A Home on the Range: Murray’s Dude Ranch and the Making of Los Angeles’s Black Urban Desert

Jennifer Thornton
History
UC Riverside

From the 1930s until the 1950s, Murray’s Ranch boasted the distinction of being “the only Negro dude ranch in the world.” Located in Bell Mountain, California, the ranch offered black Angelenos a weekend getaway where they could live out their western fantasies. The ranch also served as the setting for all-black cast singing cowboy movies starring jazz heartthrob Herb Jeffries. My research explores the history of Bell Mountain, the dude ranch that made it famous, and the films that enshrined it in myth. At Murray’s Ranch, African Americans dressed up and performed western conquest as a form of leisure. Similarly, the black cowboy movies packaged and sold stories of the “Wild West” to segregated theaters around the country. These forms of consumer culture offer insight into the ways that African Americans appropriated, manipulated, and redeployed the iconography of the American Empire to serve their own ends.