Cowgirl Up! (9 page)

Bobby broke her first horse at age eight, and when Bobby's dad watched his daughter ride broncs with such fearless determination, he muttered, “That girl'll never make sixteen.”

Bobby recounted in an interview with the
Billings Gazette
later in life, “When I made it to sixteen, he said, ‘I'll just bet anything she'll never make it to twenty-one.'”

But she did make it well past twenty-one, even though she admitted she was a bit reckless “or I wouldn't have been riding the horses I did.” Bobby was ninety-one when she passed away, well known in Montana for her horse-training abilities.

Her adopted son, Gary Crowder, described her as “tougher than hell, but they didn't come any better than her at running horses. Bobby could ride a wolf.”

When the indomitable young woman was about fifteen, she moved a herd of two hundred horses from Terry to Broadus (about one hundred miles) by herself, spending the night on her saddle horse's back, because “there were lots of rattlesnakes. I could hear them buzz,” she related.

At sixteen Bobby married, but she said, “It didn't last. We weren't cut out to be man and wife. He was too much like my brothers.”

The Brooks family moved to a ranch southwest of Jordan in 1929, at the beginning of several years of tough drought. It took endless work to keep their stock fed. In 1931, as a break from that hardscrabble routine, Bobby and her brothers went to the Wolf Point Stampede.

Her brothers won one hundred dollars riding broncs, but Bobby went off to have some fun of her own. “I took twenty-five dollars and went to gambling. And I lost it all.” Disappointed and embarrassed, she dreaded going home to face her mother's wrath.

“I was moping around when the stock promoter came up to me. ‘I understand you are quite a hand with rough horses,' he said, and offered me twenty-five dollars if I could ride a bronc to the whistle.” Bobby accepted the offer and earned back her lost money.

In 1937, at the age of twenty-four, Bobby became one of Montana's women bucking horse riders in rodeo and competed for about ten years.

“Girls ridin' rodeo was the wrong thing to be a doin', but I didn't care what ‘they' thought—I did it anyway,” Bobby related in
I'll Ride That Horse
. “Mother encouraged me to do whatever I wanted.”

She said they didn't travel like the Greenoughs but mostly rode Montana rodeos.

When Bobby was in her late teens, she was “pretty rowdy and competed with her brothers,” according to Gary Crowder. They teased her about her male-dominated sport of bronc riding. “Being a lady is a different thing,” they said. “It's not your world. You couldn't do that.”

Never one to be told what she could or couldn't do, Bobby replied, “Oh yeah?” She proceeded to sell a couple of horses, moved to Billings, and enrolled in beauty school. While there she “tuned up a horse” for a friend, never losing touch with her roots.

She graduated from beauty school, but, she later stated, “That was the closest to being a beautician I ever got. Shortly after graduation she was walking down the street when she heard someone yell, “Hey, Bobby!” It was a man she'd met on the rodeo circuit, and he asked if she'd like to ride some green-broke horses for the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale.

Bobby needed some money, so she said, “Sure.” She wrote a postcard home asking her folks to send her saddle, and she went to work riding throughout the sale. One horse bucked over backward and broke her saddle, but she kept going. Later the man who had hired her brought her a new Hamley saddle from Pendleton, Oregon.

She was hooked on competition and continued winning a house full of trophies and awards throughout her life.

“We live each day as if it's our last.”

—F
ANNIE
S
PERRY
S
TEELE

D
ust devils rose from the corrals amid a blistering ninety-six degrees on September 19, the first day of the 1929 Pendleton Roundup. Marie Gibson wiped perspiration from her forehead as she watched from the chutes with Bertha Kaepernik-Blancett and several other cowgirls.

Bonnie McCarroll, from Boise, Idaho, was next up to ride in the women's saddle bronc exhibition. On her way to retirement with her husband, Frank, she had pleaded with him for “just one more ride.”

The women watched Bonnie mount Black Cat with her stirrups hobbled, for reasons that are unknown and controversial to this day. Some say the Roundup officials required it; others say that since the cowgirls' saddle bronc contest was not a rodeo competition but an exhibition only, it wouldn't make sense for the Roundup committee to require this. Bonnie, like Montanans Marie and Fannie, usually rode “slick.”

“That should not be allowed,” Bertha remarked. “It is just ‘suicide' to ride that way.”

Frank accompanied Bonnie and lifted the diminutive cowgirl into the saddle, to the cheers of the crowd. She waved at her fans, planted her boots in the stirrups, secured her hat on her head, and nodded, ready for a spectacular last ride. The snubber pulled the gunnysack blindfold from Black Cat's eyes; the bronc lunged up and forward but lost his footing and fell.

Marie and the watching women gasped as the horse, trying to recover, went into a backward somersault with Bonnie trapped in the saddle, one foot still caught in the hobbled stirrups.

Following his instincts, the bronc leapt to his feet and continued to buck. Bonnie's head hung down, her body flopped limply, and her left foot was still caught in the stirrup. The pickup man desperately tried to grab hold of her. For six more horrible leaps and lunges, Bonnie's head hit the ground with sickening repetition until her boot finally came off and she lay unmoving on the ground.

Ollie Osborn, one of the cowgirls watching, later said, “I could hear that girl's head hit that ground, right there in the bleachers.”

Bonnie McCarroll died eleven days later in a Pendleton hospital.

Marie Gibson was shaken to the core. She'd already lost a good friend, Louise Hardwick from South Dakota, three years earlier.

She commented to a newspaper writer, “You just never know, from [one] minute to the next, if you're going to answer that final roll call. You might say you take your life in your hands. We deplore the tragedy that takes human life, but we glory in the fine exhibitions. . . .”

Despite the danger, Marie continued to supplement the family's income with her riding skills into the 1930s, winning her second world championship title in women's bronc riding at Madison Square Garden.

Marie Gibson unfortunately proved the truth of Fannie Sperry Steele's words: “Rodeo teaches you that death is right around the corner and the ‘now' is all you have, so make the most of it. It may be the old Anglo-Saxon creed, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die' carried over into rodeo, but it fits. We live each day as if it's our last.”

Nearing age forty, Marie was growing weary of the demanding rodeo life, many injuries, and time away from her family. She was considering “hanging up” her spurs to retire on her ranch and spend more time with her family.

Then Marie attended a rodeo in Idaho Falls on September 23, 1933, just before she planned to go to Madison Square Garden. She drew a wild, high-bucking bronc and gave a spectacular, successful ride. The whistle blew, signaling the pickup man to come pluck her off the back of the still-bucking horse. Just as he reached her, Marie's bronc turned, crashed into the pickup man's horse, and fell to the ground.

Her sons were with her that summer, and twenty-three-year-old Lucien was the first to reach her.

Marie's skull was fractured, and she died a few hours later.

One of Marie's own poems sums up her feelings about life:

Let us ride together
careless of the weather
blowing mane and hair
miles ahead, no cares
sound of hoof and horses sniff
trotting down the Milk River
with the wind let's slip
let us laugh together
young one or old
to the crack of the leather
when it is cold
break into a canter
shout at chicken and rabbit
running down the river trail
steady hand and knee
take the life of the country
that's the life for me
it would be a pity
not to gallop free
so we all ride together
careless of the weather
and let the world go by.

And words said at her funeral included: “She died as she lived, hearing the applause of the people.”

A retired cowboy later told Marie Gibson's granddaughter, Ann Marie Stamey, “Life may have been tough for Marie, but she had a heck of a good time in rodeo anyway. It sort of gets in your blood.”

What happened to Bonnie McCarroll in Pendleton in 1929 and then again to Marie Gibson in 1933 is credited with the beginning of the end for the rodeo and Wild West show cowgirls across the country.

But according to Steve Wursta in his documentary film
From Cheyenne to Pendleton
, the tide had begun to turn against cowgirls many years earlier. Wursta cites “difficulties with” Mabel Strickland of Washington, a ninety-eight-pound steer roper who set the world's record at Frontier Days in Cheyenne in 1924. Apparently she was too talented for her male competitors' taste. Cheyenne and Pendleton subsequently banned this cowgirl from competing against the men, and in 1926 Pendleton announced that it had eliminated competition for women in favor of paid exhibitions.

Pendleton's
East Oregonian
explained it this way: “Women now swim the English Channel and they can ride about as swiftly as can any man who ever walked, hence they do not require nor do they desire the same degree of attentiveness [as] when the Round-Up was young.”

Wursta writes, “While on the surface this statement may not make much sense, it fits quite well with the pattern of social and economic changes that pitted the now conservative rural farming communities against the more liberal urban cities of the east after World War I.

“While it was the environment of the west that allowed young girls to escape the restrictive urban culture to develop the skills to be called ‘cowgirls'. . . it was also the changing environment of the west that would remove women from the rodeo arena in favor of the cowboy.”

Protective “knights-of-the-saddle syndrome,” men's egos, and changing social mores, along with the following factors, contributed to the demise of women's rodeo by the 1940s:

• The formation of the all-male Rodeo Association of America (RAA)
  
• Financial difficulties resulting from the stock market crash and the Great Depression
  
• World War II
  

Following the 1929 incident, an article in the
Yakima Republic
represented the national sentiment: “Here is an instance of human injuries and death that impels the question of whether such a show is worth such a sacrifice.”

The age-old question reared its ugly head once again: Should women be doing something so dangerous and physical as competing in rough-stock events? Only fifty years earlier, social attitudes had shifted to allow women to enter professions and engage in activities previously open only to men. Modernists argued that everyone would benefit by women's independence, while traditionalists insisted that marriage and domesticity were the core of women's identity—a debate that was revived by McCarroll's death.

Pendleton's rodeo board immediately ended women's bronc riding, even as an exhibition sport, and as one of the country's largest rodeos, that decision set a precedent other rodeos soon followed.

According to Milt Riske, author of
Those Magnificent Cowgirls
, at least one veteran promoter was of the opinion that the protective cowboys' arguments for women riders' rights actually worked against them and contributed to the demise of women's events.

The second factor that contributed to the decline of women's participation in rodeo was the Rodeo Association of America (RAA). Formed in 1929 to standardize events and regulations, its founding members made an effort to eliminate the “bloomers” and “fake rodeos” where the contests were staged and the promoters rotated the “victories” among themselves.

Part of this standardization included selecting which events would be included in all RAA-sanctioned rodeos, which had to include men's bronc riding, steer bulldogging, steer roping, and calf roping. This list did not include women's bronc riding. The organization did not specifically prohibit women riding, and left it up to local rodeo committees to include the event. But when the RAA later increased the list from four to eight sanctioned events, many rodeos included these new events at the expense of the women.

“When the RAA formed [the cowgirls] implored them to include women's events and make rules for them . . . for reasons we will never know, they refused,” Mary Lou LeCompte, author of
Cowgirls of the Rodeo: Pioneer Professional Athletes
, wrote.