I’m delighted to welcome Lynn Downey and her new book, Dude or Die, to the blog with a guest post.
Lynn Downey
I’ve been writing about the American dude ranch for the last few years. My novels, Dudes Rush In and the new sequel, Dude or Die, are set on a fictional Arizona dude ranch in the 1950s. My last nonfiction book tackled the same theme, American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West.
Dude ranches began in the Rocky Mountain West in the 1880s. They were originally the kind of place where men from the eastern states could go to hunt or just live like cowboys for a few weeks. It didn’t take long for women and families to start visiting these places, which opened up throughout Montana and Wyoming, and then in California and the Southwest around the time of World War I. People had experiences at dude ranches they couldn’t get anywhere else, and ranching is thriving throughout the western states today.
I first got interested in dude ranches when I was working as the company historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco. There was a catalog in the archives called Dude Ranch Duds, featuring clothing specifically to be worn on dude ranches. Not just the denim jeans and jackets, but western shirts, satin shirts with embroidery, gabardine riding pants, everything that real cowboys wouldn’t actually wear. But that was the point. The guests were dudes and dudines, they came from somewhere else to immerse themselves in the cowboy West.
Writing about dude ranching for so many years has yielded stories I never thought I would find, and they went beyond tales of cowboys and dudes. Doing research included perusing a lot of historical newspapers, which are available and searchable online. One day I found what is probably my favorite headline of all time. It was in a number of papers in July of 1935:
“Vampire to Retire to Dude Ranch”
It seems actor Bela Lugosi, most famous for playing Count Dracula in the 1931 film Dracula, had just finished making a new movie called Murder By Television (believe it or not). The Cameo Pictures Corporation was running publicity for the film, and told Lugosi to fill out a questionnaire for readers of various movie magazines. One of the questions asked what his “Present Ambition” was. His answer: “Dude Ranch.”
Of course, I had to read that article.
This just tickled newspaper reporters. One writer for the Brooklyn Times tracked down what he thought were a few more details about Lugosi’s interesting statement.
While the second leading fiend in the United States does not find his lot an unhappy one, he would rather be a cowboy…he has no intention of retiring to a haunted castle in the mountains of his native Hungary when his days of screen acting are over. His desires are for a home on the range, preferably a dude ranch, where all the midnight shrieks, if any, will be from guests whose digestive systems have disagreed with the ranch fodder.
Well, I didn’t believe that for a minute. So, I did what any good historian would do: I tracked down Bela Lugosi’s granddaughter.
She was lovely, and intrigued by the story, which she’d never heard before. She talked to her father, Bela Lugosi, Jr. and a few days later wrote me an email. “My grandfather was an interesting person and I believe he could have thought a dude ranch was a good idea. He really loved the outdoors and especially enjoyed hiking and taking walks.”
I think Lugosi also had a great sense of humor. Because I believe he told the PR people about his dude ranch ambition purely as a joke. Perhaps he was tired of talking to the publicity folks, and wanted to have a little fun.
This reflects how popular dude ranches had become by the 1930s. Movie stars like Errol Flynn and Joel McCrea told reporters they planned to open ranches of their own, but they never did. Gary Cooper did have a dude ranch during this decade on the property where he grew up in Helena, Montana, but it didn’t last long. That was probably because people expected to see the movie star when they arrived, but he was rarely if ever there.
Bela Lugosi could have made up anything when the Cameo Pictures Corporation people asked him about his ambitions for the future. But he chose the dude ranch, which was deeply embedded in American culture. It was also the absolute opposite of his character, both on and off screen. And he knew it.
Here’s the blurb
It’s 1954, and San Francisco writer Phoebe Kelley is enjoying the success of her first novel, Lady in the Desert. When Phoebe’s sister-in-law asks her to return to Tribulation, Arizona to help run the H Double Bar Dude Ranch, she doesn’t hesitate. There’s competition from a new dude ranch this year, so the H Double Bar puts on a rodeo featuring a trick rider with a mysterious past. When accidents begin to happen around the ranch, Phoebe jumps in to figure out why, and confronts an unexpected foe. And a man from her own past forces her to confront feelings long buried. Dude or Die is the second book in the award-winning H Double Bar Dude Ranch series.
Buy Link
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited
Meet the Author
She was the Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco for 25 years. Her adventures as ambassador for company history took her around the world, where she spoke to television audiences, magazine editors, and university students, appeared in numerous documentaries, and on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She wrote many books and articles about the history of the company and the jeans, and her biography, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, won the Foreword Reviews silver INDIE award.
Lynn got interested in dude ranches during her time at Levi’s. Her debut historical novel, Dudes Rush In, is set on an Arizona dude ranch in the 1950s; Arizona because she’s a desert rat at heart, and the 1950s because the clothes were fabulous.
Dudes Rush In won a Will Rogers Medallion Award, and placed first in Arizona Historical Fiction at the New Mexico-Arizona book awards. The next book in this series, Dude or Die, was released in 2023. And just for fun, Lynn wrote a screenplay based on Dudes Rush In, which is currently making the rounds of reviewers and competitions.
She pens short stories, as well. “The Wind and the Widow” took Honorable Mention in the History Through Fiction story contest, and “Incident at the Circle H” was a Finalist for the Longhorn Prize from Saddlebag Dispatches. The story “Goldie Hawn at the Good Karma Café,” won second place in The LAURA Short Fiction contest from Women Writing the West, and is based on her experiences in a San Francisco religious cult in the 1970s. (That will be another book one of these days.)
Lynn’s latest nonfiction book is American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West, a cultural history of the dude ranch. It was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, True West, Cowgirl, and The Denver Post, and was a Finalist for the Next Generation INDIE Award in Nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews said the book is “…deeply engaging and balances accessible writing style with solid research.”
When she’s not writing, Lynn works as a consulting archivist and historian for museums, libraries, cultural institutions, and businesses. She is the past president of Women Writing the West, a member of the Western Writers of America, and is on numerous boards devoted to archives and historic preservation.
Lynn lives in Sonoma, California, where she sometimes makes wine from the Pinot Noir grapes in her back yard vineyard.
Connect with the Author
MJ Porter 
