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Yesteryear s rodeo cowgirls

By JIM HOY

© Plains Folk

Back in the early days of rodeo, women competed in bronc riding and steer riding, just like the men. In fact, when the first Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo was held back in 1897, Prairie Rose Henderson tried to enter the bronc riding but was refused when all the male contestants protested. They knew that if she drew the right horse, she could easily have won the contest, being a better rider than most of them, and they didn't want to take a chance of being shown up by a woman.

So the next year Cheyenne instituted a women's bronc riding, an event that ran through 1940.

By the way, Marge Roberts, a cowgirl from the Flint Hills, won that last contest. Andy Olson's first wife, Helen, was the daughter of Bill Ebbutts, one of the best cowboys to ever have come out of the northern Flint Hills. (I'm told that back in the 1930s and 40s, kids around Junction City didn't just play cowboys, they played Bill Ebbutts.)

Helen Olson was a skilled calf roper who competed successfully against men in many of the local Flint Hills rodeos. Once at a rodeo in Emporia she was riding a horse that, while good in the pasture, had never been to a rodeo before.

When Helen nodded for her calf and started her horse, he was leery of the barrier rope and leaped clear over it as he left the roping box. Helen roped her calf, and when some of the male ropers protested about the barrier jumping, the judges ruled that it was released as the horse was in the air and that he would not have broken it had he stayed on the ground. Despite the disadvantage of combining steeple chasing with calf roping, Helen won the event.

Many years ago one of my students in a folklore class gave me some rodeo photographs that had been passed down through the family.

One of them, a woman bronc rider at a rodeo in Chase or Greenwood County in the mid-1930s, remains to this day my favorite old rodeo picture. The photograph itself leaves a lot to be desired. There's a big washed out patch in the lower part of the picture, and the action isn't all that exciting. A mounted pickup man or field judge is in the background, while the bronc, just lunging out of the chute, hasn't really started bucking yet. The reason I like the picture, however, is not because of what it shows but because of the story behind it.

I was told that when the whistle blew, the rider, a woman named Mattie Downs, refused to get off until the bronc was standing perfectly still because, she said, she didn't want to get hurt. The reason she didn't want to get hurt was because she was eight and a half months pregnant. Why she got on a bucking horse in the first place, I don't know.

According to the story I was told, and my student believed it to be true (which makes it a legend, whether it actually happened or not), Mattie had a baby, a full-term normal-birth baby, 17 days after the photograph was taken.

Now there are recorded instances of cowboys riding bucking horses backwards and bulldogging (or attempting to bulldog) steers from low-flying airplanes, but Mattie Downs proved that rodeo cowgirls can be just as crazy as their male counterparts.

The only other thing I know about Mattie was that her husband's name was Bobbie.

There was a Texas bronc rider, Booger Red Privatt, who could ride a saddle bronc with both hands in the air or with both hands tied behind his back. He was not only skilled, but extremely self confident. On two separate, documented occasions he rode a bucking horse while holding his own baby in his free arm. I don't know where his wife was while he was doing this, but he should have been married to Mattie Downs. They were made for each other.

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