Cheyenne Frontier Days is happening now and goes through July 28. This year, they’re calling it the Year of the Cowgirl highlighting the spirit and strength of western women throughout history.
A new novel titled Sunny Gale by Jamie Lisa Forbes was inspired by women who competed in rodeo in the late 1800’s and into the early 1900’s. Wyoming Public Radio’s Grady Kirkpatrick spoke with the author about her inspiration for the book.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jamie Lisa Forbes: As you can see, I spent about 40 years in Wyoming total and was very familiar with rodeo. We were either at Jubilee Days or Frontier Days, or both, every summer. I had never heard of women riding broncs or doing any of the things that I later learned that they had done.
I think that's when I first learned of the history. I was just incredulous. I thought this could never have happened where I live. In fact, I learned it had happened. When I learned the nature and extent of it, how many women were involved over two generations, I felt so sad because first of all, I had never got to see them or never got to learn of them.
And second of all, I was sad that the history had been so obscure, that there was no depiction of it, no memorial to it, nothing about it in all the years I lived in Wyoming. So I took the time to go and learn about these women and as much as I could about the stories of their lives. I wanted to have them live again the way they must have lived at the time.
Grady Kirkpatrick: One of the people, one of the women back in the day, Prairie Rose Henderson, was a big part of the inspiration, right?
JLF: She was, for a number of reasons. One of the reasons I found her inspiring was because she was one of the very first to show up at an arena and say, ‘I can ride bronc.’
She had started out horse racing, I knew that. And I knew that from the Cheyenne Frontier Days programs because they had listed her under her first married name as winning either a horse race or a relay race. I knew she had started out that way, but eventually she showed up at either Frontier Days or another rodeo and started riding broncs.
She was one of the first to do so. Then, of course, her costumes. She had amazing costumes and I'll just direct your listeners to go look at the pictures. There's amazing costumes that she made herself or had her relatives make for her. And then there was her pluck and sticking with it for so many years.
She continued to perform until her middle age. All of these things I found inspiring about her, even though she did have a very tragic end.
GK: Describe the setting where the story begins with young Hannah Brandt, who eventually changes her name to Sunny Gale.
JLF: Hannah Brandt and her family have moved to the Sandhills of Nebraska from Ohio.Hannah's father had passed away. Before he died, he and his wife had made plans to move to the Sandhills where they'd heard that everything was going to be just wonderful. Building a farm in the Sandhills, Hannah's mother ends up marrying her husband's brother, who is not as industrious as the father.
Nevertheless, they still make the move to Nebraska where they encounter numerous difficulties they're not able to overcome. They are not able to raise cattle. They suffer from drought, which I did read there was a drought in that period in Nebraska. They basically were failed pioneers.
By the time Hannah wants to start riding, she knows her parents are failing as settlers in Nebraska.
GK: She develops a love of her natural surroundings, horses, and soon wants to race and compete against the cowboys. The year was 1897 when Hannah and her new husband, Luke Mangum, see a poster advertising a cowboy and cowgirl competition, a rodeo, first of its kind in Cheyenne.
There's a passage in the novel that describes their wagon ride from Nebraska into Wyoming and arriving at the very first Cheyenne Frontier Day. I think it was just one day back then.
JLF: It was one day.
GK: I'd love for you to read the passage when they first arrived in Cheyenne.
JLF: Mr. and Mrs. Luke Mangum drove to Cheyenne in a wagon with Helios and a second horse tied to the back. When Hannah saw the Cheyenne lights flare across the prairie, she grabbed Luke's arm and squeezed it. They were alive to share this moment together. Hannah was in love again. Down the main thoroughfare, at least ten bars were lit open and overflowing. Music poured out into the street, a cacophony of reels, cakewalks, polkas, and waltzes.
Knots of cowboys jostled one another under the streetlights. One was trying to ride his horse into a bar while others cheered him on. Even the women were loud. Many of them smoked cigarettes as they hung on to their men's arms.
GK: Jamie Lisa Forbes reading from her novel, Sunny Gale. Sunny defies convention of the times with her drive to compete in a predominantly male oriented sport.She's among the first women in the bronc riding event. What was it that inspired her so much to compete?
JLF: In my fictional telling of it, she's already doing horse racing when she goes to Frontier Days. She meets a Native American girl named Eleanor, who also was a horse racer at that point.
And Eleanor's husband is in bronc riding. So they watched the first ever bronc riding at Cheyenne Frontier Days, which is a men's event at that point. Eleanor just turns to her and says, ‘I can do that too.’ And Sunny, who is still Hannah at that point, is flabbergasted by that idea, but she is inspired by Eleanor's desire to push that envelope and go even farther and stretch her horsemanship even more. It's based on Eleanor's words that Eleanor is going to do it, that Sunny decides she's going to do it too.
GK: Yeah, the story is set in other parts of Wyoming, including Medicine Bow and around the historic Virginian Hotel. It's certainly a timely book coinciding with the year of the cowgirl at Cheyenne Frontier Days and also a bronze statue of a cowgirl without stirrups.
JLF: Without the hobbled stirrups!
GK: Without the hobbled stirrups, yep. It's a great story, not just for rodeo fans. What do you hope 21st century readers will experience and take away from Sunny Gale?
JLF: I hope readers are going to be moved by the book. What I want the readers to take away is that this is history that has not been celebrated, but more than that it's a story of trying to reach the heights of glory and ambition and immortality and being undercut by your own choices, which is what happens to Sunny Gale.
And I think that is a human story. Beyond that, I think the reader can tell that I personally love the West. I love the openness and the magnificence of the West. I want the reader to come away with that feeling of magnificence.
GK: Do you want to tell us about any of your early rodeo experiences at Cheyenne Frontier Days? You've attended a number.
JLF: Yeah, because my father's family is from Cheyenne and we had a lot of friends in Cheyenne. We were at Frontier Days quite a bit from the time I was a child all the way through adulthood. My son and I were at Frontier Days when the bull rider was killed in the late 1980s. That was the first message to me that fatalities can happen anytime at a rodeo. So it wasn't hard for me at that point to imagine the fatalities that happened for women and the one that I wrote about in the book.
