Cowgirl Up! (18 page)

“Women's riding was waning. Promoters didn't want to mess with us and start to have to have different stock for women,” she said.

“My own small role in the history of rodeo may or may not be considered typical of rodeo people in general,” Jane wrote in her memoir. “I am kind of a ‘has-been who never was' but I damned sure gave it a try. And just because a man or woman never reached the championship level, maybe never even came close, is no reason to write them off as failures. There are lots of things besides riding ability and guts that determine who makes the grade and who does not. It is no disgrace to fail. The only disgrace is in not trying.”

As far as a highlight from her life, she told a reporter, “How can you select a highlight from a life that varied from riding broncs in Madison Square Garden to struggling to be accepted in the movie business to eventually joining the army, raising a family, dealing blackjack, and being a published author? Each one of these lives provided its own highlight.”

Jane died in Chandler, Arizona, on November 15, 2011, just a month short of her ninety-second birthday. She has been nominated to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

Bobby Brooks married Corwin “Bud” Kramer on July 24, 1943, while he still served as a cavalryman in the army. After he came home from the war, they began buying land in Garfield County.

“You had an awful hard time getting a few dollars,” Bobby said, but she followed her dad's advice: “‘Whatever money you get, buy land because it's not going to stay that cheap.'”

In 1945, she related, she made an offer of $3.33 an acre for thirty sections of land, “a ridiculously low offer,” but the only one received. “I wrote them a check and didn't have no money,” she admitted.

Her dad, the former sheriff, was upset with her. “They'll throw you in jail and you'll never get out!”

“I knew my dad and my husband were mighty unhappy with me, but I did it,” she said. With only five hundred dollars in her checking account, she called a land brokerage firm to borrow the rest of the money. “I was young then, and my motto was, always shoot for the sky, you'll fall someplace in between.”

In the 1930s, failed homesteaders had left their horses to run wild across the prairie. Mechanization and World War II, with men going off to war, contributed to the glut. By the 1940s, “there were horses on every hill,” old-timers recalled. Bobby's adopted son, Gary Crowder, said that early in his mother's life, “they were just starting to fence the country, but you could ride from the Missouri [River] to the Yellowstone and not hardly open a gate.”

“It was a land that was overpopulated with horses—running free and inbreeding,” Bobby said in an interview later in life. “It was a business opportunity for someone willing to work hard.”

Ranchers who took over the land rounded up these wild horses and sold them to the Kramers, who broke them and sold them as riding or draft horses. Bud and Bobby captured as many as ten thousand horses a year and shipped entire trainloads from Ingomar.

A trend from the Southwest created a growing market for the new “short horse,” or quarter horse. The Kramers, along with Benny Binion, a Las Vegas casino owner who owned a Montana ranch, were instrumental in bringing in first-rate sires and developing a top-notch quarter horse herd in an area Montanans call “The Big Dry.”

That's how Bobby, who was a lifetime member of the American Quarter Horse Association, got her start breeding and training award-winning quarter and cutting horses.

Together Bobby and Bud formed one of the largest horse ranches in the United States, the Kramer Horse Ranch, at Cohagen, under the Hanging Diamond A brand, which grew to more than 150,000 acres.

In 1962 Bobby got her pilot's license. “We just couldn't get around” that large ranch. She flew to check on their horses and occasionally to herd a wayward bunch.

One day she went out to find an older wild mare they had been having a hard time rounding up. She saddled her fastest horse and left him in a corral. Then she climbed into her Cessna 172, flew until she found the mare, and chased the horse with the plane until she ended up near the corral. Bobby landed in a field, mounted her horse, and roped the renegade mare nobody else had been able to catch. “I thought the rope was too short, but I throwed it anyway.”

“She could rope anything,” her son, Gary, commented.

Bobby said of this wild pinto, “I felt sorry for her, for her lost freedom, and if she'd got out, I'd be happy for her.”

Bobby continued to fly around the ranch and later competed in and won air races.

In 1962 the Kramers purchased an eighty-acre ranch near Billings. Bobby's father was ill, and she wanted to be closer to a bigger town. Around that time, when she was close to fifty years old, she went to business college.

Twenty-two-year-old Gary Crowder came from Malta in 1968 to help run the place and became a partner in the Kramer-Crowder Horse Ranch. Bud and Bobby had never had children of their own, but the Kramers became fond of Gary, and they formally adopted him. Gary, his wife, Linda, and son, Kale, still run the quarter horse ranch. Linda teaches barrel racers and trains barrel and cutting horses.

Tragedy struck in 1979, when Bud was killed in a vehicle accident. Bobby related that she was following him, pulling a horse trailer, when she saw the truck veer off the road. She speculated that he may have had a heart attack.

Bobby continued to work hard with her horses on the ranch and was still riding almost to the day she died. In the 1950s she had completed a one-day endurance race on one horse, riding 140 miles from Billings to Miles City. “She made it in nineteen hours, thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds, coming in third,” Gary related, “and the next morning she got up and trailed horses.”

Not to be outdone by her younger self, in 1989, at the age of seventy-six, she was one of two women among forty-four drovers to ride fifty miles in the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive.

Bobby had a houseful of awards for the horses she raised and trained, including AQHA Grand Championships and All-Around Championships, which include six won when she was eighty-one years old. At age ninety she won one of four high-point awards at the Billings Saddle Club, of which she was a charter member from 1939. Bobby was a lifetime member of the American Quarter Horse Association, Montana Quarter Horse Association, and Montana Cutting Horse Association. She was featured in the documentaries
I'll Ride That Horse
and
The Last Stronghold
.

But her highest award, and one she was most proud of, was her induction in the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 2000.

Bobby Brooks Kramer died January 5, 2008.

“Montana's women adapted to the frontier life, significantly influenced the state's history, and lived lives that were distinct but as important as the men's lives.”

—
M
ONTANA, THE
M
AGAZINE OF
W
ESTERN
H
ISTORY

“I would definitely do it all over again.”

—A
NN
S
ECREST
H
ANSON

T
he cowboy spurred forward and back as the outlaw bronc kicked toward the sky with his hind legs, then pawed the air with his front hooves. Man and beast melded, the cowboy absorbing the blows like he had springs in his body. The eight-second whistle blew, and the cowboy leaned over to grab hold of the pickup man, nearly losing his hold upon learning he'd been picked up by a woman.

Ann Secrest Hanson was born at Fort Peck, Montana, when her dad worked on building the Fort Peck Dam (the third-largest earth-filled dam used for power in the United States) there. Growing up on her grandmother's homestead at Flat Creek, north of Jordan, Ann rode a horse to get to school. “I always loved horses,” she said in an interview. “I drew pictures of horses and they were hanging all over the walls at home.”

The one person in her immediate family who was “horse crazy,” Ann admired her cousins, the Berrys, “a bunch of wild girls,” and wanted to pattern herself after them. Their father, Leo Berry, gave Ann her first saddle, and there she felt at home. She said she also loved reading about Fannie Sperry Steele. “She is one of my idols.”

About the time Ann was ready for high school, her folks sold the ranch and bought a dairy farm near Missoula. “I hated that farm,” she said, so after graduation she came back to eastern Montana and worked for the telephone company in Miles City, then began working for a ranch.

That's where she met a young rodeo cowboy, Walt Secrest, who was breaking horses on a neighboring ranch. “I'd ride back and forth between the spreads, and that's how we met.”

She married her cowboy, and they bought a twenty-five-section ranch at Cohagen, where they raised cattle, sheep, and registered quarter horses and bucking horses. They had one son, Cotton, who now ranches at Hardin.

Ann worked for the Miles City Auction Company to help buy cattle for the ranch, trained quarter horses for the track to market the colts better, and attended a stockman veterinary school in Fort Collins, Colorado, to learn how to pregnancy test and perform cesarean sections on cows. “I never let anything stop me if it would help the ranch,” she said—not even working with men on other ranches who may have looked sideways at a woman doing a man's job. “Some cowboys didn't seem to mind and others totally ignored me. I didn't really care. The best way I found to get along was to always ride a good horse, do a good job, and not say anything. Pretty soon they started noticing and would invite me back to help.”

“I did everything I needed to do to run a ranch. For fun, I bulldogged and rode steers, wrote poetry . . . judged Queen contests and broke my own horses to ride,” she wrote in her book
I Did it My Way
.

Since she had ridden most of her life, Ann “fell into the rodeo life with ease.” She started out barrel racing. “I won a lot of buckles, but never won a championship saddle,” she said, although admitting she won a trophy in barrel racing after she turned fifty and joined the Old Timers Association.

“It was no big deal, but it's a nice little trophy,” she said modestly.

Barrel racing was not exciting enough for Ann, so she tried bulldogging, “but I had too many wrecks. I just wasn't strong enough.” She said she also broke a lot of horses and tried bronc riding, “but I wasn't very good at it.”

Then she began team roping with her husband, who also worked as a pickup man at the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale. This event has been a nationally known rodeo and sale since 1951, when Bob Askin and Paddy Ryan were the first pickup men and Cy Taillon emceed. Alice Greenough served as secretary of the organization in 1958.

In 1962 one of the pickup men had to go home, leaving a vacancy. As the organizers wondered what to do, Ann's husband suggested that she could help.

“It didn't scare me at all,” she wrote. “I had watched enough to know where to be to help the other pickup man.”

A pickup man is a skilled horseman and roper who removes riders from bucking horses, rescues them when they become entangled in rigging, and removes the flank strap from horses to get them out of the arena.

“Picking up bucking horses requires many things the average person does not see,” Ann wrote in her book. “First, the person has to be in good shape, as you use every muscle in your body. Good, broke, big saddle horses are a must. Having the horses in shape is necessary, as they run and have big stout broncs hanging off them for hours at one performance.”

“Ann did a real fine job,” wrote T. J. Walter of Watkins, Iowa, director of the PRCA, PRCA board secretary-treasurer, and secretary of the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. “Good horsemanship is just part of what it takes to be a good ‘pickup' person. It takes good roping skills, nerves of steel, and an ability to respond quickly and intuitively to a predicament in the arena.”