Holly George-Warren - The Cowgirl Way: Hats Off to Americas Women of the West

One of Americas early cowgirls.

In the most literal sense of the word, a cowgirl is a woman, or girl, who works outdoors with livestock. In the nineteenth century, before the word cowgirl was coined, girls and women who learned to hold their own working with cattle and horses were sometimes called cow-boy girls as they helped settle the western frontier. It wasnt until around 1900 that cowgirl was commonly used to describe women who had become celebrated entertainers in Wild West shows and early rodeos.

More important than what cowgirls do with livestock, though, is a certain spirit that most cowgirls have: spunk, adventurousness, and courage. Some women who grew up on ranches, such as the former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day OConnor, pursue other professions once they become adults. But they never stop being cowgirls at heart. Justice OConnor made that clear in the book she wrote about her life, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. In her native Texas, she had learned to ride and shoot by age eight. Her tenacity and spirit surely helped her become the first woman ever to be appointed to the highest court in the land.

Connie Douglas Reeves teaching horseback riding at Camp Waldemar, in Texas, in the 1940s.

Chapter One

Women of the Old West

I wish every American girl today could take a wagon trip [west]. Our young folks need the self-reliance we learned there. Nobody told us how. We set ourselves a job, then we did it. We used common sense. We helped one another. We didnt whine.

Martha Jane Chappell, who traveled on a wagon train from Arkansas to California in 1869

Before anyone ever heard the word cowgirl, there were women who ventured west. Most traveled with their families in covered wagons, beginning in the 1840s. They moved from crowded eastern cities to settle in western states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Some wagon trains eventually went even farther, to California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington.

After the Civil War, more and more people sought new lives in the West. For nearly thirty years, from the 1840s to the late 1860s, the largest migration in the history of our country took place. The Homestead Act of 1860 mandated that 160 acres could be claimed in the west by men as well as women as long as they were twenty-one and unmarried. Though men by far outnumbered women in the early years, by 1870, there were 172,000 women over the age of twenty out west, compared with 385,000 men.

While back east most women lived within societys traditional rules, pioneer women had to adapt to survive the harsh circumstances of their journey and new surroundings. Many began to take on chores formerly done only by men. Wives, widows, mothers, and daughters on farms and ranches were helping to settle the western plains. Some of these women homesteaders learned to master the skills of riding horses, roping cattle and other animals, and shooting a gun when necessary. Pioneer Nannie Alderson, who settled in Montana, believed that the new country offered greater personal liberty than the old.

An unidentified woman scout of the late 1800s.

One new freedom for women that grew out of the pioneering way of life involved a change in wardrobe. In those days, women rarely wore pants, and when riding horses, they sat sidesaddle. Their skirts kept them from riding like men, and in any case it was not considered ladylike to do so. One early pioneer woman advised against observing customary attire and riding style while traveling to the West: Sidesaddles should be discardedwomen should wear hunting frocks, loose pantaloons, mens hats and shoes, and ride the same as men, she wrote. The work of settling the new frontier was leading many women to abandon (at least some of the time) the constricting, traditional mode of dress.

Ranch woman and photojournalist Evelyn Cameron wrote about her transition to buckaroo life in Montana and Wyoming in the 1880s. For some twenty years past, there have been cowgirls on Western ranches who are the feminine counterparts of cowboysriding in similar saddles, on similar horses, for the purpose of similar duties, which they do, in fact, efficiently perform. The abolition of the sidesaddle was naturally the first step towards the creation of the cowgirl... I [was] determined to ride astride. With [a] divided skirt, I found it a simple operation to mount into a cow saddle. So great at first was the prejudice against any divided garment in Montana that a warning was given to me to abstain from riding on the streets of Miles City lest I might be arrested!