Picture Leads To Quest For Pioneer Cowgirls

EUGENE, Ore. - Before she saw the pictures, Polly Helm felt every inch the daughter of the Great American West.

Her ancestors on both sides were early settlers in northeastern Oregon. One limb of the family tree stretched out into ranching near the tiny community of Stanfield, and the other set up a prosperous saddlery and leather goods business in Pendleton, where she grew up.

Flanked by the purplish, bruised horizon of the Blue Mountains and creased by the Umatilla River, Pendleton was a town that never threw off the residue of the Old West. In fact, it wore it proud. Boasted of it. Reveled in it.

Pendleton was cowboys and wheat farmers and neighboring Umatilla Indians. It was a stubborn admiration of the ways of the West and the sense of freedom that come from wide-open spaces. And once a year, it was rodeo.

For a child growing up in the 1950s, the annual Pendleton Round-Up meant getting out of school early to watch the Westward Ho Parade and staying up late to see the Happy Canyon Pageant. Cowboys ate breakfast in the city park.

Helm's family was in the thick of it. Since the rodeo's inception in 1910, her great-grandfather, J.J. Hamley, and later his son, Lester Hamley, had provided the prized, silver-mounted trophy saddles for the all-around champions of the Round-Up.

SMELL OF RAWHIDE

She remembers the old saddle store - the scent of cigars and dusty boots and people who worked hard in the sun. And always, the

sweet, clean aroma of saddle. "You can't mistake the incredible smell of rawhide. It was the first thing you noticed," she recalled.

The saddlery and her family's link to the Round-Up gave Helm a front-row seat on the mythic Old West.

It would take years for her to discover what was missing from the picture. It would take a faded, grainy image of a young woman standing in the soft, gray dirt of a rodeo arena - tipping the brim of her huge hat and squinting into the sunlight.

Helm left Pendleton, moving to Bend with her family when her grandmother died. She went to the University of Oregon, started a small business, married, had a child, divorced and returned to college for one degree, then another. Still, she treasured the past like a family heirloom. She remembered it. She believed in it.

Then about 10 years ago, the photograph showed up.

She was at work as a University of Oregon photo technician when it happened. Her boss returned from the Knight Library and dropped onto her desk a foggy print made from an old glass-plate negative. A joke. An afterthought.

It was a cowgirl. A tiny woman with a strong chin. She wore a fringed leather skirt and a dusty Western shirt and a big black hat. The gallon, perhaps. She stood alone, the skin between her eyes drawn up into twin furrows.

Scratched into the negative were these words: "Champion of All" Lady Buckaroo Katy Wilks. Round-Up. Pendleton, Oregon. 1916.

"My question was, `Champion of all what?' " Helm said. "I later learned that in 1916 she had competed for three days. She came in first, winning two trophy saddles made by my grandfather. And she won money."

Helm was floored. Despite a childhood full of Round-Ups, she had never seen faces like this before. She had never even thought of cowgirls as a part of the Golden Age of Rodeo, from about 1910 to 1930.

Aside from an occasional exhibition act, women hadn't competed at the Round-Up since 1929.

"I think I felt some anger about not knowing, and some embarrassment," Helm said, "that I had grown up there and had no recollection of this as part of my own heritage.

"It could have been that people talked about it and I missed it, or that I didn't see the significance of it somehow. But with this picture, the seeds of curiosity were planted," she said, nodding at the print that is today tacked to a doorjamb in her Eugene home.

Helm called an uncle connected with the Hamley saddle business. Did he know of these pioneer cowgirls? "Oh, sure," he said. "I have a whole postcard collection."

She ventured into the special collections at the Knight Library and found a treasure - rare glass negatives of the Pendleton Round-Up as captured through the lens of regional photographer Lee Moorhouse, a former superintendent of the Umatilla Indian Agency.

The images.

Trick roper Jane Bernoudy "spinning the wedding ring" around Tillie Balwin, a bronc rider, trick rider and relay racer, who sits Indian-style in the Round-Up arena dirt. The year is 1912.

Bertha Blancett caught mid-stride as she urges her horse into a turn at the 1913 Pendleton Round-Up to claim the $300 purse for the World Championship Cowgirl's Relay Race.

In one photograph, seven cowgirls line up at the 1915 Tucumcari Roundup in New Mexico to await their turn at bucking horses. Shy, proud, stern. Their hats are too big and their skirts too long for their work. They smile.

"To me they were these nameless, compelling images - so old, yet so contemporary," Helm said.

Two years before Oregon women won the right to vote, they earned the right to be slapped around on bucking horses at the Pendleton Round-Up.

Helm discovered that as early as the first Round-Up in 1910, women freely competed in events now considered male-dominated - bronc and bull riding, steer wrestling and calf roping. Some came to the rodeo out of Wild West shows, others straight from ranches.

For 20 years they traveled a well-worn rodeo circuit - the Calgary Stampede, Cheyenne Frontier Days, the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, Madison Square Garden, and always, the Pendleton Round-Up.

"We also know that the Pendleton Round-Up was one of the very biggest events for women. It is continually mentioned throughout these ladies' lives and histories," she added.

The cowgirls lived the rodeo circuit until the social and political tide - plus war, a depression and gas rationing - began to turn against them in the late '20s and early '30s.

In Pendleton, that tide rushed in early, when Bonnie McCarroll, a talented bronc rider, was thrown during an exhibition ride at the 1929 Round-Up.

Ollie Osborn, a turn-of-the-century cowgirl from Union, gave this account of the accident during a radio interview in the early 1980s:

"Everybody just stood still, speechless when it happened. We all knowed she was hurt bad. I run over there and Bonnie was out just colder than a wedge. There wasn't no color in her face. It was just chalk white. . . . It was five, six more days she lived."

It was one thing to watch a man lie crushed and still in the rodeo ring. But there was something about seeing a mother, a sister, a wife, fatally hurt there that didn't set right.

`NO MORE WOMEN'

"They said, `That's it. No more women,"' said Bob Larson, who today sits on the Round-Up Hall of Fame committee. "Except for an occasional exhibition, we have not had women competing since," he said.

Helm learned about McCarroll and others by scouring details from periodicals, books, museums, historical societies and individuals.

There was bronc rider and bulldogger Fox Hastings, who wrestled steers for three days at a 1924 rodeo in Houston with broken ribs and a fortifying shot of cocaine. There was Prairie Rose Henderson, who challenged judges and became the first woman to compete in a bucking contest at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1901.

At the age of 40, Helm embraced new heroes.

"I wanted people to be able to identify these faces. I wanted to bring them out of obscurity and make them accessible to a wider audience," she said. Helm knew she was probably working toward a book. But she also felt impatient about promoting the cowgirls and their histories. "I wanted to create a product that was collectible, not consumable pop art that was more about the artist that the cowgirl."