Join us online as we host author and historian Lynn Downey as she discusses the history of dude ranches and her newest work American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the Old West. 

Viewers of films and TV shows might think the dude ranch is something not quite legitimate, a place where city slickers pretend to be cowboys. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America’s original western vacation, is much more interesting, and is deeply connected to the culture and history of Arizona and the American West.

Lynn Downey is an award-winning author and historian. She is the former Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. and the author of Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World. She has written two books about Wickenburg: Wickenburg: Images of America and Arizona’s Vulture Mine and Vulture City, which was a finalist in Arizona History at the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. 

She is also a novelist. Her debut historical novel Dudes Rush In, which is set on a fictional Arizona dude ranch, won a Will Rogers Medallion Award, and placed first in the Arizona Historical Fiction category at the 2021 New-Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. The next book in her series, Dude or Die, will be released in August.

Lynn is the President of Women Writing the West, and works as a consulting archivist and historian. She writes the blog Tumblereads: A New Twist on the Old West. Tumblereads: A New Twist on the Old West | A New Twist on the Old West (tumblereadsblog.com)