Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Equal rights across the pasture

Julie Carter

It didn't take an act of Congress to give cowgirls their equal opportunity rights in their work at the ranch. Since cowgirl time began, the women of the range have been afforded the opportunity to work side by side with their male counterparts.

The weather never made the issue debatable. She was allowed to freeze her backside off in the same West Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, or Dakotas blizzard as he was.

Her circle for the day included ice just as thick to axe through and the same drifts to drive or ride through. Her frost-encrusted eyelashes, batting over blue eyes, never turned an ounce of sympathy or empathy from any of the other chilled-down cowhands as they moved a herd of mother cows and calves in a spring snowstorm.

Dust boiling from a droughty country side as the winds whipped across the landscape never offered a preference for what gender the rider was when she got sandblasted, dirt stuck to eyes and nostrils and teeth turned brown with grit.

The start before daylight, the stop long past sundown carried no clause for shorter hours for the fairer sex.

In fact, more often than not, she started earlier and ended later, as she first tended to arrangements for provisions to last the day and the cleanup at the end of the day. It's not a complaint, just a fact.

A charging cow in the alley will just as quickly run over the one wearing chaps and mascara as she will the guy who hollers at her in a deep voice, then laughs when the denim bottom is last seen bailing over the fence into the weeds.

The bulls will knock down the gate she is holding with no regard to the fact she's a mother and has plans to live to raise her children, preferably not as a quadriplegic.

The real equalizer in the operation has always been the horses. And, this is where the cowboys will, and they can't help it because it is how they are, claim a superior notion that they can ride what the little woman can't.

Sometimes true, sometimes not.

I remember my dad warning me not to ride one of the horses he brought home in a herd of several that he’d bought.

"You stay off that horse," he said. "Even the cowboys at the ranch I bought him from are afraid of him and for good reason."

The local hands murmured and warned me. Eagle's reputation had traveled the information highway common to ranch hands.

You can see where this is going. I was 15 and bullet proof, or horse proof as it were.

As soon as nobody was looking, I had the tall, leggy dun saddled and in a long trot in the opposite direction from the house so my mother couldn't see me ride off.

Never knew why, but nothing happened. And in subsequent saddlings, no problems. When my dad got over being mad at me, Eagle and I covered lots of miles at a long trot.

One time a friend of mine was hurt seriously when her horse bucked her off at the ranch. She was on the mend and would live to return to riding in a few months, but the best medicine she got came in the form of some news.

The "outlaw" that had put her on the ground was sent to a cowboy for some miles, wet saddle blankets and manners. Seems that was going along fairly well until this same horse dusted that cowboy's britches in the dirt.

"That son-of-gun sure can buck," he admitted.  The lad’s lightbulb moment had arrived. The cowgirl hadn't "fallen" off in a simple crow-hopping event ... dang if she hadn't actually been bucked down by a real bucker. Victories for the cowgirl sometimes come in odd ways.

This was one of them.

Julie, who sometimes just fell off, can be reached for comment at jcarternm@gmail.com.