Keeping the Wild in the Wild West
By Dr. Louis F. D’Elia
Custodian, Pancho Barnes Trust Estate
Before the Postcard: When the West Was Still Real
I’ve spent the better part of two decades as custodian of the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate, and in that time I’ve come to understand something about the American Wild West that most history books skim right past. The Wild West didn’t die on a specific date. It didn’t get shot in the street at high noon. It faded out slowly, like the sound of hoofbeats on a dirt road, getting softer and softer until you’re not sure whether you’re still hearing them or just remembering them.
By the late 1800s, the open range was already closing. Barbed wire fencing was going up. Railroads were cutting across country that used to belong to nobody and everybody at the same time. Towns were popping up along those rail lines, and with the towns came banks, general stores, schoolhouses, churches, all the trappings of respectability. The frontier, which had always been sitting there in America’s backyard like a promise of second chances, was shrinking. And Americans knew it.
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau made it official: there was no longer a continuous frontier line in America. Three years later, a young Wisconsin professor named Frederick Jackson Turner stood before the American Historical Association in Chicago and argued that the frontier had been the defining force in shaping the American character, our independence, our inventiveness, our democratic instincts, our impatience with anyone who tells us what to do. Now, Turner warned, that shaping force was gone. He didn’t say America was finished. But he implied that something essential was slipping away.
Turner was an academic. His paper was dense and scholarly. But his timing was perfect, because he was putting into words something ordinary Americans were already feeling in their bones. The country was getting too tidy, too managed, too civilized. People missed the dust.
Buffalo Bill Knew It First
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody figured this out long before the professors did. Cody was a scout, a buffalo hunter, and a man who understood spectacle the way a jockey understands horses—instinctively. In 1883, he launched his famous outdoor extravaganza in Omaha, Nebraska, and he made a very deliberate decision about what to call it. He didn’t call it a show. He called it Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Period. No quotation marks. No winking at the audience. He wanted people to believe they were witnessing the real thing. And in a way, they were.
Cowboys roped and rode bucking horses. Annie Oakley shattered glass targets from distances that made grown men hold their breath. Riders from around the country galloped through staged battles and stagecoach ambushes. At its peak, the operation required three trains to move and employed over a thousand people. When it played the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the very same event where Turner read his frontier thesis a few blocks away, more than two million people showed up by the time the Fair ended.
Think about that coincidence for a moment. In the same city, during the same summer, one man was lecturing that the frontier was gone and another man was re-creating it nightly to packed crowds. Turner and Cody were working the same vein of American anxiety, just from opposite directions. One diagnosed the illness. The other sold the cure.
Cody understood that cowboys were already moving from hired hands to cultural icons. They were becoming symbols of something Americans feared they were losing — physical courage, self-reliance, a life lived outdoors and on your own terms. Wild West spectacles offered a theatrical dose of that vanishing world. But there was a catch. You sat in the stands. You watched. When it was over, you returned to your factory job or your office or your parlor. The experience was secondhand. What people really wanted, even if they didn’t know how to say it, was to get off the bleachers and onto the horse.
The Guest Ranch (aka: Dude Ranch): Getting Out of the Bleachers
That’s exactly what the guest ranch offered. If the Wild West spectacles brought a version of the frontier to audiences in cities and fairgrounds, the guest ranch flipped the equation. It brought the audience to the frontier. Or at least to what was left of it.
The guest ranch as a recognized business model goes back to the 1880s, right around the time that Cody was launching his extravaganza. Out in the Dakota Badlands, three brothers named Eaton—Howard, Willis, and Alden—were running a cattle ranch and writing enthusiastic letters home about the life. Some of their more colorful accounts were published in the newspapers. Those letters caught the eye of a young Theodore Roosevelt, who came out to visit, promptly fell in love with everything about it, and bought his own ranch nearby. Roosevelt would spend the rest of his life talking and writing about the West with the fervor of a convert, and his enthusiasm helped put guest ranching on the national map.
But the roots of Western hospitality go back even further than the Eatons, and they come from a direction most people don’t expect.
After the Civil War, as the country west of the Rockies opened up, word got out, and it traveled fast about the extraordinary hunting. There were plentiful deer, antelope, elk, and the country’s wilderness seemed to go on forever. Cattle ranches were springing up across the territory. The railroads were threading their way across the land, and the big cattle drives were pushing herds to railheads from Texas to Montana. Livestock operations attracted serious investment money, and a surprising number of the men who bought into those early ranches were British who were hunting enthusiasts and came from a culture where the country lodge was already a way of life. Hospitality was bred into them. When strangers came through, headed out to hunt, or simply to take in the scenery that Eastern newspapers and magazines were writing about so breathlessly, these British ranchers did what came naturally. They offered a bed, a meal, a place to rest. It wasn’t a business model. It was just how you behaved when someone showed up at your door a long way from anywhere.
Eventually, of course, some of these ranchers began charging visitors for the use of a horse, a pack animal, or other provisions. The costs added up, and what had started as simple generosity quietly turned into something with a price attached. That shift, from open-handed welcome to paid experience, is one of the earliest threads in the story of the American guest/dude ranch.
By the early 1900s, guest ranches were spreading across Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Some emphasized hunting. Some featured hot springs or desert scenery. Some catered to families, some to sportsmen, some to society people looking to rough it in comfort. But they all shared a few essential qualities that set them apart from hotels.
A hotel sold you a room and brought you breakfast. The owner was invisible unless something went wrong. A guest ranch invited you into someone’s home. You sat at the family table. You met the wife and children. You watched the work of the ranch happen around you, and if you were game, you pitched in. You helped round up the horses at dawn. You rode out across open country. You sat on the corral fence and listened to cowboys talk about their lives. You ate food that was cooked by people who knew your name. The word “host” meant something on a guest ranch. It meant somebody who shared their life with you, not just their square footage.
There was psychology at work in all of this, too. Men came to guest ranches the way a middle-aged guy might go back and visit his old high school or college, looking for a version of himself that was younger, freer, a little wilder. The desk job, the mortgage, the responsibilities of grown-up life had a way of sanding down the rough edges that made a man feel like a man. The West represented that younger self. It was the teenager they used to be, before life got serious. Guest ranches gave them a few days to be that person again.
For women, the appeal was different but just as powerful. The guest ranch was one of the few places in early twentieth-century America where a woman could ride hard, move freely through open country, dress casually, and operate outside the tight social expectations of city and suburban life. It was a place of genuine personal freedom. And it’s no accident that women were central to the guest ranch story from the beginning. They ran ranches alongside their husbands, and as the decades rolled on, a few women ran them on their own.
Enter Pancho
Which brings us to one of the most extraordinary women who ever owned and operated a guest ranch: Florence Leontine Lowe, better known to the world as Pancho Barnes.
I’ve lived with Pancho’s story for a long time now. I’ve handled her personal papers, her photographs, her business records, her song charts and lyrics, her correspondence. The archive alone runs over 350 linear feet. And what strikes me every time I go through this material is how completely she defied every expectation people had for a woman of her background.
Pancho was born on July 22, 1901 to one of Pasadena’s wealthiest families. She grew up in a 32-room mansion in San Marino. She attended the finest private schools. She married an Episcopal minister. And then she blew the doors off all of it.
Pancho Barnes became one of the first licensed female pilots in California. She broke Amelia Earhart’s speed record in 1930. She barnstormed across the country with her own aerial troupe, Pancho Barnes’ Mystery Circus of the Air. She performed aerial stunts for several early movies, most notably for Howard Hughes’ epic Hell’s Angels. She founded the first movie stunt pilots’ union. She acquired the nickname “Pancho” on a youthful escapade to Mexico and wore it like a badge for the rest of her life.
By the time she bought a run-down alfalfa farm near Muroc Army Air Base in 1935, she had already packed more adventure into her thirty-four years than most people see in a lifetime. The land was flat, dry, and not much to look at. She planned to grow alfalfa, raise pigs and cattle, run a dairy. Practical, unglamorous work. But this was Pancho Barnes, and her idea of a modest plan had a way of outgrowing itself.
The first thing she did was grade an airstrip so that her pilot friends could fly in to visit her for the weekend. That single decision was the seed of everything that followed.
Building the Happy Bottom Riding Club
Over the next several years, Pancho expanded the property piece by piece. She bought more land until the ranch covered about 360 acres. Pancho enlarged the ranch house and built a swimming pool that was one of the first in the Antelope Valley. She added a bar, a restaurant, a dance hall, a motel. Pancho kept horses for her guests to ride. She built a championship rodeo stadium, and a Quarter Horse racetrack. The airstrip was upgraded to FAA specifications.
The name of her ranch evolved along with the place. The original name she gave to the ranch was Rancho Oro Verde because she felt that by raising alfalfa she was basically practicing a form of agrarian alchemy, turning her crop into hard cash (Ranch of the Green Gold). After she improved her landing strip, she renamed it the Rancho Oro Verde Fly-Inn Dude Ranch. The final name came from General Jimmy Doolittle. Pancho had put him on a horse outfitted with a new, comfortable saddle made by famed silversmith and saddle maker, Edward H. Bohlin. After Doolittle’s ride she asked him how the ride was. Doolittle, ever the gentleman, told her the horse had given him “a very happy bottom.” Pancho loved it. She renamed the whole operation the Happy Bottom Riding Club on the spot. The first two members were Doolittle and a young test pilot named Chuck Yeager.
What Pancho created on that desert property was, in every meaningful sense, a membership-only guest ranch, but one that operated on a scale and with a personality that the guest ranch world had never seen. At its peak, the Club reportedly had about 9,000 members worldwide. You never knew who would walk through the door on any given night. It might be a test pilot who had just taken an experimental jet to death-defying extremes. It might be a radio personality, Hollywood actor or early TV star. A military general. A captain of industry. A jazz or country music musician who sat in with the combo. A mechanic from the flight line. A rancher from the next property over. Pancho mixed them all together with a casualness and familiarity that was deeply, essentially Western.
At the Happy Bottom Riding Club, your rank, your resume, and your bank account mattered a lot less than whether you were good company. Members could fly into her private airstrip, saddle up a horse from her corral, attend rodeos in her arena, swim in her famous circular pool, eat steaks in her restaurant that people still talk about decades later, dance in her hall, join treasure hunts for silver dollars buried on the property, listen to live music, and stay overnight in her motel. On the same land, she ran a working dairy, cattle, and hog operation. It was a guest ranch, a social club, a party venue, a working agricultural business, and a piece of living Western mythology, all wrapped up in one woman’s outsized personality.
The Legendary Free Steak and What It Meant
One story captures the spirit of the place better than any description I can offer. On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into the Bell X-1 at what was then Muroc Army Air Base and broke the sound barrier. That evening, he came to Pancho’s. She gave him a free steak dinner to celebrate. It became a tradition: every pilot who broke the sound barrier for the first time got a steak on the house. As supersonic flight became more routine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pancho found herself handing out free dinners several times a week. She never complained.
That generosity, large-hearted, slightly reckless, completely in character, tells you everything you need to know about how she ran the place.
At night, over the desert, the Club’s swimming pool glowed a shimmering light-blue that was visible from the air. Pilots used it as a navigational beacon. It was, for a while, the only pool in the Antelope Valley, and its light in the darkness of the Mojave was like a campfire on the old frontier, a signal that said: there are people here, they’re having a good time, and you’re welcome to join.
Keeping the Wild Alive
Here is the thing I want people to understand about Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club, because it’s what sets her apart in the history of the American West.
By the 1940s and early 1950s, the truly Wild West was, for all practical purposes, over. The open range had been fenced for decades. The cattle drives existed only in movies. The frontier was a memory preserved in rodeos, dime novels, and John Wayne pictures. Most of the old guest ranches had either closed, gone upscale, or settled into a quiet routine of trail rides and scenic views. The rough edges had been smoothed off the Western experience. America itself was becoming more suburban, more regulated, more predictable with every passing year.
Pancho didn’t get that memo.
At the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the Wild West was not a memory. It was still happening. Guests rode horses and attended rodeos on the same property where test pilots were pushing experimental aircraft past the speed of sound. The frontier of the open range had met the frontier of supersonic flight, and Pancho’s ranch sat right at the intersection. She served steaks and poured drinks for men who were risking their lives every day at the leading edge of aviation technology, and she did it in a setting that still had dust, horses, corrals, live music, strong opinions, and the kind of boisterous personal freedom that the rest of America was rapidly losing.
Think of it as a Venn diagram. One circle is the old West with horses, rodeos, open desert, the ranching life. The other circle is the new frontier with jet aircraft, the sound barrier, the Space Age knocking on the door. The Happy Bottom Riding Club sat right where those two circles overlapped. And Pancho Barnes was the person who held them together.
She understood something that not many people in the hospitality business have ever figured out. A great guest ranch just doesn’t sell scenery or lodging or even food. It sells the feeling that life can still be large, daring, unpredictable, and joyful. That feeling is what the West always represented in the American imagination, and Pancho kept it alive longer and more vividly than almost anyone else in the twentieth century.
A Woman Who Was the Action
I want to be clear about something. Pancho was not a decorative figure in this story. She wasn’t just a charming hostess who smiled and poured cocktails while the men did the interesting things. Pancho was the action. Pancho could cuss like a sailor and laughed like a woman who had decided, a long time ago, that life was too short for pretending.
She built the business, managed the livestock operations, maintained an FAA-regulated airport and entertained thousands of members. She also wrote songs, with several recorded and one becoming a multi-million seller. She was an active member of ASCAP. The archive holds a catalog of over sixty of her songs.
Women had been running guest ranches since the industry began. They worked alongside husbands, and as the years went on, more and more of them operated ranches independently. The guest ranch was actually one of the more progressive corners of the American business landscape in the early twentieth century, a place where a woman’s authority, creativity, and management skill were not just tolerated but essential. Pancho Barnes took that tradition and turned it up to eleven. She was, and remains, one of the most famous women ever to own and operate a guest ranch, and she did it entirely on her own terms.
Why This Still Matters
I’ve been asked many times over the years why people still care about Pancho Barnes. Why her name still comes up in aviation circles, in Western history, in conversations about remarkable American women. And my answer is always the same.
Pancho Barnes kept the Wild in the Wild West. Not as a museum exhibit. Not as a nostalgia act. Not as a theme park version of something that used to be real. She kept it alive as a lived experience, a place where people could walk in, sit down, eat a meal, hear music, ride a horse, watch a rodeo, meet the most daring pilots on earth, and feel, for a few hours or a few days, that the American frontier was not dead. It had just moved to the Mojave and was being run by a woman who flew airplanes, wrote songs, raised livestock, and never backed down from a fight.
The tradition she belonged to stretches all the way back to those first ranchers after the Civil War who opened their doors to strangers passing through, and all the way back to Buffalo Bill’s arena in Omaha, where a showman first figured out that Americans would pay good money to feel close to a world they were afraid of losing.
But Pancho didn’t just inherit that tradition. She reinvented it. She fused the Western guest ranch with the new frontier of aviation, and she did it with a style, a generosity, and a force of personality that made the Happy Bottom Riding Club one of the most legendary gathering places in American history.
That legacy belongs to everyone who loves the West, the great outdoors, animals, and aviation, and to everyone who believes that the best answer to a world growing a little too complicated and over serious is to throw a great party in the desert and invite the whole damn world to come celebrate life and make new friends. Pancho didn’t just celebrate the Wild West. She kept it breathing. And for a blazing stretch of years on a patch of Mojave desert, she made sure the Wild stayed exactly where it belonged.
Dr. Louis F. D’Elia is the custodian of the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate
and a Trustee of the Flight Test Historical Foundation at Edwards Air Force Base.
He is co-author, with Dana Kilanowski and Michael D. Salazar, of the forthcoming book “Voices from the Happy Bottom Riding Club.”
© Pancho Barnes Trust Estate. All rights reserved.