Cowgirl Up! (8 page)

“Marg! Help!” she yelled to her younger sister, who pulled up behind her with another team of three horses and a disk. Between the two they finally got the plow back upright and continued preparing the twenty-acre field at Bradley, near Avon, Montana, for planting.

The Brander sisters, the fourth and fifth children of fifteen and the oldest daughters, were expected to pitch in with the housework, which included baking dozens of loaves of bread, washing clothes in a tub with a washboard, caring for the garden, and disciplining the younger children. When it came time to plant grain and harvest, cut, and stack hay, they did that too, as their three older brothers were helping their father as a sawyer in the woods.

To prove up the homestead, Vi later related, “Twenty acres [of steep and rocky hillsides] had to be plowed and seeded to crop.” She and Marg did most of that work. “It was as hard to get it cut and stacked on top of the mountain as it was to get the land ready. During the winter we tramped up those steep hills in snow up to our waists to feed the stock we kept up there. It was bitterly cold and blizzardy, particularly in December, January, February and March, but we had to feed—if we hadn't, the stock would have starved! It's a good thing we were young and strong then.”

Overcoming a life of poverty and backbreaking labor, these two “workhorses” developed a tough and fearless outlook. In addition to helping their mother with the farm, they worked at any job that would help keep the home place going and earn a few extra coins to support the family. “Life wasn't easy,” they admitted.

In 1922, after a spat with their father, Vi, eighteen, and Marg, seventeen, rode bareback seventy miles cross-country to Bill and Fannie Steele's ranch at Montana City. Fannie greeted the two fresh faces with enthusiasm and invited them to stay for the summer. The girls worked for the Steeles, mowing, raking, and stacking hay for “keep and found” (board and room). Fannie, whom they had met and admired previously at a rodeo, also taught them to ride broncs.

“I never saw nobody who can talk to horses like you can, Fannie,” Marg told the rodeo cowgirl. “How'd you get 'em to understand you like that?”

“I listen to them, I guess,” Fannie explained. “I seem to know what they're thinking just from being around them all my life. I feel it in my bones, in my heart. I wouldn't know how to tell anybody. You have to get to know them. Takes time. And patience.”

Marg and Vi listened well and would take Fannie's advice and teaching to heart to use in their future rodeo career.

After that summer, the sisters went to high school in Deer Lodge, where they worked as babysitters and housemaids for their board. During the summers they worked shoulder to shoulder with men, earning one dollar for a ten-hour day doing farm and ranch work. One summer Vi and Marg also went to pick fruit in Washington for the unheard-of high pay of three dollars a day, and then they worked in a box factory in Oregon before returning to Montana to work with their brothers in the timber industry.

The sisters had found that the best way to make a living was to do men's work at men's pay. From dawn until dusk they ran a crosscut saw, felling the big trees, limbing, peeling, and skidding them to an area where they helped load them on vehicles to be hauled to a railroad siding at Bradley.

Helen Kay Brander Larson, another sister, wrote in the book
Let 'er Buck
:

Falling timber means bending over until your back feels as though it will never straighten again in weather so cold and miserable “'tis not fit for man or beast to be abroad.” Arms ache from the constant see-saw of the crosscut as it bites through the bark and wood until finally the shout of ‘timber' rings out and the giant tree crashes to earth in a shower of pungent sawdust and splinters.

Limbing is swinging a heavy two-bladed axe until your hands are cramped so tightly around the handle you have to pry each finger loose to let go. Peeling is the same thing except that an adze is used instead of an axe.

But it was a job and meant money to eat and to buy clothes. Margaret and Violet were hard, conscientious workers, and their services were always in demand by ranchers in the nearby communities.

One summer after Vi and Marg graduated high school, they went to the Deer Lodge Rodeo, where the promoters asked them to ride an exhibition bronc as an added attraction. They said, “Sure,” and it turned out to be the hit of the show. Learning that an eight-second ride could pay fifteen dollars, they began riding exhibitions at local rodeos.

Also at the Deer Lodge Fair, Vi discovered another talent. During the half-time show, a Texan gave a Roman Riding exhibition (standing with one foot each on the back of two horses). The man challenged the young cowgirl to a race. Vi had never done it before, but she was always eager to become the first woman to try something new. Tying a piece of twine between the two bridles of her horses, Vi jumped onto their backs, found her center of balance, and the race was on.

And she won.

“The crowd went crazy, like a touchdown at a football game,” her niece, Linda Brander, said. “The headline could've been ‘Local Girl Beats Pants Off Cocky Texan.'”

Her son, Marlin Gilman, said of his mother, “[She] had a terrific sense of balance. She could balance on horses while twirling two ropes at a time.” Vi became adept at Roman racing and won over many men in this event during the years.

At another rodeo in Polson, the sisters met Paddy Ryan, a slight, five-foot bronc rider. He asked Vi to ride double on a steer with him. “I'll kick him under the chin from my seat on the neck if he gets to buckin' too hard. That way you won't have any trouble riding on his back.”

Always game, Vi agreed. They made a successful ride, Vi had fun, and she thought it was easy. “If Paddy and I can do it, you and I can,” she told Marg. And from that event, the Brander sisters' career was born. They claimed to be the only cowgirls in the world to ride the big Brahma steers double, Vi on the back and Marg on the neck.

“However,” the five-foot, ten-inch Marg remembered, “I couldn't kick the steer under the chin—I was too tall. It was hard enough just keeping my long legs in place and him from jumping into my boots with me. Paddy was short—it was easy for him.”

Vi and Marg rode in rodeos all over Montana, Colorado, and Utah, in Canada, and at the second annual World's Rodeo in Chicago. “It [rodeo] gave us the freedom to travel and work. Nobody got paid for ‘women's work,'” Marg said.

That they risked their lives on each of these bucking animals apparently never entered the sisters' minds. But later in life Marg reminisced about one particular hair-raising ride when she had been told to take a “short hold” on the rope rein, which turned out to be bad advice. At the first lunge out of the chute, the bronc yanked the rein from her hand, leaving her with only the tip of it as a balance for the rest of the ride. The heavy horse lunged with its head and kicked back, while twisting its hindquarters. Since Marg was riding hobbled, she couldn't jump free. And with no rein to balance her, she was whipped back and forth on the fighting animal for what seemed an eternity. With one lunge she would hit the saddle horn and on the next, the cantle—over and over. Finally a pickup man was able to get close enough to take her off the bronc. By that time both her eyes were black and her body covered with bruises and abrasions. Marg admitted she had been lucky to escape alive.

“We always had to draw our horses right with the men,” Vi said. “Sometimes we'd get a light, showy bronc, and the next time, one that was so rough he'd tear you to pieces, but look as though he wasn't bucking at all.”

The sisters were seldom bucked off, however. Vi said the only time she was ever thrown from a bucking horse was when the cinch broke. “I thought I had it made, when saddle, me and all, went over the bronc's head and landed with a sickening crash on the ground.”

A black Angus steer also piled the duo one time in Polson. “Most of the time it was harder getting off than it was getting on, particularly on the Brahmas,” Vi said. “They have a six-foot horn spread and are vicious. They're prodded with an electric prod and a flank strap is drawn up tight around their middle . . . to make sure they'll buck. They're mad at the world even before you get down on 'em.”

Vi wrote in an article for
Western Story
magazine, “Now about the wild steers, I'll tell you—they don't look so awfully hard to ride, but if you care to ride the next thing to a cyclone, just pick out a nice, long-horned Texas steer. . . . If he doesn't give you more thrills per second than you've ever had in your life, then I give up.”

Steer riders rode with a loose rope or a leather surcingle—a long strap around the animal's middle—held with one hand (women were allowed to use two if they wanted). Often a cowbell was attached to the rope to help promote bucking. “If you can ride him over the deadline, which is only fifty feet, we riders take our hats off to you,” Vi said. “If he does throw you, look for a high spot,
muy pronto
, for he's sure coming right back after you a-snorting and a-bellering.”

The sisters also roped, bulldogged, did trick roping, and won a Wild Cow Milking contest over a field of male entries. As their rodeo career progressed, the Branders added relay racing to their repertoire. They collected horses no one wanted: Mickey, a thoroughbred high-strung mare the male owner couldn't handle; another mare, Polly, who was too rebellious for her former owner; and Buckles, a mustang with no known bloodlines who made up for lack of speed with spunk and stamina. Vi and Marg won many purses on their racing string.

The sisters garnered big headlines when they appeared in their home state. The
Montana Standard
in Butte reported:

With the distinction of having more girl bronc riders than any state, Montana has the only two girls who are expert in the dangerous pastime of bulldogging wild steers. The Brander Sisters of Avon, winners of various rodeo prizes, yesterday entered the list of contestants who will display skills in the big Butte Wild West show here. . . . Both Violet and Margaret Brander have entered the bulldogging contests as well as other dangerous stunts. . . . Other Montana girls who have filed as bronc riders, relay racers and fancy riders are Miss “Pete” Shipman of Cardwell, Ruth Martin of Bozeman, Alice Sisty of Camas, Edna Edwards of Red Lodge and Minnie Smith of Miles City.

The Butte Rodeo Association was admitted to membership in the Rodeo Association of America . . . and the association is one of the four listed as Class A. Other Class A shows are Madison Square Gardens, New York; Cheyenne, Wyo., and Pendleton, Ore.

Bulldogging is also known as steer wrestling, in which the rider chases a steer, drops from the horse to the steer, then wrestles it to the ground by twisting its horns. It takes a lot of strength to wrestle a 750- to 1,000-pound steer. Only a few women ever competed in that event, and women's bulldogging contests never materialized nationally. Tillie Baldwin, originally from Norway, was the first in 1913, and Fox Hastings of Texas set a record time at the Fort Worth Rodeo in 1924.

“Anything a cowboy can do, we can do and better,” became the Brander sisters' motto. If they had to give up on one thing, they tried something else.

“The old proverb of life is, ‘Life is a gamble.'” Vi wrote in an article in
Western Story
magazine. “My proverb for rodeos is: ‘A gamble with life.' From the moment a rider lowers himself off the chute onto the back of an outlaw horse or wild steer he never knows but what his minutes are limited. Some folks say, ‘Oh, that's easy! They've only got to ride them (less than) one minute.' But let me tell you, that's one of the longest minutes you'll ever live. . . . It's one of the greatest sports on earth and one of the most hazardous. . . . But I wouldn't trade one second of my arena life for all the rest of my life put together.”

“That girl'll never make sixteen.”

—H
IRAM
B
ROOKS

B
orn December 1, 1913, in Terry, Montana, Bobby Brooks, like Fannie Sperry Steele, started riding at age three and broke her first horse at eight. Bobby spent her early life on the open range, when ranch country was just beginning to be fenced. Her father, Hiram, had settled in Montana after a trail drive from Texas. He was later elected sheriff of Prairie County, so Bobby and her two brothers were their mother's “ranch hands” on the family spread. Bobby's mother, Violet Butterfield (Brooks), was crowned the first Miss Montana, but she was also an avid rider and had ridden as a jockey for her father. Bobby followed in the footsteps of her mother with her love of horses and riding.

Named Lemeral Lenora at birth, Bobby was called “Lemmy” until her grandmother cut her hair and started calling her “Bobby.” Hating her given name, she changed it legally when she turned eighteen.