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PrintWords from the Wild
Cadre of accomplished writers discovered Jackson Hole early on
The Bar BC Ranch was established in 1912 by Maxwell Struthers Burt and his fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Horace Carncross.
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About the time Gertrude Stein composed the romantic line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—and invited Lost Generation writers and artists like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Picasso into her chic Parisian salon on 27 rue de Fleurus—another significant literary get-together was taking place far away. This one was much more rustic in style; in some ways, however, just as glamorous, as a sophisticated crowd of artists and writers gathered in Jackson Hole.
In the early 1900s they came to the valley to hunt, fish, write, and, in some cases, gather information for Saturday Evening Post articles or for their own books about the West. One of the big names was Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, the first true western novel. Wister stayed at the valley’s earliest dude ranch, the JY, on the banks of Phelps Lake, while building a cabin for his family. Others on the scene not long after included Ernest Hemingway, in the throes of writing A Farewell to Arms; the prominent publisher Alfred Knopf; Western writer Wallace Stegner; and historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bernard DeVoto.
Jackson Hole, frequented by trappers, outlaws, big game hunters, and cowboys, was very much “undiscovered” in the early 1900s, still the Far West of Theodore Roosevelt. To get here it took four or five days by train from the East, then a few more days in a covered buckboard over dirt roads. This small group of sophisticates, philosophers, poets, and some of the top people in publishing and politics—for the most part, Philadelphia socialites like Wister—sought out this valley, a place romanticized as the last of the Old West by Roosevelt and artists like Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, and Charlie Russell, and photographer William Henry Jackson. These were people who crossed the Atlantic on steamers and engaged in the creative movements in Europe, but also chose trail riding with cowboys, dancing the Charleston inside rough-hewn cabins, and singing “Ten Thousand Cattle” around a campfire under starry skies.
The man responsible for many of these visits to Jackson Hole was the valley’s second dude rancher, another prominent Philadelphian named Maxwell Struthers Burt. An award-winning novelist and one of Charles Scribner’s Sons top authors, he shared the prestigious editor Maxwell Perkins with the likes of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Burt wrote numerous popular novels, articles for The Saturday Evening Post, short stories for literary magazines, and many poems and songs. His best known books, Diary of a Dude Wrangler (1924) and Powder River (1938), became classic Wyoming histories.
On Burt’s first ranch, the Bar BC, and later in the 1930s on his Three Rivers Ranch, he provided family, friends, and colleagues with rustic retreats where they could experience the West. The remoteness attracted the visitors.
As one early Bar BC visitor reported, “We were so far away from home base we could have been in Tibet for all we knew."
The entire article can be read in the Winter 2012 issue of Jackson Hole Magazine.
