Chris Enss

Contributions

Wild Women Of The West: Florence LaDue

Twenty-nine-year-old Florence LaDue laid on her back in the middle of a rodeo arena in Alberta, Canada, twirling a lasso. It was July 1910 and the crowd in the stands watching her work were cheering and whistling. The trick, the petite cowgirl was preparing to do was to throw a wide loop over a rider...

Wild Women Of The West: Fox Hastings

Cowboy Bill Pickett is credited with introducing the sport of bulldogging to rodeos in 1907.  In bulldogging, the rider dashes after a madly fleeing steer, leans out from the saddle, and throws himself onto its horns, bringing the beast to the ground in a swirling scramble of dust and a half ton of flying beef. ...

Wild Women Of The West: Texas Guinan

Texas Guinan (Mary Louise Cecelia Guinan) was a popular cowgirl star from 1918-1923, who grew up on a ranch near Waco, Texas. Before graduating from high school, she received a scholarship from the Chicago Conservatory of Music. After she acquired a degree in music and art, she moved to Denver and helped her father on...

COWGIRL Iconic: Lucyle Richards

Lucyle Richards tightened the grip she had on the rope attached to the flank strap tied around the steer she was about to ride.  The monstrous animal underneath the ninety-nine-pound woman recognized by rodeo fans across the country as the most beautiful of all the professional cowgirls, waited anxiously for the chute to open.  The...

Wild Women Of The West: Enid Justin

Thirty-two-year-old Enid Justin drove her Model T Ford into the small town of Jacksboro, Texas, in early 1926, determined to sell her quality, handmade cowboy boots to the mercantile owners there. As the head of the newly formed Nocona Boot Company, the tenacious woman knew what needed to be done to make her brand a...

Wild Women Of The West: Dr. Harriet Belcher

A team of bald face horses pulling a buckboard wagon galloped wildly along a dirt road heading toward the Santa Ynez Mountains, twenty miles outside of Santa Barbara. The driver, a pudgy man wearing a worried expression, urged the animals along. Dr. Harriet Belcher, a distinguished looking, forty-year-old woman with dark hair and dark eyes,...

Wild Women Of The West: Patsy Montana

In 1939, a petite singer from Hot Springs, Arkansas, named Patsy Montana, made her screen debut in the Gene Autry Western Colorado Sunset.  Her role in the film was that of a waitress working at a diner near a popular ranch.  When the ranch hands came into the eatery one evening for supper, they asked...

Wild Women Of The West: Kitty Canutt

Bronc busting champion Kitty Wilkes won her first title at the Wild West Celebration Rodeo in Miles City, Montana, in 1916.  The seventeen-year-old New York native’s straightforwardness and untamed physical daring gave fans the impression she was born and bred into the rugged life of a Wyoming ranch.  Few would have guessed she was new...

Wild Women Of The West: Mary Wiggins

Mary Wiggins worshipped excitement. As a double for such screen stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Dorothy Lamour, Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert she loved to climb the facades of tall buildings, to leap from a running horse to a speeding automobile, to fly a plane while blindfolded. Wiggins was one of the top stuntwomen during the...
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