Cowgirl Up! (10 page)

Ironically, it was the East that would temporarily save the rodeo cowgirl. Many Eastern rodeo promoters did not join RAA, and women's bronc riding and trick riding gained popularity in that part of the country. Montana's cowgirls benefitted, as witnessed by the world championships won by Marie Gibson and Alice Greenough in New York and Boston during the 1930s.

International rodeo flourished during the 1930s as well—in Europe, Australia, Cuba, and Mexico—and in 1932 a promoter invited Alice to go to Spain. “That year in Spain was one of the best I ever had,” she related. Before each bullfight, she would ride the bull out of the chute and around the ring. Then the matadors took over their part of the show.

After Alice won her first championship in Boston in 1933, she was among several rodeo riders to perform in the White City Stadium in London. Family members recounted that Queen Mary joined Alice and the riders for tea at the stables. Because the tea was too strong for Alice, she asked for additional hot water. Her niece Christine Linn now has that gold lusterware pitcher that was later sent across the ocean aboard a ship with a friend of the queen's to present to “that little cowgirl” at Madison Square Garden.

Not long after Alice returned home from England, she was selected as the only woman in a group to go to Australia. She performed “all over the back country” during 1934 and 1935 at “cattlemen's picnics,” as rodeos were called. She won the Cowgirls International buck-jumping contest (bronc riding) in Sydney in 1935 and 1939.

“If travel is educational, the cowgirls should have been awarded Masters' Degrees,” Milt Riske wrote in
Those Magnificent Cowgirls
.

Alice was one of the professional cowgirls to enhance her income through endorsements, something few women athletes experienced during that era. The international successes enhanced the publicity at home. Most of the events paid huge prizes, with promoters paying all or part of the contestants' travel expenses, and helped add to the American cowgirls' earnings. While in Australia, Alice endorsed products from saddles to refrigerators, and later back home received several lucrative offers, including one for cigarettes. Although she was not a smoker, Alice signed the contract.

But the impact of Bonnie McCarroll's death and the RAA began to change the environment, leaving few options for women rodeo riders.

Even with the RAA's standardized rules, the problems of “crooks” in the business continued to flourish. Vi and Marg Brander learned this firsthand when they attended the World's Championship Rodeo in Chicago in 1932.

Marg later related, “Cowgirls from the North never had a chance. We drew our broncs the same as did the cowboys. The showy bucking horses that jumped high and bucked straight ahead always went to the southern girls. Northern cowgirls were allowed to win just enough to keep them riding for the nine days. [We] never got into the running for the championship money, even though the rodeo was billed as ‘competitive.'”

Following this “fixed” rodeo, the sisters were nearly broke. Vi wanted to go on to Madison Square Garden, but Marg vetoed the idea, and they headed home to Montana in a Dodge roadster they had bought for $125 on the installment plan and just enough money for gas.

This practice of a promoter bringing his own troupe of performers who ended up being the “winners” persisted. Cowboys accused Col. William T. Johnson—who had developed the successful Madison Square Garden and other Eastern rodeos—of distributing prize money mostly to himself. In 1936 they went on strike at the Boston Garden Rodeo and demanded a bigger share of the admissions proceeds for their prize money. Johnson finally gave in, and the cowboys formed the Cowboys Turtle Association (CTA), the forerunner of today's Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA). The CTA was named, as the story goes, “because we were slow to organize but finally stuck our necks out.”

Women joined the organization but were nonvoting members, and cowboys only rarely acted on the cowgirl's behalf, having declared in 1938 that women were “on their own.” One exception was at the 1939 Fort Worth rodeo. Men did threaten to strike because the women's bronc riding competition had been dropped in favor of the “sponsor girls” event (more a beauty pageant than a competition). Leading the protest was a cowboy whose wife was a cowgirl bronc-riding representative to the CTA. The promoters finally agreed to allow a two-woman riding exhibition at one performance.

Unfortunately, two cowgirls putting on one exhibition ride did not encourage women's contests in future rodeos.

Women had joined the Turtles expecting to benefit from the riders' organization, and cowgirls like the Greenough sisters resented paying dues when they had no vote. But the CTA did improve conditions overall for the sport, eliminated dishonest promoters, and obtained more equal distribution of prize money, so the women perhaps felt that the improvements overshadowed the disadvantages.

“It would be easy to suggest that the women should have formed their own organization, but it is doubtful if many cowgirls would have been willing to defy their husbands to do so,” wrote Mary Lou LeCompte in
Cowgirls of the Rodeo
. “The West, like the rodeo business, was a patriarchy, and most of the cowgirls had been raised under the stern control of their fathers. . . . The rodeo business had given these women a much freer and more exciting life-style, yet their fate still rested with powerful males: promoters, producers, judges, rodeo committees, husbands, and now the CTA-RAA.”

Although several women tried to negotiate with their own local rodeo committees, they were in the minority in the sport. Even if all the cowgirls, along with all the cowboys married to women in the sport, had formed a group, they would not have been able to overcome the trend.

New promoters took over the Madison Square Garden and Boston Rodeos, and women were the biggest losers in this evolution of the sport. “The Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, was one of the first promoters to develop a cadre of “sponsor girls.” Once again “traditional” gender roles were asserted, and these sponsor contests focused on femininity rather than on athleticism.

Upper-class Easterners had a negative attitude toward female professional athletes and found amateur sports more socially acceptable, so the
Madison Square Garden
magazine took advantage of this and advertised these sponsor girls as strictly amateur, not competing for prize money. “These youthful beauties . . . are sponsored socially and otherwise by the localities they represent.”

The sponsor girls idea was actually born in Stamford, Texas. In 1930 the town fathers wanted to help boost low moral that resulted from the Great Depression and try to preserve the history of the cowboy with the Stamford Cowboy Reunion. The first three-day reunion featured an all-male rodeo, but the following year the parade committee invited businesses from the surrounding area to sponsor a female contestant. These young women led the opening-day parade, and they demonstrated horsemanship by riding in a figure eight around barrels, the birth of barrel racing.

“It wasn't really a contest, because they were judged on their horse, their outfit . . . ,” said rodeo historian LeCompte in an outtake from the documentary
From Cheyenne to Pendleton, the Rise and Fall of the Rodeo Cowgirl
.

Fellow historian Renee Laegreid adds, “The economy was down and do you want to bring women in to compete against men when they are feeling so badly already? So they said, no women, but we will have them there, as kind of, you know, eye candy. . . . So they are bringing beauty into it, for the first time.”

In 1939 Everett Colburn, who now produced the Madison Square Garden event, invited the Texas Sponsor Girls to appear at his rodeo to garner publicity. The next year the women rode while Gene Autry sang “Home on the Range.”

Autry formed his own rodeo company in 1941 and eventually took over Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, and most of the other major rodeos throughout the country. The new formula, which combined patriotism and Western music with beautiful women riders, brought in more money than the traditional rodeos that included cowgirls' rough-stock events. For business reasons one of Autry's first actions was to discontinue the cowgirl bronc-riding contest, which had been a highlight of the Madison Square Garden Rodeo since its inception in 1922. Vivian White of Oklahoma was the last woman bucking horse champion at the Garden in 1941.

One of the “competitions” that resulted from that Stamford rodeo and subsequent Sponsor Girls shows throughout the Southwest was the beginning of barrel racing. The rodeo promoters set up barrels and the women were judged on “horsemanship, on how well they are appointed, their saddles, and how cute they are,” said Laegreid. The sponsor contest turned out extremely successful, and all over the country rodeos began to copy the event.

In 1942 the Madison Square Garden Rodeo replaced the cowgirl bronc riders with this new racing “contest.” The event, which features running a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels, was the beginning of barrel racing's acceptance on the professional rodeo circuit. (In 1935 the pattern had been changed from the figure eight to a cloverleaf pattern, but was not judged by time until 1949.) It now is the only contest available for women on the national circuit.

LeCompte's observation:

Autry came in . . . and promised short patriotic rodeos. And short means you have to cut out a bunch of acts. Well, this was the time when the soldier was the hero so the cowboy is going to be the hero and the cowgirl is going to be effectively a cheerleader. . . . He put them into parades and square dances on horseback and his rodeos ended up with the Cavalcade of Men Who Made America Great. Flags came tumbling down, speeches were made and you saw people dressed like Abe Lincoln and George Washington and there's no room for women in that story.

After twenty-seven years the West was writing a eulogy for the rodeo cowgirl. The sport once shared by both men and women had reduced women's roles to a beauty pageant on horseback.

Despite these new obstacles the 1930s created, the intrepid Montana cowgirls continued not only to ride whenever they could but also to win national and international titles. Neither RAA rules nor finances nor death could stop them.

Marie Gibson won her second world championship title at Madison Square Garden in 1931. The Greenough sisters had just started their long and illustrious career in 1929. Alice Greenough won the women's world championship in Boston in 1933, 1935, and 1936 and in Madison Square Garden in 1940. They all enjoyed the accolades of 1920s and 1930s crowds in Eastern cities as their careers grew, and they became nationally known as top lady bronc riders.

“The Wild Bunch”

“R
odeo was a different world when Margie and my brothers and I competed. . . .We came from a great era. We called ourselves the Wild Bunch,” Alice Greenough wrote for
Persimmon Hill
magazine in 1982. “Rodeo boys were wild and tough, I'll tell you that. Those boys were ranch boys. I mean they didn't sack groceries at a grocery store and go to Little Britches rodeos. . . . Our boys learned the hard way, because they had to.”

And the girls did too. “We rode to school, we learned to drive teams, learned to handle horses. . . . It was a good teaching, a good background.”

At age fourteen, Alice dropped out of school and took over her dad's mail route. She was the only girl to get a government contract to deliver the mail thirty-seven rural miles out of Billings on horseback. During her first winter Montana suffered record lows—fifty-five below zero at times. She checked out of the post office at eight every morning and sometimes didn't get back until two the next morning. She did the job for three winters and was earning $155 a month when she quit.

Alice made her first appearance at the Madison Square Garden Rodeo in 1929 but couldn't participate in 1930. When a bronc threw her in El Paso that year, her foot hung up in the stirrup, and “I was drug all the way across the arena.” She broke her ankle badly, so bad the doctors considered amputating. “I lay in the hospital there for about nine months,” she wrote. “The bones wouldn't calcify.” But finally a German doctor came along and pinned her bones with ivory pegs, and her ankle healed.