Photos: Inside Wild West City, New Jersey Theme Park

Little Miss America meant business. She may have been only 4 or 5 years old, but that girl wanted me (pretend) dead — and I have the pictures to prove it.

Last year, I visited Wild West City, a small, family-owned theme park in the hills of North Jersey, about an hour outside New York City.

Every 15 minutes, the park stages short skits in which a succession of mostly white actors playing Frontier heroes like Wyatt Earp guns down the “bad guys.” It taps directly into the myth of the “good guy with a gun” protecting America from the nefarious, often non-white, “others.”

Kevin Holdorff and two other actors during a skit on Main Street at Wild West City.

The audience awaits as the jury is convened during an audience participation skit.

The good guys kill Mexican banditos at Wild West City, though I observed no Latinx actors during my visit. Kenn Hill, the long-time Black marshal, was the only actor of color I met.

On my second day at Wild West City, I stumbled into an audience-participation skit. Lawmen led children to apprehend a gang of thieves they’d seen commit robbery earlier that day. Chris Dimitriou, who played one of the good guys, sent the kids ahead to the Sheriff’s office to discover the punishment for the outlaws: hanging.

But before they could string them, the posse needed volunteer jurors for a quick trial. They selected three, and Dimitriou started up a call-back chant.

“What are we gonna do?” he yelled. “We’re gonna hang ’em,” he replied to himself. Then, he screamed again, “What are we gonna do?” This time, the children, holding toy guns, shouted in unison:

“Hang ’em!”

Then they did it again. I checked to see if anyone seemed troubled, but the crowd was rapt. No one paid any mind as I snapped my pictures, though I noticed one juror giving me the stink-eye: Little Miss America.

A young girl pretends to shoot me with her toy gun during an audience participation skit at Wild West City.

Her blonde hair was in a ponytail, secured by an American flag bow. The shirt was red-white-and-blue, and she wore a blue, beaded necklace with sparkly stars over it. Little Miss America’s jean shorts were fringed and painted with stars and stripes. Pink cowgirl boots covered feet planted firmly on the ground as she raised her cap gun and pointed it at me.

With a Clint Eastwood stare, she pulled the trigger.

Bang!

The young girl, whom I've nicknamed "Little Miss America," continued to pull the trigger, and furrowed her brow.

In the second photo, her brows furrow. But when I didn’t “die” in the skit, her luck turned, as Dimitriou yelled that one of the robber actors from the earlier heist was still at large.

(The robbery happened before I arrived at Wild West City for the day.)

Maybe the last bad guy was in the gift shop? Did anyone see him? Could they bring him back for the hanging?

In a flash, cortisol flooded my bloodstream because I had a premonition of what came next. Who should we hang, Chris asked. Little Miss America dropped her gun hand, raised the other... and pointed directly at me.

Chris Dimitriou asks the children to find an extra bank robber from among the actors, so he can also be hung. "Little Miss America" seems to have misunderstood the question, and pointed me out instead.

I knew they weren’t going to hang me for real, obviously, but getting singled out for the gallows like that was pretty stressful.

I looked around, and the immediate crowd saw her finger me. Then, to ease the tension, someone shouted, “It’s the beard. The bad guys always have a beard.”

Looking for confirmation, I turned and discovered Deanna Greenridge, a Black woman, and her son JJ, standing behind me.

We chatted for a few minutes and took portraits. Deanna had just arrived from Upstate New York with an open mind and hadn’t gotten the vibe of the park yet, so she was loath to criticize the skit too much, calling it “tricky.”

Later, though, we bumped into each other, and Deanna asked to speak on the record again because she said an employee treated her and JJ in a disrespectful manner. She felt it was because of the color of their skin.

Deanna Greenridge and her son JJ were visiting from New York state. Later in the day, when we spoke again, Deanna said she felt she and JJ had been mistreated based on the color of their skin. But she was still glad she’d come to Wild West City. “I am always grateful for the experience, and I know how to navigate through situations, even when it’s not as favorable,” she told me.

Deanna was more forthcoming about the hanging scene too.

“It was inappropriate,” she said. “And the violence. Don’t get me wrong. I understand the concept of what this place is supposed to be. But you also have to make it kid-friendly because a child sees things one way. They don’t fully understand this is just make-believe. They’re imitating a culture from however many years ago, but this is 2022.”

Katie Benson, 26, along with her brother Frank, has been charged with leading Wild West City into the future. She is more comfortable in the reformer role than Frank and inaugurated the first Cowgirl Day at Wild West City in June of last year. “It makes it extra special to put females in that leading role so that little girls can look up to us,” she said.

Frank Benson, during an on-the-record interview at Wild West City. He was about to leave the next day for a road trip across the American West, beginning in Dodge City, Kansas. "In Dodge City, you step out on the outskirts of town, and you can see the horizon. You see past it. And out here you just see trees and foliage," Frank told me in a follow-up interview after he’d returned to New Jersey.

The park’s third-generation, twenty-something owners, Katie and Frank Benson, both defended the lynching scene, though Katie did ask for re-write suggestions.

“I am curious,” she said. “Put yourself in my shoes. How would you still portray that they’re being hung, but not get them {the children} hyped up?” Frank was adamant he had every right to tell the stories he wanted, just as his grandfather had.

“Yeah, the kids are screaming ‘Hang ‘em,’” he said. “But they’re put on trial, and they’re found guilty.”

The law is the law, and these are the stories he was raised on.

See more photos from Wild West City below.