Guest ranches arose in response to the romanticization of the
American West that began to occur in the late 19th century. In 1893, as part of his
Frontier Thesis, historian
Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the
United States frontier was demographically "closed". That, in turn, led many people to have feelings of
nostalgia for bygone days, but also, given that the risks of a true frontier were gone, people could safely indulge in this nostalgia. Thus, the person referred to as a "
tenderfoot" or a "
greenhorn" by Westerners was finally able to visit and enjoy the advantages of western life for a short period of time without needing to risk life and limb. In 1967,
Marshall Sprague wrote that Griff Evans was running a dude ranch near
Estes Park, Colorado by 1873, "thirty years before dude ranches were officially invented". When
Isabella Bird visited Evans that year, he already had nine men and women as guests. In 1884, a dude ranch near
Medora, North Dakota was owned by the Eaton brothers, businessmen from Pittsburgh. It was likely fostered by the collapse of the free-range cattle industry in the late 1880s. Too many ranchers shared the open plains with vast herds of cattle, and in the hard
winter of 1886 herds were decimated, with some owners financially ruined overnight. The Western adventures of famous figures such as
Theodore Roosevelt, a neighbor of the Eatons in the 1880s, were made available to paying guests from cities of the East, called "
dudes" in the West. In the early years, the
transcontinental railroad network brought paying visitors to a local railroad depot, where a wagon or buggy would be waiting to transport people to a ranch. Experiences varied, because some ranch visitors expected a somewhat edited and more luxurious version of the "
cowboy life", while others were more tolerant of the odors and timetable of a working ranch. By 1913, it was noted that ranchers had begun to dress as cowboys, and had introduced pageantry, such as an afternoon cattle round-up, to add to the assumed glamour of Western life. ==Hunting ranches==