The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West

Founded in 1893, the 101 Ranch was famous across the country for its touring Wild West shows, which featured countless cowboys and cowgirls, including Buffalo Bill, Geronimo, and Bill Picket. Playing to packed arenas from coast to coast, and even in Europe, the 101 Ranch show came to embody the spirit of the frontier for the entire nation. The Miller brothers, who owned the ranch, also found themselves involved in the formation of Hollywood and western movies, and the ranch produced many of the earliest western film stars, including Tom Mix and Buck Jones.

Ten years in the making, this epic story of the 101 Ranch is nothing less than a sweeping history of the West of myth and reality. Indeed, the history of the ranch begins in Kentucky in the early 1840s and continues through most of the first half of the twentieth century. Describing the legendary cattle drives from San Antonio along the fabled Chisholm Trail, as well as the hardscrabble life of cattlemen, Michael Wallis paints an indelible portrait of the frontier as it expanded westward in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Colonel George Washington Miller, the founder of the 101, participated in these cattle drives, and Wallis follows Miller from Kentucky through Missouri and Kansas and into the Cherokee Outlet in northern Oklahoma, where he founded the 101 Ranch on the banks of the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River.

Although the 101 was an enormous, viable ranch that produced huge profits for the Millers, the family became best known for its touring shows, in which ranch hands showed off the kind of bronc-busting activities they performed on the ranch. Their re-creation of life in the West captured the imaginations of Americans across the country who longed to preserve the frontier, even as it began to disappear.

The massive popular interest in the West, evidenced by the crowds at the 101 Ranch shows, also sparked a growth in western movies, and the Miller brothers were there to participate. Dozens of Hollywood's earliest films were shot on location at the ranch, and man of the 101 Ranch cowboys starred in these motion pictures.

Following the Miller brothers through their barnstorming years, Wallis also portrays the origins of the mass entertainment industry that flourishes today, and shows how this industry helped to undo the West of reality and preserve it as a popular mythology. Full of incredible characters and unbelievable stories, this is an evocative reflection of the story of America itself, in all its grandeur and all its foibles.

After reading Wallis's lively history, even readers who had never heard of the 101 Ranch will feel as if they've known of it all their lives. At its height, George W. Miller's 101 Ranch, so named in 1893, covered 110,000 acres in what is now Oklahoma. It was not only a ranching empire but also a western legend. In fact, as Wallis (Route 66: the Mother Road) tells it, the 101 played a critical role in creating the West as it came to exist in the American popular imagination. The 101 staged elaborate Wild West shows and was largely responsible for Hollywood's infatuation with the West (which in turn was responsible for the country's infatuation). Will Rogers, Tom Mix and the famous African-American cowboy Bill Pickett performed in the 101's shows, and the ranch itself was a favorite filming location for many early Hollywood westerns. Readers will quickly turn the pages, as Wallis portrays larger-than-life characters such as Lucille Mulhall, billed as the "original cowgirl," of whom Wallis writes: "Weighing less than a pair of fancy Mexican saddles, Lucille not only threw steers and busted broncs but also stalked prairie wolves, branded cattle, and roped as many as eight running range horses at once. She was an absolute showstopper." Miller's sons kept the 101 alive until the Depression, after which the ranch was divided into small farms. Full of amazing storiesAvirtually a who's who of popular Western cultureAWallis's book tells a tale of people in whom genuine accomplishment and show-biz promotion fused in a marriage as quintessentially American as the idea of the Wild West itself.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A wild and woolly history of a cowpoke mecca. Missouri-born writer Wallis (Way Down Yonder in the Indian Nation, 1993, etc.) has spent the better part of his prolific career explaining Oklahoma to the rest of the world. With The Real Wild West, whose subtitle is a touch overblown, he turns his attention to the big chunk of the state that a famed ranch took in for several decades: the 101, owned by the Miller Brothers dynasty, a 110,000-acre spread that produced cattle, grain, and western myth in roughly equal portions. The western myth element, as Wallis ably shows, came from the Miller Brothers' well-tuned sense of self-promotion: onto their ranch came such characters as Geronimo, Will Rogers, Buffalo Bill, and Tom Mix, the last a Hollywood cowboy who worked on the ranch for a short time. (Another Hollywood cowboy, John Wayne, learned ``how to ride and how to walk with a cowboy's rolling gait'' under the tutelage of a 101 alumnus, Yakima Canutt.) With an eye for the Big Picture and a sweeping style, Wallis traces the fortunes of the ranch from a political and economic powerhouse to its eventual decline some decades ago. Along the way, he turns up some nicely pointed commentary that has not been often used before, such as historian Emerson Hough's remark that ``the chief figure of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired, fringed-legged man riding a rawboned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where he might lead.'' Wallis gives those sad-faced women room to speak in his book, but as might be expected, the rootin'-tootin' cowpokes speak louder, blustering from roundup to feud to the occasional gunfight. This is western history told with twang and flair, and fans of Lonesome Dove and Louis L'Amour should eat it up. (16 pages color, 32 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

According to Wallis, the legendary 101 Ranch was the embodiment of the romantic image of the American West. Formally established in 1893 by Colonel George Washington Miller, the 101 Ranch incorporated more than 100,000 acres of prime Oklahoma grassland and stretched across four counties. In addition to their livestock, farming, and oil interests, the Miller family also operated an extraordinarily popular Wild West show featuring a "rollicking company of buckaroos, wranglers, ropers, trick shooters, and wild horse riders." Some of the more memorable characters to visit the ranch or to perform with the show included Geronimo, Buffalo Bill, Lucille Mulhall, Will Rogers, and Tom Mix. A victim of its own success as well as its own excess, the overextended Miller empire crumbled when it suffered a series of devastating economic blows in the mid-1930s. Still, during its turn-of-the-century heyday, the 101 Ranch represented virtually the only locale in the country where the "West of the imagination collided and merged with the West of reality." Margaret Flanagan

After fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War, George Washington Miller left his native Kentucky and, like many other Southerners, set out West. Building a new fortune by bringing up herds of cattle from Texas, he and his sons eventually established the 101 RanchAone of the biggest, most famous, and longest-lived of the old WestAnear the present Ponca City, OK. The Miller brothers were early pioneers in the rodeo business; Bill Pickett, the famous black cowboy who created the sport of steer wrestling, rode and performed for the 101, which ran a renowned Wild West show for many years that included nearby Ponca and Otoe Indians. (During oil boom times, it was charged that the Millers obtained oil leases from Indians in unscrupulous ways.) The Millers also provided many riders and stock for early Western movies. Wallis (Route 66: The Mother Road, St. Martin's, 1990) has written a lively account of this fascinating family that in many ways exemplified the best and worst of the Old West and helped translate it into popular mythology. Highly recommended.ACharles V. Cowling, Drake Memorial Lib., Brockport, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.