Fred Harman: Red Ryder's Colorado Home

Fred Harman was born in nineteen oh two in St. Joseph, Missouri, but the ranch country around Pagosa Springs gave him the landscape, the horses, and the western spirit that would define his most celebrated work. Growing up on a ranch near Pagosa Springs, Harman developed an intimate feel for the San Juan Mountain country that never left him.

His first syndicated comic strip, Bronc Peeler, launched in nineteen thirty-four. Four years later, on November sixth, nineteen thirty-eight, NEA syndication distributed the first Red Ryder Sunday strip. The character was a straight-shooting cowboy hero, and his fictional home on Painted Valley Ranch in the Blanco Basin was drawn unmistakably from the Colorado mountain landscapes Harman had known since boyhood.

Red Ryder's young companion Little Beaver, a Navajo boy, appeared alongside him from the beginning. At its peak, Red Ryder ran in seven hundred fifty newspapers, reaching an estimated forty million readers. Harman established a Red Ryder Ranch in Pagosa Springs in nineteen forty, bringing the fictional setting back to its real-world inspiration.

That same year, a licensing arrangement produced the Daisy Red Ryder air rifle, one of the longest continuously licensed products in merchandising history, made familiar to generations of American children and immortalized in the film A Christmas Story. In nineteen sixty-five, Harman was among the five founding members of the Cowboy Artists of America, a group dedicated to western representational art and to ensuring that the visual tradition of the American West would outlast the century that created it. He died in nineteen eighty-two.

Pagosa Springs holds an annual Red Ryder Roundup Rodeo in his memory.