How ‘bout them cowgirls?

I came of television-watching in the great era of the Western. There were the Saturday morning kiddy shows like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Range Rider, The Lone Ranger, Annie Oakley, The Cisco Kid, Fury... And there were more grownup shows too numerous to count: Gunsmoke, Maverick, The Rifleman, Wells Fargo, Wyatt Earp, Wanted Dead or Alive, Have Gun Will Travel, Tombstone Territory, Texas Rangers, Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Wagon Train, Bonanza, Big Valley, High Chaparral, Laramie, Branded…

An awful lot of romanticizing went into glorifying the Old West. And an awful lot of the scripts were notable for their absence of women.

Annie Oakley and The Big Valley were the only shows I remember where female characters had the lead. Other than Miss Kitty, the saloon keeper on Gunsmoke; Milly, who ran the general store on The Rifleman, and one or two others, women were, for the most part, just passing through, generally on their way to their grave. (Ben Cartwright on Bonanza was a widower three times over. If any of his boys got anywhere near a woman, it was generally a death sentence for that lil’ ol’ gal. On the Roy Rogers Show, Roy’s real-life wife – Dale Evans – had a regular role. Not as his wife, but as the proprietor of the local cafe and hotel.)

Despite the absence of role models, dead or alive, I grew up fantasizing about living out West, and the West to some extent continues to capture my imagination. (Albeit a tiny bit of it.)

I must, of course, edit this imagination to eliminate the outhouses, the hygiene challenges (M and F), the casual gun violence (“…just a flesh wound…”), the boredom, the cold, the heat, the danger, the backbreaking pre-dawn, post-dusk work, the bar fights, the spittoons…

Not to mention that the only horse I’ve ever sat was on a merry-go-round. And the fact that I’m a city girl born and bread, a city girl by baptism and desire.

Yet when I play George Strait, which I am inclined to do every once in a while, I lustily sing along with “How ‘Bout Them Cowgirls.”)

But realistically, riding, roping and branding dogies aren’t on my bucket list.

And when it comes to cowgirls, the truth is that I’d rather see than be one.

Thus I was quite delighted to read in The New York Times the other day that “Female Ranchers Are Reclaiming the American West.”

Hundreds of years before John Wayne and Gary Cooper gave us a Hollywood version of the American West, with men as the brute, weather-beaten stewards of the land, female ranchers roamed the frontier. They were the indigenous, Navajo, Cheyenne and other tribes, and Spanish-Mexican rancheras, who tended and tamed vast fields, traversed rugged landscapes with their dogs, hunted, and raised livestock.

The descendants of European settlers brought with them ideas about the roles of men and women, and for decades, family farms and ranches were handed down to men. Now, as mechanization and technology transform the ranching industry, making the job of cowboy less about physical strength — though female ranchers have that in spades — and more about business, animal husbandry and the environment, women have reclaimed their connection to the land.

I’m a bit disappointed that most of the cowgirls, errrr, cow-women, pictured in the article are wearing baseball caps and not cowboy hats. But I guess I should be heartened by the fact that, if I do decide to add riding the range – or driving the range in a pickup – and mending fences to my bucket list, I have some of the requisite clothing, namely baseball caps and jeans. And I also know how to drive a stick shift, so there’s that. (I didn’t see the gearshifts in any of the pickups the cow-women were driving, but I’m pretty sure that the automatic transmission is for city slickers and wusses.)

Anyway, as of 2012, “14 percent of the nation’s 2.1 million farms had a female proprietor.” And a ranch is just a farm with horses and cattle, right?

This is nowhere near the percentage of, say, doctors who are women. Under 35, it’s 60:40 female to male. Still, it’s better than it was in the old days of 1950’s and 1960’s TV.

Caitlyn Taussig is pretty enough to be a model, but she:

…helps run the [family] ranch with a cadre of cowgirls, including her mother and sister. They only really rely on men on the days when they have to brand the Angus Cross cattle. “We just sort of treat each other differently,” Ms. Taussig said shortly after a cow kicked a gate that split open her forehead. She got six stitches and was back at work that afternoon. “There’s less ego.”

And there’s more environmental awareness:

Women are leading the trend of sustainable ranching and raising grass-fed breeds of cattle in humane, ecological ways.

If I ever decide to resurrect my interest in cowgirl-ing, I will be sure to sign up for the

… New Cowgirl Camp, a five-day course that trains women in animal husbandry, ranch management, financial planning, ecological monitoring and regenerative grazing. Ms. [Beth] Robinette recoils at the gaudy, country-pop version of the overly feminized cowgirl, and calls her program a “rhinestone-free zone.”

New Cowgirl Camp is already accepting applications for it’s August 2019 session. It’s held at Robinette’s Lazy R Ranch, and as a Lazy R myself, that sounds pretty comfy. Or did until I read the hazard list and the info on waivers and indemnity. Here’s the non-exhaustive list of the perils of ranch camping:

Chemicals
Cold and sun/heat
Dust and pollen
Electricity
Hand tools
Highway traffic
Lifting
Livestock handling
Machinery and equipment
Mud
Noise
Ponds
Slips, trips, and falls
Small critters that can sting or bite
Tractors
Wells

Some of this, even us city girls got covered: cold, sun/heat, noise. And slips, trips, and falls – as I’m repeatedly reminded by ads for stairlifts on TV – are the major hazard for the elderly, a demographic which includes potential cowgirls like me. Small critters? Well, these mean streets hold plenty of rats. And I have a bunch of hand tools, even a drill that I mostly know how to use.

Anyway, nice to see that there’s a sisterhood of cowgirls out there, handling live stock and mud with aplomb. Yee haw!