Dude Ranch Capital of the World
Near Wickenburg, Arizona
After the gold mines slowed down and before the Interstate Highway made the Arizona desert easy to cross, Wickenburg reinvented itself as a place where city people came to play cowboy. The dude ranch era began in the nineteen thirties and reached its peak in the nineteen fifties and sixties, when Wickenburg was home to as many as fourteen operating dude ranches at one time. The ranches offered Eastern visitors the experience of the Southwest, horses and desert trails and campfire nights, without any of the actual hardship that the original cowboys had endured.
The town's climate helped. Wickenburg sits at roughly two thousand feet elevation, warm enough to attract visitors escaping northern winters but not as relentlessly hot as Phoenix in the summer. The town became a winter resort for a particular kind of vacationer who wanted wide skies and horseback riding and the aesthetic of the frontier without the frontier's actual dangers.
Wickenburg capitalized on this identity hard enough to claim the title of Dude Ranch Capital of the World. Among the ranches that defined this era, Rancho de los Caballeros and the Remuda Ranch were the most famous, drawing celebrities and socialites alongside ordinary families looking for a western holiday. The dude ranch industry has contracted considerably since its peak, but Wickenburg still holds onto the identity, and a few of the original ranches continue to operate.
The cowboy mythology that the dude ranch era manufactured is still very much part of what the town sells.
