Cowgirl Up! (3 page)

Around 1925 Vera McGinnis (California, 1892–1990) became the first cowgirl to wear pants in the arena. Considering skirts and tight breeches as nuisances, McGinnis created a pair of trousers from a pair of boys' flannel pants with a zipper on the side. She remarked, “I like to wear them so then I can kick up my heels as I like.”

Cowgirls felt they belonged in the saddle and loved the open prairie, horses, guns, and competition, but most still loved dressing up and showing their feminine side. A woman could be tough and competitive, but in public she should definitely look like a girl.

The Greenough sisters were talented seamstresses as well as riders and carried a sewing machine along on the road. Not liking the short pants that ended below the knee when they were starting out, “we bought a pair of sailor pants, took them apart and made a pattern,” Margie later told the
Arizona Daily Star
. From then on they designed and sewed their own bell-bottomed trousers and bolero jackets.

“Each cowgirl was an individual who dressed in her own style. Most designed their own clothes and tailored them to fit neatly and well,” Alice wrote in a 1974 article titled “Cowgirls of Yesterday” in
Persimmon Hill
magazine. “I can remember when a cowboy was required to wear dress pants in the Grand Entry in New York and Boston; if he was wearing Levis he had to wear chaps over them. A cowgirl in Levis during a performance was unheard of, unthinkable.”

Alice also expressed her opinion in a 1937 article in
Physical Culture
magazine: “A cowgirl would no more think of wearing spike heels, a tight girdle, a binding brassiere, than she would drink poison. It is not that a cowgirl does not want to attract the masculine eyes, but we know cowboys. They like slimness, line, grace—but they want it natural.”

Alice and Margie enjoyed shopping for new fabrics in New York after rodeo events to sew their rodeo clothes, but they soon decided not to wear Western clothing while out in the “Big Apple,” since crowds followed them around town, enamored with the attractive costumes they designed.

Nothing seemed to daunt these intrepid cowgirls, not clothing restrictions nor children, not society's gasps nor men's opposition. When a group of cowboys attempted to get up a petition to have women thrown out of the Pendleton Roundup in 1910, complaining that “girls spoil the horses and water down the events till there's no challenge,” Fannie Sperry scoffed, “You're wrong, mister. Just watch us.”

And the world did. Fannie, Marie, Bobby, Jane, and the Greenough and Brander sisters proved everyone wrong. They had the passion, the courage, and the dream, and nothing was going to stand in their way.

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.”

—T
EDDY
R
OOSEVELT

T
he wind howled outside the ranch house at Gilt Edge, Montana, one morning just a few days before Jane Burnett's seventh birthday in 1926. She scraped a small peephole through the frost on the window. Nothing was visible—no livestock in the corral or around the feed racks—nothing but drifting snow. Jane shivered and turned back to eating breakfast.

Visions of eating popcorn and stretching out on the calf-hide rug near the potbellied coal stove in the living room were quickly squelched when Grandpa Bill rose from the table. “Clinton, you'd better pick up those colts today. They're with Hedman's horses.”

Jane's dad, Clinton, turned to her. “Well? Wanna go along?” It was not really a question, and there was only one acceptable reply.

“Sure,” she said. The subzero weather seemed a minor issue compared to the idea of being considered unable to “take it.”

Jane's Shetland pony jogged along beside her daddy's horse, nearly high centering in many of the deeper drifts. Time froze, along with her limbs. When they found the horses in a set of abandoned corrals, her father indicated with a nod of his head that she was to wait near the entrance in case the animals tried to get away.

Several diminishing degrees later, she was still sitting hunched over the saddle horn, teeth chattering and icicles hanging from the end of her nose.

Finally her daddy rode up to her. He never questioned whether she was frozen, if she was all right, or how she felt. He simply asked matter-of-factly, “You hired out as a tough hand, didn't you?”

Nothing else was necessary.

In the years to come, this incident would serve as a foundation for Jane's life. Later she said, “My early childhood made me stronger, more independent.”

She rode her first steer for fifty cents at age eleven. At twelve, she sneaked away from the ranch on many weekends and hitchhiked to any rodeo within an area of three hundred to four hundred miles, where she rode steers for “mount money.”

Jane continued her journey for the next twenty years in one-chute, small-town rodeos from the Canadian border to Mexico City, Los Angeles to Madison Square Garden in New York. She worked for Gene Autry, riding broncs in rodeos he promoted and working as an extra or stunt woman in several Western movies. During her career Jane experienced not only the best of the sport—the rodeo people who were closer than her real family—but she also had to fight the dark side of early day rodeo—unscrupulous promoters, leering drunks, and abusive relationships.

Jane Burnett Smith wrote in her memoir,
Hobbled Stirrups
, “All because I had hired out for a tough hand and thought I had to follow through without complaining. I asked for no sympathy and gave no excuses.”

In her book's introduction Jane wrote,

From the scared kid riding his first steer, to the crippled old saddle bronc rider who is going to try it just one more season, each individual secretly believes himself capable of developing into one of the “greats.” Without this belief there would be no competition.

I consider myself a charter member of these forever hopefuls who doggedly struggled in the shadows of the champions. During my rodeo years I . . . never at any time doubted that I would eventually hold the title of World's Champion Woman Bronc Rider.

However, she wrote, “It seems I was the only person who was genuinely surprised when this failed to occur.”

At one point Jane expressed her intention to quit rodeoing to a group of cowboys, who broke into laughter as if she'd just told the biggest joke of the season. “Did I say something funny?” Jane asked.

“You sure did,” one replied. “In case nobody ever told you, it's as tough to quit this business as it would be to get off of whiskey, cigarettes, or dope. We've all tried to stop rodeoing—at least once a year—an' the first thing you know, we're right back in there.”

That passion, the hunger for the burst of adrenaline, the thrill of the victory echoed by the cheers of the crowd, is something cowgirls find difficult to explain. Fannie Sperry Steele said, “How can I explain to dainty delicate women what it's like to climb down into a rodeo chute onto the back of a wild horse? How can I tell them it is a challenge that lies deep in the bones—a challenge that may go back to prehistoric man and his desire to conquer the outlaw and the wilderness.”

The history of the cowgirl shows the sense of freedom they were able to experience, not hobbled by the restraints of social convention. They felt alive with a good horse under them, the wind blowing through their hair, the exhilaration of a fast ride or conquering a thousand-pound bucking animal. All these Montana cowgirls began at an early age, working alongside their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and learned to ride as well as the men, so why not experience the same thrill in the rodeo arena?

Antoinette Marie Gibson, also known as “Buckskin Mary” or “Ma” Gibson, was born near Winnipeg, Canada, on August 18, 1894, and named for the famous queen. A “tomboy,” Marie learned to love horses at an early age. She had a black pony and helped on her Belgium-born father's farm, learning the ways of ranching and handling horses and cattle. Later she helped gentle horses as saddle mounts for her father's female customers at his livery stable in Saskatchewan. Her father also owned several racehorses, and while still a teen Marie became one of the few licensed women jockeys in North America.

The love of animals, coupled with early responsibilities, an independent spirit, and bravery, would be a major influence on her future life.

At age fifteen Marie married a neighbor boy, Joseph Dumont, and had four children. One child died at three months, and later her daughter Lucy drowned at age nineteen. How she must have grieved over her losses, which most likely helped her find an inner strength to accomplish what she did.

In 1914 the Dumonts moved to Montana in a covered wagon, where her parents had already moved. They homesteaded at Burnham, ten miles west of Havre, a town that no longer exists.

The marriage failed, and Marie was forced to become the sole support of her children. She became friends with neighbor “Long” George Francis, a local rodeo rider who gave her the nickname “Buckskin Mary” (which she didn't care for), and his friends Ray Ellis (who had introduced bulldogging to the Havre area), Jack Maybee, and Clayton Jolley. Marie watched them break wild horses to use for saddle and team animals, and soon, with their encouragement, she began riding bucking broncs, not always successfully.

At one rodeo her bronc stumbled and she ended up on its neck. The rodeo manager joked that she had bronc riding confused with bull dogging. Other women riders laughed at her clumsy efforts. Marie told one cowgirl, “When I have been riding as much as you have, I'll do better.”

Foghorn Clancy, a famous announcer, program man, and rodeo publicist (much of that time at Madison Square Garden), wrote of Marie Gibson in his book
My 50 Years in Rodeo:

[At the Medicine Hat Stampede in Alberta, Canada] . . . I met for the first time, a girl who was later to become the world's champion cowgirl bronc rider. . . . Her name on the program was Mary Dumont—a name under which she achieved no great reputation, for she was bucked off the first horse she tried to ride. She came back the next day and rode again. She was “popped” considerably, as she hadn't yet learned the knack of keeping her neck stiff to support her head. . . . On this ride she stayed to the finish.

After the second ride she came up to me. “Foghorn,” she said, “what do you think of my chances in the bronc-riding game?”

“Well,” I answered, “you certainly have one of the chief requirements and that is plenty of nerve. If you keep on riding and keep on living, you ought to be able to make the grade. You might even become a champion. Who knows?”

As you can see, I wasn't overenthusiastic. And judging from this first performance of hers I had no idea that she was really to become famous and be a champion. Under the name of Marie “Ma” Gibson, she rode at the biggest rodeos in the United States, from California to Madison Square Garden and was nearly always in the winning column. At one time or another during her long career in the arena, she won over nearly every other cowgirl bronc rider of her time.

Marie's successful rodeo career began with her debut at Havre's 1917 Francis- and Maybee-produced Great Northern Stampede, where she won third money in the horseracing event. This rodeo was also one of Fannie Sperry's major appearances. The Montana cowgirls were truly one big rodeo “family,” often meeting and competing at events all over the country.

That summer Marie also met her future husband, Tom Gibson, a professional bronc rider from Canada who had won the 1914 amateur championship of the provinces. They were married in 1918, and she acquired the last name she would make famous.

After that first rodeo in Havre, Marie plunged into the rodeo circuit, riding in Canadian rodeos at Nelson, Medicine Hat, Calgary, Moose Jaw, Regina, and stops in between.

In September 1919 Marie received a huge boost to her career at the Saskatoon rodeo, where she won the Best Woman Bronc Rider award.