Arctic Circle
Productions
Arctic Circle Productions
19934 Antler Pt
Bend, Oregon 97702
541.255.2420
Peggy Warren competes at the 1914 Pendleton Roundup, the year a cowgirl Bertha Blancett almost took the title of “All Around Cowboy.” After the Round Up, Pendleton immediately changed the rules so that a woman could only come in second place.
Steve Wursta has recently completed his fourth film, “From Cheyenne to Pendleton, the Rise and Fall of the Rodeo Cowgirl.”
Wursta’s historical documentary offers insight into the west and women’s participation in the rodeo in the early decades of the 20th century. The film chronicles the lives of Idaho’s Bonnie McCarroll, Colorado’s Bertha Blancett and Washington’s Mabel Strickland during the years 1904 through 1929. All three women have been inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.
“The reason I made the film was to answer the simple question ‘why?” says Wursta. “Why were women allowed to compete in the rodeo and why were they removed from the arena?”
Many historians point to the death of Idaho’s beloved cowgirl Bonnie McCarroll at the 1929 Pendleton Round-Up as the reason for the expulsion of women from the rodeo arena, but in reality, the tide had turned against the cowgirls many years earlier. Both the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and the Pendleton Round-Up had difficulties with Mabel Strickland, a 98-pound steer roper who set the world’s record at Frontier Days in 1924 – an accomplishment that was written up in newspapers and magazines across the country. Both rodeos barred this petite woman from competing against the cowboys.
Throughout the 1920s the rodeo cowgirl was losing ground to the Rodeo Queen, an invention of the Pendleton Round-Up, which was viewed as the more “appropriate” role for women. “You can’t begin to understand the history of women’s rodeo unless you understand the current events of the early 20th century,” says Wursta. By the spring of 1929, the Rodeo Association of America had already announced that 1929 would be the last year for women in the rodeo. Bonnie McCarroll’s tragic and avoidable death at the Pendleton Round-Up was used as the excuse to remove women for good.
