The Great Exclusion:
The McCarroll Affair and Its Aftermath (1929–1948)

September 19, 1929 marks a turning point in the history of women's rodeo. But to understand what happened that day (and why the consequences ran so deep) you have to look at both the event and the context in which it occurred.

Bonnie McCarroll: A Career at the Top

Bonnie McCarroll, born Mary Ellen Treadwell, came into the world in 1897 near Ola, Idaho. She was riding by the age of ten. At thirteen, in 1910, she entered her first rodeo, in Vancouver, Washington. In 1915, she married Frank McCarroll, a professional bulldogger.

Together they toured the circuit for fifteen years. She ranked among the best saddle bronc riders of her generation: at the Pendleton Round-Up, at Madison Square Garden, at Cheyenne, and in London. Her complete record is covered in the series dedicated to the rodeo.

The summer of 1929 was to be her last on the circuit. She and Frank had decided to retire after the Pendleton Round-Up and go home to Boise, Idaho.

September 19, 1929, and the Irony of the Stirrups

That day, Bonnie McCarroll drew the number of the bronc Black Cat. Here is what matters: the Pendleton Round-Up committee required women to ride with hobbled stirrups, that is, tied together beneath the horse's belly for greater stability. Bonnie McCarroll, like Fannie Sperry Steele before her, was flatly opposed to this. Her own words are preserved in the archives: "I'd feel insulted if I was told to tie my stirrups down."

That day, Pendleton forced her to.

Black Cat lunged forward, stumbled, and turned a complete somersault (a flip over the horse's neck). In the fall, Bonnie's left foot stayed caught in the stirrup, still hobbled beneath the horse's belly. Black Cat got back up and went on bucking until her foot came free: Bonnie's head striking the ground with every jump. The eyewitness Reba Perry Blakely, present in the arena, described six consecutive bounds during which Bonnie hung there, unconscious. Her husband Frank rushed out the moment she fell. She was carried to the hospital in critical condition.

She died on September 29, 1929, eleven days later, from a spinal injury compounded by pneumonia. She was 32 years old.

The measure meant to protect her had helped to kill her.

The Institutional Response: The RAA

That same year, 1929, the producers and managers of the western circuit formed the Rodeo Association of America (RAA), an organization meant to standardize the rules, establish a points system, and regulate prize money. From its founding, the RAA sanctioned no women's event. None.

The RAA covered only the western circuit: the eastern rodeos, organized by Colonel W. T. Johnson, went on including women's events, notably at Madison Square Garden. But the signal had been sent. One by one, the western rodeos dropped the women's rough stock events.

Marie Gibson, 1933

In 1933, at Idaho Falls, Idaho, a cowgirl named Marie Gibson was killed during a rodeo. She had just completed a successful ride when the pickup man rode in to bring her off. The two horses collided, her mount fell on top of her, and her skull was fractured. She was 39 years old. One detail deserves noting: as with Bonnie McCarroll four years earlier, her hobbled stirrups kept her from getting clear during the fall. The press seized on the tragedy as further ammunition against women's competition on rough stock.

Marie Gibson had been born in 1894 in Manitoba, to a family of Belgian origin, and had built most of her career in Montana and on the major American circuits. She is recognized today by the National Rodeo Hall of Fame (2006) and the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame (2011).

The Deeper Forces

To reduce the exclusion to the death of Bonnie McCarroll would be inaccurate. The rodeo historian Gail Woerner, author of six books on the subject, states it plainly: "Women already had been killed riding broncs as early as 1915", women had died in bronc riding before 1929 without its leading to exclusion. What changed in 1929 was the convergence of a traumatic event with a context that made it exploitable.

Institutional exclusion was, in fact, not without precedent. As early as 1914, the Pendleton Round-Up committee had changed its rules so that a woman (in this case Bertha Kaepernik Blancett, who had come within four points of the title) could never win the All-Around championship (an episode recounted in the article The Golden Age of the Cowgirls). The RAA of 1929 merely turned into a system a logic already tested.

The filmmaker Steve Wursta, director of the documentary From Cheyenne to Pendleton: The Rise and Fall of the Rodeo Cowgirl (2010), points to the social and economic forces at work from the early 1930s: "People were saying, 'we're in a depression, and we don't need it rubbed in our faces that women are better than men.'"

In short, three forces converged:

The Great Depression shrank the budgets of the shows. Producers looked to cut positions, and the women's events — which required paid competitors, extra horses, and trained judges — were the first targets.

Social unease at the sight of women athletes: the urban crowds of the 1930s were less comfortable with the spectacle of women outdoing men in events of strength and risk.

The logic of substitution: the ranch girls and sponsor girls — pretty attendants who did not compete — were cheaper, more compliant, and useful for selling tickets. They foreshadowed the rodeo queens.

1936 and the 1940s: The Lock Closes

In 1936, the cowboys boycotted the rodeo at the Boston Garden (Boston, Massachusetts) to demand better prize money, and formed the Cowboys Turtle Association (CTA): forerunner of today's Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA). When they organized, women were not included.

In the years that followed, in the early 1940s, Gene Autry's Flying A Rodeo company took over Colonel Johnson's rodeos and relegated women to pageant exhibitions and ranch girl roles. Madison Square Garden hosted its last women's bronc riding competition in 1941.

It was out of this competition among ranch girls relaying around barrels in the arena that, paradoxically, barrel racing would be born: the discipline that would become the heart of the women's professional reclaiming from 1948 onward.

The Outcome

By the end of the Second World War, women had been all but driven out of the American professional arenas. The few who kept competing did so on local circuits, in marginal all-girl rodeos, or in the rare events still open to them.

What they did next was foundational.

In February 1948, thirty-eight of them gathered in a Texas hotel to create their own organization. Without the exclusion of 1929–1948, there would have been no Women's Professional Rodeo Association (WPRA). The story of that reclaiming is the subject of the article The Reclaiming — From the GRA to the Modern Arena.

But before that comes another story: that of the women whom the official record erased twice over rather than once.