The Golden Age of the Cowgirls (1890–1929):
The Stage Was Theirs

Between 1890 and 1929, for forty years, women competed against men in American and Canadian arenas on equal terms of competition, danger, and prestige. They rode broncs, roped steers, and performed trick riding at full speed. They traveled to London, Sydney, and Calgary. They won world championships.

This was no anomaly. It was a structural feature of the rodeo of the era, until an institutional decision brought it to an end.

The Wild West Shows: The First Professional Stage

It was in the great touring spectacles that women first found their professional place. The Wild West Shows (Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, Zach Mulhall's Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers) were not rodeos in the competitive sense, but they built the talent pool: they trained the women riders, sent them traveling, and gave them a national and international audience.

Annie Oakley (1860–1926) is the figure who opened that door. She was not a cowgirl (she was a sharpshooter) but her presence in Buffalo Bill's show for sixteen years (1885–1901) made the point undeniable: a woman could be the star of a western spectacle, on her own merits, before millions of spectators.

Lucille Mulhall, or the Coining of a Word

Lucille Mulhall (October 21, 1885 – December 21, 1940) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She grew up on her father Zach Mulhall's Oklahoma ranch: more than 80,000 acres (about 32,000 ha). When she was seven, her father promised her she could keep every calf she managed to rope and brand herself. He soon regretted the offer: Lucille branded more than twenty steers.

On July 4, 1900, at a "Cowboy Tournament" in Oklahoma City, Theodore Roosevelt (then campaigning for the vice presidency) saw her compete. He was impressed.

Four years later, Lucille was the star of the Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where a young roper named "Cherokee Kid" made his debut: Will Rogers. In March 1905, she took part in the inaugural parade of the newly elected President Roosevelt.

In 1905, at her first appearance at Madison Square Garden (New York), the New York reporters groped for words. They tried "Female Conqueror of Beef and Horn," "Lassoer in Lingerie," "Cowboy Girl." One of them finally wrote "cowgirl." The word stuck.

Will Rogers would later write, in a column that ran in several newspapers after Zach Mulhall's death (1931): "Lucille Mulhall was the first cowgirl." Roosevelt described her as "the best horsewoman in the world." She died on December 21, 1940, at 55, in a car accident near her ranch. Her complete record is covered in the series dedicated to the rodeo.

Fannie Sperry Steele and the Horse That Had Killed a Man

Fannie Sperry Steele (March 27, 1887 – February 11, 1983) was born in the Prickly Pear Valley, Montana. She learned to ride before she could read.

In September 1912, she was invited to compete at the first Calgary Stampede (Calgary, Alberta) among six selected women. Before the horses were drawn, a bronc named Red Wing had killed the rider Joe LaMar with a kick in the preparation chute. Fannie drew Red Wing's number. She rode him. Her ride was unanimously hailed as one of the best ever performed by a man or a woman in the history of bronc riding. Bertha Blancett finished third in that same competition.

What set Fannie Sperry Steele apart was also what she refused: she never rode with hobbled stirrups: the practice usually imposed on women to make it easier to stay seated. She held that it robbed the horse of a fair chance. That refusal matters in the story that follows. She died on February 11, 1983, at the age of 95. Her full career is covered in the series dedicated to the rodeo.

Bertha Kaepernik Blancett and the Rule That Changed

Bertha Kaepernik Blancett (born 1883 in Cleveland, Ohio), a Colorado cowgirl, entered history as early as 1904: on that day, under a driving rain that had made the cowboys back out, she became the first woman to ride a bronc at Cheyenne Frontier Days (Cheyenne, Wyoming). Her exhibition in the mud compelled admiration, and opened the event to women.

She went on to win the bronc riding championship at the Pendleton Round-Up (Pendleton, Oregon) in 1911, 1912, and 1914. But it is another feat that carries the most weight. In 1914, at Pendleton, Bertha Blancett finished just four points short of the All-Around title: the overall championship across all events, contested against the men. Alarmed at the prospect of a woman winning the supreme title, the committee immediately changed its rules: from then on, a cowgirl could finish second, but only a cowboy could be crowned All-Around world champion.

It was the first time a rodeo institution changed its rules to keep a woman from winning. Fifteen years before the death of Bonnie McCarroll and the founding of the Rodeo Association of America, the machinery of exclusion was already at work. This episode foreshadows the article The Great Exclusion — The McCarroll Affair and Its Aftermath.

The Generation of Queens

Many women defined the golden age. Three deserve to be named precisely.

Mabel Strickland (1896–1976), born in Walla Walla, Washington, was one of the most versatile competitors of the era: bronc riding, steer roping, trick riding, relay racing. She traveled the American circuit for more than twenty years and was one of the few to have taken titles at Cheyenne, Pendleton, and Madison Square Garden. She performed trick riding on her white Arabian horse, clearing automobiles at full speed. Her complete record is covered in the series dedicated to the rodeo.

Tad Lucas (September 1, 1902 – February 23, 1990), born Barbara Inez Barnes in Cody, Nebraska, the youngest of 24 children, turned professional in 1922. In 1924, she went on her honeymoon to London with her husband Buck Lucas: the two of them competed at Tex Austin's rodeo at Wembley Stadium, carrying the western circuit all the way to England. She then dominated the great American arenas for two decades, earning more than most professional cowboys of her time. Her complete record is covered in the series dedicated to the rodeo.

Fox Hastings (born Eloise Fox, 1898–1948, in Galt, California) specialized in steer wrestling (bulldogging): the event of leaping from a galloping horse and wrestling a steer to the ground bare-handed. It was a discipline reserved for men in nearly every rodeo. She learned it from her husband, the professional bulldogger Mike Hastings, and practiced it anyway. In 1924, at the Houston Stock Show (Houston, Texas), she became the first woman to compete in bulldogging at a major rodeo, throwing her steer in seventeen seconds. The most famous cowgirl of the discipline in the 1920s and 1930s, she was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) in 1987.

What This Era Means

These women were not curiosity acts. They competed in the same arenas as the men, drew the same numbers by lot, and faced the same falls. They traveled to London, Sydney, Winnipeg, Chicago. They sewed their own costumes on the trains between rodeos. Some, like Tad Lucas, earned more than most professional cowboys.

In 1918, at the first indoor rodeo in history at the Cowtown Coliseum (Fort Worth, Texas), women competed alongside the men from the opening day. Between 1920 and 1928, a third of all American rodeos included competitive women's events.

Then, in 1929, everything changed.