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  • Prep School Cowboys: Ranch Schools in the American West by Melissa Bingmann
  • Victoria Grieve
Prep School Cowboys: Ranch Schools in the American West. By Melissa Bingmann. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. xxvi + 230 pp. Cloth $45.

Melissa Bingmann's study of ranch schools in the twentieth-century American West opens a unique window into several intersecting fields of study in the US West: tourism, education, and childhood studies. The author defines ranch schools as "private, nonsectarian boarding schools that offered the benefits of an 'authentic' western experience and catered to the elite of the Atlantic Seaboard and Midwest" (xv). Through the establishment and proliferation of these schools in the 1920s, Bingmann analyzes the growth of Western tourism in the interwar years and interrogates the idea of the West as a colony of the Eastern elite. The wealthy families who sent their sons, and sometimes their daughters, to ranch schools imagined they could counteract the decadent effects of urban, luxurious living with the traits embodied in the Old West: self-reliance, courage, and initiative (xviii). The second- and third-generation descendants of self-made men seemed to lack these traits, ones their elders deemed necessary to assume their rightful places as effective leaders.

Bingmann does an excellent job of exploring the paradoxes inherent in ranch schools. She analyzes them not only as embodiments of the West as a conceptual and a moral space, but embeds them in the context of Progressive Era educational theories. In the first two chapters, Bingmann shows how headmasters attempted to incorporate the "character education" increasingly prevalent in Progressive-Era organizations like the YMCA, experimental outdoor classrooms, and John Dewey's ideas about education as lived experience (xxi). But Western ranch schools were firmly embedded in an upper-class, Eastern social network as well. Their curricula typically mimicked that of traditional Eastern [End Page 443] preparatory schools, prepared elite boys for the College Board exams, and made it easy for wealthy children to move freely between East and West. Although their location in the West made ranch schools seem more egalitarian and democratic than Eastern prep schools, in the end, Bingmann argues, the "authentic" Western experience they promised was an expensive commodity beyond the means of all but the wealthiest of Americans. Ranch schools typically required that students supply their own horses and tack, guns, ammunition, and cameras. In addition, ranch schools remained isolated from the living Native American communities that typically surrounded them, other than employing Natives as manual laborers, cooks, and cleaning staff. Native Americans were imagined as part of the romantic history of the Old West, appropriate for study in archaeology classes.

The final two chapters of the book situate ranch schools within gendered conceptions of the American West. Like Theodore Roosevelt, weak or sickly Eastern boys would be transformed into men by participating in strenuous outdoor activities like camping, hiking, hunting, and horseback riding (116). Ranch schools encouraged these forms of "constructed savagery" while discouraging some of the less gentlemanly aspects of raw frontier life, such as drinking, smoking, and profanity, evidently with varying levels of success. Bingmann provides a fascinating glimpse into the role of boarding schools in general and ranch schools in particular as antidotes to excessive mothering, apparently a national danger even before "momism" threatened American national security in the 1950s. However, Bingmann makes clear that ranch schools promised to teach self-reliance within a "family atmosphere," provided by headmasters' wives and female employees who worked as nurses and surrogate mothers.

Bingmann relies on an impressive variety of primary sources to inform her arguments. Ranch school brochures and catalogs demonstrate the curricular and educational goals they shared with Eastern prep schools and the continuity of progressive educational theories, while promotional literature from towns, tourist clubs, and railroads highlights the public image of the West and the schools' links with the region's growing tourist industry. Oral histories and interviews with ranch school alumni provide interesting perspectives that sometimes diverged from the institutional literature. Written in an appealing style, Bingmann's study is a welcome addition to a largely ignored aspect of twentieth-century American childhood: the experiences of privileged Eastern boys becoming men in the American...

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