Cowgirl Up! by Heidi Thomas

colts, but her dad caught wind of her desertion and sent the sheriff to take her off the bus a few miles out of town. Jane was “banished” to the ranch, but once the calves were branded and the herd moved to summer pasture, there was a short lull before haying season started. The family drove to Billings for a Western celebration, but it was rained out.
    As the family ate breakfast at the Stockman’s Café before heading home, Jane saw a poster for a rodeo in Red Lodge in two days. “I deliberately kept Clint’s [her dad’s] head turned away.” Later she won a coin toss with him to “hang around for one more day.”
    Jane caught a ride with a couple of cowboys to Red Lodge, where she met the Greenoughs. She wrote, “When Alice and Margie finished riding their broncs, they stood in front of the chutes, arms crossed, looking extremely regal and aloof as they peered out from under their ten-acre hats (as opposed to ten-gallons such as the one worn by us peons).” Jane said Margie was a “sweet gal,” but she was not as complimentary about Alice, saying the champion bronc rider “didn’t want any other women to compete with her.”
    The would-be cowgirl was “as awed by the famous family as everyone else was, so I just trailed around behind them, staring.”
    The Burnett family moved into Lewistown that winter, and the next summer Jane invented the excuse of going to visit her grandfather on the ranch, but she instead headed for a rodeo in Wolf Point with a girlfriend, a “Romeo-magnet.”
    â€œAt the rodeo headquarters I began to question my decision to travel this far with no assurance of a job, and . . . the extra responsibility of another mouth to feed (to say nothing of her taste for expensive Scotch whiskey).”
    The promoters suggested that Jane might be able to earn a few dollars in their “mount money” bareback riding event. A cowboy explained that there was no actual competition offered, but each saddle bronc rider was required to ride at least one bareback bronc every day for one dollar each. This had been designed to fill out their list of events, but none of them really wanted to participate.
    â€œYou oughta find a least one bronc rider, maybe more, who’d be glad to turn his bareback over to you and let you have the money,” the cowboy told Jane.
    The transactions turned out to be surprisingly easy, and by the time Jane finished talking to the riders, she’d agreed to ride a total of eight broncs during the two-day show. “I leaned against the fence, still somewhat dazed at what I had done as I watched some cowboys shooting craps on a saddle-blanket behind the bucking chutes.”
    Then she overheard, “Can you imagine them birds thinkin’ we’d be stupid enough to ride them chute-fightin’ barebacks fer a buck apiece?”
    No wonder it had been so easy. She then learned that the promoters had searched the open country for green broncs that had never been inside a corral, much less a bucking chute. Jane began to wonder what she was in for.

    â€œThe one-woman rodeo I put on . . . was pretty wild,” Jane wrote. “I came out of the chute, bucked off, stumbled back, and prepared to mount another bronc.” She stayed until the end of the day and collected her four-dollar pay.
    The next day, Jane was back for four more rides. “I crawled down on a big black chute-fighting bronc that had his ears laid back, waiting for me. His powerful muscles were quivering so much it was almost impossible for me to grip the surcingle. Or maybe it was not the horse that was shaking. After all, why in hell would he be afraid?”
    The gate flew open and “it was immediately evident the black horse was not scared, even one little bit. He tossed me what felt like eighty-two feet, six and three-eighths inches into the air. The ground jumped up and caught me with a loud thud. I did not care