Cowgirl Up! (11 page)

“I was called ‘The Girl with the Ivory Ankle,'” she said. After that, “I wore a boot-shoe, and rode broncs for years that way. It's hard to tell how many head of bucking horses I rode after I had that serious accident.”

That was the only time she was in the hospital more than overnight with an injury, and then only when she was carried there unconscious.

Alice was back in New York in 1931, but her foot wasn't yet in shape, although she rode in the “Grand Entry.”

Then, in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1932, “an impresario [promoter] from Spain came looking at some of the cowboys and cowgirls. He picked me out to go to Spain.” Alice was to ride steers as a curtain raiser to bullfights.

The contract was written in Spanish, and when she arrived Alice found out she was to ride fighting bulls. She might have had second thoughts, since she had understood the word
toro
to mean steers, but “I was never afraid of anythin'. I'm there already—might as well try it.”

In her first attempt, the bull burst out of his pen, kicking all four sides into splinters and sending Alice and the attendants flying. “Next time I make sure I get the riggin' on him quick,” she said. And it worked.

The only way she could get off after her act was to wait until the bull lunged near the boards, signal the matadors to throw their red capes over his head, then leap for her life.

Alice was one of only a half-dozen men and women to attempt to ride fighting bulls, and the only one to succeed, being thrown only three times, according to an article in the
New York Woman
, reprinted by the
Carbon County News
in January 1937.

And it all happened by mistake.

Interviewed by Teresa Jordan in an article in
Persimmon Hill
magazine in 1982, Alice said,

It was unusual to see a girl alone in Spain. . . . One morning I was walking around with my pants on . . . going out to work my trick-riding horse. I came across a whole group of little girls going to school. . . . When the girls saw me, the Sisters [their nun teachers] made them turn around and cover up their faces. They weren't supposed to look at me 'cause I had pants on. Course, the little girls giggled and peeked through their fingers. They wanted to see me anyway.

In 1933 she made a miraculous comeback from that 1930 injury to win her first world championship in Boston, which she would repeat in 1935 and 1936. In that Boston arena Alice and her brother Turk were “the only brother and sister to win world titles in one show,” she said later, “both for bronc riding.”

“Marge and I worked in every state in the Union but three—Maine, Vermont and New Jersey. They just didn't have rodeos then. It's hard telling how many shows we won.”

And every year they would return to Red Lodge for the annual rodeo. “Odds are ten to one [a] Greenough [sister] will win, place, or show in the World's Championship Bronc-Riding Contest for Cow-girls,” the
New York Woman
magazine reported.

Miles City held a rodeo called the Range Riders Roundup, wrote Ernest Tooke in
The Montana Cowboy
. During the 1930s Alice was scheduled to ride an exhibition saddle bronc at each of the three performances. “Her first horse didn't do a very good job of bucking, and her second horse ran off.” After the day's performances, the cowboys and fans all headed for the nearest saloon.

One man leaned back against the bar and said he didn't think Alice Greenough was much of a bronc rider, a remark that nearly ended in a free-for-all. The next morning, Tooke wrote, his dad (who provided rodeo stock) told his brother Red, “Cut out that bald-faced sorrel that we talked about for Alice.”

Red and the other cowmen looked out over the pen, which held three bald-faced sorrels. “Which one?” someone asked. Red pointed to one, and they brought him in for Alice to ride.

“The horse exploded out of the chute as if he had been sitting on a keg of blasting powder,” Tooke wrote. “This was no ordinary run-of-the-mill bucking horse. . . . The horse sucked back, sunfished, turned back, and tried to kick the stars out of the sky. He threw everything he had at Alice, but when the whistle blew, she was still sitting in the saddle.

“Red was hopping around, giggling and slapping people on their backs. Dad came running over to Red, and Dad's face was white as a sheet. ‘Red!' he said, ‘How could you make such a mistake. That was one of the final horses!'”

Tooke concluded, “Dad had saved his five best saddle broncs for the final ride, so the bald-faced sorrel was probably capable of throwing the horn off the saddle. On that day in Miles City, the people saw why Alice Greenough was considered to be the World Champion Lady Bronc Rider.”

In addition to bronc riding, Alice was also a flamboyant trick rider and rode in relay races and quadrilles (square dance on horseback).

Described as a tall, graceful woman who wore big black Stetsons, large flapping chaps, and satin shirts, Alice was quick to express her opinion and wouldn't take “no” for an answer. She was described in a newspaper article as “a single-minded woman full of wanderlust . . . hellbent for adventure.”

Margaret “Margie” Greenough, on the other hand, was soft-spoken and quiet, not nearly as flamboyant as her sister. Younger by six years, she was also a champion bronc rider.

“No Greenough kid was afraid of a horse,” Margie said. “We didn't have sense enough to know we could be seriously hurt. Fear went over our heads like Gene Autry bullets.” The Greenough kids learned to ride well out of necessity in their rock-strewn corral at their base camp in the Beartooth Mountains. “Nobody could get bucked off in those rocks and live,” Margie said.

But injuries were plenty—broken legs, broken ribs—and once Margie broke her wrist in the chute, waiting to go on. “I switched hands and used that hand from then on.”

Despite the rough and tumble life of rodeo, she said of the cowboys they met along the way, “They were gentlemen. . . . If anyone was cussing or talking dirty, they'd tell 'em to hush. And if they didn't, they'd punch 'em.” One of those rodeo cowboys would turn out to be husband material.

While riding with King's Wild West Show, Margie met Charles “Heavy” Henson, who bulldogged and rode exhibition broncs in the show. “He was a great big fellow,” as Margie described him, a former soldier in World War I who enlisted at age fourteen, a logger, and a bronc rider in Cuba until he broke a leg.

Soon after they met, a bronc fell on Heavy and put him in the hospital. The show moved on, but Margie couldn't get him off her mind. She went back to watch over him while he mended. They were married not long after that and left the show to follow the circuit on their own.

“There were big contests all over . . . lots of girls riding the broncs,” Margie told the
Arizona Daily Star
in September 1994. A baby slowed her down only slightly. She continued riding broncs in the fall of 1930, and Chuck was born in February 1931. “His crib was a pillow in an apple box. He went everywhere with us.” Except during her eight-second rides. “One of the cowboys would hold him for me.”

The Hensons joined the 101 Ranch Show, and Margie rode as a jockey, rode bareback and saddle broncs, stags (older bulls that had been castrated), and later even rode Brahma bulls. She had started saddle bronc riding the second year on the road with King's show.

“Two of the rankest horses I remember were Little Snow, a white horse, and Skunk, a black-and-white paint,” Margie said. “They were both small and quick and real stinkers, but they couldn't buck me off. Later, when I joined Leo Cremer's rodeo, rank horses came in bunches. He had the best string of bucking horses.”

(Bobby Brooks Kramer also rode twelve years for Leo Cremer, a well-known Montana stock producer. She said of him: “We all rode for Cremer—Mr. Rodeo—he was the best showman and had good horses. We were all riders—no gender—all contesting.”)

Once, as the gate opened for Margie's ride, a man poked her bronc with a hotshot. The horse reared over backward and broke her leg. Heavy saw the whole thing, chased the man down, broke his front teeth, and held his head underwater in a nearby stock tank.

Their son, Chuck, was always there when his mom was injured. He claimed it didn't bother him when he was little. “I'd shout, ‘That's Margie Greenough, my mama,' every time her name was announced, whether she was on the horse or under him. [But] by the time I was seven or eight I couldn't stand to watch her ride, because I couldn't stand to see her get hurt.”

Chuck was bucked off his dad's horse when he was one, and he became part of the family clown act by age five. At seventeen he was coming along nicely as a calf roper, and he would go on to become famous in his own right as a well-known rodeo clown.

The Greenoughs weren't the only women to continue successful rodeo careers during the 1940s. Montana cowgirls didn't get the memo that rodeo was dead to women. As the saying goes, “Where there's a will, there's a way.”

“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I'm possible!'”

—A
UDREY
H
EPBURN

A
small white schoolhouse squatted forlornly in the center of a dusty sagebrush flat at Valentine, Montana. As eleven-year-old Jane Burnett Smith and her family approached the school on July 4, 1930, the young girl saw one lone bucking chute tucked away behind the school. Then the rodeo fans began to arrive, automatically parking their cars in an oval to form an arena.

Heat already sweltered in the morning air, scented with sagebrush and horse sweat. As Jane finished a breakfast of hot dog and lemonade, she felt a tug on her sleeve. The brother of an acquaintance from school greeted her. “Hey, why don't we try riding a coupla steers? They're payin' fifty cents a mount.”

Jane hesitated. “I was not all that anxious to take part in the rodeo, especially after seeing the first two cowboys get bucked off right in front of the chute,” Jane wrote in her memoir,
Hobbled Stirrups
, “but the prospect of being the only person to make a qualified ride took precedence over my cowardice, and I agreed to ride at least one steer if they said it was okay.”

With the encouragement of the Burnetts' hired man, Nate, Jane crawled down onto a short, stocky Hereford yearling. “I could feel my shaking knees knocking against the inside of the chute. The steer's hair was soft and curly like the calf-hide rug at the ranch, and when Nate pulled the rope tight with my hands under it, palms facing upwards, I could feel twitching nerves running through the hide like escaping air bubbles. I peeked through the gate poles at the waiting crowd, then took a deep breath and nodded.”

The chute gate opened, and at the first glimpse of daylight, the steer exploded into the arena. “I had an eerie sensation of being catapulted backwards over a steep cliff, but there was no mistaking the instant I made contact with that hard-packed gumbo dirt.” A noise like a punctured balloon escaped from the would-be cowgirl.

As the rodeo clown rushed up to see if she was all right, Jane grabbed the front of his shirt and gasped, “Did I ride him? Did I? Did I?”

“You bet,” he lied, “just like a real little cowhand.”

Car horns honked, people applauded and cheered. Despite a mouthful of gumbo, the fact that Jane had been thrown only a few jumps from the chute, did not dampen her enthusiasm. She attempted two more steers, was bucked off both, “but even the huge sum of a dollar and fifty cents was not as exciting to me as the fact that I was actually accepted as a rodeo hand on my very first try.”

Jane said in an interview later in life, “I just wanted to be one of the boys. I wanted somebody to admire me, to make a fuss over me. It was an ego thing—something I wasn't getting at home.”

A few days later she hitched a ride to the Flat Willow Rodeo, where she made several more rides. Jane was having such a good time, she continued hitchhiking to rodeos. She made several successful rides and earned enough to dream of becoming a professional rodeo rider. “Already that life was beginning to get under my black-and-blue skin.”