“You’re going to want to see this.”
Monica Ellis, Lone Mountain Ranch’s head wrangler, points up the hill. A group of 15 wranglers—all but one, women—descend towards us with purpose and poise. Some are trotting on horseback, others swinging their arms to mimic a lasso motion, doubled up on tractors, as they lead more than 20 horses back to the stables. The sight was thrilling; pins and needles rushed up my spine.
It was the final day of Cowgirl Up Week, an annual get-together at Big Sky, Montana’s iconic dude ranch. The celebratory week started on the ranch back in 2017 and takes place at the tail end of the summer season in September. Every year, it draws women from around the world who have an itch for the quintessential American west ranch lifestyle. Our days prior to this one had consisted of daily horseback rides led by the head wranglers, a day trip to Yellowstone National Park, and tickets to their end-of-the-season rodeo. There were opportunities to learn the ways of the wrangler, too—from how to trot if you’re a beginner rider, to how to communicate with your horse during a ride.
The exhilaration I’d felt seeing the wranglers at work, I later realized, was because I’d never witnessed so many women dominating their field at once, particularly one usually associated with cowboys in story books and characters like John Wayne immortalized on screen. “You’d be surprised,” Ellis told me at a denim- and diamond-themed dinner to celebrate the end of the week. “There are more female wranglers running dude ranches in the west than you think.”
Ellis, who has worked as a wrangler for ten years at ranches across the Rocky Mountain West, has seen an increase in women applying for wrangler positions on ranches in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona. At Lone Mountain, where she’s worked since 2021, she says that women often make up over 80% of the applicant pool.
The origin of the dude ranch dates back to the 1880s, when the Rocky Mountains became an increasingly popular tourist attraction for urbanites who wanted to learn the way of the cowboy on a working ranch for a few days. Due to the physical demands of the role and the English settler tradition of family farms, where ranches were passed down to the sons, men were usually prioritized for the wrangling jobs. But women have long been making contributions to ranch and farm life: Mary Fields, the first known African American woman Star Route mail carrier in the U.S., became a critical figure in delivering mail across treacherous terrain via stagecoach, while also managing livestock and farm operations on a mission site.
Over time, the rise of mechanized agriculture made dude ranch life less about physical strength, and further opened the door for women—so much so that in 1934, Levi’s introduced the first line of jeans for women, known as Lady Levi’s, to cater for them. (Beforehand, women were known to borrow their husband or brother’s jeans to work and ride more efficiently.) There have been more recent markers of progress, too: Grand Canyon National Park’s mule wranglers had their first all-female team last winter, and according to the latest trend reports from the United States Department of Agriculture, from 2015 to 2019 the women operators on American farms jumped from 14% to 51% of those employed.