Melissa Bingmann. Prep School Cowboys

The western frontier looms large in American national identity. Since the late nineteenth century, writers, filmmakers, and politicians have fostered a myth of the western wilderness as the crucible of a uniquely “American” pioneering spirit characterized by initiative, indomitability, and rugged individualism. In Prep School Cowboys: Ranch Schools in the American West, Melissa Bingmann presents an absorbing history of an institution whose role in the development of this “frontier myth” has hitherto attracted scant scholarship—the western ranch school. Proliferating throughout Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Wyoming during the 1920s and 1930s, ranch schools were elite, privately run, non-sectarian boarding schools that offered the benefits of an “authentic” western experience to young tenderfoots from the urban centers of the Atlantic Seaboard and Great Lakes. Bingmann’s thoroughly researched account shows how, after World War I, ranch schools developed as institutions that offered the sons (and a few daughters) of wealthy easterners a taste of America’s pioneering past. Rooted in the landscape and lifestyle of the Old West, ranch schools pitched themselves as a wholesome solution to the enervating consequences of inherited wealth and urban living. Offering the challenge and adventure of life on the range, ranch schools claimed to instill the robust characteristics hewn on the frontier—courage, independence, leadership—and promised, as Bingmann puts it, “to transform pampered, effete children into gentleman cowboys who could rightly assume positions of power as adults” (xviii).

Adventure · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Courage · Elite · Frontier · HERO · Institution · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Wilderness · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies