By Elizabeth Clair Flood

All dudes and dudines want is a little manure on their boots...and some respect

Old West Days in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Each Memorial Day Weekend, locals western up in their loud rags to entertain the first summer visitors. "Soiled doves" promenade down the boardwalks. Indians dance about, beating drums, and gunmen with sinister curly mustaches fire blanks at unnerving intervals.

While a float lurches down Broadway carrying the high school band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," kids scramble for flying bonbons. Several in the crowd get downright weepy-eyed over the sight of a cowboy carrying Old Glory. On the corner, a New Yorker boasts about the manure on his cowboy boots.

For me, Old West Days means that it's the perfect time to wear a great Western outfit.

On that particular morning, I rolled out of bed and looked at my 1930s Harrison Crandall painting of a dude girl dressed in woollies, an orange shirt, leather vest, and beaded gauntlets. She flaunts a saucy attitude, leaning against a buck-and-rail fence in front of the Tetons. I decided to be her for the day. Better yet, I made up my mind to enter the Best Dressed Contest.

So, I headed for Mary Schmitt's store, Cayuse Western Americana. She'd have the perfect dude outfit. I stepped gingerly into a pair of $3,200 woolly chaps, once worn by a gal at the S Bar B Dude Ranch. I also put on a Yakima beaded vest decorated with red roses, North & Judd five-spot spurs, and George Lawrence cuffs which I matched with a vintage red shirt and a 1920s cowgirl hat with a wide, pencil-rolled brim. As I left the shop, I felt pretty smart in my outfit, which cost more than a couture wedding dress.

"Want me to shoot those sheep?" said a guy with a handlebar mustache, pointing at my chaps.

"They're already dead," I answered in my best Western drawl, as I clanked down the street in my spurs and strutted my dude-girl style.

I lost the contest to 9-year-old Katie Loveless, dressed like a cowgirl in a black velvet mini, a shocking pink shirt, black hat, and boots with fringe on them. After the contest, she told me she aspired to be an actress, and she had won the Best Dressed Contest three years in a row. I had had no idea what I was up against. The crowd went wild when she bowed and scraped and twirled her hat.

When I found out Katie didn't own a horse either, I felt a little better. She was just a dudine like me.

Out west, the word dude for guys, and dudine for the gals, officially means someone from the East who pays to stay at a ranch. Although dude ranchers insist this isn't true, dude more commonly means a greenhorn, someone with little or no knowledge about horses, or someone who dresses flamboyantly. With hearts full of unabashed love for the Wild West, dudes are gullible creatures--cat toys Westerners love to bat around.

If a true Westerner tells a dude to sit on an ant hill, he will. If a cowboy tells a dude to slather himself in bacon grease because the stench on his nude body will keep grizzly bears away, he will.

The chances of dudes becoming anything other than outsiders are slim. Even Jackson Hole's glossy summer magazine pokes fun at the summer tenderfoot by listing all his stupid questions, such as:

"Are cowboys only cowboys in the summer?"

"What time of the year do elk turn into moose?"

"Is the horse manure on the Square real?"

Dudes haven't got a chance. As one elderly dude rancher from the East, who gave up trying to earn her spurs years ago, told me, "You're a dude 'til you die."

But, that's not such a bad vocation. Dudes and dudines spin cowboy grit and fantasy like nobody else. Who else enjoys strutting into the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar all gussied up in a Montana Peak hat, a colorful Western rag, boots, chaps, spurs with jinglebobs on them, and a saucer-size belt buckle they didn't win? Who else coaxes the neighbors to swing dance to Crystal Gayle on the freshly cut lawn, or believes pickups and Country/Western music will lead them down a spiritual path and help them understand their souls?

Dudes think sleeping in a one-room log cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water is better than a canopy bed at New York's Plaza Hotel, and working cattle with skinny-butt guys in hats is more fun than vacationing on the Riviera.

Today, dudes are still cluttering their homes with rickety wooden tables, wagon-wheel furniture, beat-up old saddles, and lamp shades propped up over cacti schooners, Winchester rifles, and distressed lodge pole, diseased with bulges.

Last month, my friend asked me to go to her family branding. I thought, "How romantic," and said something to that effect.

"Yeah, whatever," my friend replied. She was just happy for a hand. So there I was operating the shoots and having a little trouble getting the hang of the levers. The cows were bawling, the smoke was rising, and my friend's dad was tough, nonchalant, and cool as he did his job. I went about my own task--being kicked by calves in the shoot and smelling burnt hair.

We later had lunch at the Knotty Pine, where the conversation went from whether it's better to castrate calves when the moon is waning or waxing, to telling raunchy jokes. Then we returned to the corral for an afternoon of more branding. I went home that evening, happy as could be. I wiped my brow with my red bandanna, took pride in my bruises, and felt truly Western with real manure on my boots.

As I fell asleep that night, dead-tired, I thought about how I would sit down to write the rancher a thank-you letter and about the cowboy I had worked next to all day long. Then I heard the old lady's words again, "You're a dude 'til you die."

Copyright ©1998 Cowboys & Indians

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