Cowgirl Up! (16 page)

After the war, more leisure time revived rodeos' popularity and youngsters became involved on the college level. Needing a sanctioning body, twelve schools met in Texas in 1949 to form the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association (NIRA). They included women, although the National Finals standings on NIRA's website do not list women's standings until 1956.

Bozeman, Montana, began hosting the college finals in 1973, and that became its home for the next twenty-four years. The sport grew consistently through the years and during the 1960s received a huge boost when the College National Finals Rodeo was televised on ABC's
Wide World of Sports
.

“Preserving Western heritage through collegiate rodeo” has been a theme for more than sixty years, and several professional rodeo stars follow their roots to college rodeo. These riders include Roy Cooper, Chris LeDoux, Ty Murray, Tuff Hedeman, and Dan Mortensen (Montana).

The Collegiate National Finals Rodeo in Casper, Wyoming, is the “Rose Bowl” of college rodeo. The NIRA crowns individual event champions in saddle bronc and bareback riding, bull riding, tie-down roping, steer wrestling, team roping, barrel racing, breakaway roping, and goat tying. National team championships are also awarded to men's and women's teams. More than 400 cowboys and cowgirls from 137 colleges compete each year. Women compete in bareback riding, team roping, barrel racing, breakaway roping, and goat tying.

“You're never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

—C. S. L
EWIS

T
he war years may have forced most cowgirls to retire from competition, but Alice Greenough didn't retire from rodeo. She teamed up in the rodeo business with an old friend and former bull rider, Joe Orr, and they formed the Greenough-Orr Rodeo Company in 1943.

“We started right out with nothing, but every time we'd have a little money we'd buy a bucking horse. We put together a good string of bucking horses and sent them to the [Madison Square] Garden,” she told Teresa Jordan in
Cowgirls: Women of the American West
. “After two years of that we decided to keep our own good bucking horses and put on our own shows.”

The couple furnished stock for rodeos throughout Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Canada, the Dakotas, and as far east as Milwaukee. Joe took care of the stock; Alice ran the office, kept the books (“I didn't even have an adding machine the first two years.”), ran the arena, and paid the cowboys. And she rode broncs as an exhibition during the shows. The Orrs also offered some of the first women barrel-racing events and featured many nationally known trick riders.

“Birdie Askin, daughter of great cowboy Bob Askin, trick rode at our Montana Rodeos [and] Trixi McCormick, a trick roper and rider . . .,” Alice wrote in
Persimmon Hill
magazine in 1974, listing all the cowgirls she'd worked with in her career.

A lot of girls did a man's work—because they had to. Cowboys and ranchers went to world wars, left the women and girls to do the work. . . .

Most of the girls in Rodeo yesterday came in young and stayed a long time, improving with experience. They accepted the hard knocks and long hours of driving with few of the comforts we have today. . . . Rodeo is deluxe today. There are schools to teach anything from barrel racing to bull riding . . . there are fancy house trailers, horse trailers, and campers—but I really don't think it makes better riders or rodeo hands. Some are better athletes than cowboys.

Alice also lauded the women “behind the scenes,” including Mae Zumwalt, wife of Missoula-area stock contractor and rodeo producer Oral Zumwalt.

“That rodeo life was a good old life. We were all so close-knit. It's a friendship that we created over the years,” she said. “I'm proud and happy to have been among the best, winning my share around the world.”

One day in 1958 Joe said to her, “Why don't we get married? You don't know anybody else, and I don't want anybody else.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Alice replied. “I've known you all my life. I know all your faults and you know mine.”

And so they became partners in marriage as well as in business.

Alice served as rodeo secretary and chute boss for the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale for several years, and the Orrs produced rodeos until 1958, when they sold the business to the Fettig brothers of Killdeer, North Dakota. That year Alice rode her last exhibition bronc in Greybull, Wyoming. But every year she returned to Red Lodge on July 4 for the Home of Champions Rodeo. She rode in her last parade there in 1992.

In 1959 Alice established the Carbon County Museum in a log cabin in Red Lodge to house the collection of her world-renowned rodeo family as well as the Linderman rodeo collections. The museum serves as an archive on early ranching and rodeoing in the West.

Later that year the Orrs moved to Tucson, Arizona. After Joe died in 1978, Alice and her sister, Margie, who then lived next door, operated a livestock-exchange restaurant in Tucson. The sisters frequently did stunts and drove wagons for movies and television series about the West, including
Little House on the Prairie
and
Father Murphy
. However, Alice said the movie organizations and guilds did not give her the freedom that rodeo had.

She had first encountered Hollywood when she performed trick riding in the 1937 film
The Californians
. During her career Alice hobnobbed with royalty and American socialites such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, and she became friends with American Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jack Dempsey.

Alice has been credited with teaching Dale Evans, wife of cowboy movie star Roy Rogers, how to ride. She continued working in the Western film scene until she was eighty.

Alice was a colorful and dynamic woman who didn't let anything stand in the way of her rodeo career. At a gathering in 1995 after Alice died at age ninety-three, one friend described her as “bossy. Oh, she was bossy. God himself must be wondering why he asked her to go on her last ride up there.”

Sister Margie told the
Arizona Daily Star
, “Alice had her own way of doing things. She got your attention.”

Another neighbor said, “She wouldn't take no for an answer. She just got up and did it. She could dance. She could ride. She could hoot 'n' holler. She was a great lady. She had nerves of steel.”

“They don't make 'em like that anymore,” remarked another. “The whole damn country ain't the same. I reckon just about everything's gone downhill since the days when Alice was queen of the rodeo.”

Others said she was generous and hospitable, and she encouraged fallen riders when they were down, gave riders cash when they needed a saddle or a bus ticket home.

Alice's single-mindedness led her to abandon her first husband and children early on to do what she loved best. She married several times, although she claimed in at least one interview that she waited until late in life to marry (Joe Orr).

“Mom was America's first liberated woman,” her son E. Jay Franklin Cahill told a newspaper reporter after her death. “I didn't see her for the first seven years of my life. After that she'd sometimes take me out to dinner and buy me a cowboy hat, and then she was gone again.” He said he'd see her occasionally when the rodeo came to town or in the movies. “But I didn't hold anything against her. She was what you call a star. In her time, what she did—telling the man to raise the children—was not approved of. With professional women nowadays, it happens all the time. She was a brave one.”

“She had one heck of a life,” said her nephew, rodeo clown Chuck Henson, Margie's son. “She never smoked or drank, and she was quite the lady.” He told the story of how Alice, on her way to her ninety-third birthday party, refused his help and insisted on climbing into his truck by herself. “Hard-headed is what you call it,” he said. She even earned the nickname “She-Boss” among her contemporaries.

A lifelong friend, Jim Barrett, described Alice as “a great person. She was a great credit to the ladies—she was on her last saddle bronc when she was fifty-five years old. I figure she'd been on about eighteen hundred bucking horses in her lifetime.”

Ernest Tooke of Ekalaka wrote about her in the book
The Montana Cowboy: An Anthology of Western Life
: “I doubt if we'll ever have another lady as versatile around a rodeo as Alice Greenough. I think those of us who had the privilege of knowing this fine lady will feel that she was the ‘Queen of the Cowgirls.'”

Great-nephew Deb Greenough, a world champion bareback rider himself, said of Alice, “She was tough. She was a leader in her own way—and she was strong.” He told of her coming to him before a rodeo just two years before she died and offering to help adjust his equipment. Deb Greenough retired from rodeoing in 2001.

Alice taught her grandniece Cathy Jo Ledoux “all about horses. But mostly she was a hero to look up to because she was a great woman.”

Reporter Paul Brinkley-Rogers wrote in her obituary for the
Arizona Republic
, “Some say the American cowboy hero is myth. But then, to prove skeptics wrong, you have a hard-riding bronc buster like Alice Greenough Orr. . . .”

Alice was one of the first members inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1975, and Margie followed in 1978. In 1983 they were initiated into the Cowboy Hall of Fame, along with their brother Turk. Nephew Chuck Henson entered in 1995. Alice was also a 2010 Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame Inductee.

Alice Greenough was further honored as Best Woman Athlete by Birth State–Montana as reported by
Sports Illustrated
and CNN. She was also named as one of Montana's one hundred most influential persons in the twentieth century.

Alice Greenough Orr died in August 1995 at the age of ninety-three.

While Alice was the more flamboyant and well known of the Greenough sisters, Margie Greenough Henson was also a champion bronc rider. Born the seventh of eight children in 1908, she began her career by winning a fifteen-dollar purse for a half-mile cowgirl race at the Red Lodge rodeo in 1924. She continued rodeoing through the 1930s and 1940s, until she retired in 1954, sometimes beating her older sister. She often was the only woman bronc rider in the rodeo. She competed seven years at Madison Square Garden and took second place there twice. Margie won her first saddle at Ogden, Utah, in the 1940s and was awarded her prize by the late film star Wallace Beery. She also won the Tri-State bronc riding events for three consecutive years, competing against riders from Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

“I competed in rodeos in every state in the nation, with the exception of Maine,” she told the
Tucson Daily Citizen
in a 1963 interview. “I never heard of a rodeo in Maine, so never went to compete.” This article announced that the Greenough sisters were to ride again—in the Fiesta de los Vaqueros parade.

Margie attributed her success to “a good sense of balance and lots of practice.” She and Alice had their share of injuries and broken bones. “Anyone who rides the rodeo for any length of time gets a few broken bones,” she said.

Bucking broncs—both bareback and saddle—were the sisters' specialty, and “I've ridden bulls too,” Margie said. “But I wasn't a very good bull rider. When it came bull-ridin' time, my heart was just a pounding.” Whether bulls or horses, the women rode the same as the men, having their mounts picked from the same stock.

“I enjoyed every bronc I ever been on,” she remarked in the documentary
I'll Ride That Hors
e. But “the biggest thrill of my life was to ride up out of that basement into the Madison Square Garden arena.”

“They were ranch-raised and they had to work for everything they got. Riding in rodeos was one of the easiest ways for them to make money,” Margie's son, Chuck, said, “better than they were making working as waitresses in Red Lodge.”