Denim-inspired Tales – A Historian's Journey from Levi's Archives to Western Historical Fiction
Readers like to ask historical novelists where they get their ideas. Sometimes we don’t know, because writing fiction can be a magical process. But I know exactly where the idea for my western historical series came from: blue jeans.
I am a trained historian and archivist, and from 1989 to 2014 I was the company Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, the company that introduced the blue jean in 1873. I ran the company archives, took pairs of very old Levi’s on the road to do PR events (including appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show), and wrote a few books about the history of the company and the pants. But it was a little item in the archives that set me on the path toward writing fiction.
Levi Strauss & Co. was a big supplier of western wear from the 1920s through the 1990s. Early on in my career I was organizing a collection of clothing catalogs and I came across a pamphlet from 1938 called “Dude Ranch Duds.” I opened it up to discover that the company had created a line specifically aimed at people who were taking vacations at dude ranches across the West. In addition to the classic jeans and denim jackets, the line included satin and flannel rodeo shirts, gabardine riding pants, and the very first pair of jeans made just for women: Lady Levi’s.
I knew what a dude ranch was, of course. But I was fascinated by the idea that people would wear special clothing just for this kind of buckaroo holiday. So, I started researching dude ranches and collecting memorabilia: photos, advertising, artifacts, postcards. I’m not obsessed or anything, but I have over one hundred items in my collection.
Anyway, in 2003, I went to the town of Wickenburg, Arizona to track down the grave of a miner named Homer Campbell, whose jeans had been in the company archives since 1920. (This is a much longer story and involved me almost passing out in a remote, historic cemetery because it was 114 degrees that day.) I fell in love with the town, its museum, people, and history, and wrote two books about the place.
From the 1930s and through the rest of the twentieth century, Wickenburg was called “The Dude Ranch Capital of the World.” At one time there were about ten ranches scattered around the city limits, and I stayed at two of them while working for Levi’s and writing one of my books. To this day, whenever I visit my friends in Wickenburg, I also trek into the mountains to check on Homer’s grave.
Then, in 2012, I had a passing thought that I’d like to write a historical novel with a touch of mystery in it, and it didn’t take long for the plot, characters, and locale to bloom. The book would take place on a dude ranch, in a town based on Wickenburg during the 1950s, one of the heydays of dude ranching. I called the ranch the H Double Bar (the “H” was for Henry Wickenburg, the town’s founder), and it was a mashup of the two ranches I’d stayed in. A desert rat friend from Nevada gave me the name of my fictional town: Tribulation. And when I wrote about it, I had a postcard image of 1950s Wickenburg in my head.
Levi’s jeans and an old western town: they came together and gave me my story. My first novel, Dudes Rush In, debuted in 2020 and won the Will Rogers Medallion Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. My characters had more to say, so the next book in the series, Dude or Die, was released in October 2023.
I had long thought that dude ranches were the perfect setting for storytelling. They had been showing up in movies since the silent era, and books like Death on a Dude Ranch and Dude Woman were popular in their day. There was even an entry in the Cherry Ames series of young adult novels in the 1950s, called Cherry Ames: Dude Ranch Nurse (she was the nursing equivalent of Nancy Drew).
There’s a good reason for this. Dude ranches are isolated, closed societies with their own language and activities. Throw a few strangers together, some with dubious back stories, and you get the perfect recipe for drama, not to mention comedy.
Dude ranches originated in the 1880s as a place for hunters to stay when they were after big game in the Rocky Mountains. After WWI, ranches opened up in California and the Southwest to serve winter dudes who couldn’t stay in Montana or Wyoming in the snowy season. People flocked to these places because they could suspend their daily lives and pretend to be cowboys. They were called dudes (men) or dudines (women), and ranches offered everything from horseback riding and pack trips in the early days, to archery, electric bike rides through the desert, and farm to table eating today. Dude ranches are still their own world, a place to get away, and to make unique memories.
I continue to be intrigued by the dude ranch. In 2022 the University of Oklahoma Press published my well-reviewed cultural history of dude ranching, American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West. I am also noodling on an idea for the third book in my H Double Bar series of novels.
So, when readers ask me where the ideas for my novels come from, I point to the pair of Levi’s I’m always wearing and say, “Let me tell you a story.”
About the Author
Lynn Downey is a native Californian and self-described dudine. She grew up around her uncle's horses and her rodeo cowboy cousins in the San Francisco Bay Area, but instead of spending her childhood on horseback, she ended up as a historian and novelist of the West. She read about the culture of dude ranching while working as the company Historian for Levi Strauss & Co., and spent her first dude ranch vacation in Wickenburg, Arizona. She became fascinated with this unique American institution and made it the setting for her award-winning debut novel, Dudes Rush In, the first book in her H Double Bar Dude Ranch series. Lynn has written about Western history for over thirty years, and her books include American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West; Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World; Arequipa Sanatorium: Life in California's Lung Resort for Women; Arizona's Vulture Mine and Vulture City; Wickenburg: Images of America; and A Short History of Sonoma. Her books have won many accolades: the Will Rogers Medallion Award, New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the WILLA award from Women Writing the West, and the INDIE award from Foreword Reviews. She shares her home in Sonoma, California with a collection of very entertaining cats and occasionally makes wine from the Pinot Noir vineyard in her backyard. You can find Lynn on Instagram at lynn.downey.historian. Her website is at lynndowney.com, and she also writes the blog Tumblereads: A New Twist on the Old West: tumblereadsblog.
