Classic cowgirl Connie Douglas Reeves, 101, dies after fall

Connie Douglas Reeves, who taught four generations of Texas girls to ride horses and was the oldest living honoree of the National Cowgirl Museum's Hall of Fame, died Sunday, 12 days after she was thrown from her horse. She was 101.

A former high-school teacher and onetime rancher, Mrs. Reeves became a riding instructor at Camp Waldemar for Girls near Hunt, Texas, in 1936. Over the next six decades, she taught more than 30,000 girls to ride.

She stepped down as head riding instructor in 1998, but continued to consult with the camp's riding teachers until her accident.

A life-size bronze statue of Mrs. Reeves, whose motto was "Always saddle your own horse," stands at the camp entrance.

"She just inspired everybody she met," Kit Moncrief, president of the board of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, said yesterday. Moncrief took riding lessons from Mrs. Reeves in the 1960s — as did her mother in the '30s and her children in the '90s.

Mrs. Reeves, who suffered a broken vertebra in her neck in the fall and died of cardiac arrest, was riding with camp owner Marsha Elmore when Mrs. Reeves said she would like to stop walking and do some cantering.

As she urged her horse forward, he ducked his head and threw her head-first onto the camp's one-hole golf fairway.

The fall wasn't her first accident in recent years.

A horse's kick broke her leg in 1986. She broke her wrist, fractured five ribs and punctured a lung when she ran into a hornet's nest while leading a trail ride in 1994. And she was thrown from her horse during a parade in Kerrville, Texas, two years ago, but suffered only bruises.

But nothing could keep her from saddling up.

"I'm nearly blind and hard of hearing," Mrs. Reeves told The San Antonio Express-News in 1998, when she was still conducting three two-hour classes, six days a week. "I just can't give it up. It's in my blood."

Mrs. Reeves was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum's Hall of Fame in 1997, and last year she rode in a parade marking the grand opening of the museum's new building in Fort Worth.

In 1998, she became the first woman to receive the Chester A. Reynolds Memorial Award, named after the founder of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Past winners include Gene Autry and Ronald Reagan.

She was born in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Sept. 26, 1901.

She earned a bachelor's degree in speech from Texas Woman's University in Denton in 1922 and became the first woman to enter the University of Texas Law School.

But the Great Depression halted her plans to follow in her father's footsteps. She instead began teaching in a San Antonio high school and opened a riding stable.

In 1936, she took a summer job teaching horseback riding at Camp Waldemar for Girls — a job that lasted 67 years.

In 1942, she married the camp's head wrangler, Jack Reeves.

Mrs. Reeves, whose husband died in 1985, had no children.