Cowgirls: Women of the American West

Riding on the range with only a trusty steed for companion and miles of open country ahead--what a romantic notion. I admit it's been one I fantasized about ever since I was horse-crazy kid growing up in the very opposite of open range: the wilds of Southern California. Luckily for me, I actually found many ways over the years to indeed cowgirl it across open lands, although I cannot honestly claim the title of "cowgirl." For one thing, I don't even like cows. But the hardy, singularly focused women in Teresa Jordan's intensive look at a marginalized way of life were and are indeed cowgirls, in every sense of the word.In the 1970s, Jordan set off on a quest to find and record the voices of real-life cowgirls scattered throughout the West. Herself from ranching stock, she had no shortage of women to interview. She found many of them through word of mouth. After explaining the purpose of her project to people, someone would say, "Oh yeah, I know this woman you ought to see..." One by one, she ferreted out quiet yet amazing women who then shared their usually quiet yet amazing stories. Between 1978 and 1980, Jordan tells us she "traveled over sixty thousand miles...and interviewed close to a hundred women," which only scratched the surface of the many more women in the West she could ever hope to contact.What is a cowgirl? Jordan's definition: "A cowgirl is not just a woman who lives on a ranch or hangs around the rodeo. She is the female counterpart of the cowboy. `Cowboy' in its purest form means an itinerant hired hand who woks with cattle, but our sense of the word is much broader. It presupposes a knowledge of horses and stock (yes, even sheep) and a daily confrontation with the elements. I use `cowgirl' in this way. Cowgirls are women who work outside, on ranches or in the rodeo, on a regular basis."I have never worked on a ranch or in rodeo. What I have done is work outside for much of my adult life, daily confronting the elements, riding horses, and getting my hands dirty while a huge smile (usually) lights my face. I have driven tractors, herded cattle, been somersaulted through the air by a horse who decided I should no longer be on its back. In these senses, I can relate to Jordan's cowgirls. Yet they go far beyond my limited sphere. These genuine cowgirls pull baby calves from their laboring mothers, ride seriously bucking horses and bulls at rodeos, rise well before dawn day after day to ride (fix) fence and search for lost cattle all while facing the skepticism and sometimes outright derision of others who question their capabilities due to the mere fact that they are not men. They understand certain facets of life that city dwellers never confront. As cowgirl Pearl Tompkins said, "I loved Old Blue [her horse]. He was thirty-two when we finally had to shoot him. His teeth were ulcerating bad through his gums. Maybe some wouldn't understand you have to shoot something you love. But you shoot a Blue because you love him."Jordan also offers up "cowgirl characteristics" she observed during her time spent with these remarkable women. Her short list: They come from widely varying backgrounds (they did not necessarily grow up on ranches). Most of them are natural storytellers. They do not fear the vast openness of, and possible dangers in, non-city, outside land. Most declared themselves to not be "women's libbers" (keep in mind this book was first published in 1982), despite their insistence on doing and loving what many considered to be "men's work." They are "not concerned with fragile beauty. `It's hard on you, I know,' says Frances Bentley, `but I'm happy working outside. And my horse don't care about the wrinkles. He knows who I am, anyway.'"The stories weave in and out, fitting together in many ways, yet also highlighting differences between individual women. Each chronicle fascinates with its details, its portrait of a woman determined to live a certain life no matter the cost, even if it was never a life she'd pictured for herself when younger. Some of the women hailed from cultured money back East. They came West, fell for a cowboy, and engaged in an awesome shift in their lives that mirrored nothing they'd been brought up to believe they would ever experience. And did ranch life ever underscore their innate toughness, or build a strength they'd not known they possessed. As Gwynne Fordyce, original tenderfoot, said, Living on a ranch, you learn to handle a lot of situations. You don't get too upset when there's an accident or the electricity or water goes off...you learn to make do with what is on hand. You become very much at ease around machinery and livestock and horses and all different kinds of people. You get mentally stronger because you have to cope with things most women never encounter.Linen Bliss headed west in 1966, three children in tow. While learning to be "tough pioneers," her nine-year-old daughter got into a horse wreck one day while pushing some cows back home. The girl's horse "stepped on her chest and his hoof hit her eye." Despite the sort of accident that would probably traumatize most city kids, Bliss's daughter crawled the rest of the way home. She lost the eye--but thanks in part to her equally tough, newly-minted cowgirl mother, the girl grew up to have a normal life and never considered herself handicapped. How's that for some backbone!Sisters Elise Lloyd and Amy Chubb were born in England around the turn of the 20th century and started to ride when they were four years old. After their father moved the family to the American West in 1914, the two girls did everything a cowboy would, from branding cattle to avoiding rustlers to "bucking out" (training) horses. Yet despite these lives, exceptional particularly for the time in which they grew up, Amy only remarks, "You know, everybody says we've led such an interesting life. But it wasn't unusual to us. That's what we had to do, so we did it."Some of the women worked hand-in-hand with their husbands on their ranches, each shouldering specific duties. "There is so much responsibility to a ranch," said Carol Horn (who might be, by far, the toughest cowgirl in these pages), "and I think a woman has to be keenly in the harness with her husband to make it successful. They work together." But some of the women ran their own spreads for a variety of reasons. One of the most tongue-in-cheek observations came from Marie Scott, at the time one of the largest landholders in Colorado. She briefly married one of her hired hands. After the marriage ended, she kept the man on as an employee, saying, "Worst damn husband I ever had...but best hired hand."The rodeo cowgirls Jordan profiles seemed born with grit and determination. Women in rodeo had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, although they got their start in the late 1800s in popular traveling spectacles such as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Saddle broncs, bareback broncs, bulldogging, trick riding (such as the very perilous-looking Russian drag), trick roping, racing--anything the cowboys did, the cowgirls did, too. Tad Lucas rode in her first contest at age 14. Winning it started a long, storied career that took her all over the country and even the world for competitions. Every photo of her displays a sprite-like, broadly smiling woman. My favorite is the one of her on a bucking horse in Salt Lake City in 1924, a huge grin splitting her face as the horse tried its damnedest to toss her off. One of her trick riding specialties was going under the horse's stomach at a full gallop (just writing that sentence gives me the willies). For Tad Lucas, though, it was "a simple trick."An integral part of both the history and current times of the West, these women shaped life for future generations as they gave their time, energy, and passion toward simply doing what they loved. Their very actions helped lead to greater freedoms politically, financially, and socially, despite the fact that few of these cowgirls ever struck a specific public note for women's rights. They just did what they wanted and loved to do, and faced head-on whatever consequences their choices provided.For anyone interested in the history of the West in general and real cowgirls in particular, Jordan's book is a classic standout. Her own epilogue perhaps sums it up best: "These women have changed me. They taught me to ask more of myself, to pay less mind to small encumbrances, to forge a life out of raw material and live it."Julie Trevelyan lives in southern Utah and has been known to ride horses over the high desert open range as often as possible. She blogs at Wild Girl Writing.

I love this book! These stories are so powerful and just resonate with me. Her other books are worth a read too!

Every woman should read this book. Why don't they teach this history in our schools? They should. These women are strong, resourceful, intelligent, capable, they take care of business. I'm a cowgirl at heart, so this book was right up my alley! Men aren't the only ones that get things done no matter what. We do too!! Do you have a teenage daughter? Give her this to read. It's a real eye-opener for them. Us too! These Cowgirls opened up the trail for us. It's a wonderful history of feminine power and strength. The author did a fabulous job of getting this across. She came from this "stock". Highly recommend this wonderful book.

Teresa Jordan's "Cowgirls: Women of the West" is a great read as well as an excellent source for researchers. I borrowed a copy from a friend to look for information on the cowgirls I came across when curating an exhibit, "Git Fer Vegas Cowboy!", at the City of Las Vegas (New Mexico) Museum. I found leads to much information as well as images of the cowgirls that competed in Las Vegas, 1915-20. The exhibit is a fine success.But this book is also fascinating reading--full of personal accounts and documented events of working cowgirls and rodeo gals. So, when I reluctantly returned the book, I tried amazon.com and eventhough it's over twenty years old, I found an excellent copy. Thanks amazon.com!Pat RomeroA Writer for Hire[...]

Original and very well written - the stories of these strong, resourceful women were inspirational.

This book is well written and very enjoyable. The author has other books and those are worth reading as well.

Absolutely LOVE this book. I have many paragraphs highlighted, very inspirational read. I love history, this book is chock full of it!

I love this book but pages 177 and 178 are missing.

Reçu rapidement, livre d'occasion bon état, très bel ouvrage !

This interesting collection of interviews with American women ranchers, rodeo riders, farmers, horse trainers and smallholders was researched and collected by Teresa Jordan in the 1970s and early 80s. The thirty or more years that have passed since she talked to these women mean that this has now matured into an important social and historical document. The 1970s had been a turbulent and critical period in the growth of feminism and it's very interesting to read the different responses of women when questioned on whether the way they lived their lives represents feminism, and what the word meant for them. In fact, what at first might appear to be a selection of women hand-picked to share the same outlook reveals a huge range of attitudes to feminism, farming, ranching, riding, politics and "being a cowgirl." The wide range of personalities, beliefs and ideas is what makes the book really fascinating; that, and the age range of the women involved, which gives the book both depth and breadth.The youngest interviewee, Kim Taylor, was aged just 14 and had a firm ambition to be a vet. Kim was already working with the cattle and horses on her father's ranch, although she felt her father favoured her brother with regard to the work: "Dad's a chauvinist [...] I don't know why. I guess he's just an old timer and used to the women staying back.....I want to go out and show him I'm going to learn how to do it whether he teaches me or not. If he doesn't teach me, somebody else will. Finally, you know, he'll teach me things." The eldest were in their 80s and their reminiscences of growing up on remote ranches date to a time when horses were often the only transport.Sisters Elsie Lloyd and Amy Chubb, for instance, recalled their roundup days in the early 20th century: "If we went to a dance from home, we always took our dresses and shoes and stockings tied behind our saddles. But we didn't have dresses when we were on the roundup, so we'd just dance in our britches." Many of the women were from dynasties of tough pioneering women who worked alongside their menfolk, or often alone if no man was in their lives. Carol Horn, for example, remembered her grandmother harvesting and haymaking using horse teams: "When I was a little girl, I remember seeing a team run away with Grandma on the rake. She was thrown underneath. There she was, in her sixties, being rolled around under the rake. I wasn't even concerned about it because it was Grandma. Grandma took care of everything."The photographs are excellent and evocative, providing real snapshots into the lives and characters of the interviewees. Their lives were hard but fulfilling, and spent largely by choice out of doors, stock-raising or working the land. Most of the women showed a preference to outdoor work over "indoor", or housework; however, one or two, a minority, seemed to indicate that they only worked out of doors when and if they had to do so, showing that a "traditional" division of labour was still viewed as normal for some. For others, feminism meant an equal sharing of chores, both indoor and outdoor. Their views on feminism, when questioned on it, range from "all in favour of it" through "don't see why I need it" to the utterly scathing comments of rodeo rider Fern Sawyer. Again, it's the breadth of these views that makes the book such fascinating reading.During the 1930s there were several successful rodeo cowgirls, the best known of whom was probably Tad Lucas. Lucas, and another early rodeo rider, Alice Greenough Orr are interviewees in the book. The women on the rodeo circuit did everything the men could do and often travelled the world in wild west shows. They simply went out and did whatever they wanted to do, not needing endorsement from any political group, nor from any other individual, male or female. Injury and death were part of the world of the rodeo. The women received no concessions or quarter and nor do they appear ever to have wanted them. The rodeo has its own politics, though, and these are discussed within the book.In different and more contemplative mood, rancher Helen Musgrave's views on meat production and the American consumer are incisive, and ring a surprisingly familiar note: "Here we are, one of the most literate populations in the world, and we don't understand anything about nutrition or the production of food or what it means." In the early 21st century, with issues over GM food, adulterated meat, water use, and so on, Musgrave's comments on issues of food production are like a warning from an earlier age.Finally, a cowgirl, like a cowboy, is nothing without a horse; and one of my favourite quotes from a book, in which there are many quotable comments, comes from Frances Bentley: "It's hard on you, I know, but I'm happy working outside. And my horse don't care about the wrinkles. He knows who I am, anyway."

Brilliant book, will definitely be one that I reread over again. There is so much that you can take away from this book as a woman. Would definitely recommend. Beautifully written these women are truly amazing.