What it means
A dude ranch was a ranch that sold the ranch experience: horses, cookouts, a bunkhouse with clean sheets, and a wrangler who called you ma’am. The dude was the customer, an Easterner or Midwesterner with money, time and the wrong boots. In Scottsdale the term covers the whole guest economy of the 1920s through the 1950s, from the Jokake Inn under Camelback to the small ranches that opened on the town’s edges after the war. You will hear it today mostly in the past tense, from someone explaining why a town of farmers and health seekers ended up calling itself The West’s Most Western Town.
The site’s 1930s chapter and the Dude Ranch and WWII era carry the full story of how a farm town rode out the Depression on winter guests. This page is about the word, and the places that earned it.
Where you’ll meet it
In the names of a few surviving ranches around Arizona, in old brochures at the Historical Society, in the Howdy Dudettes, and in every February when Parada del Sol rides down Scottsdale Road for a crowd that mostly arrived by plane.
Where the word came from
Dude was an insult before it was a market. It descends from “duddes,” a northern English word for clothes, and by the 1880s an American dude was a dandy, a city man dressed too well for the work in front of him. On the northern plains, where ranchers traditionally fed and sheltered any hunter who rode in, the Eaton brothers of Pittsburgh ran the Custer Trail Ranch near Medora, in Dakota Territory, from 1882. Their guests kept coming, one of them, Bert Rumsey of Buffalo, insisted on paying, and locals called the lot of them dudes; Howard Eaton is credited with turning the slur into a trade name. The Eatons moved to Wolf, Wyoming, in 1903 or 1904, and by 1917 ran 7,000 acres with room for 125 guests.
The industry organized in Bozeman, Montana, on September 27 and 28, 1926, when the Northern Pacific Railway and 26 ranches founded the Dude Ranchers’ Association. Railroads carried the idea south to Arizona by the 1920s, where the selling point was reversed: not summer in the mountains but winter in the sun.
Scottsdale’s version started before the name. The Graves Guest Ranch at Scottsdale and Indian School roads began as a tuberculosis recovery center, advertising “all the comfort of a real home and in a climate that is with out a peer in the entire world,” and was selling Navajo blankets from its curio shop by 1910. The Ingleside Inn opened as a private club in 1909. North of town, the Vista Bonita Guest Ranch ran cabins, a riding arena and a restaurant at Pima and Pinnacle Peak roads in the 1920s. In 1926 Sylvia Evans and Lucy Cuthbert opened a tearoom under Camelback Mountain that a Hopi boy had named Jokake, “mud house”; they added guest rooms in 1928 and ran it November through April on the American Plan. The Camelback Inn followed in 1936, the Kiami Lodge in 1937.
What it is not
A dude ranch was not a working cattle ranch with a spare room, though it liked to look like one, and it was not a resort, though the line blurred fast. The Jokake and the Camelback Inn were inns with horses; the ranches beyond town were horses with beds. Neither was a hotel in the European sense until the Valley Ho opened year-round in 1956.
The fine print
The postwar list is the surprising part. The city’s own historic-context survey names the Ride-n-Rock Ranch, built in 1949, then the Flying T, Rancho Vista Bonita, the Bunkhouse, the Sundown, the Yellow Boot, the Sundial Guest Ranch, Paradise Valley Ranch and Turquoise Ranch in the early 1950s, and the Diamond Lazy K, Geronimo, Rainbow and Macaw ranches by the end of the decade. Guests from these places and riders from the reservation hitched horses outside downtown shops, and in 1949 a Chamber of Commerce meeting resolved to “give preference to the horseback rider over the automobile.” That line explains the hitching rails and the 1947 slogan better than any brochure.
The automobile won anyway. Nationally, registered dude ranches dropped from about 500 in 1936 to about 100 by 1958 as families drove to motels instead of training to a ranch for a month. Scottsdale’s ranches were absorbed by subdivisions in the 1960s and 1970s; the Jokake was sold to Charles Alberding in 1952, closed as a resort in the late 1970s, and its land became the Phoenician, where two adobe towers still stand at the entrance.
Two gaps are worth naming: no source gives a rate card for a Scottsdale dude ranch, and the survey that lists the 1950s ranches does not say where most stood. The word, meanwhile, drifted. “Guest ranch” replaced it as operators tired of the joke, and in Scottsdale the dude survives only in costume: the Howdy Dudettes, the hostesses of Western Week, are the last people in town paid to use it.