Chris Enss

The most influential woman at Republic Pictures from the early 1940s to the studio’s demise in the early 1960s, was Vera Hruba.  Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on July 12, 1919, the blonde beauty caught Republic Picture’s president Herbert Yates’ attention in 1939 when she toured the United States with an ice-skating show called Ice Vanities.  ...

In many of the films actress Anne Jeffreys made for motion picture studios like Republic Pictures, she either played a cowgirl or a damsel in perilous situations.  Neither the studio nor the performer could imagine how much those movies would affect the lives of young ticket buyers.  A letter from a fan written to Republic...

There were many talented, female contract players at Republic Pictures.  In the mid-1940s the studio had more than a hundred-twenty actors in its stable of gifted individuals.  Some of those actresses became household names because of their work in front of the camera and others rose to fame as a result of their off-screen exploits. ...

Rodeo star Opal Wood Elliot tackled bulls.  Real, live snorting bulls, big ones with long horns and nasty dispositions.  At the American Legion Rodeo in Vinita, Oklahoma, in September 1935, she poised her lean, lank frame on her horse and maneuvered toward one of those snorting bulls.  She leapt off her horse, grabbed onto the...

Skillful and graceful trick rider Faye Blesing and her Palomino horse Flash raced by excited fans at the Butte’s Buckaroo and Homecoming Days Rodeo in Butte, Montana, on July 6, 1951. Faye smiled at the spectators while demonstrating one of her most popular stunts, the Cossack, or Russian Drag. Pulling her feet out of the...

Cowboy Bill Pickett is credited with introducing the sport of bulldogging to rodeos in 1907.  In bulldogging, the rider dashes after a mad, fleeing steer; leans out from the saddle; throws himself onto the steer’s horns; and bringing the beast to the ground in a swirling scramble of dust and a half a pound of...

When the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West show paraded down one of the main thoroughfares in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 27, 1925, leading the way was an attractive twenty-three-year-old cowgirl named Claire Belcher, dressed in a fringed colorful outfit and riding atop a white stallion.  The talented rodeo performer hadn’t been with the...

A well-traveled trail rests peacefully between the rich forested hillsides around the town of Cascade, Montana, and snakes seventeen miles west to St. Peter’s Mission. The road, as well as the mission itself, was the hub of activity in 1895. Back and forth along the route, Mary Fields, a former slave from Tennessee, drove a...

The crowd attending the John Robinson’s Circus in Clarksdale, Mississippi, swelled around the rodeo arena where expert equestrian, roper, and whip cracker Pearl Biron was performing.  The twenty-six-year-old Pearl was the master of the Australian bullwhip.  She could flick the ashes off the cigarette of a fellow performer or a flag off the head of...