endorsed McGee,

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however, it did so as if mustering up a forced compliment for an ugly relative: “Granted his voting record at times has shown an undesirable swing toward the needs and demands of big labor and fat government.” Further, they admitted, “we prefer Republican Wallop’s philosophy where it involves limiting government and McGee can be called a spender.” Finally, however, the editor coughed up the endorsement, concluding, “in the main, the Democratic Senator can deliver what Wyoming needs.” 49 In contrast, the Gillette News Record, in the heart of the energy frontier, endorsed Wallop: “In view of the fact that Wyoming needs a representative in the U.S. Senate who will more closely reflect its conservatism, its belief in less, not more governmental control . . . [a] vote for Malcolm Wallop will give Wyoming a more representative voice in Washington.” 50 The election of Wallop was an upset. He was expected to win in the traditionally Republican northern counties, but he won 56 percent of the vote and most counties in the southern half of the state, normally the Democratic stronghold. “Wallop’s strength in the southern tier of counties, traditionally Democratic, proved the biggest surprise of the election,” the Rock Springs Daily Miner reported. “I just hoped to break even in southern Wyoming,” Wallop admitted, expressing surprise he had done so well in McGee’s former domain. McGee even lost in his home county by thirty-five votes, “astounding local Democrats,” one observer commented.” Pollsters rated McGee an early favorite in this year’s race,” the Casper Star Tribune noted, “but Wallop’s campaign style . . . helped push the McGee forces to the wall as the race tightened.” An article in the Washington dc—based Spotlight magazine was headlined, “Cowboy Ropes Senate Seat: Wallops Liberal” and depicted a cowboy tying up a man in a business suit with the caption, “Wallop Hogtied McGee.” 51 The Washington Post reported that the pressing issue now facing the senator-elect was whether he “wants to dress down the deer carcass he has shot during a hunting expedition on his 6,000acre Polo ranch before or after he goes to Washington to discuss committee assignments with the Senate powers.” 52 On his upcoming move to the nation’s capital Wallop remarked, “I’ve never

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lived in a city before,” and attributed his victory to Wyomingites’ desire “to protect what we value so much in Wyoming . . . our openness, individuality, and way of life. They put their faith in a long shot because I represented what they felt.” He remarked to a local reporter before going to Washington that he had to spend some time fixing fences and getting work done on the ranch that he had neglected, and he reiterated his loyalty to a “western” agenda: “The western states seem to be the only unrepresented regional attitude in America yet the region seems to be one of the most precious.” He would always keep the family ranch, he said, “just to keep my roots intact in Wyoming. The ranching way of life is my heritage and lifestyle.” 53 The Sheridan Press commented: It’s nice to have a man who worries about fixing a few fences and getting some things done on his Big Horn ranch and a man who wants to take some quiet time with his family. It’s nice to hear him say he feels the Wallop drive would never have had a chance if his opponent had hit any of the dreams of Wyoming. It is like being proud of a son who accomplished something big against great odds. It is like the pride felt in the land and the people of the land from whence came those we know well. It’s nice because he’s a product of home and because he’s a friend. 54 The symbols and iconography Wallop used to articulate Wyomingites’ frustration with federal power and taxes may have been local, but the disenchantment with federal power and taxes certainly was not. Wallop’s campaign style and rhetoric previewed Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. As early as 1974, Reagan declared that “we have had too much government, too much red tape, too many taxes, and too many regulations.” 55 Wallop’s campaign also reflected the national rise of conservative populism, which began in the 1960s with the New Right’s response to rising public impatience with the antiwar movement and governmental solutions to social problems. George Wallace employed a populist disenchantment with the federal government in his 1964 and 1968 election bids by posing as the champion of Americans harassed by arrogant

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but inept bureaucrats. And in one observer’s words, he used race to draw a “class line between two different groups of white people.”56 With the rise of this “New Conservatism,” many activists and politicians employed a populist rhetoric in order to oppose social reform instead of support it. The New Right maintained that a “new establishment” had gradually taken hold of America’s institutions and was running them in a “haughty manner inimical to the interests of most citizens as the robber barons of old.” 57 In 1980, resistance to Washington and a continuing fear of inflation sparked the same backlash against liberalism that Wyoming had expressed four years earlier. The Democratic candidate for president, Jimmy Carter, lost to the Republicans in Wyoming by twice as many votes as McGee did in 1976. 58 When Reagan labeled the government the great problem facing most American voters and said that government pursued abstract or utopian ideas that simply defied common sense, he drew on much of the antielitist rhetoric that the right had been using since the 1960s. Reagan’s populism invoked a particular traditional America that invited voters to go forward to the past rather than back to the future. In his nomination speech in 1976, Reagan remarked: “Our national capital has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefit, increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes. Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems, the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business and big labor.”59 The New Right that Reagan represented found powerful political symbols by taking western self-images of rugged individualism and combining them with a potent resentment of the federal government.60 Malcolm Wallop was one of many local politicians around the country who articulated and fueled Americans’ disenchantment with the federal bureaucracy. And it is not surprising that he employed local images to do so, for western representations served double duty as symbols of both America and the West. What is significant is that the grandson of the very people Jack Flagg had detested with such vehemence and against whom he directed his most virulent populist rhetoric in the 1890s had successfully used

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Flagg’s cowboy past to attack the “new establishment” in the 1970s. For Malcolm Wallop was not your average rancher. When the Washington Post reported Wallop’s victory, the story quoted him as follows: “We’re no different than anyone else who has had a piece of land that has been good to them for almost half a century.” The article acknowledged that “some ranchers in this part of the country are Yale graduates like Wallop. However, not too many have brother-in-laws who are English Earls or had grandfathers who sat jointly in the Wyoming legislature and England’s House of Lords or have entertained Prince Philip on their ranch when he came to visit.” A Wyoming local conceded, “Malcolm Wallop is the closest thing we have out here to rancher aristocracy.” 61 Wallop’s “rancher aristocracy” ran deep. Under the headline “Wyoming Earl Soon Will Take His Place in House of Lords,” the Wyoming State Tribune reported in December 1931 that “Hon. Oliver H. Wallop, Earl of Portsmouth, left his home near Sheridan in the fall of 1925 to return to England to become the head of one of the old titled estates of England.” Malcolm Wallop’s grandfather, Oliver, was the second son of the fifth Earl of Portsmouth and Lady Eveline Herbert, attended Eton College, and graduated from Oxford in 1883. Directly after his graduation, he set out for America with a firm determination to become a cowboy. That quest first took him to Jamestown, North Dakota, and from there, the aspiring cowboy headed south to Wyoming. He settled along the mountains near Big Horn, Wyoming, near his cousin, Malcolm Moncreiffe, son of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, Baronet of Perthshire, and Lady Louisa Hay. The cousins raised cattle and supplied horses to the British government during the Boer War and World War I. The Moncreiffes are credited with introducing polo to the Sheridan area, and Oliver Wallop himself was rated quite highly as a three-goal player. Matches were played Wednesday and Sunday afternoons in the summertime, and they often included local cowboys, who mixed it up with some of the best polo players in the country. One such matchup in the summer of 1915 pitted the local cowboys—known as the “Sun Flowers” because of the light-yellow shirts they wore—

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against Moncreiffe’s team. Moncreiffe’s memorial in the Big Horn Pioneers’ history book succinctly recalls, “He was a very good polo player.” 62 Oliver Wallop married Malcolm Moncreiffe’s sister-in-law, Marguerite Walker, and continued to ranch under the Big Horns. He blended into life in the West, began a family, became a U.S. citizen, and served in the tenth Wyoming legislature. When four of his older brothers died without male heirs, Oliver Wallop became the seventh Earl of Portsmouth in 1922, which forced him to renounce his U.S. citizenship and return to his ancestral home in North Devonshire. But he returned to Wyoming every year and in 1935 told a reporter in a Lincoln, Nebraska, barbershop, “You’ve heard the word Wallop many times, and it was one of my ancestors who was responsible for starting its usage. He whipped the French fifteen times straight in battle which led to future beatings being termed ‘wallopings.’ ” 63 When Malcolm Wallop’s grandfather became Earl of Portsmouth, his uncle became Viscount Lymington, and the viscount took his place among the peerage in the English House of Lords when the earl died in 1943. Wallop’s own father graduated from Yale in 1928 and returned to Wyoming to ranch and raise registered cattle. Wallop’s “Polo Ranch” included a 6,560-square-foot mansion with six bedrooms, six baths, a formal dining room, library, garden room with fountain and three fireplaces, and polo grounds that were among the oldest in the United States. 64 Malcolm attended the prestigious Cates Boarding School in California and then went on to Yale, where he captained the Yale polo team and led them to two intercollegiate championships. (Wallop was inducted into the Big Horn Polo Hall of Fame in 1995.) 65 He would be continually associated with British royalty as well. Wallop’s sister married Lord Porchester, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth’s, and became Lady Porchester. Prince Philip requested a visit and stayed five days on the Wallop Ranch in 1969, where he acknowledged that Lady Porchester’s stories of her upbringing had piqued his interest in Wyoming. The queen herself visited in later years. 66 To diminish Wallop’s local appeal, the McGee camp did point out his differences from the average Wyoming voter. But the Wal-

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lop campaign charged that “The McGee camp has blitzed the newspapers of this state with an ugly organized letter-writing campaign slurring, ‘Sir Malcolm Wallop.’ Their attempt seems to be to foster a notion that Malcolm Wallop is something other than a Wyoming rancher and businessman who represents the interests of Wyoming.” The letter “blitz” referred to one letter written by the president of the Wyoming chapter of the afl-cio, which declared, “Sir Malcolm Wallop should be driven out to pasture.”67 The Congressional Quarterly noted that in contrast to his 1974 gubernatorial bid, in 1976 Wallop was running as a conservative Republican and that his ads sought to “portray him as a rugged westerner, often showing him on horseback. The ads refer to the Wallop Senate Drive, implying that the effort is more like a cattle drive than a political campaign. This is necessary to stamp out the impression that Wallop is an outsider. He was born in New York City.” Another national story in the National Observer began: “Malcolm Wallop, gentleman rancher, wealthy investor, and U.S. Senate aspirant, hoists a shiny black boot atop a vinyl-covered restaurant chair and leans forward against his knee.” It was a characterization Wallop disliked and countered in later remarks: “I’d like to see [the reporter] walk a few miles in -30˚ weather trying to save a newborn calf.” 68 Despite Wallop’s spin, voters did take note of his background. One woman wrote to her local paper: “I see Wallop galloping across my tv screen and throwing a bale of hay on a truck. One can’t tell if one of the riders is Wallop. It might be even Ronnie Reagan in one of his B movies.” An Evansville man wrote: “After watching Malcolm Wallop’s latest ad on tv I think that if he wants to play John Wayne, he should go to Hollywood with his white hat. We need someone in Washington that wants to do more than play cowboys and Indians.” Another man commented caustically, “In reviewing the two candidates, a working man or woman voting for Mr. Wallop is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” 69 There was apparently enough local speculation concerning Wallop’s upbringing to elicit a response from the candidate. Late in the campaign, he commented that he was “saddened and dismayed when sharp or hateful remarks filter back to the family,” and

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explained that, like many ranchers, his wealth was in the land. Contributions tapered off because Wyomingites assumed Wallop would use his own money to fund his campaign. “There is an unspoken assumption that somehow we will draw on a limitless financial reservoir of our own this fall, financing the Senate drive personally,” Wallop explained. In his appeals to contributors, he stressed both his western authenticity and his noblesse oblige: “I am a wealthy man, my children represent the fourth generation of Wallops who have lived continuously in Sheridan County. My grandfather arrived here from England in the 1880s and was one of the early permanent settlers in this part of the state. We have done well since. In return, we have tried to serve the state that has been so good to us.” 70 Wyomingites were certainly conscious of Wallop’s campaign strategy. A Casper Star Tribune editorial noted that “Some viewers have said that pictures of Malcolm Wallop, Republican senatorial candidate, riding with a cavalcade, reminded them of a Japanese remake of the Virginian series and Medicine Bow, galloping into our living room with Wallop wearing a white hat. That’s symbolism, circa ‘Hop a Long Cassidy.’ Another shows Wallop heaving hay bales. But what really catches even falling eyes is his dress. He is wearing a proper blue Yale shirt while grunting up the bale.” If the editor shared with voters an awareness of Wallop’s conscious use of symbolism, he also realized that it was all part of campaigning. For McGee also catered to Wyoming voters in appropriate fashion. “And then there’s Senator Gale McGee, the incumbent Democrat, talking to the hard hats around oil drilling rigs in one shot and wearing what appears to be a mod, abbreviated version of a yellow rain slicker while conversing with a stockman,” the paper observed. 71 Local symbolism informed both campaigns, but Wallop combined it with a ranching background, which was widely perceived as being more fundamentally western, and a distaste for federal intervention, which he shared with many Wyoming voters. By the 1980s, both Wyoming’s old and new industries were in free fall. Bust had replaced boom on the energy frontier, and the state reverted to its more familiar role as the economic underachiever of the nation. 72 Thousands of workers left towns like

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Jeffrey City, although many remained in Wyoming. By 1982, one writer described the streets of Jeffrey City “as quiet as the streets in the movie ‘On the Beach’ after the human race has just fallen asleep for good.” In the late 1980s, the town’s new corporate owner suggested turning the site into a minimum-security prison. (The other proposed alternative was a recreation and vacation center renamed “Home on the Range.”)73 By 1987, Wyoming’s per capita income had fallen to thirty-seventh in the nation, 18 percent below the national average. In the 1988 campaign, Wallop won reelection in a very narrow victory. Times had clearly changed. Wallop’s Democratic opponent claimed for himself the mantle of populist working man, in tune with Wyomingites’ self-perception, and repeatedly pointed out that his elitist opponent had “entertained the Queen of England.” 74 A decade before when Wyomingites also faced an uncharted future, many voters had chosen to respond to the shared western past that Wallop offered them. That common appreciation of and connection to a western past allowed them to identity with a wealthy, aristocratic British family most would otherwise have had little in common with. Not all Wyoming voters embraced Wallop’s symbolism—many voted against him or did not vote at all. 75 But the campaign emphasized Wallop’s cowboy image and “western” past for a reason. And the cultural image that Wallop articulated through his cowboy persona was certainly accessible to Wyoming voters in many walks of life. An observer of the Wright community, which consisted totally of arco workers, noted that “Wright has become a conservative community that values a family oriented lifestyle. . . . [T]hose values mesh nicely with those of their ranching neighbors.” 76 Voters from across the class spectrum identified and responded to a cowboy image that conveyed deeply held cultural values. Wallop’s campaign style also reminded Wyomingites, rich and poor, of their national cultural importance at a time when their public role more closely resembled that of a giant sacrificial crater for the nation’s energy needs. For all their western bravado, their animosity toward the federal government revealed their lingering insecurities over the trials and benefits of being widely considered as the embodiment

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of western authenticity. Their dependence on the federal government perhaps reminded them that their colonial status was as accurately “western” as their celebrated individualism. Wallop’s campaign gave voice to a regional pride, a coherent identity, and a prominent place in the national narrative. “This is an area that up to [Wallop’s election] the eastern power structure just doesn’t know exists,” replied Wallop after his victory. “One woman didn’t even know we are a state. That causes me great trepidation.” 77 Wallop was not afraid to show his own westernness and, in the process, proudly affirmed Wyoming’s. 78 Remington and Wister, as well as other turn-of-the-century representers of the region, created a knowledge about the west as a home of rugged, valiant icons. In the years since, popular culture and westerners themselves have reinforced these notions of this imagined space. If Wallop’s campaign cowboys could conjure up associations with individualism and independence it was because a discourse about the West had already imbued cowboys with those meanings. Wallop could use western symbols to claim his own localism because these symbols had a resonance and history that Wyomingites understood. 79 For many Protestant Americans in the turbulent late nineteenth century, the nostalgia-laden West had offered a reassuring, shared memory and the promise of a return to a common past. That discourse about the West came to define not only western legitimacy but its opposite, which at the turn of the century, included Populist cowboys and urban immigrant workers. In its portrayal of “western” attributes, the Wallop campaign capitalized on this nostalgic past to unify Wyomingites, turning great memories into political theology. Malcolm Wallop’s campaign wove together Flagg’s populism with threads of Wister and Remington’s western narrative and thereby found political success. Flagg and Wallop may have directed their distrust against different sets of “elites,” but they were both populists who clearly identified who the “elites” were and attempted to harness the same mass resentments against them. They were both fervent in viewing working-class whites with their common sense, moral values, and toughness as superior to elites who never “got their hands dirty.” 80 Jack Flagg,

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however, viewed the government as the people’s best ally against the “Money Elite.” It was an enricher of democracy rather than a handmaiden of a haughty set of officials. 81 By 1976, Wallop could use Flagg’s iconic image, on the one hand, and his populist rhetoric, on the other, to define a whole other set of illegitimate players in the West, now embodied by the federal government. The University of Wyoming professor who had queried in the late 1970s, “Wyoming, Still the Cowboy State?” concluded: When most of our minerals are gone, what will we do with our land? Who will want to stay to survive the winters and the wind? Who will appreciate the sunrise? Things may be changing, but old satisfactions remain. There is pride in the newborn calf. And in changing, the cowboy, too will not vanish. He has been a critical contribution to this state. Difficult days are ahead. Yet one suspects he will endure. Will Wyoming continue to be the cowboy state? I think we should hope the answer is yes. 82 In his campaign, Wallop adapted these familiar western symbols and meanings to new social realities in a way that his former university professor opponent, Gale McGee, simply could not. 83 Wallop’s use of western symbolism constructed by latenineteenth-century elites enabled him to align himself with average Wyomingites from whom his status, money, and education would otherwise have largely alienated him.84 It was this blend of the imagery of a common past with a populist message that made the Wallop campaign a success. A past that allowed Wyomingites to remember themselves as independent and self-sufficient has been a mixed blessing for their present as well as their future. 85 A nostalgic western narrative and its symbols were both Wyoming’s collective memory and the beloved popular culture of America at large. Having one’s own local symbols be integral icons in the national mythology could be both proudly empowering and a cultural straightjacket. After all, at some point, westerners might have to live up to their legendary status, a perhaps unfair demand. The critique of western states as hypocritical welfare recipients is a familiar one. It was

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the western myth itself that set westerners up, as it were, to be reminded all too often of their own hypocrisy. Still, it is a charge that is often accurate. Wyoming’s stockmen have always supported some amount of governmental interference, including tariffs in the early years and restrictions on beef imports later. 86 Malcolm Wallop himself championed the conservative notions of the free market but complained, “we are the only major country in the world that allows beef imports.”87 Historian T. A. Larson notes that Wyoming’s economy has historically been characterized by two main things: it produced raw materials, and it depended on a regular infusion of federal money to keep the economy viable. In 1975, Wyoming was still receiving more back from Washington than it was sending. 88 Wyoming has long been characterized by its colonial economic role, and the Cowboy State has engaged in a seemingly endless struggle to achieve economic equilibrium. A 1959 analysis of the Wyoming economy cited as obstacles to economic development lack of markets, lack of skilled labor, high labor costs, lack of adequate water supply, and an unfavorable climate, among other things. 89 That Wyomingites voiced familiar western protests against federalism while they simultaneously pocketed federal dollars, then, is perhaps less important than the simple fact that, regardless of the federal government’s role, Wyoming was the unfortunate possessor of any number of barriers to economic stability all on its own. In their protests against federal intrusiveness, Wyomingites continually reminded themselves of their legendary individuality and self-sufficiency, which Wallop so effectively echoed in his campaign. That Wyomingites enlisted the tenets of the myth in their own protestations is hardly a surprise. Wyomingites, after all, were no different than the rest of the nation, who had been reared on stories and images of the West’s rugged individualists. However, it was westerners alone who had to live up to the expectations the stories demanded of them. T. A. Larson writes that during the Great Depression, Wyoming’s stockmen served as “vocal aggressive custodians of what remained of the frontier spirit.” And as he also points out, those

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frontier attitudes of independence and self-reliance could be found not only on the “isolated farms and ranches but everywhere else in the state.” In 1930, the state’s governor declared that Wyoming could take care of its own unemployed without federal assistance. In 1933, Harry Hopkins, head of the Works Progress Administration, complimented Wyoming for being the only state or territory that had not asked for or received any federal assistance for its needy. Governor Miller acknowledged the burden of living up to cultural expectations of rugged individualism and authentic westernness as defined by easterners and claimed by westerners. He told the legislature in 1933: “Wyoming was the single state in the Union which refrained from borrowing any of this money and, in this fact, we took considerable pride for some time. I have been wondering presently whether we are entitled to indulge in that feeling of pride. As a result of surveys which I have caused to be made through reliable agencies, there are now being revealed thousands of cases of undernourished children and likewise many cases indicating a lack of proper clothing for such children and adults.” 90 Wyoming’s western independence did not last—it accepted federal assistance in abundance for the remainder of the Depression—but rhetoric about western individualism permeated much of the resistance to and resentment of Roosevelt and the New Deal. The stories that a culture tells of itself, and that others tell of it, provide a valuable sense of identity and connection to a shared past. But the power of that narrative also imposes limitations on how we imagine ourselves within it. Perhaps the greatest drawback of invented traditions, then, is that they can frustrate other imaginings, other possibilities beyond their often limited boundaries. The executive manager of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association suggested that the true sources of ranchers’ problems were their own “invented traditions,” which insisted that “real” westerners uphold the very qualities that Wallop ran as a representative of. The manager pointed out that unless people in western agriculture joined together and modified their rugged “individualism,” overproduction and low prices would continue to plague them, and “the U.S. would continue its slide into hands of

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men subsidized by income from other sources.” 91 This is perhaps the most difficult thing to negotiate regarding invented traditions: that devotion to them can interfere with the ability of the people who claim them to form creative solutions to new challenges. A Wyoming journalist writes: “[We are pinned down by] our hostility toward new people and ideas we would have to welcome if we really wanted to embrace change.” 92 Wyomingites, ranchers and laborers, rural and town dwellers, had legitimate concerns in the 1970s. Ranchers faced the familiar but nonetheless threatening predicament of unstable markets and diminishing importance in an urbanizing West. 93 Wyomingites of all backgrounds faced an unpredictable economic future as the perennial colonial outpost for the nation’s energy needs and were left to face the environmental costs that came with that role. And, yes, they were frustrated by a distant federal government whose policies often seemed incongruous with western realities. There is much to be said for the political proposition that individuals and local communities should have more control over their own destinies and should not be subject to the bureaucratic dictates of a central government. Wallop’s campaign, and western conservatism in general, maintained that all would be well if only the West could gloriously return to a time of local control and power, a time when the cowboy, which Wallop put to use so symbolically, rode the range. As David Lowenthal writes, however, “the prime function of memory is not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.” 94 The memory Wallop evoked ignored the fact that Wyoming had always been a colony of someone or something. The energy frontier of the 1970s was simply the latest incarnation. Wallop offered federal deregulation as a panacea for a state whose daily economic life was dictated by out-of-state corporations and faraway markets. Jack Flagg and his contemporaries understood that government could mediate between capital and labor, between powerful outsiders and ordinary locals. By scapegoating the federal government and denying its benefits altogether, Wallop foreclosed the opportunity to pragmatically use governmental power to address

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these pressing concerns about community and the exploitation of the state’s resources. 95 In the election of 1976, Wyomingites defined themselves as “authentic” westerners standing firm against an eastern, federal master, and the determination to maintain this image did little to solve any of their problems. A 1997 edition of High Country News ran the headline, “While the New West Booms, Wyoming Mines, Drills . . . and Languishes.” The article’s author, Paul Krza, noted that calling Wyoming “the Cowboy State” was almost a joke. By 1986, the state had become an industrial island locked in economically, politically, and psychologically by the mineral industry and the insular attitude of its citizens. “We in Wyoming,” Krza wrote, “still seem to run our public lives based on a series of myths.” Krza noted that despite the cowboy nomenclature, in the latter part of the twentieth century, agriculture accounted for only 2 percent of the state’s economy. Krza connected Wyoming’s woeful economic state to a myth whose nostalgic vision insists that Wyoming is what “America was.” He posited that the main way Wyoming resembles the good old days is more accurately in its familiar colonial status. However, the colonizers were not cattle barons but the mineral and energy industry, based in such faraway and distinctly nonwestern environs as France, Korea, Belgium, and Australia. 96 A collective memory can be profoundly limiting in its self-satisfaction. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wyoming’s, and the West’s, economic fortunes are as notoriously unstable as its cultural symbols are consistent. Certainly, an imaginary past that connects people to universally loved, independent, and romantic western figures galloping across Remington paintings is a welcome escape from a bleak financial statement. And after all, “Remembering the past,” as David Lowenthal notes, “is crucial for our sense of identity.” 97 Identifying those “outside the narrative” as the sources of regional difficulties also went a long way toward salving the economic woes of the living remnants of the “authentic” West of popular imagination. It explained to many westerners why they continued to struggle, although they worked hard and fought the elements, the markets, and the changes to the region’s economy. It

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was all too easy to blame a murky hierarchy far off in Washington dc if the individualistic and independent westerner turned out to be neither. And an invented tradition that provides westerners with an important place in the national mythology undoubtedly ameliorates the view from a new housing development on the outskirts of Gillette. But this understanding of the mythic West, however limiting, is now a part of the region’s, and nation’s, collective identity. It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect westerners to replace the western narrative of rugged, proud independent individualists with anything else. Instead of replacing one myth with another, westerners can and should perhaps pragmatically and consciously adapt this narrative to create new possibilities beyond the limited benefits of marketing it for tourism. The challenge to Wyomingites and all westerners is to not be prisoners of their celebrated past but, instead, to harness and adapt their invented traditions to serve their future. Their famed individualism has the potential to unite westerners not only against the federal government but also against multinational corporations and the vagaries of the distant and uncertain markets that have so long controlled the region’s fate. Perhaps the myth formulated in the minds of easterners in the late nineteenth century could be put to use to create a new western sustainability in the twenty-first. Jack Flagg could not expect anything more from his adopted region. Malcolm Wallop retired from the U.S. Senate in 1995. His current project is a nonprofit organization called “Frontiers for Freedom.” The group’s objective is “maintaining and restoring the American system of limited government and individual rights. . . . Frontiers seeks to lead the conservative movement from the front line of the battle against an ever more powerful and intrusive federal government. ‘Frontiers of Freedom’ is the antithesis to the Sierra Club and Vice President Al Gore’s ‘Earth in the Balance.’ ” The group’s Web site presents visitors’ browsers with a visual feast of western figures, including a panoramic view of galloping horses above the heading, “Frontiers of Freedom.” To find out more about the organization, you can click on an icon that is a silhouette of a

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cowboy. A frontal view of a cowboy walking by his horse into the sunset offers information about issues; a cowboy on horseback with an outstretched rope leads you to more information about contacts; and a click on a silhouette of two cowboys on horses leads to more information about the group’s leadership: Leadership means choosing a direction that opens up vast possibilities to bring out the best in others. Our Founding Fathers knew a thing or two about leadership. They knew that the combination of a democratic form of government and a capitalistic economy gave our citizens the opportunity to aim high, chart their own destiny and realize their version of the American Dream. At a time when our democratic rights and free enterprise system are being chipped away by the proponents of Big Government, Frontiers of Freedom stands tall in our defense of individual liberty and personal responsibility.

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——— Normal A tiny icon of Buffalo Bill’s extended arm—a part of Gertrude * PgEnds: Whitney’s statue “Buffalo Bill—The Scout”—leads you to information about contributions. [144], (3 In the late nineteenth century, Wister and Remington produced western symbols to serve an agenda that transmitted values and behavior they deemed truly and purely American. Their self-reliant, blue-blooded cowboys allowed the nation to reinvigorate itself in a manner that lessened the impact of the urban hordes whom Remington and Wister considered ticks on the American psyche. In the decades after, western symbols, from the working cowboy to Buffalo Bill, were contorted and reconfigured to acculturate the immigrant masses, express localism, assert regional pride and identity, and define common enemies. Wyoming had been the incubator of these potent cultural symbols. By the end of the twentieth century, a Wyomingite was even utilizing regional symbols and the “truth” about western identity to proselytize a very conservative, Republican message for national consumption. But while Wister’s and Remington’s creations lived vibrantly on in the national ethos, flesh-and-blood Wyomingites and westerners

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continued to search for their long sought-after stability. Whose interests have best been served by the ways in which the famed western myth has been put to use in Wyoming and the West is a question the region’s residents, and Wyomingites in particular, should not be afraid to ask.

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0.0pt Wyoming’s status in the national narrative as a place apart—a western Brigadoon, of a sort—has endured as a part of the national mythology for over one hundred years. The western narrative of independence, heroism, and “true” Americanness that Wyoming represents has been trotted out over and over again to reassure the nation in times of transformation and turmoil. In many ways, then, its narrative of rugged independence and self-sufficiency has become an American story as well. But although national trends may come and go, Wyoming’s image remains consistently rugged and western. Years after Wister chronicled his own pilgrimage west, another young ethnographer of all things Wyoming made her way to the state. And, curiously, her first impressions echoed Wister’s own of 1885: “Each breath you take tells you no one else has ever used it before,” Wister wrote on his first trip west.1 Wyoming similarly impressed his young emulator: “I had the experience of waking up not knowing where I was, whether I was a man or a woman, or which toothbrush was mine. . . . The vitality of the people I was working with flushed out what had become a hallucinatory rawness inside me. I threw away my clothes and bought new ones.


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I cut my hair. The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me.” Gretel Ehrlich recorded these impressions not in 1900, or even in 1920, but in the late 1970s. Her memoir, The Solace of Open Spaces, is less a literary reflection than a pure ethnography about a region and its inhabitants. Ehrlich positions herself as the urban outsider who comes west to heal the wounds accrued from losing a lover to a fatal disease. During her experience in the West, she observes, critiques, and takes part, always with the acute selfrealization that she is very separate from the westerners whom she chronicles. Indeed, it is in the process of articulating their difference that she discovers herself. 2 It is a positioning remarkably similar to Wister’s over one hundred years before, and their observations about the landscape, culture, and people are also notably analogous, even at times identical. The nation itself may have dramatically changed since 1885, when Wister arrived in the West, but Wyoming’s western singularity had endured, at least in the musings of its eastern chroniclers. As in Wister’s era, the state’s distinctiveness is the only thing of particular noteworthiness to Ehrlich. It is this disjunction between herself and the “foreign” landscape, people, and their habits that intrigues and renews her. She is fascinated with their curious mannerisms, customs, and speech. The Solace of Open Spaces serves as a kind of interpretive guidebook for her audience-atlarge, whom she assumes shares far more with her than they do with those she observes. “Friendliness is a tradition,” she observes of westerners but also notes: The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph their thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen, pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes, or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence with a fat wedge of Copenhagen beneath their lower lips and take in the whole scene. These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical, but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clean. Conversation goes on in what sounds like

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a private code; a few phrases imply a complex of meanings. Sentence structure is shortened to the skin and bones of a thought. Descriptive words are dropped, even verbs. Ehrlich comes across as a combination of Owen Wister and Jane Goodall. She takes pains to demonstrate that Remington’s heroic western types are reassuredly alive and well in the Wyoming of 1976. Ehrlich attributes their endurance to their western heritage, which she reminds her readers was a history of individualism and optimism. She assures us that “the West, however disfigured, persists.” But by 1976, of course, Ehrlich’s new residence resembled less the Cowboy State than the energy frontier. Wyoming’s central role in the energy boom dominated the state’s politics, concerns, and economy throughout the 1970s. Most Wyomingites spent their days hauling coal, not punching cows, and the vast majority lived and worked in urban areas, albeit in the context of Wyoming’s tiny population. Yet there is barely a mention of evidence of the “energy boom” in all of Ehrlich’s observations, although its impact was most certainly all around her. To an amazing extent, she saw, or accepted as “real,” what Remington and Wister had seen before her and iconized in their seemingly eternal representations. What was “real” was singular, different, and thus noteworthy. What makes Ehrlich’s “ethnography” so interesting is that, in many ways, it is a reflection of the power of popular culture. It is somehow appropriate that she met her husband at a John Wayne film festival in Cody, Wyoming. He too, she observed, was a cultural straddler. “He could talk books as well as ranching, medieval history and the mountains, ideas and mules.” He was apparently “civilized,” but western enough. The discourse of “westernness” provided an accepted niche for Ehrlich as an observer and westerners as the observed. Ehrlich’s impressions of all in the West that is true and authentic reveal the power of culture in determining what we discern as real—how we privilege certain ways of knowing and representing over others that are left unseen and unremarked. Her observations also divulge the enigmatic if intriguing circularity

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of how culture functions. Did western novels and movies inform her about the West? Or might they have informed her subjects, who only faithfully mimicked them? The characteristics of what constituted a pure and true western identity, after all, had to be defined and designated before they could be acted out or interpreted as authentic, and this “knowledge” is most certainly the multifarious work of culture. On her return to New York, where does Ehrlich look when she is “feeling lonely for Wyoming?” To the Marlboro advertisements in the subway, of course, though she takes some exception to the romantic national image of the cowboy and subtly corrects it: “Instead of a macho, trigger-happy man, our culture has perversely wanted him to be, the cowboy is more apt to be convivial, quirky and softhearted . . . they show their stoicism by laughing at themselves. . . . [W]hat we’ve interpreted as toughness . . . weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye, and growl in the voice, only masks the tenderness inside. . . . Ranchers still tip their hats and say ‘Howdy, ma’am’ instead of shaking hands with me.” She defines her western icons but presents her readers with few surprises, for her revelations are reassuredly within an established and accepted tradition of western authenticity, one her readers are already deeply familiar with. There is a sort of inherent positioning of subject, object, representor/representee in the act of defining and interpreting a region and its people that invokes a subtle hierarchy. If Ehrlich is verbose, her authentic cowboys are incapable of articulate expression. If she is a “cultural straddler,” able to discuss medieval history and books, then those she observes are certainly not. What they lack is what defines her. Authenticity clearly has its trade-offs. To be so definitively defined as authentic, really and truly western (however iconic), is a profoundly limiting act. Ehrlich, as did Wister, Remington, Larom, and Lockhart, places an impressive value on westerners and their authenticity, but only if they remain different from herself. Otherwise, the West’s inhabitants are little better than suburbanites. The self-image that westerners have long promoted certainly encouraged the kind of singular impression they received from

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eager chroniclers such as Gretel Ehrlich. If Wyomingites had to work at being western, pragmatism came more easily. In a state with few economic attributes, Wyomingites took a myth that had been constructed initially by nonwesterners and put it to work for themselves. They not only accepted its naturalized meaning as their own but sold it, consumed it, and, at times, tried their best to live it. As late as 1988, members of the Cheyenne “Gunslingers” were devotedly carrying the mantle of western “authenticity.” Members of the Gunslingers dressed in costume, carried a rope, and threatened to hang any Cheyenne native who was not “dressed right” during Cheyenne Frontier Days. The group’s founder, Ron LeVene, maintained that Cheyenne was not taking advantage of its western heritage as much as it should. “People come here [during Frontier Days] to see cowboys and Indians,” he declared. “Of course, if we dressed like the authentic cowboys, we’d look like farmers . . . so we give them what they want.” He urged Cheyenne residents to dress up in western gear more often during tourist season, and not only during Frontier Days. The Gunslingers were only responding to demand. In 1991, Robert Wohnrade of McHenry, Illinois, wrote the Wyoming State Tribune of his disappointment over his recent visit to Wyoming. It had been his first visit west, but he pointed out that he had “been there many times, through western history, folklore, and countless western movies. I do feel somewhat disappointed in how you have acted as ‘custodians’ for the historic past of Cheyenne,” he chastised. With the passage of time comes inevitable changes in everything and the tendency is to “forget” the old and “bring on” the new. Old residents pass on and new ones move in. With these changes, it is all too easy to lose the thread of history which should hold the passage of time together. We have nothing that can compare to “Cheyenne” and the “West.” We see the Old West portrayed in Wisconsin at tourist havens that “reconstruct” frontier towns and atmosphere, trying to recreate what you had and still have to some extent, for over 100 years. You have the “real thing”

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in structures and history that our part of the country never had. The best we can do is attempt to imitate it. Give the tourists what they want: horses, hitching rails, dirt streets, board sidewalks, cowboys, a period hotel and dress. . . . As a tourist, we cannot dream the dream for you, but our tourist dollars can help pay for it. Go for it!! Do not lose the 40 years advantage that you have over us. What have you got to lose? 3 A Wyoming Department of Education employee sympathized with Wohnrade’s disappointment, for she recalled her own when she moved to Cheyenne and found it looked like most other cities. “People come here expecting to see boarded sidewalks and all that. I know we all want to look modern and say, ‘hey, I can wear a miniskirt too,’ but by God, I think we ought to make people feel that they’re really in the West,” she declared. The guidelines for a 1988 Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce meeting instructed: “Make ALL your guests feel welcome. Be attentive, alert and cordial, but don’t be too forward. Talk up local events. Know the history of the area. If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all.” The information representative at the state capitol building reminded the gathering, “The one statement that everyone makes to me is ‘don’t let anyone change your town. Keep it small . . . and friendly.’ ” 4 Even a 1996 advertisement in the travel section of a metropolitan newspaper attempted to capitalize on this western mystique. For a price of $995, the ad offered urban women a Wyoming weekend filled with hoedowns, rodeos, and a wagon rides, and, most importantly, “real” western men. “There is something about a cowboy that women love,” the weekend’s organizer reminded. “It has to do with their softspoken integrity and fierce independence. The type of work they do is also part of the appeal. Simply stated, they are a jolt of pure masculinity in an often confusing social order. . . . [The cowboy’s] soft-spoken, home-on-the-range demeanor is especially appealing to urban women,” she promoted. 5 For Wyoming son Dick Cheney the cultural perception of Wyoming as the last bastion of true Americanness isn’t necessarily

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a bad thing. “When you talk to Americans about Wyoming, they don’t think of Wyoming as oil and gas and coal,” Cheney acknowledged. We may sit out here and occasionally feel that that’s all the rest of the country wants from us. But that’s what we sell them. And we do very well selling it to them, too, by the way. We’ve got a very successful fiscal policy. No state income tax. And it’s an important part of our economy. But the rest of the country doesn’t even know we are the leading coal producer in America. They associate us with the West. And the West is more than just a geographical location. It’s part of our culture. It’s part of our history and the values that we associate with the West: freedom and independence, self-reliance. When people think about Wyoming they think about wide open spaces. They think about the beauty of the state, they think about Yellowstone, and Frontier Days, and those things that I think many of us see in our state. For us to believe the rest of the country looks at us as a place where they simply come to mine coal simply isn’t accurate. It’s not the way they look at us. 6 The constant selling of a wild western authenticity might be profitable, but it is not without its limitations. Perhaps the constraints of pinning so much of the state’s identity on a western narrative was never as evident as in the weeks and months after October 6, 1998, when news trickled out of Laramie, Wyoming, that a young man had been lashed to a fence and beaten to death because he was gay. It didn’t take long for the national media, cultural commentators, and locals themselves to pinpoint one of the primary reasons for Matthew Shepard’s death: Wyoming’s “western” ethos. The national press now found fault with Wyomingites because they had let their identity as the Cowboy State interfere with the other proclamation about themselves as “The Equality State.” The New York Times editorialized: “Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote, but Laramie is a small town in a masculine culture.” In a somewhat contradictory follow-up the paper noted, “Instead of more in keeping with

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a culture in which homosexuals are more and more integrated with everyone else, there was one bar in which gays and straights, cowboys and college kids, laborers and children of affluence all mixed.” 7 Even residents themselves blamed their own culture for the tragedy. The head of the University of Wyoming Lesbian Gay and Bisexual and Transgendered Association commented: “Wyoming is obviously a very rural state, so there’s going to be some old fashioned views.” A University of Wyoming student explained to the Los Angeles Times that the murder “has to do with the fact this is a cowboy place. . . . [Wyomingites are] too close minded.” Another friend of Shepard’s reflected: “If you are seen as an outsider, if people don’t know you as a person, it’s one more way you’re foreign to them and they are less tolerant.” 8 While some residents confirmed the hypothesis that Wyoming’s culture was to blame, others bristled at media representations of it. One local bitterly remembers hearing a reporter proclaiming, “Hate is a common word in Wyoming.” Other members of the media, some locals claimed, began interviews with the assumption that “You have that cowboy mentality in Wyoming, so this was bound to happen.” The president of University of Wyoming complained that the entire state had been stereotyped. 9 Conservative Republican Wyoming senator Alan Simpson said defensively that “the people of my state and the University of Wyoming want you to know this is not who we are.” The Washington Post reported that “Governor Geringer and others have bristled at some media portrayals of their state that suggested that Wyoming, because of its cowboy ethos, is inhospitable to those with unconventional lifestyles. ‘Wyoming people are discouraged that all of us could be unfairly stereotyped by the actions of two very sick and twisted people,’ ” Geringer protested. 10 One of the defense attorneys worried that punishment would be meted out with an agenda “that we have to punish somebody to prove to the nation that we are not some dusty old cow town.” And a policemen working the case commented, “I think that everybody just focused on us [because supposedly] we are the western idiots, ’cause we ride horses and do this to gays for the heck of it. I took a lot of offense at that.” 11 The national reaction most certainly

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caused more than one Wyomingite to reflect on the benefits of having for so long advertised themselves as “What America Once Was.” How we judge the past, after all, is often, if unfairly, fickle. However single-mindedly pragmatic we westerners think we are in managing and manipulating our myths for profit and notoriety, it is never quite so simple, for myths and stories are wily things indeed. Myth management is a difficult task, the cultural equivalent of wrestling a greased pig, as Wyomingites themselves realized in the aftermath of Shepard’s death. Our myths and selfimagery have a way, however unintentionally, of working their way into the ways we look at the world and the world looks at us, neither of which we always have much control over. “To the extent that our ‘nature’—that which we truly are—can be revealed in articulation, we are what we remember,” write social critics James Fentress and Chris Wickman in their book Social Memory. 12 Though westerners convince themselves that they are controlling their famous invented traditions, it is often the other way around. Wyoming’s history reveals both the dynamic possibility of myth and its profound limitations. Wyoming’s image as the epitome of the Old West and “real” America united its residents in a shared heritage, which they successfully exploited culturally and economically. But the state also exemplified the pitfalls of invented traditions. Wyoming’s economic reliance on tourism forces it to emphasize the contrast between the wild, open West and the more “civilized” developed East. What is appealing to nonwesterners about Wyoming—its Old West image, vast unpopulated areas, and general lack of development—is also what helps to keep the state’s tax base and wages near the nation’s lowest. Wyomingites’ invented traditions leave them with a kind of Sophie’s Choice. To be of cultural value to expectant nonwesterners Wyomingites must live up to the iconic myth. If they surrender its cultural significance, Wyoming is left with a blatantly unromantic national identity, valued solely for its economic contributions. And what if the past itself becomes unfashionable? Both the reaction to the Shepard murder and Annie Proulx’s recently published Wyoming Stories reveals this alternative role. Proulx

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starkly extracts the familiar myth from her representation of Wyomingites. Her westerners are decidedly unromantic, devoid of heroism and iconic status, and the portrayal is generally grim indeed. Proulx views westerners through another lens entirely— not necessarily a more illuminating one, but one in which they are certainly valued less for their western authenticity. And perhaps Proulx’s depiction signals the role for Wyomingites in the emerging New West narrative, where the recreational landscape takes center stage and human icons become expendable, simply the sad anachronisms and damning evidence of another time’s untruths. Notions of what is “real” and “authentic” in the West switch and change, and those in search of the “New Western” experience increasingly seek the “real” America in nature, not cowboys. In fact, in the New West the human evidence of the “Old West” becomes largely superfluous, even in the way. But the most instructive aspects of Wyoming’s stories are not in how they shape outsiders’ expectations of westerners but in how they influence westerners’ perceptions of themselves. As Richard White points out, the biggest disadvantage of invented traditions is that “people actually believe them and act on them.” White notes that especially “in the West, some people are trying to return to a past that either never existed or was exactly what people alive then were seeking to escape from.” 13 Invented traditions themselves may be innocuous, and even necessary, in fostering a community’s sense of itself. But to the extent that there is a connection between what one says and what one does, invented traditions can be problematic indeed, particularly when they inform the politics of a place and decisions about people’s futures. Edward Said notes that “collective memory is not an inert and passive thing, but a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed, maintained, modified, and endowed with political meaning.” 14 Since so much of the national ethos has been drawn from the American West, the lessons drawn from Wyoming’s collective memory are certainly all the more important. In the late twentieth century, Wyoming’s collective identity manifested itself in a united antipathy to the federal government as Wyomingites defined themselves as westerners against

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an eastern bureaucracy in Washington. But however “western” Wyoming might portray itself, throughout much of the twentieth century Wyoming has had more in common with West Virginia than Texas. And however legitimately they resent it, westerners need the federal government and always have. Wyoming’s farmers need its funds for reclamation, ranchers need it for protection from foreign markets, and its workers need its oversight of the multinational corporations that determine Wyoming’s economic fate. That necessity is not likely to change in the twenty-first century. Wyoming could be betrayed by its own “genuineness,” if its residents believe that surrendering any bit of their version of the past means losing control over the totality of the future. Perhaps the determination to sustain an image of independence and self-sufficiency should be recast as the goal of ending the numbing economic slumps that determine the quality of life for most Wyoming residents. Invented traditions are adaptable, after all. It is, perhaps, in that malleability that the key to true western independence lies.

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Introduction 1. Jordan, Riding the White Horse Home, 24–27. 2. Louis Owens notes in his essay “White for a Hundred Years” (in Reading The Virginian in the New West, 77) that, at least in Owen Wister’s work, “the native is simply erased in this paean to a mythic West.” 3. Michael Kammen notes (Mystic Chords of Memory, 167) that the “creation of culture and concern for tradition during [the turn of the century] remained very much the purview of migratory Easterners, whose memories were inclined in that direction and whose criteria of taste still came largely from trans-Atlantic images and impressions.” 4. Alex Nemerov in Frederic Remington and the Turn of the Century America chronicles Remington’s quest for a “pure,” authentically American form that could keep in check the subversive immigrant and lower classes. Jane Tompkins in West of Everything describes Wister’s desire to define himself in reaction to an East that he believed was overly feminized and racially impure. 5. For an insightful analysis of the durability, power, and allure of the western myth, see West “Selling the Myth,” 36–49. 6. Dippie, “American Wests: Historiographical Perspectives,” 135. 7. Handley and Lewis, True West, 6. 8. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 39. Handley and Lewis (True West, 6) write that the relationship between history and representation in the American west is deeply complex and that the distinction between them far less easy to maintain than in other areas of historical inquiry.

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1. The Battle over “Westernness” 1. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 11. 2. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 17. On neuralgia, see also Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 14, 85–88, and Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 135–36. 3. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 33, 114. 4. Louis Owens notes in his essay on Wister, “White for a Hundred Years,” 76–77, that Wister’s Wyoming was a new land in which the narratives and stories of the Native Americans had been erased and ignored. 5. For a very revealing explanation of these two competing [158], (2 myths, see Richard White, The Frontier in American Culture, and Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress,” 608–37. 6. Tompkins, West of Everything, 148; see also Pyne, Art and Lines: 6 the Higher Life, 2–3. On the rise and role of the western ——— hero see Tompkins, West of Everything, 148. For a broader 14.0pt ——— examination on the cultural effects of industrialization and Normal urbanization see Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of Amer* PgEnds: ica, 7. 7. For an examination of the function of visual arts in uphold[158], (2 ing this view of the West, see Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 3. Robert Higgs’s essay “Yale and the Heroic Ideal,” 163, also provides a fascinating examination of Yale and notions of primitivism and manliness in the late nineteenth century. More specifically, Richard Etulain looks at Remington and Wister in Re-Imagining the Modern American West, 4, 49. 8. Nemerov, “Doing the Old America,” 298–99; Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 33; Wister, The Virginian, 139; Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 59, 34. For a literary critique of Wister, see also Tompkins, West of Everything, 131–55. 9. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 33; Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 20; Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 38; Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 277. 10. For explorations of this Darwinian western space see Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress,” 608–37. See also Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 46; Bederman, Manliness and Civiliza-


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tion, 14; and, finally, Higgs, “Yale and the Heroic Ideal,” 165, on Remington and his vision of manliness and strength. See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 60, 147, for an overview of the wilderness experience, in particular for gentlemen of leisure. See Richard White, The Frontier in American Culture, 13, 46, for explanations of progress vis-à-vis Turner and Buffalo Bill. Nemerov, Frederic Remington, 43. See Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 4, for a fuller exploration of late-nineteenthcentury Anglo-American artists and their artistic and cultural motivations. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 22, 23, explores the same topic, focusing on masculinity and race. Similarly, Gossett, Whiteness of a Different Color, 89, notes the influence of various American writers on race theories of the time. Wister’s conundrum regarding refinement and ruggedness was a common dilemma in the “wilderness quest.” See Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 92. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 20; Mitchell, Westerns, 109. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 101–5. Larson, History of Wyoming, 196–98. See Nemerov, Frederic Remington, 70, for an interpretation of Remington’s painting “Fight for the Waterhole” and an exploration of Remington’s indictment of progress. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 76–96. See Nemerov’s interpretation of “What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost,” Frederic Remington, 141; and Dippie’s in “The Moving Finger Writes,” 108. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 80. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 105; Nemerov, Frederic Remington, 136. Mitchell, Westerns, 109; Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 116; Davis, Owen Wister’s West, 10. See also Edward G. White, The Eastern Establishment, 104, 107, for Remington’s western vision. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 110. Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 34.

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24. See Mari Sandoz, The Cattleman, 335, for an overview of the eastern presence in Wyoming. In 1873, the Wyoming Stock Growers had ten members with an ownership of approximately 20,000 cattle. By 1885, the membership owned nearly 780,000 cattle. Frink, Jackson, and Spring, When Grass Was King, 26. 25. Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen, 206. For a broader examination of capitalism on the West, see Robbins, Colony and Empire, and pages 70–71 specifically on the cattle empire in the West. 26. Emmons, “Moreton Frewen and the Populist Revolt,” 160. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 80, also examines the eastern and English aristocracy in the West. 27. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 83, 80; Lippincott’s 49 (May 1882), 435; Owens, Reading The Virginian, 77. 28. Edward G. White, The Eastern Establishment, 52. 29. Helena Huntington Smith, War on the Powder River, 9. 30. Woods, Wyoming Biographies, 114. 31. Clay, My Life on the Range, 78; Edward G. White, The Eastern Establishment, 123; Atherton, The Cattle Kings, 168. 32. Edward G. White, The Eastern Establishment, 114. 33. Sandoz, The Cattlemen, 329. 34. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 8. 35. Spring, The Cheyenne Cattle Club, 14; Fink, Cow Country Cavalcade, 110. 36. Atherton, The Cattle Kings, 65–66. Edward G. White examines just such men in The Eastern Establishment, 6, 20. 37. Spring, The Cheyenne Cattle Club, 14. 38. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 5. 39. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 7. 40. Buffalo Bulletin, 30 August 1894. 41. The Peoples’ Voice, 24 September 1892. 42. Tompkins, Inner Life of Westerns, 142; see also Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 4, 46. 43. Colonial Families of the United States of America, 196. 44. Between the Shenandoah and the Potomac, 101. “Album of Historic Homes XVI: Richwood Hall,” 14. The 1850, 1860,

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and 1870 censuses of the United States, Jefferson County, West Virginia. Bushong, A History of Jefferson County West Virginia, 177. Frye, Second Virginia Infantry, 98. The Magazine of the Jefferson County Historical Society, 47. George Flagg’s obituary reads that he was “an ardent Democrat and was a strong advocate of the principles of Jefferson.” See Spirit of Jefferson, 27 March 1900, 2. Bushong, A History of Jefferson County West Virginia, 61. Most information on Flagg comes from his own recollections, in Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business. Buffalo Bulletin, 19 May 1892. Helena Huntington Smith, War on the Powder River, maintains that Flagg was one of the leaders of the cowboy strike and that the Knights of Labor precipitated it. Helena Smith, War on the Powder River, 101. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 15, 16, 21. On the difficulty of making farmers into western heroes, see Nash Smith, Virgin Land, 212. Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen, 136. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 8. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 21. Sandoz, The Cattlemen, 335. The most accepted historical account of the Johnson County war is Helena Huntington Smith’s War on the Powder River, which provides a complete account of the cattle boom in Wyoming and the tensions leading up to the invasion. Asa Mercer’s Banditti of the Plains is perhaps the most legendary and well-known account of the Johnson County war, and The Rustler Business by Charles Penrose provides an account of the invasion from the cattlemen’s perspective. Helena Huntington Smith, War on the Powder River, 112. Buffalo Bulletin, 31 March 1892. Buffalo Bulletin, 31 March 1892. Helena Huntington Smith in War on the Powder River, as well as other accounts, acknowledges that Flagg and the hat outfit undoubtedly put their brands on more than a few

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mavericks, but maintains that their practices differed little from many other cattlemen, large or small. Floyd Bard, who worked for Flagg as a youth, maintained that “they were not cattle thieves, they were just small cattlemen or nesters, no different than 80% of the nesters and grangers. . . . [T]hey would probably brand a maverick or slick when one crossed their path.” Bard, Horse Wrangler, 19. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 48–49. Smith, War on the Powder River, 263–65. Woods, Wyoming Biographies, 114, 182, 76. Flagg, A Review of the Cattle Business, 7. Sandoz, The Cattlemen, 390. The Peoples’ Voice, 28 May 1892. See also Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 26. Buffalo Bulletin, 21 April 1892. Buffalo Bulletin, 17 March 1892 and 12 May 1892. Buffalo Bulletin, 23 July 1892. Buffalo Bulletin, 14 June 1892. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 22 March 1892; Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen, 247. Rocky Mountain News, 1 June 1892, Buffalo Bulletin, 21 April 1892. Buffalo Bulletin, 28 April 1892. Buffalo Bulletin, 10 March 1892. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 22, 23, for the quest of the middle and upper classes to connect to primitive man. The People’s Voice, 28 May 1892. The People’s Voice, 19 May 1892. See Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 21–23. The Peoples’ Voice, 24 September 1892. On populism and the West, see Argersinger, The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism, viii; Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 15, 16, 17, 29. The People’s Voice, 26 May 1894, 21 July 1894, 26 December 1896, 26 June 1897. Although populist farmers complained of transportation monopolies and high interest rates, in Wyoming agrarian and populist reform took the form of opposition to the large cattle interests. See Griffiths, “Populism in

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Wyoming,” 57. Griffiths “Populism in Wyoming,” 60, writes that “the Populist espousal of the side of the small settler . . . and the [resentment of] the cattle barons brought it support from the homesteaders and small farmers.” For an insightful analysis on the western dilemma over progress and nostalgia, see West, “Historical Commentary Stories,” 65–67, and also Haywood’s analysis of class and Victorian standards in Kansas cattle towns inVictorian West, xiii, 3, 33. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 39, points out that populist rhetoric managed to merge the “interests of the selfaggrandizing property owner with a nostalgic evocation of a [163], (7) past in which champions of the people had ruled for the good of the majority.” Dippie, “The Moving Finger Writes,” 114–15. Lines: 238 to Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 229. See Slotkin, ——— “Nostalgia and Progress,” 609, 611, and Kammen’s com14.0pt Pg ——— ments, Mystic Chords of Memory, 401, on the eastern vision Normal Page of the West. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 229. * PgEnds: Eject For a full discussion of Flagg’s mythic motivation toward the West and the rise of the cowboy, see Smith, Virgin Land, 53, [163], (7) 69, 119, 170, 212. Cheyenne Sun, 3 May 1892. See also Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 14–15, for a discussion of masculinity, the white upper classes, and their reaction to this worker unrest. See Sarah Burn’s comments, Inventing the Modern Artist, 85, 86, on reaction to the populist movement. Togovnick, Gone Primitive, 159. Wister’s journals reflect his ambivalence about the West. In August 1887 he wrote: “I find this sort of thing even more utterly enchanting than two years ago.” A month after he made his complaints of June 1891, he recanted: “I am exactly as enchanted and enthusiastic as I was in 1885 when I first saw all of this.” Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 51, 113, 119. See Mitchell, Westerns, 109, on Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington’s thoughts on the Anglo-Saxon cowboy. See Lambert, “Owen Wister’s Virginian,” 99. Bederman also

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94. 95. 96. 97.

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99. 100.

101. 102.

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writes of Roosevelt’s similar motivations in Manliness and Civilization, 178. Slotkin, “Nostalgia and Progress,” 616; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 342. Owens, Reading the Virginian, 86; Cheyenne Sun, 3 May 1892. See also Susan Kollin’s essay “Wister and the New West,” 238, and Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism, 46. Cheyenne Sun, 28 June 1892. Cheyenne Sun, 3 May 1892, 17 May 1892, 29 May 1892, 30 June 1892. Cheyenne Daily Leader, 24 April 1892, 1 May 1892. Flagg was at the center of the community disputes. He and the editor of the Buffalo Bulletin traded insults for over five years. The Bulletin pointed out that “The Populists go much further [than the Democrats] . . . and carry their antagonism to capital to its logical conclusion, practically advocating socialistic principles.” When Flagg ran for sheriff in 1896, the Bulletin remarked: “We do not believe in any Democratic candidate who has such an unhealthy appetite for Populist votes as Mr. Flagg has.” Buffalo Bulletin, 10 January 1895. Meyers, “Will the Real Jack Flagg Stand Up . . .”, Buffalo Bulletin, 13 August 1987. Some have speculated that Wister’s cowboy friend George West was the inspiration for the Virginian. See Handley, “Wister’s Omniscience and Omissions,” 52. Mitchell, Westerns, 111. See also Trachtenberg on Wister’s hero in The Incorporation of America, 24. Mitchell, Westerns, 113. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 23, notes that middle-class men began to read heroic adventure stories like The Virginian partly as another response to their own concerns about masculinity. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 306–7. Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 12. See also Etulain, ReImagining the Modern American West, xxi, 5, on Remington and Wister and the romantic hero. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 122.

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104. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 8. 105. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 396; Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 223. 106. Larson, History of Wyoming, 233. 107. White, The Frontier in American Culture, 55. 108. Buffalo Bulletin, 27 October 1960. 109. Buffalo Bulletin, October 1925. Obituary (no date) in Jack Flagg biographical file, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 110. Flagg shared a notion of government’s role with the “ideological leader” of the Wyoming populists, Henry Breitenstein, who “could not accept the Jacksonian dictum about the value of limited government, and thought that the federal government alone had the power to shackle the money power,” which Breitenstein associated with the cattle barons. Griffiths, “Populism in Wyoming,” 59. 2. The West, East, Buffalo Bill, and a Horse 1. Cody Enterprise, 9 July 1924. 2. Gills, Commemorations, 5. 3. See Richard White, in The Frontier in American Culture, 52, on the masculine west of Remington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Wister. Bederman, in Manliness and Civilization, 178, also examines this masculine western discourse in Roosevelt’s view of the West. See also Hine and Faragher’s discussion of the masculine west in The American West, 496, 498, 506. 4. For a fascinating and comprehensive discussion of Wyomingites’ cultural transition, see Ewig, “Give Them What They Want,” 59–79. 5. Dominick, “Caroline Lockhart,” 8–9. 6. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 32. 7. See Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 11. 8. Peter Filene, Him/Her Self, 46, described the new woman at the turn of the century: “[she] dismissed the half-pitying, half-contemptuous label of ‘old maid.’ Instead, they defined themselves proudly, as ‘bachelor women’.” One report described the “new woman” as the “enemy of marriage, the

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home and therefore civilization” (Filene, Him/Her Self, 32). Biddle, The Whitney Women, 30, 39. See also McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 217. McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 218. McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 221, 222, 223. Berman, “The Force Behind the Whitney,” 105, 107, 109, 111. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 418. See also Dorothy Brown on Gertrude Whitney in Setting a Course, 205–6. Cody Enterprise, 19 October 1905. Joy Kasson notes, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 229, that although Cody bragged about his work in bringing “civilization” to the Wyoming landscape, he continued to celebrate its western wildness as well and publicized Yellowstone National Park’s beautiful scenery in publications on Wyoming tourism. For more background on the development of Cody, see Patrick, Best Little Town by a Dam Site, 15–20. Patrick, Best Little Town by a Dam Site, 36, 63. Cody Enterprise, 25 December 1902. Cody Enterprise, 13 December 1911, 9 August 1911, 25 December 1902. Patrick, Best Little Town by a Dam Site, 52. Park County Enterprise, 8 July 1911. When locals took part in a camera scene of a shot of western reality, the Enterprise complained: “They are faking typical scenes such as are generally supposed to characterize the ‘wild and wooly.’ Shooting up the town, saloon brawls, throwing the cowboys into the street. . . . When the picture is shown in the East and Europe the natives of those sections will have a weird idea of Wyoming.” Kensel, Pahaska Tepee, 46–47. Cody Enterprise, 15 July 1911. See Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 30, on the West’s transformation after the arrival of the tourist; also Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America, 158. Paul Eldridge, “Woman on Horseback,” unpublished ms., 21 December 1977, Caroline Lockhart Collection (hereafter cited as clc), Box 7, McCracken Library, Buffalo Bill His-

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torical Center (hereafter cited as bbhc), Cody, Wyoming, 8, 4. Hicks in Caroline Lockhart, particularly pages 27–61, writes extensively on Caroline and her battles with Cody’s female population. Caroline editorialized in the Cody paper in 1922: “The Woman’s Club is to be congratulated upon having among its members so many women with the good sense to realize that the affairs of the Cody Stampede are none of its business.” Cody Enterprise, 1 March 1922. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 40. Caroline’s biographer, Paul Eldridge, (“Woman on Horseback,” 9) notes that she was drawn to Cody, “perhaps by the late Buffalo Bill.” “ ‘Wooliest’ West Is Truly Chivalrous . . .” by Suzette (a.k.a. Caroline Lockhart), clipping from the clc, McCracken Library, bbhc, Cody, Wyoming; Philadelphia North American, 27 May 1907, 1. Similarly, after selling her local business in 1925, Lockhart wrote: “I’m on top of the world being able to pass up these honyockers and shopkeepers and if I want to write, no fear of losing their business.” Hicks, Caroline Lockhart, 202. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 49; New York Times, 19 March 1911. The Philadelphia Ledger noted that “Not since the publication of ‘The Virginian’ has so powerful a cowboy story been told.” The Ledger also explained that “It is not too much to assert that no one ever would have suggested that it could be from the pen of a woman, so thoroughly has the author adapted her style to the requirement of her task.” N.d., clipping from the clc, bbhc, McCracken Research Library, Cody, Wyoming. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 103, 68. See Etulain on the West’s identity struggle, Re-Imagining the Modern American West, xviii. “Boy Howdy! Meet Caroline Lockhart, New Star for Post!” Denver Post, 31 January 1919, 1. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 102. Peter Filene, Him/Her Self, 30, notes that in 1910 “a mere 2,000 women had the talent or luck enough to survive by their pens” as freelance writers.

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Cody Enterprise, 10 October 1923. Cody Enterprise, 29 August 1923. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 109. Publicity sheet for the Cody Stampede, 1 May 1920, clc, Box 1, bbhc, Cody, Wyoming. Cody Enterprise, 5 May 1920. Park County Enterprise, 26 May 1920. Publicity sheet for the Cody Stampede, 1 May 1920. Cody Enterprise, 24 May 1922, 14 June 1922. Cody Enterprise, 28 June 1922. Cody Enterprise, 28 November 1923. Belasco, Americans on the Road, 26. Yellowstone Park press memorandum, Department of Interior, 1925, Dave Jones Collection, American Heritage Center (hereafter cited as ahc), University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. This was an increase from 4,467 tourists in 1918. Kensel, Pahaska Teepee, 83. Cody Enterprise, 19 July 1922, 14 May 1924. Cody Enterprise, 5 September 1923; Northern Wyoming Herald, 5 September 1923. For a look at the West in the 1920s, see Malone and Etulain, The American West, 19. See also Larson, History of Wyoming, 413, 416. Perhaps, then, “westernness” should not be confused with rural. Geoffrey Perret writes, America in the Twenties, 428, that a conflict of values between city and country shaped America in the 1920s and that the people of rural America regarded the cities with “a loathing so fierce, so all encompassing, so bitter, that it virtually defies belief. It was not simply that city people were different and modern but they threatened everything that rural people considered worthwhile.” Northern Wyoming Herald, 24 January 1923. Cody Enterprise, 4 July 1923. Cody Enterprise, 14 February 1923, 3. “Stories: A Narrative History of the West,” 71. Cody Enterprise, 14 February 1923. By the 1920s, Codyites

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would have seen the West depicted on screen, since many of Hollywood’s early movies were Westerns. A number of Caroline’s own books, in fact, were turned into films. See Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 46. Northern Wyoming Herald, 27 February 1924, 22 September 1923, 10 May 1922, 5 July 1922. William Robertson Coe purchased Colonel Cody’s ranch in 1911. For an exploration of the east’s view of the West in the 1920s, see Athearn, The Mythic West, 63, 64. See also, Perrett, America in the Twenties, 101–2. The most significant white settlement reached the basin in the years after 1893. Park County did not become a county until 1909, and even by 1920 the county’s population was only 7,298, or 1.4 people per square mile. Lindsay, The Big Horn Basin, 160, 223, 260. Wyoming Roads 1, no. 9, May 1925, 1. “Big Horn Basin: Wyoming,” “Dude Ranches in the Big Horn Mountains,” publicity pamphlets published by the Burlington Northern Railroad, Dave Jones Collection, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. See Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 132, 133, 140, for the emerging tourist West of the 1920s. For the emerging tourist West, see also Malone and Etulain, The Modern West, 4. For a discussion of Wyomingites’ embracement of “western” identities, see Ewig, “Give Them What They Want,” 59–79. Pomeroy reflected on the West’s power to define identities in “Rediscovering the West,” 30, and In Search of the Golden West, 172. See also Dippie, “American Wests,” 117–35. Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 130. Lockhart’s biographer (Caroline Lockhart, 130) writes that Mrs. Allen admitted, “I was so desperately busy with my own work and affairs that I paid little attention. Miss Lockhart pounded away telegrams and letters and I finally said that I would do the pioneering here in the East.” Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 30. Kirk Savage, in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 188, notes that the participa-

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62. 63. 64.

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66. 67.

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tion of women in creating public monuments was “crucial in confirming and embracing the norm of masculinity projected by the soldier monuments.” Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 130. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 22; Furman, Caroline Lockhart, 131. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 447. Mrs. Whitney news clipping, n.d., File on Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, bbhc, Cody, Wyoming. Her biographer records that “an acquaintance of Mrs. Whitney, William Coe” wrote to her about the statue, including Lockhart’s letter suggesting her as the artist. See also Kammen on Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Mystic Chords of Memory, 269. Lockhart reported that “Mrs. Whitney is most enthusiastic over the work and declares she intends to make it her masterpiece, taking about two years to its completion. The statue will be unveiled at the Cody Stampede two years hence.” Cody Enterprise, 12 July 1922. Cody Enterprise, 10 May 1922. Cody Enterprise, 10 May 1922, 7 June 1922. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 136, notes that the “ritual of funding was crucial [to nineteenth-century statues] because it turned on the whole question of what public the monument stood for, whose collective memory was represented there.” Donations were also a way to measure the devotion to a hero’s memory. Read, “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Buffalo Bill,” Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney file, bbhc. Pershing’s biographer notes that Pershing was inclined to be a conservative, and when debating a run for the presidency in 1920 certainly would have run as a Republican. Smythe, Pershing, General of the Armies, 276; Clark, “The Commodore Left Two Sons,” 4–13, 81–103. Gertrude’s father, Cornelius, served as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Her family had a strong connection with such prominent philanthropic and social organizations. Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend,

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350. See also Haraway, Primitive Visions, 29, 42, for an analysis of these social organizations, including the American Museum of Natural History. Letter from Winthrop Brooks to Larry Larom, 15 November 1923, Larom Collection, bbhc. Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 45. See Savage’s analysis, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 8, of similar motivations for nineteenth-century monuments. For an examination of these highly disruptive culture issues of the 1920s, see Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 202, and Perret, America in the Twenties, 79. Similarly, John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 254–63, 269, discusses the Americanization movement during the early part of the century and extending into the early 1920s, a movement that sought to teach “American” attributes to recent immigrants. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 256. Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, although published in 1916, achieved its peak popularity in the early 1920s and posited that American institutions would be unable to absorb the diverse populations of the most recent immigrations. See Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color, 81. Christian Science Monitor, 6 July 1925. See also Martin’s analysis of Buffalo Bill’s show and the effect on immigrants, in “The Grandest and Most Cosmopolitan Object Teacher,” 97. See Etulain, Re-imagining the Modern American West, 50, on the importance of the frontier to the American character. “Philadelphia Keenly Interested in Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney’s New Statue,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 11 February 1923, clc, bbhc. The article continues: “Buffalo Bill . . . has become a legend, the symbol and spirit as he was in life— of one of the most picturesque phases the world has ever seen; the most romantic phase of American history, it may be added, and a phase which the nation and the world will never see again. The statue . . . embodies in one bold, skyward sweep, the romance, the daring, the achievement of the days when the west was young . . . the celebration . . .

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78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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89.

will be thoroughly and picturesquely American. . . . Buffalo Bill is looked upon as the ideal type of romantic American hero.” “New Pioneers for New Frontiers,” publicity pamphlet for the Buffalo Bill American Association, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney file, bbhc, 2. See Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 277, on American nationalism of the early twentieth century. See Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 206, 211, on the 100 percent Americanism of the era. For statistics on immigration, see Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 263; for the emphasis on Americanization, see Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 361. See also Perret, America in the Twenties, 78. “New Pioneers for New Frontiers,” publicity pamphlet for the Buffalo Bill American Association, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney file, bbhc. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 303. Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 46; Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 451. Cody Enterprise, 7 March 1923. Cody Enterprise, 7 March 1923, 1. See also Cody Enterprise, 28 March 1923. Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 47. “Westerners Criticize Whitney Statue of Buffalo Bill,” New York Sun, 24 February 1923. Whitney File, bbhc, 1–3. Ashby Deering, “Buffalo Bill’s Horse Kicks Up Big Argument,” New York Telegraph, 25 March 1923. Whitney File, bbhc. “Statue of Cody under Criticism,” New York Sun, 24 February 1924. The Sun continued: “Mrs. Whitney really modeled her horse from a western animal, but the westerners aren’t quite satisfied that it looks like one. Of course, Mrs. Whitney knows a great deal about horses and has been used to them from childhood and it may be that although she used a western model, she still retained the idea of an eastern horse in her imagination.” See Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 145, for a

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useful discussion of the conflict between artistry and objectivity in sculpture. Cody Enterprise, 17 October 1923. Cody Enterprise, 28 November 1923. Cody Enterprise, 13 February 1924. See Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 223. Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American City,” 75. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 460. Winchester Herald, July–August 1924, 11–12. Cody Enterprise, 11 June 1924. Cody Enterprise, 18 June 1924. [173], (17) Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 55. Cody Enterprise, 23 July 1924, 9 July 1924. Cody Enterprise, 23 July 1924. Lines: 502 to Cody Enterprise, 25 June 1924, 9 July 1924. ——— Savage, Standing Soldiers, 7, 210. 14.0pt Pg ——— See West “Historical Commentary Stories,” 65–67, for a furNormal Page ther examination of this perennial western dilemma. See * PgEnds: Eject also Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 236. See Athearn, The Mythic West, 77, on the West’s divided [173], (17) feelings about itself; and Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 71–72. Cody Enterprise, 28 February 1923. Cody Enterprise, 25 April 1923. Cody Enterprise, 7 February 1923. Middleton and Edwards, Collective Remembering, 8, 10. See Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 223. See also Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 127, and Ewig, “Give Them What They Want. . . .”. Scott discusses the power of essentialized identities at length in “The Evidence of Experience,” 792. See Lewis, Gendering Orientalism. This contrasts with Erika Doss’s main assertion in her essay “ ‘I Must Paint’,” 240: “Few women artists painting in the Rocky Mountain Region from 1890 to 1945 chose subjects or styles that perpetuated the nostalgic frontier image of the

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113.

114.

115. 116.

117.

Wild West that still pervades our historical consciousness.” See also Swinth, Painting Professionals, 165. Cody Stampede program, file w994t-co, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Cody Club brochure and Cody publicity flyer, Cody Collection, bbhc. The Arts magazine, which Whitney sponsored, proclaimed: “ ‘The Arts’ is not afraid to enjoy American work just because it is American. It does not intend to wave the flag, but quite frankly it does intend to stand with the American artist against timidity and snobbery.” Quoted in Goodrich, “ ‘The Arts’ Magazine 1920–31,” 80. Letter from C. V. Whitney to Mary Jester Allen, October 1950, Whitney file, bbhc. Joan Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 117, discusses this at length, in particular in regard to gender claims. She points, 777, out that when experience, in this case being “western,” is taken as the origin of knowledge then the “vision of the individual subject becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place . . . are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, and how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.” I would argue that it is likewise important to historicize “westernness” and the way that westerners are constituted within this discourse. The debate surrounding Buffalo Bill’s horse enabled Codyites to assert an authority based on the presumptions of their experience as westerners, without realizing that that authority was largely based on a consciously constructed identity in the first place. “Spirit of the West Dying Out . . .”. Newspaper clipping, n.d., Billings Gazette, clc, bbhc, 1.

3. The West of Work and Play 1. New York Times, 7 May 1937, Society page.

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2. “Corral Dust,” vol. 3, no. 11, April 1937, Larom Collection, McCracken Library, bbhc, Cody, Wyoming. 3. Susman, Culture as History, 178, writes that during the 1930s, workers and “The People” were the most persistent symbol to merge from the period. 4. Irving H. Larom, interview by Charles G. Roundy, 21 May 1972, transcript, Larom Collection, bbhc. 5. Borne, Welcome to My West, 2–3. 6. Borne, Welcome to My West, vii. 7. Borne, Welcome to My West, 4. 8. Larom interview, bbhc. 9. Larom interview, bbhc. 10. L. L. Newton, “A Dude Ranch Editorial,” The Dude Rancher, n.d., Dude Ranch Collection, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. 11. See Rodnitzky, “Recapturing the West,” 124. 12. “The Call of the Dude Ranch,” The Dude Rancher, vol. 3, June 1933, 20. 13. Jessie Lynch Williams, “Joy Ranching and Dude Wrangling,” Collier’s, 9 August 1913, 23. 14. Courtney Ryley Cooper, “Dude Howdy!” Ladies Home Journal, August 1931, 41. 15. The Dude Rancher, vol. 6, no. 4, October 1937, 31. 16. Carhart, Hi Stranger!, 24. 17. Valley Ranch Promotion, Dude Ranching Collection, Valley Ranch, ahc. Larom’s trading post would also sell such “western” items as beaded Indian buckskin shirts and jackets, fringed leather vests, embossed belts and silver buckles, Navajo blankets, and turquoise and silver jewelry. See “Summer Suggestions” brochure, ahc. 18. Williams, “Joy Ranching and Dude Wrangling,” 22. 19. Salisbury, “What a Dude Wants on Vacation,” 12. 20. Williams, Collier’s, 22–23. 21. Carhart, Hi Stranger!, 14. 22. The Dude Rancher, spring 1974, Larom file, ahc. Charles Roundy, “The Origins and Early Development of Dude Ranching in Wyoming,” 15, asserts that Wyoming became

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23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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the focus for many who traveled early in the twentieth century because of its reputation as the national playground and because of Wister’s novels and the popularity of Cody and his show. Lawrence Borne, Dude Ranching, 39, asserts that World War I had closed Europe as a travel destination, and so Americans began exploring their own country. Newton, “A Dude Ranch Editorial.” “Ranch Life in Buffalo Bill Country,” published by Burlington Route, Dude Ranching Collection, ahc, 7. Meeteetsee News, 13 February 1929. Borne, “Western Railroads and the Dude Ranching Industry,” 50–52. Evarts, “Dude Wranglers,” 32; Borne, Dude Ranching, 46. Valley Ranch brochure, Dude Ranching Collection, Valley Ranch, ahc. Borne, Dude Ranching, 62; Cody Enterprise, 1 February 1922. Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 28 September 1926, 2. “Valley Ranch, Posh Retreat for the Nation’s Elite,” Wyoming Horizons, August 1982, 40. “Corral Dust,” vol. 1, no. 5, 1 January 1934, bbhc. Cody Enterprise, 22 August 1923, 5. Williams, Collier’s, 22. “Corral Dust,” vol. 1, no. 4, April 1933. Copies of Valley Ranch stationary in Larom Collection, bbhc. “Valley Ranch, Posh Retreat . . . ,” 40. The Dude Rancher, “Famed Valley Ranch Gets New Pilot,” vol. 38, July 1969, 8. Borne, Welcome to My West, 9. Remington, writes Alex Nemerov (Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America, 13), “wanted a return to the time when being angry was not so comfortable, so leisured. Extreme, violent action, a bona fide if only temporary reversion to the ‘elemental conditions’ of the frontier, would restore the Anglo Saxon’s martial spirit.” “Corral Dust,” vol. 3, no. 11, April 1937.

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42. The Round Up, 1928–29, vols. 4–5, bbhc. 43. The Round Up, Larom file, bbhc. 44. “Valley Ranch Horseback Trips for Young Ladies,” brochure, 1924, Larom file, bbhc. 45. “Valley Ranch Horseback Trip for Young Ladies,” Valley Ranch file, ahc. 46. Borne, Welcome to My West, 9. 47. Collector’s edition of the Cody Stampede program, 1976, Park County Historical Society (hereafter cited as pchs), Cody, Wyoming. 48. Letters to Julian Bryan, 1 May 1932, 23 June 1932, 4 May 1932, Larom file, bbhc. 49. Wister wrote that in the West, “you will not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews,” but “lean men of few topics.” Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 80. 50. “Corral Dust,” vol. 1, no. 4, April 1933, bbhc. 51. “Corral Dust,” vol. 3, no. 12, 1 January 1938. 52. “The West with a Capital W,” The Dude Rancher, vol. 3, June 1933, 19. 53. See Nemerov, “Doing the Old America,” 298, and Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 34, 59, for a fuller view of this western vision. 54. Carhart, Hi Stranger!, 31. 55. “Ranch Life in the Buffalo Bill Country,” Burlington railroad route brochure, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 56. “Work or Play? For the Most Part It’s All the Same,” The Dude Rancher, vol. 33, October 1944. 57. Valley Ranch brochure, Dude Ranching Collection, Valley Ranch, ahc. 58. “A Day on a Dude Ranch,” Country Life, August 1930, 52. 59. Carhart, Hi Stranger!, 31. 60. Courtney Ryley Cooper, “Dude Howdy,” 41. 61. See Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 176, 251, 252, 255, 303, 322; Susman, Culture as History, 178, 204. Susman, Culture as History, 204 notes that the 1930s was a period “that rediscovered the ‘folk’ and their work and deliberately sought to identify with this culture.” Barbara Melosh, Engendering

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62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

Culture, 83, 230, 62, notes that “work enabled not only selfdefinition and identity but also the construction of a common social life.” New Deal art and theater “accomplished a radical revision by placing ordinary people at the center of a canvas and stage and by using those images as emblems of core cultural values.” “A Dude Wrangler Must Be,” The Dude Rancher, vol. 6, no. 4, October 1937. L. L. McBride, “The Big Horns of Plenty,” Dude Rancher, vol. 3, June 1933; The Dude Rancher, vol. 6, no. 8, OctoberNovember 1938. Evarts, “Dude Wranglers,” 32. Larom, “Valley Ranching in Wyoming,” 36–37. Salisbury, “What a Dude Wants on Vacation,” 12. Cody Stampede program, pchs. Evarts, “Dude Wranglers,” 34. Williams, Collier’s, 22. “Rope Your Own, by the Head Wrangler,” Sunset, September 1926, 13. Valley Ranch promotion, Dude Ranch Collection, Valley Ranch, ahc. “Corral Dust,” vol. 1, no. 4, April 1933. In “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” Wister wrote that “to survive in the clean cattle country requires a spirit of adventure, courage and self-sufficiency.” Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 80. The Dude Rancher, vol. 6, no. 8, October-November 1938. See Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 232–48. “Dude Ranchers Assemble Here to Make Plans,” Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 28 September 1926. Valley Ranch brochure, Dude Ranching file, Valley Ranch, ahc. Cody Enterprise, 12 December 1957. Larry Larom to Julian Bryan, 1 May 1932, Larom Collection, McCracken Library, Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Julian Bryan to Larry Larom, 7 June 1932, Larom Collection, McCracken Library, bbhc. Julian Bryan to Larry Larom, 7 June 1932, bbhc. Julian Bryan to Larry Larom, n.d., bbhc.

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80. “Corral Dust,” vol. 14, 1 January 1951, bbhc; “Wrangler Rescued by Helicopter”; “Cody Country Mourns Death of Art Holman” (obituary), clippings in Arthur Holman file, pchs, Cody, Wyoming. 81. See Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” 192. 4. A Museum, Celebrations, and Yale 1. “Wyoming Celebrates Her Admission into the Union,” Cheyenne Daily Sun, 24 July 1890. Richard White, The Frontier in American Culture, 13, points out that, for Frederick Jackson Turner, progress was not “merely an increase in material well-being but was cultural as well: growing democracy, greater equality, more opportunity.” 2. Hanesworth, “Daddy of ’Em All,” 23. 3. Wyoming Roads, vol. 1, July 1925, 6. 4. Buffalo Voice, 13 June 1924, 11 July 1924, 19 July 1924. 5. See Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 273–74, on the development of local and regional traditions. 6. See Lasch, “The Politics of Nostalgia,” 65–70. See Slotkin “Nostalgia and Progress,” 636, on Theodore Roosevelt’s western nostalgia. 7. Hanesworth, “Daddy of ’Em All,” 23. 8. Cody Enterprise, 11 July 1923. 9. See Richard White, The Frontier In American Culture, 9, on the contradictions and similarities between Frederick Jackson Turner’s story of the West and Buffalo Bill’s story of the West. 10. Wyoming Roads, vol. 1, July 1925, 6. 11. Wyoming State Leader, 9 June 1924. 12. Pageants and Celebrations File, Wyoming State Archives (hereafter cited as wsa), Cheyenne, Wyoming. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 277, notes that pageants provided immense appeal during the early part of the century and “are inextricably a part of progressive-era culture, and a nostalgic one at that.” 13. Wyoming State Training School Pageant Program, 19 August 1922, Pageants and Celebrations File, wsa. See Kammen,

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Mystic Chords of Memory, 400–401, on the rise of nostalgia in the 1920s. “The Coals of Newcastle: A Historical Pageant of Newcastle, Wyoming,” 2 and 4 July 1964, Pageants and Celebrations File, wsa. Standard Oil enlarged its Casper refinery in the 1920s, making it one of the largest in the world. See Larson, History of Wyoming, 406, 432. “Pioneers to March Again,” Casper Tribune Herald, 6 August 1937. Casper Tribune Herald, 15 July 1937. For an exploration of celebrations, see Mary Ryan’s scholarship on parades in nineteenth- century America, in The New Cultural History, 133. The Legend of Rawhide Program, “A Pageant Presentation at Lusk, Wyoming,” 24 July 1955, wsa. Gillette Woman’s Club, Annual Wyoming Products Dinner Program, 4 April 1939, wsa. Cullen, Rock Springs, 48, 99. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 39, writes that “What people believe to be true about their past is usually more important in determining their behavior and responses than truth itself.” Helen McNair, “Author of Pageant Relates Incidents in Production of First Performance,” n.d., Pageants and Celebrations File, wsa. Wyoming Roads, vol. 1, July 1925, 6. Cody Enterprise, 1 May 1935. Cody Enterprise, 6 July 1932. “Go Western or Else Sounded,” Wyoming State Journal, 20 June 1940. Casper Tribune Herald, 14 June 1941, 1, 8. Casper Tribune Herald, 4 June 1941. James Fentress and Chris Wickman write in Social Memory, 198, that “by acting in a ‘traditional way’, groups often seek to validate their particular ideas about the past. It is as if the past might be ‘proved true’ if commemorated assiduously enough. . . . Societies try to prove that these standards are

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true by living up to them. In doing so, they validate their beliefs.” See also Ewig, “Give Them What They Want,” 59– 80. Larson, History of Wyoming, 338. Campbell County Record, 5 August 1920. Casper Tribune Herald, 30 June 1940; Wyoming State Journal, 13 June 1940. Casper Tribune Herald, 14 June 1941. Wyoming Roads, vol. 1, July 1925, 6. Campbell County Record, 16 September 1920, 7. Gardner and Brinkerhoff, Historical Images of Sweetwater County, 6. For a history of Rock Springs, see also Rhode, Booms and Busts on Bitter Creek. Cullen, Rock Springs, 84, 156. Rock Springs Miner, 5 September 1930. Casper Tribune Herald, 8 August 1937, 6 August 1937. Dorothy Noyes and Roger Abrahams in “From Calendar Custom to National Memory,” 84, note that unity comes about through community practices: “Intensely lived custom plays a role in the actual conservation of practices.” Similarly, Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” 179, writes of people’s inclination to look to “refashioned memory, especially in its collective forms, to give themselves a coherent identity, a national narrative, a place in the world.” See also Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 492, on the West and its legend. “How the People of Cody Built the Museum,” Buffalo Bill Historical Center File, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 108, 109, 66. William Coe to Peg Coe, 11 May 1954; “Trek to Coe Lodge” pamphlet, dated 11 August 1985, both from the Coe Collection, bbhc Archives, Cody, Wyoming. John Neary and Joan Neary, “Lovely Arboretum Gets a Reprieve,” Smithsonian 3, no. 5 (August 1972):50–55; Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 30–33. Yale University American Studies Newsletter, no. 1, June

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44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

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51.

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1956, Griswold Presidential Records, 1950–59, 1962, Yale University Library (hereafter cited as yul), New Haven, Connecticut. Best, “Cody Collections,” 98. “Mary Jester Allen and the Buffalo Bill Museum,” bbhc file, ahc. Bartlett, From Cody to the World, 131, 129, 135, 136, 137; McCracken, Roughnecks and Gentlemen, 418. “Whitney Gallery of Western Art to Be Opened in Cody,” The Dude Rancher, April 1959, 14. See Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 317, on Coe’s interest in the West. See Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 8, on the control and representation and what that indicates. Wyoming Eagle, 4 May 1954. “University of Wyoming American Studies, W. R. Coe Program,” program brochure, University of Wyoming Archives, ahc. Griswold Presidential Records, 1950–59, 1962, yul, New Haven, Connecticut. The Whitney Gallery and the American Studies program reflected the cultural mores of the “Containment Culture,” the term Alan Nadel uses to describe American life from 1948 to the mid-1960s, when the U.S. foreign policy of containment extended into biological reproduction, the cult of domesticity, and filmed teleplays. See Nadel, Containment Culture, 3. Similarly, Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 53, writes that the search to “define and affirm a way of life, the need to express and celebrate the meaning of ‘Americanism,’ was the flip side of stigmatizing Communism . . . [and] an uncritical patriotism often shaped the interpretations of the past.” See also May, Recasting America. William Robertson Coe to Charles Seymour, 25 May 1950, Griswold Presidential Records, yul; William Robertson Coe to Lawrence B. Tighe, 2 January 1951. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 657, notes that, following World War II, communism “turned into the sort of ominous specter that atheism had been a century before.” “Yale Announcement,” 1 July 1950, Griswold Records, yul.

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53. Yale News, 4 September 1952, Griswold Records, yul. 54. “Remarks by Yale President Charles Seymour announcing the gift to Yale of $500,000 by William Coe,” 19 June 1950, Griswold Records, yul. 55. William R. Coe to Whitney Griswold, 16 January 1952, Griswold Records, yul. 56. “The Tragic Neglect of American History,” New York Journal, 15 August 1950, Griswold Records, yul. 57. Buckley, God and Man at Yale, 101–3; William Coe to William Buckley, 27 July 1951, Griswold Records, yul. 58. William Coe to Whitney Griswold, 20 November 1951; William Coe to David Potter, 24 October 1951, Griswold Records, yul. 59. Whitney Griswold to William Coe, 27 November 1951, Griswold Records, yul. 60. James T. Babb to Whitney Griswold, 10 September 1951, Griswold Records, yul. 61. William Coe to Whitney Griswold, 31 December 1951; Clover Business Letter, January 1952; U.S. News and World Report, 31 July 1952, 75; William Coe to Whitney Griswold, 31 December 1951; all found in the Griswold Records, yul. 62. Assistant to President to Whitney Griswold, 15 October 1953, Griswold Records, yul. 63. William Coe to Whitney Griswold, 15 May 1953, Griswold Records, yul. 64. David Potter to Whitney Griswold, 20 April 1953, Griswold Records, yul. 65. Carwin Linford to William Coe, 16 November 1952; Mildred McFarland to William Coe, 11 August 1952, Griswold Records, yul. 66. Cody Times, November 1951, Griswold Records, yul 67. G. D. Humphrey to William Coe, 22 April 1954, University of Wyoming American Studies File, W. R. Coe program, ahc. 68. University of Wyoming American Studies Program, University of Wyoming American Studies, Coe program, ahc. 69. Edward Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” 185, notes that “collective memory is not an inert and passive thing,

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but a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed, maintained, modified and endowed with political meaning.” William Robertson Coe File, ahc; “William Robertson Coe and His Library of Western Americana,” 23 July 1954, ahc. See Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 50–51, for a broader and insightful examination of how memory, stories, and knowledge work to interpret reality for us. Richard White, Frontier in American Culture, 49, points out that the power of the stories of Turner, Buffalo Bill, and Charlie Russell were underestimated: “So powerful were these that the West had become as much an American story as an American experience.” Bennett, The Birth of Museums, 130, 147, points out that “the past, as embodied in historic sites and museums, while existing in a frame which separates it from the present, is entirely the product of the present practices which organize and maintain that frame. . . . Museums are places for telling, and telling again, the stories of our time, ones which have become a doxa through their endless repetition. If the meaning of the museum artifact seems to go without saying, this is only because it has already been said so many times.” Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” 31, notes that by nationalizing consensus “great memories” can be converted into political theology by suggesting a uniform and heroic past.

5. Voting Western 1. Larson, History of Wyoming, 336; Gardner and Flores, Forgotten Frontier, 188. 2. Flores and Gardner, Forgotten Frontier, 213. 3. Larson, History of Wyoming, 537, 518; Gardner and Flores, Forgotten Frontier, 209, 213. 4. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 563. 5. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 537.

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6. Sterba, “Town Scarred by Oil Boom Waits Apprehensively for Miners,” New York Times, 11 April 1974. 7. Sterba, “Town Scarred by Oil Boom.” 8. Blundell, “Easing the Strain: Firms Seek to Avert Boomtown Problems by Providing Services,” Wall Street Journal, 12 August 1981. 9. Blundell, “Easing the Strain . . .”. 10. Righter, The Making of a Town, 86, 92, 120; Gillette News Record, “Wright, More than a Company Town,” 8 July 1976. 11. Amundson, “Home on the Range,” 495. 12. Clark and Clark, “Wyoming Political Surprises in the Late 1980s,” 182; Larson, History of Wyoming, 510. 13. Casper Star Tribune, 26 September 1976. 14. Larson, History of Wyoming, 522, 523. 15. Sterba, “Town Scarred by Oil Boom.” 16. Iverson, “Wyoming, Still the Cowboy State?,” 6. 17. Sterba, “Town Scarred by Oil Boom.” 18. “Biographical Sketch: Gale McGee,” McGee biographical file, University of Wyoming, ahc, Laramie, Wyoming. 19. Larson, History of Wyoming, 573. 20. 1976 Wallop campaign press release, from the personal collection of Bruce McCormack, press secretary to Malcolm Wallop. 21. Sheridan Press, 11 August 1976. 22. Merry, “In a Senate Race, Wallop vs. Clout.” 23. Wallop “Senate Drive” sheet, Wallop Collection, ahc, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 24. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 570. White writes that “local control in the West had virtually always guaranteed chamber of commerce boosterism; in the 1980s, local control had become a code word for limited growth.” 25. Clipping, n.d., Wallop File, ahc. 26. Henley, “Wallop Announces for Senate.” 27. Casper Star Tribune, 20 May 1976. 28. National Observer, 9 October 1976. 29. Larson, History of Wyoming, 544, 554, 539, 611.

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30. Stuart, “Wallop Is Candidate for U.S. Senate Seat.” 31. Hoeveler, “Populism, Politics and Public Policy,” 77. Hoeveler also points out that populism “invariably honors [common sense and conventional wisdom] above the informed or expert judgments of trained specialists.” 32. Cheyenne Tribune, 23 October 1976. 33. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 12, notes that “in terms of the genesis of a populist discourse, the overriding point is that Americanism meant understanding and obeying the will of the people. To mock the opinions and or oppose the interests of the majority was more than foolish politics, it was un-American.” 34. Newcastle Journal, 1 April 1976. 35. See Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 22, for the use of fictional characters in populist campaigns. Similarly, Combs, The Reagan Range, 6, 9, writes that “For a mythology to become real to people they have to see it acted out by actors in dramas of cultural significance.” 36. Richards, “Sen. Elect Wallop Sees Need for Coalition of Energy States”; Rawlins Daily Times, 23 October 1976. 37. “Wallop ‘Right’ for Senate,” Sheridan Press, 1 November 1976. 38. See Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 11, for a history of the shared characteristics of populist speakers in the United States. Many theorists, of course, note that common sense is usually disjointed and episodic, fragmentary and contradictory—the practical, everyday consciousness of popular thought. Stuart Hall, analyzing Antonio Gramsci, writes that common sense is “the terrain of conceptions and categories on which the practical consciousness of the masses of the people is actually formed. It is the already-formed and taken-for-granted terrain on which more coherent ideologies and philosophies must contend for mastery. . . . [C]ommon sense creates the folklore of the future, that is a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at a give place and time.” Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” 431.

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39. “Wallop Tells What He Can Give Wyoming,” Sheridan Press; Cheyenne Tribune, 15 September 1976. 40. Sheridan Press, 27 October 1976; Cheyenne Tribune, 15 September 1976; Casper Star Tribune, 23 October 1976; 1 November 1976; 14 August 1976; 15 September 1976. 41. Rock Springs Daily Miner, 21 July 1976. 42. Casper Star Tribune, 11 September 1976. 43. Casper Star Tribune, 19 August 1976; Newcastle Journal, 1 April 1976. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune, 606, notes that the New Right in the West “would have to create a ‘traditional’ West, for the one they imagined had never existed.” 44. Casper Star Tribune, 10 August 1976; Sheridan Press, 13 October 1976. 45. “Wallop: Too Many Rules,” Casper Star Tribune, 19 August 1976. 46. Sheridan Press, 29 March 1976; Rawlins Daily Times, 2 October 1976. 47. Casper Star Tribune, 23 October 1976; Rock Springs Daily Miner, 21 July 1976; Rawlins Daily Times, 2 October 1976. 48. Casper Star Tribune, 30 September 1976. 49. Rock Springs Rocket Miner, 14 October 1976; Casper Star Tribune, 31 October 1976. 50. Gillette News Record, 18 October 1976. 51. “Wallop Upsets McGee,” Billings Gazette, 3 November 1976; Cheyenne Tribune, 3 November 1976; Rock Springs Miner, 4 November 1976; Casper Star Tribune, “McGee Defeated in Home County,” 3 November 1976; “Cowboy Ropes Senate Seat: Wallops Liberal,” The Spotlight, n.d., clipping in Wallop File, ahc. 52. Bill Richards, “Senator Elect Wallop Sees Need for Coalition of Energy States,” Washington Post, 12 December 1976. 53. Rock Springs Rocket Miner, 18 December 1976; Wyoming Tribune Eagle, 7 November 1976; “Wallop Stuns McGee for Senate,” Gillette News Record, 3 November 1976; “Wallop Ousts McGee, Sheridan Press, 3 November 1976. 54. “A New Senator from Sheridan,” Sheridan Press, 5 November 1976.

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55. Hoeveler, “Populism, Politics and Public Policy,” 90. 56. See Berman, America’s Right Turn, 20, for an overview of this rise of the “liberal establishment.” 57. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 171. See Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 166, as well for an overview of the emergence of Cold War conservatism and reaction to liberalism. Berman, America’s Right Turn, 3, maintains that “The key to the Republicans’ success lay in redirecting populist resentment of the rich toward a governmental establishment that supported a liberal social and cultural agenda.” 58. Larson, History of Wyoming, 575. 59. Berman, America’s Right Turn, 31. See also Berman, America’s Right Turn, 46, on middle-class voters’ sentiments about government by the late 1970s. See also Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 130–31, who offer a racially oriented explanation of American politics in the 1980s. 60. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 576, 604, notes that turning the West’s rugged individuals into victims was not an easy task, but by the 1960s westerners were favoring more individualist solutions to economic and social problems. 61. Richards, “Senator-Elect Wallop Sees Need for Coalition of Energy States.” 62. “Wyoming Earl Soon Will Take His Place in House of Lords,” Wyoming State Tribune, 4 December 1931; Sheridan Press, 20 May 1957; from Vi Willits Garber, Big Horn Pioneers, 1878–1900 (1961), Wallop File, Sheridan County Fulmer Library, Sheridan, Wyoming; “Polo at Big Horn Racks up 86 Years,” Sheridan Press, 20 July 1968. 63. Sheridan Press, 6 January 1935. 64. Newspaper clipping, n.d., Wallop File, Big Horn Library, Big Horn, Wyoming. 65. “Wallop Inducted into Polo Hall of Fame,” Sheridan Press, 11 August 1995. 66. “Oliver Wallop Is Host for Britain’s Prince,” Denver Post, 30 October 1969. 67. Rawlins Daily Times, 29 October 1976.

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68. Congressional Quarterly, 9 October 1976; National Observer, 9 October 1976; Kerry Drake, “Wallop’s Campaign Trail: Reaching Everybody,” Cheyenne Tribune, 19 October 1976. 69. Casper Star Tribune, 30 September 1976, 27 October 1976; Cheyenne Tribune, 19 October 1976, 30 October 1976. 70. “Family Money Causes Wallop Funds Crisis,” Cheyenne Tribune, 11 August 1976. 71. Casper Star Tribune, 27 October 1976. 72. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 567, writes that in the 1980s the rural West confronted its grimmest decade since the 1930s. 73. Amundson, “Home on the Range No More . . . ,” 500, 503. 74. Clark and Clark, “Wyoming Political Surprises in the Late 1980s,” 182, 188. 75. Although voter turnout was high in the fall 1976 elections, Wallop bested McGee 83,306 votes to 69,641 votes. Wyoming had fewer than 500,000 people. 76. Robert Righter, The Making of a Town, 138. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 602, notes that the ability of the “New Right” to tap into “plain folks’ Americanism gave political conservatism a new life in the West.” I would argue, however, that the New Right in Wyoming was less united against a minority “Other” than in their resentment of their perceived colonial status, for which they blamed Washington. 77. “Sen-Elect Wallop Sees Need . . . ,” Washington Post, 12 December 1976. 78. Edward Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 179, notes that “the study and concern with memory or a specifically desirable and recoverable past is a specifically freighted latetwentieth-century phenomenon that has arisen at a time of bewildering change. . . . People now look to this refashioned memory, especially in its collective forms, to give themselves a coherent identity, a national narrative, a place in the world.” 79. Hall, for instance, writes (“New Ethnicities,” 446) that “Representation is possible only because enunciation is always

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80.

81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

produced within codes which have a history, a position within the discursive formations of a particular space and time.” Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 234, identifies these as the traits typical of populist movements throughout American history. The populists of the late nineteenth century argued for a stronger state and spoke about the state as the creation and property of people like themselves. “Greedy, tyrannical men had usurped that birthright; government power itself was not the problem,” Kazin, 41, 42. Iverson, Annals of Wyoming, 7. Fowler, Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings, 246, remarks that each people creates and uses contested meanings in its folk histories so as to maintain self-esteem in the competitive context. Leaders in each group used the symbols of folk history to motivate others politically, economically, and ritually. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 24, remarks that “the irony of populism is that the language that praises connections between anonymous people and mistrusts the palaver of elites has often been communicated most effectively by eloquent men who stand above the crowd.” See Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 27, on the ideological polysemousness of cultural symbols, including western ones like the cowboy. Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” 179, writes that “the invention of tradition is a method for using collective memory selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others and elevating still others in an entirely functional way. The art of memory for the modern world is both for historians as well as ordinary citizens and institutions very much something to be used, misused and exploited, rather than something that sits inertly there for each person to posses and contain.” See Richard White in his 1996 address to the Western History Convention (“The Current Weirdness in the West,” 10– 11). Sheridan Press, 26 October 1976.

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88. The “irony” of western dependence on federal monies has been well documented and critiqued. In 1975, Wyoming was still receiving more than it was sending to Washington. Westerners’ resentment and frustration with the federal government, however, was and is very real, and the knowledge of that dependence was as frustrating for them as it was perhaps hypocritical. Larson, History of Wyoming, 536. 89. Larson, History of Wyoming, 507, 509. See Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American West,” for an exploration of the legitimacy of such scholarly critiques of hypocrisy against the West. 90. Larson, “The New Deal in Wyoming,” 249, 250, 252, 255. Larson, “The New Deal in Wyoming,” 255, points out that after Wyoming accepted its first federal check in June 1933, it received more per capita in federal relief than most states in the Union: $330 per Wyomingite compared to $115 nationally. 91. Larson, History of Wyoming, 525. 92. Krza, “While the New West Booms, . . . .” 93. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 572, notes that by the 1970s the metropolitan West showed all the signs of being the master of the rural West. “Its rural hinterlands mattered only as sources of water, energy, recreation, and places to dump wastes.” 94. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 210. 95. See Western, Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River, for a very useful and interesting examination of Wyoming’s economic plight. 96. Krza, “While the New West Booms . . .” 97. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 197. Conclusion 1. Vorpahl, My Dear Wister, 18. 2. To a large degree, Ehrlich’s observations reflect Torgovnick’s observations (Gone Primitive, 157) about the fascination that the West has with the “primitive,” which she maintains “has to do with its own crises in identity with its own need

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

to clearly demarcate subject and object even while flirting with other ways of experiencing the universe.” Wyoming State Tribune, 15 May 1991, 11. Wyoming State Tribune, 5 May 1988. “Going Places,” Santa Barbara News-Press, 15 September 1996. Junge, The Wind Is My Witness. New York Times, 13 October 1998, a-18. Washington Post, 10 October 1998, a-15; Los Angeles Times, 10 October 1998, a-16. Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 11, 12, 14. Washington Post, 15 October 1998; 13 October 1998. Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 109, 162. Fentress and Wickman, Social Memory, 7. Richard White, “The Current Weirdness in the West,” 10. Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” 185.

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Bibliography Archival Collections American Heritage Center (ahc). University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Buffalo Bill Historical Center File William R. Coe Biographical File Malcolm Wallop Biographical File Dave Jones Collection Dude Ranching Collection Town of Cody File Park County File University of Wyoming Libraries, American Studies, W. R. Coe program. McCracken Library. Buffalo Bill Historical Center (bbhc), Cody, Wyoming. Caroline Lockhart Collection (clc) Coe Collection I. H. Larom Collection Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney File Dude Ranching Collection, Valley Ranch Park County Historical Society (pchs), Cody, Wyoming. Cody Stampede File Arthur Holman Clippings Wyoming State Archives (wsa), Cheyenne, Wyoming. Pageants and Celebrations File U.S. Census, 1850, 1860, 1870, Jefferson County, West Virginia. Yale University Archives. Yale University Library (yul), New Haven, Connecticut. Griswold Presidential Records, 1950–59, 1962. American Studies, Wm. R. Coe File.

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Page numbers in italics refer to the illustrations following page 32. Abercrombie, Robert F., 101 African Americans, statehood and, 89–90 Afro American Club, 88 agriculture: Big Horn Basin irrigation, 38; decline in Wyoming, 142; economics of western, 46, 140– 41; energy industry and, 116, 119; populist reforms and, 162n82 Albright, Horace, 77 Allen, Mary Jester, 51, 64, 101–2 American cowboy: as bulwark against foreigners, 4; disappearance of, 7–8, 93; dude ranches and, 67, 71, 81–86; Flagg as, 3, 28–29; frontier spirit and, 137–38; Holman as, 84–85; Lockhart views on, 42; in movies, 95; in political symbolism, 127–28; as rugged individualist, xiii–xv, 89, 114–15; The Virginian as, 29–31; western preservation and, 25–27; Wyoming identity and, xii, 2–3, 149 American identity: Buffalo Bill and, 51–57, 62; dude ranches and, 69; ethnic diversity and, 79–80; instilling symbols of, 34, 103–4; western ethos and, 155–56, 157n8; western myth and, 2–4, 142, 146, 184n71; work ethic and, 80–81. See also immigration; national identity American Indians: dude ranch role of, 67, 72; in historical pageants, 93–94; public lands and, 9; tourism and, 40, 44, 47 Americanism: antigovernment resentment and, 123; foreign policy

and, 182n50; populism and, 186n33, 186n38; teaching, 104–13; Wyoming and, 2, 146 Americanism, Our Schools, Our Laws (Simpson), 109 American Legion, 54 American Museum of Natural History, 170n69 American Studies Program, University of Wyoming, 104–7, 109–13, 182n50 American Studies Program, Yale University, 105–10 Ames, Tom, 46–48 Andersen, Hendrik Christian, 36 Angus, “Red,” 19 “Annual Wyoming Products Dinner,” 94–95 aristocracy, Eastern: Cheyenne Club and, 11–12; dude ranches and, 84; western economic development and, 8–10; Wyoming identity and, 22–23 aristocracy, rancher, 132–33 art and literature: American work ethic in, 81; Buffalo Bill statue and, 52; cowboy in, 81–86; Flagg as model for, 28–29; preservation and, 25–26; western identity in, 33–34, 46; western stereotyping in, 30–31; Whitney role in, 36–37, 64. See also Lockhart, Caroline; Remington, Frederic; Wister, Owen Arts and Decoration, 82 Athearn, Robert, 40 Atlantic Monthly, 29–30 Atlantic Richfield (arco), 118, 122, 136 authenticity, western: Buffalo Bill

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authenticity, western (cont.) Museum and, 103; of Cody wy, 37– 40, 74; conflicting views of, 31– 32, 166n20; dude ranches and, 67, 69–72, 79–81; dude wranglers and, 81–86; historical pageants and, 95– 96; institutionalization of, 90–92; intolerance and limitations on, 152–54; New West narrative in, 155; politics and, 115; self-image of, 149–50. See also Westernness Azbug, Bella, 126 Babb, James T., 107–8, 112 “Bad Man’s Gulch” pageant, 91–92 Bankhead, Tallulah, 75 Barber, Amos, 19 Bard, Floyd, 162n63 Big Horn wy, 121, 132 Big Horn Basin, 2, 38, 46, 49–50 Big Horn Polo Hall of Fame, 133 Billings Gazette, 64–65 Black Thunder coal mine, 118 The Bookman, 29–30 Boston ma, 1, 35 Boulder wy, 32 Bouvier, Jacqueline, 77 Breitenstein, Henry, 165n110 Bridger, Jim, 50 Brooks, Winthrop H., 53, 57, 68, 77 Brooks Brothers Clothing, 53, 68–69, 77 Brown, M. C., 89 Brown University, 75 Bryan, Julian, 75, 78, 85–86 Buckley, William F., 106–7 Buffalo wy, 6, 19, 91–92 Buffalo Bill American Association, 52–57 Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 64 Buffalo Bill Memorial Association, 43, 50–51 Buffalo Bill Museum: American identity and, 101; Coe Foundation and, 111–12; endowment of, 64; expansion of, 102–3; Larom, Larry in, 87. See also Whitney Gallery of Western Art Buffalo Bill Museum Association, 101 Buffalo Bill statue (“The Scout”), 32b; authenticity of, 57–59, 172n88;

dedication of, 64; financing the, 52–56, 170n67; unveiling of, 33– 34, 60–61; western identity and, 50, 174n116; Whitney and, 37, 43, 51– 52 “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” 35, 51, 68, 85 Buffalo Bulletin, 21, 22–23, 164n97 Buffalo Echo, 20 Buffalo Voice, 91–92 Burns, Sarah, 30 Campbell County Record, 98–99 Canton, Frank, 16 Carter, Jimmy, 131 Casper wy, 6, 94, 97–99 Casper Star Tribune, 119, 125, 127– 28, 135 Casper Tribune Herald, 97, 100 Cates Boarding School, 133 cattle industry: cowboy role in, 14– 15, 115; cowboy strike and, 14, 161n51; hat cowboys and, 15– 16; hypocrisy of, 138–39; populist reforms and, 162n82; western development and, 8–10, 161n59; Wyoming identity and, xii–xiii. See also ranching; roundup cattle rustling: Flagg accused of, 16– 17; Johnson County war of 1892, 16; Maverick Law of 1884 and, 15; Wyoming Stock Grower’s Association and, 17–20 Chamber of Commerce, 151, 185n24 Chamption, Nate, 17–20, 24 Cheney, Dick, 151–52 Cheyenne Club, 11–12, 15 Cheyenne Daily Leader, 22 Cheyenne Daily Sun, 27–28, 88 Cheyenne Frontier Days: culture of nostalgia in, 92–93; “Gunslingers” of, 150; western identity and, 90; western tradition and, 99 The Cheyenne Leader, 11 Cheyenne Tribune, 123, 125 Chicago Daily News, 41 Chicago Herald, 17 Chicago Saturday Blade, 17 Christian Science Monitor, 54–55 Civil War, 2, 13 Clark, William, 50

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Cleveland, Grover, 12 Clover Business Letter (Gallaher), 108 coal industry: Newcastle wy, 94; Rock Springs wy, 98–100; western progress and, 115; Wyoming development of, 116–17. See also energy industry “Coals of Newcastle Historical Pageant,” 94 Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”: death of, 43; as legend, 171n77; Park County Enterprise and, 38–39; te Ranch, 51, 59, 68, 84, 101–2; tourism and, 40, 49, 166n14; Wild West Show, 35, 51, 68, 85. See also Buffalo Bill statue (“The Scout”) Cody wy: Buffalo Bill statue unveiling, 33–34; dude ranches and, 73; Lockhart arrival in, 35–36; western authenticity of, 37–40, 63–64, 103; western identity of, 46–48, 50, 96; Woman’s Club, 167n23 Cody Canal, 38 Cody Club, 48, 52, 63 “Cody Day,” 63 Cody Enterprise, 60–61, 73–74, 96 Cody Memorial Committee, 57–58 Cody Stampede, 44–45, 49, 63, 73, 167n23 Cody Trading Company, 46 Coe, William Robertson, 49, 51, 101– 13 Coe, William Rogers, 112 Coe Collection of Western Americana, 105–6 Coe Foundation, 108, 111–12 Coe Library, 112 Coleman, Lloyd, 57–59, 62–63 Colgate University, 75 Collier’s, 70–71, 74–75 Columbia University, 11 Communism, 90–91, 104–13, 182n50 Congressional Quarterly, 134 conservative movement, 130–31, 143– 44, 189m76 Continental Oil Company, 99 Cooper, Courtney R., 80 Cooper, James Fenimore, xii Coughlin, Charles, 84 Coulter, John, 50 Country Life, 75, 80

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Coward, Noel, 75 cowboy. See American cowboy cowboy clothing: dude ranches and, 66, 70–71, 76–77, 83; politics and, 120–21, 123–24; Westernness and, 39, 44–47, 61–63, 150; Wyoming identity and, 72–73, 96–98 cowboy ethos, 152–53 “Cowboy State,” Wyoming as, xiv, 120, 138, 142, 152 Coxey, Jacob, 24 Cullen, Thomas, 95, 100 cultural and class tensions: alien immigration and, 3–4; American cowboy and, 26–27; American history and, xvi; cattlemen vs. settlers, 28–29; Cheyenne Club and, 11–12; economic development and, 119– 20; federal government and, 123; frontier settlement and, 7–8; Great Depression and, 78–79; Johnson County war of 1892 and, 20–21; Wyoming identity and, 22–23 culture/cultural identity: cowboy role in, 26–27, 81–83; creating American, 54–57, 177n61; dude ranches and, 66–70; Eastern and immigrant, 157n3; energy industry and, 116– 17; intolerance and limitations in, 152–54; invented traditions in, 140–45, 190n85; myth management in, 154; politics and, 123–25; symbols and ideology in, 64, 104– 7; Westernness and, 33–34, 46, 62, 95–96, 148–49; work ethic and, 80– 81 Custer, George Armstrong, xvi, 50 Dartmouth University, 11, 75 DeBillier, Frederic, 10, 19–20 Debs, Eugene, 24 democracy: dude ranch as repository of, 83–84; free land and western, 20–21; frontier settlement and, 6; Jeffersonian principles of, 3, 12–13; localism and role of government in, 125–26; populism and, 137–38; primitivism view of, 8; western myth of, 15, 29 Denver Post, 42–43 Devil’s Tower, 94–95

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discrimination, cultural and racial: Cheyenne Club and, 11–12; dude ranches and, 74, 77–79, 84; ethnic diversity and, 79–80. See also cultural and class tensions; racism Dos Passos, John, 81 Douglas wy, 6 Dripps, Robert D., 53 dude, defined, 72–73 dude ranch: creating the experience of, 66–67; cultural and class discrimination, 74–75; dude wrangler role, 81–86; egalitarian nature of, 83–84; ethnic diversity and, 79–80; health benefits of, 75–76; purchase of Valley Ranch, 68; University of Wyoming and, 73–74; western authenticity and, 69–72, 79–81. See also Valley Ranch Dude Rancher, 70–72, 80, 81–82, 83, 103 Dude Ranchers’ Association, 77 Dude Ranch West, 32c, 67, 72, 75, 84, 86. See also Valley Ranch Durbin, John, 17

“Earth in the Balance,” 143 economic development: boomtown growth and, 117–19; bust following boom in, 135–36; cattle boom and western, 8–10; cultural identity and, 119–20; energy industry and, 115–17; localism vs. federal government in, 121–22, 155–56; urbanization and, 141; western myth and, 138–40 Edwards, Derek, 63 Ehrlich, Gretel, 147–50 energy industry: bust following boom, 135–36; localism and, 121–22; as new western frontier, 115, 148; Wyoming identity and, 116–17, 152. See also coal industry; oil industry; uranium industry environment. See “Earth in the Balance;” “Frontiers of Freedom;” preservation; Sierra Club equality and progress, 91–93, 98, 152 “The Equality State,” Wyoming as, 88–89, 152

ethnic diversity, 79–80, 89, 99–100. See also immigration; racism “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher” (Wister & Remington), 7 Exxon Corporation, 118, 122 Farrell, James T., 81 The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (Slotkin), xvi federal government. See government federal lands. See open range; public lands Fentress, James, 154 Field and Stream, 77 Flagg, Jack: birth and education of, 13; as cowboy, 13–15; cowboy strike and, 14, 161n51; discrediting the reputation of, 16–17, 27–28; origins of, 1–3; politics of, 12–13, 20–21, 116, 164n97, 165n110; western myth of, 25–26, 31–32 free land, 13, 20–21. See also open range; public lands free silver, 24 Frewen, Moreton, 9 Friedman, B. H., 51 “Frontiers of Freedom,” 143–44 frontier spirit: American cowboy and, 137–38; American studies of, 104– 13; antigovernment resentment and, 122–24, 131–32; invented traditions and, 104–5, 143, 155–56; national identity and, 90–91; state pride in, 119–20; western heritage and, 148; western myth and, xi–xii, 146. See also Wyoming pageants and celebrations Gallaher, E. B., 108 Geringer, James, 153 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Western Gallery of Art. See Whitney Gallery of Western Art Gilded Age: lure of western wealth in, 9–10; western migration in, 13– 14; western myth in, xv; Wyoming identity and, xii–xiii Gillette wy, 98–99, 117–18 Gillette News Record, 129 Gillette Woman’s Club, 94–95

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Gills, John, 34 God and Man at Yale (Buckley), 106 Goldwater, Barry, 126 Gore, Al, 143 government: foreign policy, 182n50; individual liberties and, 104–7; localism vs. bureauracy of, 116, 121– 28; populism and role of, 165n110; public lands and, 24; western agenda for, 130, 141–42; Wyoming dependence upon, 136–40, 155–56, 191n88 “Go Western” celebration, 97. See also Casper wy Great Depression, 78–79, 81, 101, 139–40, 191n90 Green River wy, 117 Griswold, A. Whitney, 107–8 Groves, F. S., Jr., 59 Hammer, Armand, 103 Handley, William, xv Harding, Warren G., 63 Harper’s Monthly, 7 Harrison, Benjamin, 19, 22 Harvard University: cattle baron alumni of, 10, 19; cowboy alumni of, 42; dude ranches and, 75–76; Flagg and, 1; Wister and, 30 hat cowboys, 15–16, 161n63 Haymarket Riots of 1886, 3 heritage, western: frontier spirit and, 148; “Go Western” as, 97–98; institutionalization of, 90–92; symbols and ideology in, 104–7 High Country News, 142 historical accuracy, pageant, 95–96 Hi Stranger! The Complete Guide to Dude Ranching, 70–71 Holman, Arthur, 84–86 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 30 homesteading, xi, 14–15 Homestead Strike of 1892, 3 homosexuality, 152–54 Hopkins, Harry, 140 Howells, William Dean, 30 ideology, political and economic, 104– 13 Illinois Oil Company, 99 immigration: American identity and,

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2–4, 34, 54–57, 171n73; racism and, 4, 7, 171n74; western preservation from, 25–27. See also American identity individualism and self-reliance. See frontier spirit Irvine, William, 10 Jackson wy, 73 Javits, Jacob, 126 Jeffrey City wy, 118, 136 Jews, racism toward, 4, 7 J. J. Little and Company, 49 Johnson County war of 1892, xiii, 15– 20, 32, 91, 161n59 Jordan, Teresa, xi Kammen, Michael, xvii, 4, 105 Kerr McGee Corporation, 118 Knights of Labor, 161n51 Knoedler Galleries, 103 Krza, Paul, 142 Laberteaux, Frank (Mrs.), 27 Ladies Home Journal, 70, 80 Lander wy, 93, 96 Laramie wy, 152 Larom, Irving H. (Larry), 32c; background of, 67–68; Brooks Brothers Clothing and, 53; death of, 87; marketing of Westerness, 66–67; “The Valley Ranch,” 68 Larson, T. A., 120, 122, 139 “The Last Cavalier” (Remington), 7 “Legend of Rawhide” pageant, 94–95 Lesbian Gay and Bisexual and Transgendered Association, University of Wyoming, 153 LeVene, Ron, 150 Lewis, John L., 79 Lewis, Meriwether, 50 Lippincott’s Monthly, 9, 35 literature. See art and literature Little, Arthur W., 49, 51 Little, June, 48 “Little Waldorf,” 74 localism: anti-growth attitude of, 121–22; Buffalo Bill Museum and, 102–3; western authenticity and, 114–15; western symbolism and, 123–25, 128, 137

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Lockhart, Caroline: background of, 35–36; Buffalo Bill statue and, 50– 51, 57–59; creating western identity, 34, 167n27; role in Cody wy, 40–45, 64–65; western authenticity and, 37–38 Lodi ca, 32 Long, Huey, 84 Lowenthal, David, 141–42 Lusk wy, 94, 114 Maverick Law of 1884, 15 McCoy, Tim, 44 McFarland, Mildred, 109 McGee, Gale, 120–21, 128–29, 135 McNamara, W. G., 98 Me-Smith (Lockhart), 36, 41 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 101, 170n69 Middleton, David, 63 Miller, Leslie A., 140 mining industry. See coal industry; energy industry Mobil Chemical Company, 118 Moncreiffe, Malcolm, 132–33 Moorcroft wy, 99, 111 mythology defined, xvi–xvii. See also western myth Nash, Roderick, 25 national identity, 90–91, 189n78. See also American identity National Observer, 121–22, 134 National Republican Committee, 51 National Security League, 54 nativism, western identity and, 33–34 Newcastle wy, 94, 114 “New Conservatism,” 131 New Right politics, 131, 189n76 New Western History, xvi, 155 New York Journal, 106 New York Sun, 58 New York Telegraph, 58 New York Times, 41–42, 103, 117, 152–53 Northern Wyoming Herald, 48–49 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha), 126–27 oil industry: economic development and, 116; impact on frontier, 98–

99; local symbolism of, 135; pipelaying competition, 99–100. See also energy industry “Old West”: Buffalo Bill Museum and, 102–3; death of, 64–65, 79; national identity and, 54; New West narrative in, 155; pageants for re-creating, 44–45, 91–92; Wyoming as custodian of, 150–52, 154. See also Wild West identity Omaha World Herald, 22 open range: economic development and, 8–10; Johnson County war of 1892, 15–20; western settlement and, 15; Wyoming identity and, xii– xiii. See also free land; public lands Owens, Louis, 9, 27 pageants, parades, and celebrations. See Cheyenne Frontier Days; Cody Stampede; Wyoming pageants Park County Enterprise, 38–39, 43– 44, 47–48 Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Company, 98 The People’s Voice, 20, 23 “The People, Yes” (Sandburg), 81 Pershing, John J., 53 Peterson, Arthur, 93 Philadelphia Bulletin, 35, 40 Philadelphia Inquirer, 58 Philadelphia Ledger, 55 Philadelphia North American, 41 Philip, Prince of Wales, 133 philosophy, foreign, threats to America from, 104–13 Pinedale wy, 32, 40 pioneer spirit. See frontier spirit Plunkett, Horace Curzon, 9, 14 politics: campaign symbolism in, 135– 38; conservative movement in, 130–31, 143–44, 189n76; creating American identity, 54–57; cultural and class tensions and, 3–4; Flagg and Wyoming, 20–21; ideological threats to America from, 104–13; localism and, 114–15; racism and, 78–79; western myth and, xv, 141; Westernness and, 120–21; Wyoming identity and, 23–24, 122, 123–25; Wyoming settlement, 12–13

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Polo, 75 Polo Ranch, 132–33 Pomeroy, Earl, 8–9 populism: agenda of, 116, 163n63, 186n31, 186n33, 186n38, 188n57, 190n81; antigovernment resentment and, 123; cultural and class tensions and, 3–4; Flagg politics and, 12–13, 24, 164n97, 165n110; Johnson County war of 1892 and, 22, 162n82; Maverick Law of 1884 and, 15; rise of conservative, 130– 31; western symbolism and, 137–38 Post, Emily, 45 Potter, David, 109 Powder River Basin, 118 Powell, Baden, 43 preservation: Buffalo Bill Memorial Association and, 43; Buffalo Bill Museum and, 101; Cody Stampede and, 44–45; from ideological threat, 104–13; by invented traditions, 141–45; wilderness, 25–26 primitivism: frontier settlement and, 5–6; western identity and, 23, 34, 42, 191n2; western preservation and, 25–27 Princeton University, 11, 67, 75–76, 86 progress. See equality and progress Progressivism, western heritage and, 91–92 Proulx, Annie, 154–55; Wyoming Stories, 154–55 public lands: cattle baron control of, 9–12, 14–15; cattle baron view of, 28; dude ranches and, 86–87; energy industry and, 122; federal regulation of, 123–26; government ownership of, 24. See also free land; open range Pulitzer, Ralph, 43 Pullman Strike of 1894, 3 Queen Elizabeth, 133, 136 racial equality, 89–90 racism: cultural and class tensions and, 3–5; frontier myth and, xvi– xvii; politics and, 78–79; western settlement and, 7; Wyoming iden-

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tity and, 23–24. See also discrimination, cultural and racial rancher aristocracy, 132–34, 136 ranching: cattle boom and, 8–10; cowboy role in, 14–15; dude ranch experience and, 71; energy industry and, 119; as heritage and lifestyle, 130; Johnson County war of 1892, 15–20; Lockhart origins in, 35; Maverick Law of 1884 and, 15–16; open range and, xii–xiii. See also cattle boom; dude ranch Ray, Nicholas, 18–20, 24 Reagan, Ronald, 130–31, 134 religious discrimination, 77–79 Remington, Frederic: Buffalo Bill statue and, 52; collaboration with Wister, 7–8; cowboy image of, 3– 4; frontier primitivism and, 5–6; racism of, 4, 157n4; Turnerianism and, 4–5; western mythology and, xiii, 30–31; western symbolism and, 124–25, 137, 144–45, 148; Whitney Gallery of Western Art and, 103–4; wilderness preservation and, 25–26 Remington Studio, 103 Reno nv, 32 Riding the White Horse Home (Jordan), xi Rock Springs wy, 98–100, 117 Rock Springs Miner, 100, 128–29 Rocky Mountain News, 22 Roger, Henry Huttleson, 101 Ronaclio, Teno, 100 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 81, 140 Roosevelt, Theodore: Cody wy and, 43, 63; Harvard University and, 10, 30; western myth and, 3–4; western preservation and, 26–27; Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association and, 51 The Round Up, 76 roundup: as cattle baron ritual, 10; dude ranches and, 71; maverick branding and, 17; Maverick Law of 1884 and, 15–16 rural America, 168n48, 191n93 Russell, Charles, 103 Said, Edward, 155 Sandburg, Carl, 81

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Index

Sandoz, Mari, 10, 16, 20 Saturday Evening Post, 72–73, 82–83 Schreyvogel, Charles, 52 Schultz, Scoop, 97 “The Scout.” See Buffalo Bill statue (“The Scout”) Scribner’s, 29 segregation. See discrimination, cultural and racial; racism; religious discrimination Seymour, Charles, 105–6 sheep industry, 93 Shell Oil Company, 118 Shepard, Matthew, 152 Sheridan wy, 73, 94, 96, 132 Sheridan Press, 127, 130 Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, 38 Sierra Club, 143 Simpson, Alan, 153 Simpson, Milward, 109–10 Sinclair Oil Corporation, 99 Smith College, 76 Social Memory (Fentress & Wickman), 154, 180n28 The Solace of Open Spaces (Ehrlich), 147 “spirit of the west,” 49–50, 61–62, 64–65, 71 Sportsman, 75 Standard (Oil) of Indiana, 98 Standard Oil, 101, 118 Stanford University Press, 108 Stanolind Oil & Gas Company, 99 statehood, Wyoming, 88, 93–94 Studs Lonigan (Farrell), 81 Sun Oil Company, 118 Sunset, 83 Susanville ca, 32 symbols and ideology: of American identity, 34; of Buffalo Bill statue, 55–57, 60–61; Cody wy as, 63– 64; cowboy role in, 26–27; of government regulation, 126–28, 130; of localism, 123–26; New Right politics, 131, 189n76; “Old West,” 44–45; political campaign, 135–38; of western myth, xiv–xvi, 141 te Ranch, 51, 59, 68, 84, 101–2 Teschemacher, Hubert, 10, 19

Teschemacher and DeBillier Cattle Company, 10 Texaco Incorporated, 118 tolerance, 152–54 Tompkins, Jane, 3, 12–13 tourism: Cody Stampede and, 44–46; “cowboy” dress and, 39, 61–62; dude ranches and, 69–70, 176n23; energy industry and, 119; Lockhart and Wyoming, 35–36; western authenticity and, 37–38, 150–52, 154; western myth and, 143; Wyoming identity and, 32d, 40, 50 Town and Country, 70, 74–75 Townsend, Francis, 84 traditions. See western traditions Turner, Frederick Jackson, xvi, 4–5, 25, 179n1 Turnerianism: Flagg politics and, 12; Johnson County war of 1892 and, 22; principles of, 4–5; progress and, 179n1; western heritage and, 93 Union Pacific Coal Company, 100 University of Wyoming: Lesbian Gay and Bisexual and Transgendered Association, 153; recreational ranching degree, 73–74; School of American Studies, 104–7, 109–13 uranium industry, 118 urbanization, Wyoming, 98 USA (Dos Passos), 81 U. S. government. See government U.S. News and World Report, 108 Valley Ranch, 32c; “cowboy” dress at, 71, 83; cultural and class discrimination, 74–75, 77–79; dude wrangler role, 85–86; Larom purchase of, 68; marketing dude ranch experience, 69–70; preparatory school, 75–77; summer pack trips, 77, 86. See also dude ranch; Dude Ranch West Vanderbilt, Cornelius (Commodore), 36 Vanderbilt, Cornelius (Gen.), 53 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, II, 36, 170n69 Vanderbilt, Gertrude. See Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt Vassar College, 76

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

The Virginian (Wister), xii, 1–2, 8, 28– 29, 164n98 Virgin Land: The American West and Symbol and Myth (Smith), xvi Walker, Marguerite, 133 Wallace, George, 130 Wallop, Malcolm, 114–15, 120–35 Wallop, Oliver H., 132–33 Wall Street Journal, 117 Warren, Francis E., 53, 88 Washington Post, 129, 132, 153 Webb, Clifton, 75 Weiss, William, 103 Wellesley College, 76 West, Elliott, 48 West, George, 164n98 West, Lee, 17 western clothing. See cowboy clothing western ethos, 152–53, 155–56 western myth: authenticity and, 31– 32, 81–86, 110, 149–52, 166n20; dude ranches and, 87; hypocrisy of, 138–39, 191n88; invented traditions and, xi–xii, 112–13, 143; opposing visions of, 24–26; symbols and ideology of, xiv–xvi, 141–42, 154. See also “Old West”; “spirit of the west” Westernness: Buffalo Bill statue as, 33–34; Cody wy and, 50; “cowboy” dress and, 39, 44–47, 61–63, 72–73; creating, 37–40, 174n116; defining, xiv–xv, 88–92, 168n48; dude ranch, 66–67, 70–71, 83; Lockhart as voice for, 36, 40–45; politics and, 114, 120–21, 131; Remington and Wister creation of, 28–31; Wild West identity and, 48–49. See also authenticity, western western settlement: Big Horn Basin and, 49–50; Cody wy and, 37– 40; free land and, 20–21; Johnson County war of 1892 and, 20; lure of wealth from, 8–10; opposing visions of, 24–26; primitivism and, 5–6; racism and, 7 western traditions: American Studies Program of, 104–7; frontier spirit and invented, 140–45, 155–56,

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190n85; myth management in, 154; politics and, 115. See also Wyoming pageants and celebrations West Virginia, 2, 13 “What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost” (Remington), 32a, 7 White, Richard, 31, 155 Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 52, 64, 103 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 32b; art background of, 36–37; Buffalo Bill statue and, 51–53, 64, 172n88; creating western identity, 34 Whitney, Henry Payne, 36 Whitney Gallery of Western Art, 64, 101, 111, 182n50. See also Buffalo Bill Museum Whitney Museum of American Art, 37 Wickman, Chris, 154 Wildenstein Gallery, New York City, 57 Wild West identity, 48–49, 95–96, 117. See also “Old West” “Winning the West,” 90 Wisconsin, 150 Wister, Owen: collaboration with Remington, 7–8; cowboy image of, 3–4; Eastern culture and, 157n4; Flagg friendship with, 28–29; frontier primitivism and, 5–6; Harvard University and, 10; move to Wyoming, 1–2, 146, 163n89; Turnerianism and, 4–5; The Virginian, xii, 1–2, 8, 28–29, 164n98; western mythology and, xii–xiii, 30–31; western symbolism and, 137, 144– 45; Whitney Gallery of Western Art and, 103; wilderness preservation and, 25–26 Wohnrade, Robert, 150–51 Wolcott, Frank, 1–2, 18 women: cowboy mythology and, 31, 151; equal sufferage for, 88, 152; frontier settlement and, 5–7; in historical pageants, 93, 167n23; marriage and gender roles of, 36–37, 165n8; role in western identity, 36, 40–41, 63, 91–92, 167n27, 173n112 Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association, 51

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Index

World War I, 37, 46, 132, 176n23 Wright, Lester & Faith, 118 Wright wy, 118, 136 Wyoming atmosphere, creating, 97–98 Wyoming identity: Buffalo Bill and, 51–52; Buffalo Bill statue as, 33–34; Cody wy and, 37–40, 50; cowboy as icon of, 2, 115, 149; “cowboy” dress and, 72–73; “Cowboy State” as, xiv, 115, 120, 138, 142, 152; defining, 22–24, 73; distinctiveness of, 147–48; dude ranch culture and, 66–67; energy industry and, 119–20; equality and progress as, 88–92; in historical pageants, 93– 94; localism and state unity, 101; myth management of, 154; politics and, 123–25; tourism and, 32d; The Virginian and, 29–31; western mythology and, xii–xiii, 30–31, 152 Wyoming pageants and celebrations: Buffalo “Bad Man’s Gulch,” 91– 92; Casper “Go Western,” 97, 99; “Coals of Newcastle Historical Pageant,” 94; Fort Casper Pageant, 94, 96; Gillette Woman’s Club, 94– 95; institutionalization of westernness in, 90; Lander “Pioneer Days,” 93, 99; Lusk “Legend of Rawhide,”

94–95; Moorcroft “Frontier Days,” 99, 111; national identity from, 112–13; oil industry and, 98–99; Rock Springs “Days of ’58,” 99– 100; Sheridan rodeo, 94. See also Cheyenne Frontier Days; Cody Stampede Wyoming Roads, 50, 90, 93 Wyoming statehood, 88, 93–94 Wyoming State Training School, 93 Wyoming State Tribune, 93, 132, 150 Wyoming Stock Grower’s Association: cattle boom and, 160n24; economic development and, 9–10, 140–41; Johnson County war of 1892, 16–20; Maverick Law of 1884 and, 15 Wyoming Stories (Proulx), 154–55 Wyoming Tourism Bureau, 32d Yale University: American Studies Program, 105–10; Brooks as alumni, 68; Coe as alumni, 101; cowboy alumni of, 11, 42; dude ranches and, 75–76; Wallop family as alumni, 132–33 Yellowstone Park, 38, 40, 46, 73, 85 Your Rugged Constitution (Coe), 108, 110

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