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Rebel hoofprints through the rodeo arenas

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Special to Outsports.com

As spring comes on, basketball people start thinking March Madness. Baseball people start thinking training camp. But rodeo people start thinking new belt-buckle trophies. The International Gay Rodeo Association season starts in January and goes through 22 rodeos in a dozen states, winding up in Denver for IGRA National Finals in October. Our women in boots and big hats will be busting bulls and broncs – things that females aren’t allowed to do at the “mainstream” National Finals in Las Vegas the same month.

Like many sports, rodeo is still obsessed with the ruggedly masculine. Yet in the sport’s beginning, women actually enjoyed some equality -- along with a little room for unconventional gender profiles. Indeed, rodeo, and the LGBT people in it, has a history of bloody battles about “gender appropriate” events and dress code.

As a member of a family that spent four generations on a Montana ranch, I competed in high-school rodeo as a teen. Coming out, I realized that secret lesbian stories could unfold both on a ranch and in the arena. But these are very different stories than the cowboy love in “Brokeback Mountain.”

Early days

Rodeo grew out of the vast livestock industry west of the Mississippi. But cowgirls had a different role in that industry than cowboys did. “The boys” were employees -- working stiffs who populated ranches by the countless thousands. “Boy” referred to your lowly and possibly non-white social status. Cowboys did the dangerous horseback work that the “cowman” or owner needed done. But ranches never hired women to do those jobs.

Jennifer Vrana, winningest cowgirl in gay rodeo history

Instead, women’s role in rodeo grew out of the owner side of ranching. My dad set me straight on the subtleties of the terminology, when he was educating me on the possibility that I’d run the ranch some day. “You’re not a cow girl,” he said pointedly. “You’re a cow woman.”

The roots of “cow woman” and “cowman” go back into the Spanish-speaking regions of colonial North America, especially California during the 1697-1848 period. Ranches were created out of vast land grants given to families that emigrated to the New World. Wives co-owned the ranchos with their husbands. Under Spanish law, a man’s inheritance went to his widow, not his oldest son as in English law. Land ownership elevated a couple to gentry, so the ranchera and her husband were styled Doña and Don, the equivalent of England’s madam and sir. Whereas the working help (who were often Indians) were called vaqueros (cow boys).
Historian Kathy Hughart writes: “As husband-wife partnerships became stronger through joint ownership of ranch lands, women experienced a new kind of power, freedom to enter the world of men's work.” Spanish California women virtually lived on horseback, since equestrian skills were part of upper-class social life. Even on the bigger ranches, a crew of well-born rancheras – the wife and her daughters -- might show up at round-up time to help brand or ship the cattle. Hughart relates: “Foreign visitors marveled at California women's horseback riding skills and expertise with the lasso.”

Rancheras also turned out for fiesta-type affairs that evolved out of the rodeos, or roundups. After the United States grabbed California and the Southwest away from Mexico in 1848, these ranch fiestas survived.

In the eastern Anglo colonies, where law traced back to England, things developed differently. After the American Revolution, the new state constitutions restricted voting rights to property-owning white Christian males. Women weren’t free to own land till the Homestead Act of 1862, which the federal government passed to speed American occupation of Western regions that might still be grabbed by the British or Russians. This act put millions of low-income owners on 270 million acres by the early 1900s. To claim a 160-acre parcel, a homesteader had only to be a head of household and 21 years old. So an unmarried woman or widow could stake out a homestead.

Land ownership shot new life into the women’s suffrage movement. Not surprisingly, the first states to let women vote were Western states. In turn, land and suffrage touched deeply into other areas of women’s sensibilities – including gender identity and sexual orientation. We can only guess how many of these female homesteaders were closet cases of the Victorian era – women who aimed to escape the church-driven strictures of daily life “back in the states.” Women’s westward spirit was movingly expressed by closeted lesbian novelist Willa Cather in her novels O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

If a cow woman was wealthy enough, she didn’t have to wrestle around with the livestock – she could hire cowboys to do that. But a cow woman of more modest means couldn’t afford to pay cowboys. At most she might hire a hand or two at roundup time. For the rest, she (and her sisters or daughters, if she had them) did their own work -- harness and drive a team, rope steers, cut cows or calves out of the herd, do branding, and sit a bucking horse on a cold morning.

Some Western women did crash the male employee world – but they did it in other professions, by wearing men’s clothes and passing as men. Some were evidently lesbian or bi women or FTM transgendered people. One-Eyed Charlie, a well-known stagecoach driver, was discovered (after death) to be a woman. Some passing lesbians actually married the women they loved – as did Oregon pioneer Lucille Hart.

To fight the trend in some localities, Bible-thumping moralists cited the Old Testament prohibition of cross-dressing, and passed laws making it illegal for women to wear trousers and other men’s clothes.

That's entertainment


Through the late 1800s, ranches and communities started staging the first organized celebrations of ranch sport. At first these were called “stampedes” or “roundups.” Later everybody opted for the Spanish term – rodeo.

Rodeo, and women’s role in it, got its biggest push from the Wild West shows. In 1883, frontiersman-turned-promoter William “Buffalo Bill” Cody brought international popularity to ranch sport when he added it to his show -- the biggest and most successful traveling entertainment enterprise in American history. With the Indian wars finally over, the “Old West” was sufficiently tamed that it could be packaged as circus for city people – featuring appearances by famous figures like Lakota chief Sitting Bull and mountain man Liver Eatin’ Johnson.

Along with re-enactments of battles and stagecoach robberies, Buffalo Bill created sport competitions based on ranch skills, showing how women as well as men lived the frontier spirit. So the shows created a female class of employee entertainers with cowboy skills, who were dubbed “cow girls.” The “girls” roped steers, topped broncs, did relay races and trick riding, often competing directly with cowboys. Out of respect for Victorian dress code, they often rode sidesaddle. If they rode astride, they wore voluminous skirts or circusy costumes that were actually a safety hazard. Other Wild West shows followed Cody’s formula.
The term “cow girl” had a less respectful ring than ranchera or “cow woman.” In those days, society looked down on entertainers -- circus acts, dance-hall girls, vaudeville and burlesque performers, theater artists, early film stars, etc. – considering them to be bohemian types who led irregular and immoral lives. So, despite their efforts to look ladylike, the women riders who worked for the shows were grouped as hired bohemians along with the “cowboys.”

"That awful girl"

Between 1884 and 1901, one of the West’s most notorious gender-bending women was a Wild West star. She would cast a long shadow down the history of rodeo.

Born in 1856 to struggling pioneer parents, Martha Jane Canary was orphaned at age 13. Though her life was later colored by legend, it was actually “a bleak story of poverty and alcoholism,” according to historian James McLaird, who sifted patiently through frontier records to write her definitive biography. But we know one fact for sure: Martha defied convention on the gender frontier. A pretty but tough brunette girl who fended for herself and wore men’s clothes as a young teen, she was dubbed Calamity Jane.

For 30 years, Calamity led a transient life around the boom towns of the West. Her favorite hang-out was Deadwood, in Dakota Territory. In 1875, when she was 19, the U.S. Army was still fighting the Plains tribes. Several times Calamity put on uniform and smuggled herself into army expeditions as a camp follower. There she was the soldiers’ pet, and mastered skills that would later be important in the arena – horsemanship, firearms, and driving a big wagon team so expertly that she could reportedly knock a fly off a mule’s ear with her long bullwhip.

Calamity loved to make a grand entrance into Deadwood, riding down the main street in fringed buckskin jacket and breeches, her hair all windblown under her campaign hat, with pistols in her belt and a Winchester rifle across her saddle bow. Already a heavy drinker as a teen, she became a familiar figure in saloons west of the Missouri. Far from resenting her invasion of their domain, most of the male drinkers liked her – she was entertaining, funny, generous and kind (when she wasn’t pissed off).

As her reputation spread, newspapers started logging her movements around the West. It was news when Calamity Jane rolled into town. One newspaper editor called her “that awful girl.” It’s a wonder she was never lynched. But she had her friends in high places, plus civic good will that she’d built by nursing sick people during the West’s frequent epidemics. The worst punishment she suffered was a few days in jail, or being asked to leave town.