THE WILL ROGERS RANCH: A TRIBUTE

 In 2017 as part of a larger tour of Hollywood and its surroundings I took a trip p the Santa Monica Mountains to visit Will Rogers State Historic Park and joined a tour of the ranch house, polo grounds and stables. I did not know then I was seeing what would in less than a decade become lost history. By the second day of the LA wildfires the ranch house and stables were among the many cultural markers lost to the inferno. Their destruction pales in comparison to the thousands of homes destroyed, the thousands of people displaced and the lives lost. Nonetheless, the loss of what was a testament to a fascinating character, a uniquely American success story, is a blow. 

Memorials and honors to Will Rogers abound west of the Mississippi. Most notable among them is the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma, near where the Will Rogers story truly begins. Rogers was born in 1879 in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory near what the coming railway would soon influence rechristen Oologah, Oklahoma. Both his parents were of mixed Cherokee and European blood, but considered themselves part of Cherokee Nation, his father, Clement V. Rogers holding important political positions within the Territory. 

Typical of a boy raised on a ranch, Rogers became an expert roper. Unlike many young men of his time and place Rogers took his roping skills abroad, albeit with limited success. First, in Argentina he attempted starting his own ranch. When that endeavor failed, he became an entertainer, rodeoing before crowds in South Africa and then Australia. By 1904 he was back in the United States. After gaining popularity at the St. Louis World’s Fair as a stunt roper and, the following year, roping a bucking steer before a stunned audience in Madison Square Garden, Rogers began a fruitful career in vaudeville and later in radio and film. 

Rogers’s career as an entertainer is as well remembered for his comical takes on politics and society as for his roping skills. After his popularity was established in rodeos and theater, Rogers found an outlet for his observational wit in newspapers, radio and talking pictures. His satire was gentle and often self-deprecating. He described it best himself, “I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.” 

It was his joy of living and good-natured humor that made him a beloved national icon, a triumph of a humble young man from the Indian Territory who took the rodeo world by storm and helped America laugh at herself even during some of her darkest moments. As it has a sad habit of doing, tragedy cut the laughter too soon. While flying with his aviator friend Wiley Post over Alaska on August 15, 1935, both Rogers and Post were killed when the Lockheed Orion-Explorer Post was piloting crashed into a lagoon some twenty miles south of Point Barrow. A nation mourned.

The museum in Oklahoma is an important archive and testament to the legacy of Will Rogers but the ranch house Rogers built in the 1920s in the Pacific Palisades is an irreplaceable loss. Its conception, construction and furnishing were all direct products of Rogers’s imagination and unique style. They were the rewards of a long and happy career. Just as there will never be another Will Rogers there will never again be another ranch like the “Ranch that Jokes Built”. In face of this we should count our blessings that the home was preserved after Rogers’s widow, Betty, willed it to the State of California in 1944 for the world to see. Above all, we owe a debt of gratitude to the park rangers who cleared the ranch house of as many artifacts as they could while the fires were encroaching. Thanks to their efforts and dedication many Native American artworks, Rogers’s banjo and some furniture was saved and not a single horse in the stables perished.

On January 8th, the fires completely engulfed the ranch house and burnt it to the ground along with other historic landmarks. In the wake of the fire all that was left of the Will Rogers ranch was two crumbling chimneys and smoldering rubble. For the second time in less than a century, a nation mourned for Oklahoma’s Son.