Cowgirl Up! (4 page)

“Competition was keen and there was a great deal of rivalry between the girls and the men.” Marie later related her experience. “The Prince (Edward) of Wales sat in the grandstand in the royal pavilion draped with flags and streamers. . . . I drew Sugar Company. He was a big horse with a mean look in his eye. He bucked right out in front of the royal pavilion and sure came undone. Being a great big horse and I weighing only 96 pounds, I stayed with him, but it was all I could do.”

When she'd finished her ride, Marie received a big hand of applause and was summoned before the prince. “The prince, he is a handsome one, and quite the ladies' man. . . . I was ashamed to go to the stand all dusty from riding and the wind blowing, but he congratulated me on my ride and said he would like to live out west with us.”

She asked him if he'd like to ride, and he was quite enthusiastic about the idea. So she had one of the trick horses brought out, and he rode back and forth in front of the grandstand. The prince also donned a wide-brimmed hat and posed for pictures in front of the crowd.

After the rodeo was over, Mayor McMillan presented Marie with a diamond pendant and a gold vanity case that he said had been left by the prince for the best lady bronc rider.

While at this rodeo, another cowgirl dared her to ride a Brahma steer, saying she would ride one if Marie did. Well, her husband, Tom, had told her earlier that those huge animals were too dangerous and she wasn't to be riding one, so she said no.

The promoter laughed at her. “I never knew you to be a coward, Marie.”

She answered, “I've never ridden a steer and have no right to try.”

“I know what's the matter with you, you're getting cold feet,” he taunted.

The five-foot, ninety-six-pound Marie didn't like the idea of being called a coward. “Just put a surcingle on one, and I'll show you I'm not afraid, even if he throws me.”

The other cowgirl came out of the chute first and rode about four jumps before she hit the dirt, knocked out cold. “We carried her out of the arena and then my name was announced,” Marie wrote later. She thought maybe being “yellow” wasn't so bad after all but had no time to back out before she was on the big black steer's back and he was bursting through the chute.

“About the second or third jump he kicked both my spurs off,” Marie related. “I went reaching for him but he was not to be found, so I hit the dirt, and he jumped over me.” The crowd hushed, but she got up, unhurt.

This experience gave her confidence, and she continued to ride steers from then on, as well as broncs and exhibiting trick riding. (Steers in those days were wild off the prairie and much larger than the ones the kids ride in rodeos today, and they were also often included in the men's events.) Marie and Tom rode the circuit together for several years, until he was injured and stayed home to work their ranch and small coal mine a few miles west of Havre.

Fannie Sperry Steele, born March 27, 1887, learned to ride on the family ranch near Helena almost as soon as she could walk. When she was two years old, she told her horse-loving mother, “I'm gonna catch me a white-faced horsie.” Pintos were always her favorites, and by age six she had her own horse.

She later wrote, “If there is a horse in the zodiac then I am sure I must have been born under its sign, for the horse has shaped and determined my whole way of life.”

Although she preferred working with horses to going to school, the daily event that kept her enthusiastic was racing to the schoolhouse on horseback with her neighbor and best friend, Christine Synness.

Fannie had more than an average knack with horses, and neighbors often watched her break horses in the Sperry corral, commenting with surprise on her skills. One admirer once observed that Fannie must have been born with glue on the seat of her pants.

At fourteen Fannie caught her own wild stallion and became an expert at gentling and breaking horses. That same year at the Mitchell Fourth of July rodeo, she heard an announcement that the producers were short on riders and would pay five dollars to anyone who would sign up to ride a bucking horse.

Eager for a chance to earn some money, Fannie approached the man in charge. “Mr. Hager, I'd like to sign up for the contest.”

He tried to brush her off, pointing toward the schoolhouse where the “women's exhibit” was. Fannie persisted. “I can ride.” She turned to Christine's father, Andreas Synness. “Tell him it's all right.”

Synness came to her rescue, telling the organizer that she was “a heck of a rider. I don't see any harm in letting her ride. I can vouch for her, I've seen her ride some pretty tough broncs up at my place.”

Hager finally relented and allowed her to enter.

Fannie drew a bay named Spitfire, borrowed a hat, and accepted a boost into the saddle. Bucking and whirling, stretching skyward, then jerking his head down toward the ground, the bronc tried his best to unseat the young girl, but she stayed on him until he tired, finishing in second place.

“Good goin', Fannie! Nice ride! You rode 'im like a champion,” came praise from the cowboys. At the dance that evening, she was surrounded by young men, eager to talk about her ride. The adrenaline, the attention and accolades, plus knowing she could ride as well as any man, fueled Fannie's lifelong obsession with horses and competition.

In her later years Fannie wrote,

Perhaps it is odd that a woman should be born with an all-consuming love of horseflesh, but I have never thought so. It seems to me as normal as breathing air or drinking water . . . If there are not horses in heaven, I do not want to go there . . .

I can truthfully say that if I had it all to do over again, I would live it exactly the same. From such a statement you gather that I have liked it. I have loved it, every single, wonderful, suffering, exhilarating, damned, blessed moment of it. And if, with my present arthritis, I must pay the price of every bronco ride that I have ever made, then I pay for it gladly. Pain is not too great a price to pay for the freedom of the saddle and a horse between the legs.

Alice Greenough would concur. As a little girl, Alice met Fannie, and the two-time Women's Bucking Horse Champion of the World in 1912 and 1913 would serve as her role model. Despite more broken bones than the average person can count, Alice's love of the rodeo game kept her riding, from her first rodeo bronc at age seventeen to exhibition bronc riding at age fifty-seven in 1959.

In 1919 a group of cowboys dared Alice to ride a bucking horse at a rodeo in Forsyth, Montana. “They brought over a gray bronc and saddled him and turned me loose in front of the grandstand,” Greenough wrote. “I didn't buck off.”

And that began her lifelong wild ride that would take her to rodeos in New York's Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden to Europe, Australia, and Spain.

After the failure of her marriage to Ray Cahill, which produced two children, Alice was working in a rooming house in 1929. She and her sister, Margie, saw an ad in
Billboard
magazine: “Cowgirls Wanted” for Jack King's Wild West Show. They packed their clothes and then went to tell their parents.

Although their mother was shocked and dismayed, their dad, Ben “Packsaddle” Greenough, said, “You always did have more guts than good sense anyway, so go on. Just take Old Willy with you.” That was his name for willpower.

And so they did. When the train chugged through Red Lodge, the sisters climbed aboard. “We were the only two women, except for Jack's wife,” Margie said. They started out living in a tent and being paid fourteen dollars a week. The sisters became well known in rodeo circles all over the country, riding as a team or individually in races, competing on bucking broncs and in exhibitions for trick riding.

Fannie Sperry Steele mentored two more Montana cowgirls, Violet and Margaret Brander of Avon. She gave them jobs on her ranch when they were seventeen and eighteen, respectively, after they had a spat with their father and left home.

“Fannie was a real horsewoman. She was no fake,” Marg said later in the documentary
I'll Ride That Horse
. “She was my hero. I'd watch her to see how she did it.”

Shortly after their high school graduation, they met famous Montana cowboy Paddy Ryan, who asked Vi to ride double on a steer with him. After that Vi and Marg became well known on the Western rodeo circuit, not only for their bronc riding skills but also for their exhibition double rides on Brahma steers. Marg sat on the neck backward, and Vi rode facing her sister.

“Anything a cowboy can do, we can do better” was their motto. That was motivation enough for Montana cowgirls.

“Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway!”

—J
OHN
W
AYNE

T
he 1920s are known as the “heyday” of women's rodeo, producing more world champion female riders than any time since. Montana's cowgirls were products of working-ranch values, where athleticism, skill, competitiveness, and grit were acceptable traits in women. Some cowboys, such as Mr. Hager in Fannie Sperry's case, were skeptical of women rodeo riders, and society in general branded them “loose women.”

But these cowgirls proved themselves capable of surviving the rough life of rodeo, while still hanging on to their femininity, and they became accomplished athletes well ahead of the athletic and feminist movement of the 1970s.