Cowgirl Up! (17 page)

Even by the time the Greenough sisters were in their sixties, they vowed that, if they were twenty-five years younger, they would follow the rodeo circuit again in a heartbeat. “Despite the town-to-town travel, the mud, rain, and cold, it was a wonderful life and you lived with fine people,” Margie said.

Claiming that rodeo was born in her, Margie was just as proud of her son, grandchildren, and great-granddaughter and their rodeo accomplishments as she was of her own. When Margie died in 2004 at age ninety-six, she was the last of the Riding Greenoughs.

Director Jack Young told
American Cowboy
magazine, “I was always glad to see Margie and Alice coming. They could hitch and drive any kind of harness rig, from a buggy to a four-horse team, and they owned their own vintage costumes.”

J. P. S. Brown also wrote in
American Cowboy
,

Everyone who knew Margie and Alice agrees they may have been wild when they performed in the arenas, but they always behaved as ladies. They wore trousers and chaps when they performed, but for formal occasions they donned suits, skirts or dresses, which was the only acceptable behavior of their time. They handled dignitaries and interviewers with good manners and the same poise and aplomb as they handled rough cattle and horses. People who met them outside the arena would never have believed they were tough enough to stomp a bronc, because their speech was as refined as any eastern debutante's and their behavior unsullied. Because of this they were admired and respected by everyone who knew them.

This description could have fit any of the Montana cowgirls.

“I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”

—G
RANDMA
M
OSES

A
fter her husband, Bill, died in 1940, Fannie Sperry Steele continued to run the ranch by herself for another twenty-five years, shoeing and breaking her own horses, guiding hunters into rough country, and carrying cans of fish over treacherous terrain to stock mountain streams.

In 1975, when Fannie was seventy-eight, Bill's son wrote to tell her he'd sold the ranch, and she prepared to move to her sister and brother-in-law's homestead cabin in the Beartooth Mountains. As her greatnephew Dave pulled his truck up to help her move, he brought her a letter postmarked Oklahoma City. Fannie opened the letter and looked at her helpers in astonishment. “I've been chosen a charter life member of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. They remember.” She was one of the first women inducted, along with Bertha Blancett, Lucille Mulhall, and Florence Randolph. She was also inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1978.

At age eighty-seven Fannie reluctantly admitted she could no longer live alone and moved to a retirement home in Helena. She had put off this final move as long as she could. “My greatest worry will be the well-being of my pintos. I can leave the range, since I have had a full share of life on it. I can quit the ranch and ranch house and my souvenirs, but I hate like hell to leave my pintos behind.”

At her ninetieth birthday party, Fannie raised a toast: “To the yesterdays that are gone, to the cowboys I used to know, to the bronc busters that rode beside me, to the horses beneath me—sometimes—I take off my hat. I wouldn't have missed one minute of it.”

Sheryl Monroe wrote of her great-aunt, “I'll never forget the summer I spent with Aunt Fannie on her dude ranch. It was 1957, a year before I graduated from high school. . . . I admire her so much for being such a strong woman. . . . I'm proud to have known her and the other cowgirls of her day that she encouraged and helped along the way. [They] are surely glad they met my Great Aunt Fannie.”

A great-nephew, Walter Jester (Fannie's brother Walter's grandson), related a similar story about riding his first horse at Fannie's ranch when he was a small child and helping put up hay on shares to help feed his family's own horses. “I spent quite a few summers with her. She was a class act, had a great sense of humor, and she taught me a lot about horses.”

A neighbor in the Helmville area, Mary Hamilton, related a story told by Tom Geary, one of the county workers who drove the snow-plow near the Steele place on Arrastra Creek in the 1950s:

In the winter, the county road crew had a good neighbor policy of plowing everyone's lane when the snow quit for a few days and they got caught up. But the county commissioners discussed the hazard of this service (for which they sent an annual bill) and decided that some cattle guards weren't up to “standards.” The first one that had to go was Fannie Steele's.

Verner Bertelson, then county commissioner, was delegated to tell her, and she wasn't a bit pleased. Tom Geary, then county foreman and the person who told me this story, took his pick and shovel to the Steele place and dug the cattle guard out. “She built it herself at the age of sixty. It was all hand hewn, poles laid in snug as could be, there wasn't a nail in it!” Then he said, “If I'd spun out on it with a set of chains on, I might have popped a pole loose, but I doubt it.”

I asked Tom if the county put in a new cattle guard or gate, and he said, “No, not a thing, but you know, the horses didn't seem to want to leave anyway.”

Mary wrote,

We owned one of her pinto mares. Old “Paint” raised my kids. My husband, Grant, went to her place in about 1950 and bought the filly as a yearling and trailed it home with a neighbor who also bought some of her horses. Paint lived to be twenty-eight years old.

I never met her, but I heard that Fannie was quite a nice person who always had time to help the young women who wanted to become horse people.

Bill Huntington, author of
They Were Good Men and Salty Cusses
, wrote: “Of all the women riders that I ever saw on the hurricane deck of a bucking outlaw horse, I think Fannie Sperry had them all cheated. . . . She rode her bucking horses slick, fair, and honest. . . . There never was any easy horses picked for her. They filled the chute and Fannie rode whatever horse her number called for.”

He also described her as “a quiet, dignified lady that everybody liked.”

Dee Marvine, author of
The Lady Rode Bucking Horses
, visited Fannie shortly before the cowgirl died at age ninety-five, and she brought a recording of an interview with Fannie at a rodeo from her bronc-riding days. “The tape started with the roar of the crowds, and when she heard that, she sat straight up in her bed and got such a huge smile on her face,” Marvine said. “Fifteen years just melted from her.”

“I have never tired of rodeo in my life,” Fannie wrote. “I hope there's an arena in Heaven . . . that's where you'll find me.”

As Heather Raftery wrote in an article for
Range
magazine,

Maybe in her last moments Fannie Sperry Steele again heard the roar of the crowds, the slap of her skirt on the saddle, and the jingle of spurs. Maybe she smelled the dust billowing from pounding hooves, her own sweat mingling with that of the animal beneath her, and the distinctive scent of well-worn leather. Maybe she felt the rise and fall of a bucking horse and the feel of air rushing past, blowing her dark hair back and whipping the tails of her silk scarf about her flushed, smiling face.

Maybe she was, once more, World Champion Lady Bronc Rider.

Jane Burnett Smith wore many hats during her life. “For a woman, what else is there after rodeo?” she wrote in
Hobbled Stirrups
. “Rodeo men who retire from the arena usually settle for breaking and training horses, managing ranches, teaching in one of the newly formed ‘rodeo schools,' or even tending bar or gambling. But women? That's a different story.”

Jane did not retire to knitting neck scarves in a rocking chair. She quit rodeoing to join the Women's Army Corps in the early 1940s and learned to fly. Following her service, she returned to Montana, married Woody Smith of Gilt Edge in 1946, and they had two children, Camille and Loren. The Smiths owned Bar 87 at Windham, and Jane dealt blackjack near Glacier Park one winter and the next summer moved to Chico Hot Springs to play the organ. After they sold the bar, they moved to Arizona.

During her post-rodeo life, Jane became a certified scuba diver and underwater photographer, sold real estate, and dealt blackjack in Reno. She also worked as a medical transcriptionist and as a substitute creative writing teacher, and she wrote several Spanish-English puzzle books for the National Textbook Corporation—despite not knowing Spanish.

“My husband said, ‘Are you crazy?'” Jane related in an interview, “but I got a (Spanish-English) dictionary, used the simplest verbs, and took it to a translator to go over. There were only a few corrections.” The clues were written in English, and the answers would be in Spanish, she explained. These books were still earning royalties and being used in US and overseas high schools when she died.

As a young girl Jane wrote ranch romances and was published in a short-story anthology in 1955. In 2000 she published her first mystery novel with a rodeo background,
If At First
. . ., followed in 2001 by
Always Standing By
, and her memoir,
Hobbled Stirrups
, was published in 2006.

Rodeo riding requires a certain personality, an element of competitiveness and risk taking, Jane said in looking back at her life. “It was a little like pool-playing. I wanted to show what I could do—do what the big boys do.”

With rodeo Jane “felt like I belonged for the first time in my life. I worked so hard to be a part of a group. That was as much of a struggle as the riding was.”

“I never knew from day to day where it [her riding] would lead,” she said. “I always thought I'd become a great bronc rider, but I never did.” Jane was proud of what she accomplished, however. “I got by on sheer guts. When I started out I didn't know what I was doing. Nobody told me what to do. I just did it, and learned on my own. I just stayed on as many jumps as I could.”

Riding hobbled allowed this cowgirl, who was just five feet, two inches tall and 110 pounds, to ride tougher horses, she said. “It was easier to ride saddle broncs than bareback or steers. With steers, it was just pure strength in the arms, and that was harder for women to keep in position. I was not that strong.”

She did ride with Bobby Brooks during a three-day rodeo in Forsyth at one point in her career. “Bobby was used to riding big old rank wild horses out on the range, and she was one of the few professional women bronc riders who did not hobble her stirrups.”

Jane mostly did exhibition rides, for “mount money.” Many times, she said, she was the only woman at the rodeo. “I only rode in competition with other women eight or ten times in my career, even at Madison Square Garden.” She rode at the Garden in 1941, the last year women were allowed to compete in bronc riding on the men's circuit.