Books

Pahaska Tepee: Buffalo Bill’s Old Hunting Lodge and Hotel, A History, 1901–1946
Published by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1987.

“Dr. Kensel gives the reader a detailed history of the Cody Road to Yellowstone Park and the dude ranches, hunting lodges, and tourist facilities along the way. Well researched and very well written, this book offers a delightful view of what it was like being a tourist or a hunter in Cody country, or a guest at Pahaska Tepee, in years not too far past.” Richard Bartlett, Author of Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged

Dude Ranching in Yellowstone Country – Larry Larom and Valley Ranch, 1915–1969
Published by The Arthur H. Clark Company, an imprint of the University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Republished in paperback 2022.

Winner of the 2011 Wyoming State Historical Society Book Award, Nonfiction.

After riding a stagecoach in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in 1910, Princeton student Irving H. “Larry” Larom was determined to live a life in the West. Later that year, Larom made the first of four summer trips to Wyoming, where he was a guest at Jim McLaughlin’s Valley Ranch, nestled in a scenic valley in the upper South Fork of the Shoshone River. Larom became so enamored of the magnificent wilderness environment and the prospects of becoming a dude rancher that he abandoned his life as a New York socialite. Partnering with Brooks Brothers heir and Yale student Winthrop Brooks, he purchased Valley Ranch in 1915. W. Hudson Kensel recounts the life of Larom, whose East Coast connections to financial resources and wealthy guests enabled him to transform McLaughlin’s small homestead into a major tourist destination and prep school on the edge of Yellowstone National Park.