cowgirl iconic

“If there aren’t any horses in heaven, I don’t want to go,” World Champion Saddle Bronc Rider Fanny Sperry Steele told a New York public relations consultant in 1980.  Fanny’s love for horses began at the age of three when she tried to lasso a pinto with her mother’s scarf.  By the time she was...

Rodeo fans at the Round-Up in Pendleton, Oregon, in 1928 were thrilled by the prospect of meeting the cowgirl actress chosen to reign over the prestigious event.  Queen Mary Duncan had entertained motion picture audiences with her horseback riding skills in the popular silent films Four Devils and The River.  Audience members hoped she would...

Spain. September 1932. Alice Greenough, a seasoned cowgirl, sits astride an angry steer.  In the place of a saddle, a surcingle, a sort of plastic girdle, has been fashioned around the animal’s back and cinched to his stomach.  He doesn’t like it.  Alice’s attractive face is focused as she secures a good grip on the flat braided...

Among the many performers who thrilled the crowds at the Calgary Stampede in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in September 1912, was a nineteen-year-old cowgirl trick rider named Dolly Mullins. New to the sport, Dolly shared the arena with well-known rodeo entertainers Lucille Mulhall and Florence LaDue. All the women were part of the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild...

Twenty-three-year-old Marie Gibson straddled a cantankerous bronco waiting inside a chute at the Havre Stampede in Havre, Montana.  It was July 1917, and this ride would be the cowgirl’s first as a professional.  Long, black curls dangled from the wide sombrero atop her head, and she wore men’s riding breeches and a flamboyant silk shirt...

A mammoth crowd of Westerners gathered at the Black Hills Roundup in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, in early July 1927.  Among the spectators present at the prestigious rodeo were President Calvin Coolidge and South Dakota Senator Peter Norbeck.  The politicians, their wives, and staff members applauded the cowboys and cowgirls who rode into the arena...

Fashionably dressed bronc rider Bertha Kaepernik, picked herself up from the dust and mud of the rodeo arena in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in August 1904, and wiped the dirt out of her eyes. She had just been thrown from a big gray horse, a bucker of the worst type. “Why of course I’m going to ride him again,”...