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Article: 100 years of saddled dudes. (Eaton's Ranch, Wyoming)(Western Wanderings)(Column)
- Article from:
- Sunset
- Article date:
- May 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Sunset Publishing Corp. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Around 6 you hear them - horses galloping from the upper pasture and splashing across Wolf Creek, wranglers pushing them on. Mornings have begun this way for nearly a century at Eatons' Ranch, the oldest dude ranch in the world. That may seem a frivolous claim to fame, but it is not. There is the West that occupies the map, and the West that occupies the imagination. Eatons' belongs in both.
The ranch lies at the base of Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains, but its story begins in Dakota Territory, where in 1879 a young Pennsylvanian named Howard Eaton started raising cattle. When blizzards and collapsing cattle prices pushed the ranch to bankruptcy, Eaton devised a ...