Out of Site

Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West

Rebecca Scofield

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295746050
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Kunst

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness and independence of America's frontier past. However, marginalized people have starred in rodeos since the very beginning. Cast out of popular western mythology and pushed to the fringes in everyday life, these cowboys and cowgirls found belonging and meaning at the rodeo, staking a claim to national inclusion. Outriders explores the histories of rodeoers at the margins of society, from female bronc-riders in the 1910s and 1920s and convict cowboys in Texas in the mid-twentieth century to all-black rodeos in the 1960s and 1970s and gay rodeoers in the late twentieth century. These rodeo riders not only widened the definition of the real American cowboy but also, at times, reinforced the persistent and exclusionary myth of an idealized western identity. In this nuanced study, Rebecca Scofield shares how these outsider communities courted authenticity as they put their lives on the line to connect with an imagined American West.

CHAPTER 1

Coiffeuse to Cowgirl

Pioneering and Performance of Western Womanhood

Anna Mathilda Winger did not like styling hair, or at least we can assume as much. She dropped the profession as soon as she learned how to hang off a galloping horse and snatch a handkerchief from the dirt. Around the turn of the twentieth century, having emigrated from Norway as a teenager, Winger lived and worked with an aunt in New York City. On a fateful weekend excursion with some friends to then rural Staten Island, Winger saw “a troupe of show people” performing equestrian tricks for a film. Winger later described being amazed by the “wonderful costumes and apparently colorful lives” of the entertainers. She desperately wanted to learn to ride a horse so that she could join the troupe. “Back to New York I would go and dream.”1 Unlike so many other young women, however, she did more than just dream. She reportedly returned to Staten Island and paid one of the performers to teach her to ride.

Within a couple of years, New York hairstylist Anna Mathilda Winger had become Tillie Baldwin, “Champion Lady Bronco Buster.” By the mid-1910s, she had performed with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show and competed at the largest rodeos in America and Canada, winning titles in racing and riding against some of the toughest ranch women and men in the business. Despite this illustrious career, in 1916, she exclaimed to the World magazine: “Cowgirl? I’m no cowgirl … I’ve never been on a ranch in my life.”2 In this mediated moment, Baldwin exposed deep debates about women’s performance and western authenticity. Her air-of-innocence response articulated the performance of nonperformance cowgirls worked to achieve. At times appropriating larger tropes of “authentic” western womanhood, Baldwin also often cheekily resisted these narrow definitions, especially after her retirement from rodeo. Competing in an era defined by anxiety about the closing of the frontier, the growing number of immigrants, and the increasingly loud political demands of women, Baldwin negotiated her nationality, inexperience on stock ranches, and gender in order to assert her place as a true American pioneer.

The term “cowgirl” did not come into popular usage until the end of the nineteenth century.3 White women who went west throughout the nineteenth century did not celebrate the moniker cowgirl or its predecessor “cowboy girl.” As historian Joyce Gibson Roach has explained, most white women who lived on stock ranches in the mid- to late-nineteenth century carried Victorian gender ideals, including eastern fashions and a strict division of labor.4 For instance, despite the rough terrain, the use of a sidesaddle was still encouraged for women in order to protect their sexual productivity. Oregon resident Elizabeth Ludley took exception to the notion that riding astride was more comfortable, challenging women in 1872: “I fancy that twenty miles’ experience on a man’s saddle, over rough road, will convince almost any of our ladies that she can’t do everything ‘as well as a man.’ ”5 Outside work was men’s work. Only desperate need would drive a cattleman to let his wife or daughters consistently participate in herding practices.6

Tillie Baldwin in her classic bloomers costume exhibiting her trick-riding abilities. Fancy Riding by Tillie Baldwin Champion Lady Buckaroo, Pendleton Round Up. Photograph by W. S. Bowman, courtesy of National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth, Texas.

As the nineteenth century waned, however, alongside the cultural emergence of the cowboy hero, writers and theater directors increasingly promoted daring dime novel heroines and Wild West gals, crafting a new image of the western “cowgirl.”7 While Theodore Roosevelt has often been credited with coining the term in reference to Wild West performer Lucille Mulhall, historians have noted its usage in Wild West programs and news articles in the 1890s.8 Based on these historical realities and the diversity of cowgirl experiences, twentieth- and twentieth-first-century historians have made a careful delineation between cattle women and rodeo entertainers. The National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, for instance, has separate categories for “women who had kinship with the land” and “women who went into the arena.”9 Yet, from the 1900s through the 1920s, rodeo producers and performers made no such distinction. Performers often sold audiences on the notion that rodeo cowgirls were the daughters of true pioneer mothers with ranching in their blood.

Women working and living on the early professional rodeo circuit performed a specific form of what gender theorist Jack Halberstam has called “female masculinity.”10 Female masculinity refers to the performance of a masculine identity by women who were otherwise blocked from masculine privilege. Lacerated skin, shattered bones, and excruciating deaths often resulted from riding broncs, wrestling steers, and racing horses. The media continually reiterated the “heroic” and “brave” natures of rodeo women. As one show program proclaimed, “And then the cowgirls! […] the kind of girls who never hesitate to join the cowpunchers in the great cattle drives and who brave the lonely prairie rides with all the attendant dangers of outlaws and renegades, with never a thought of danger.”11 As women’s suffrage debates raged during the 1910s, with many western women already enfranchised, the paying public embraced this form of female masculinity under the exceptionalist premise that these women were bred in the unforgiving environs of the West. Unlike other women in show business during the early twentieth century, their authenticity protected them, at least partially, from undue moral scrutiny.

Historians like Renee Laegreid and Mary Lou LeCompte have shown the complex realities of balancing femininity and masculinity in both cowgirl and rodeo queen performances in the early twentieth century. As local queens vied with glamorous, if rowdy, touring cowgirls, debates about who was an authentic participant in western culture emerged.12 Tillie Baldwin’s ability to navigate the American public’s growing obsession with the West and her own impulses to claim a western identity, her immigrant story, or both illuminates the crucial intersection between nation and gender in western performance during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Indeed, the American public desired western women, imagined as strong mothers, forged on the frontier, as dual panics about white womanhood and immigration created anxiety about modern society. As waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe poured into the country and the United States spread its imperialist influence around the globe, white elites began to craft a discourse of “over-civilization.” Many people were concerned about preserving the hardiness of native-stock, white Americans, seeing a lack of vigor in urban life. Adherents to the theory of race suicide, which postulated that falling birthrates were a harbinger of inevitable racial extinction, urged women to remember their primary duty to the nation in bearing healthy children who would become fit citizens.13 Popular cultural movements like antimodernism and primitivism, which celebrated “the frontier” as cultivating more genuine forms of existence, provided tropes that cowgirls could invoke. Within the performative arena of rodeo, cowgirls could also reject a growing concern about rural degeneracy. As people fled farms for cities, social scientists worried that the country’s vital stock was dwindling, making rural places as deviant as the city.14 Cowgirl performers actively drew attention to both their fit bodies and their homemaking skills in order to protect their respectability and to craft themselves into antimodern heroines, often reinforcing traditional gender norms and anti-immigrant sentiments.

Tillie Baldwin both broke with and bolstered this longer narrative about the place of easterners, European immigrants, and women in the imagined American West as she strategically emphasized particular physical and behavioral attributes that allowed her to be marked as genuinely western. Importantly, Baldwin’s image was crafted in large part by the media stories published over her lifetime. An immigrant who at times openly scorned notions about a woman’s place throughout the 1910s, Baldwin’s story had the potential to counter the idea that authentic western womanhood was rooted in blood and upbringing, but she often strategically decided to uphold that definition. She was able to do so in part because, as a blonde Norwegian, she faced far less anti-immigrant sentiment than southern and eastern European, Mexican, or Chinese immigrants experienced. While during her early career she often shared or withheld the particularities of her birth at different events, meaning some people knew she was an immigrant while others did not, during her retirement in Connecticut, she actively combined her immigrant and cowgirl stories, defining herself as a true pioneer.

This is not a biography of Anna Mathilda Winger, or of her alter ego Tillie Baldwin. She published no memoir to tell her own story, no diary to reveal her inner thoughts. Instead, this is an examination of how women like Baldwin crafted their own identities in the media. Many women like Baldwin earned a living by selling a standard definition of the cowgirl that emphasized ranch-born narratives of hardy domesticity while also actively resisting that definition by participating in masculine wage-earning performance, supporting the expansion of women’s political and social rights, and embracing their own east-to-west stories. Placing Baldwin alongside her competitors and compatriots from the 1910s and 1920s, including Lucille Mulhall, Mabel Strickland, the Greenough sisters, and Vera McGinnis, we can analyze how white women in these decades used the tools available to them, specifically ideas about their birth and upbringing on the rugged frontier, to ensure the acceptance of their rodeo performances. When Baldwin left the circuit, she continued to rework the meaning of the cowgirl, asserting her right to be a western performer without being ranch born. In her retirement, as national concerns about immigration and women’s rights waned, Baldwin claimed to be western and ultimately American on her own terms. Instead of lamenting her lack of pioneer pedigree, she was recast as the “good immigrant,” a true pioneer who, through a trial by fire on the old frontier, overcame her Norwegian heritage and became fully American. Walking dangerous tightropes between public adoration and public scorn, outrider cowgirls played with concepts of western authenticity to gain acceptance as full citizens in the United States.

In 1912, the San Francisco Chronicle announced, “Tillie Baldwin, the young Oklahoma girl who recently created a sensation at the recent rodeo at Los Angeles by winning all the prizes for bucking bronchos [sic], defeating some of the best-known cowboys in the exhibition, will be a feature of the 101 Ranch Wild West.”15 Riding as an “unknown” in the 1911 Los Angeles Rodeo, Baldwin swept the riding trophies and the media gleefully reported on the homegrown cowgirl, “recruited from the Miller Brothers’ famous 100,000-acre ranch.” The 101 Ranch Wild West Show, dubbed the “Real Wild West,” advertised its authenticity, inviting only “bona fide cattle men of the ranges” and “genuine, blanket-wearing” Native peoples, alongside “Clever Ranch Girls.”

The woman from whom Baldwin stole the crown in Los Angeles was Bertha Blancett. Born Bertha Kapernick to German immigrants in Ohio, she moved with her family to a Colorado ranch when she was very young. Historian Mary Lou LeCompte dubbed her a “typical cowgirl, [who] spent most of her time riding.”16 In 1906 she joined Pawnee Bill’s show and then married a successful rodeo cowboy, Dell Blancett, after meeting him at the first Pendleton Round-Up in 1910. In 1911, she almost won that rodeo’s All-Around Champion title, placing ahead of almost all her male competitors in points. Her successful performances spurred rodeo producers to create separate “ladies’ events.”17 The expansion of these events, with different rules and smaller cash winnings, ensured that cowgirl performers could participate in rodeos, but with carefully established limits.

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, cowgirls readily participated in the construction of a narrative that linked their masculine abilities to their supposed upbringing on the rugged frontier. Many women explained their own transgressive behavior in terms of a celebrated notion of pioneer motherhood and hardy domesticity. Baldwin’s story demonstrates the tenacity of the equation of cowgirl performer with ranch-born daughter. The narrative of cowgirls as fiercely dedicated to serving the home, strong through necessity, and healthier than their eastern sisters, however, meant a single, childless, and immigrant performer like Tillie Baldwin should not have existed; yet she did. As she attempted to establish her career, Baldwin successfully played on particular physical and behavioral traits in order to portray herself as a “genuine” American cowgirl.18

At the turn of the twentieth century, Baldwin was one of the hundreds of thousands of young Norwegian immigrants fleeing a time of rapid economic and political change in their homeland. As self-sufficient farms gave way to market production, factories provided ready-made fabrics, and railroads carried goods from the interior to the ...