MYTH AMERICA

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Feb 19, 2004 | by DAVE PHILIPPS THE GAZETTE

America's image of the cowgirl inevitably lassoes itself around Dale Evans.

She's wearing a fringe dress embroidered with flowers and has one shiny white boot propped up on a fence rung. Her cream-colored hat, letting you know she is one of the good guys, is tipped back to let the sunlight shine on her curls and her angelic smile while she rides off singing "Happy Trails."

Of course, the plucky, glamorous cowgirl that Evans embodies is just a myth crafted from hundreds of reels of black-and-white film, TV reruns and sweet country songs.

Women who actually grow up working cattle are a little less polished.

But the funny thing about the West is that myth and reality can ride side-by-side. Even today, real riders and urban dwellers in cowboy hats have equal claim to the cowgirl title.

"The cowgirl has a sort of feisty commitment and courage," said Beverly Stoeltje, a visiting professor at Colorado College who has studied the evolution of the cowgirl and is giving a public lecture on "Rodeo Queens, Ranch Women and Media Dreams" next week at the college. "But the image is available to everybody.

"It makes a person feel energized and strong just to put on the hat and boots and belt. When you wear this outfit, you're not a wallflower, no matter whether you're a real cowperson or not."

Dale Evans is a perfect example.

At 17, she was a stenographer, divorced with a child, before she adopted the cowgirl image. Before long she became the buckskin- fringed "Queen of the West," inspiring a new generation: Girls who saw her playing cowgirl took her as the real deal and followed her down the trail.

"Oh thank heavens for Dale Evans, you're everything I'd ever want to be.. .. Dale Evans made a cowgirl out of me," The Dixie Chicks sing in a tribute song.

But the "real" cowgirl performance wasn't a stage act. It took place in the 1860s, when women homesteading in the West were branded as tough, independent females who could, as one Texas pioneer woman put it, ride, rope and shoot better than any "tobacco-chewing cowpoke."

"These were real women not constructed by the movies," Stoeltje said. "They weren't called cowgirls or ranch women. They were just women who came west and did what they had to do."

Living on ranches, they learned to handle cattle, horses and anything else that got in their way.

The fact that they often could ride with the cowboys lent a certain equality to life in the West.

"It's no accident that the first state to give women the vote was Wyoming, in 1890," Stoeltje said.

The rest of the country, where women still rode sidesaddle, was fascinated by stories of "women riding the gender frontier," according to Candace Savage, author of the book "Cowgirls".

She writes that women such as Annie Oakley, who could ride and shoot, drew huge crowds at Wild West shows in the East at the turn of the last century.

The minute Oakley took aim in her sharpshooting act, the image and reality of the cowgirl started to ride off on different trails.

Performers went from Wild West shows to movies, then to TV. Their clothes got brighter. Their skirts got shorter. Their fringe got longer.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, women kept feeding cattle, trimming hooves and getting dirty like they always had.

Today, you can find a lot of different folks under the brim of the cowgirl hat.

Ranch women, barrel racers, rodeo queens and urban gals with a hankerin' for that tough yet sexy persona all sometimes lay claim to the term.

Ann Hanna, a local rancher, isn't sure what a cowgirl is, even though she rides every day and herds cattle.

"I kind of picture someone with a pink hatband with jewels on it and some kind of tight clothing," Hanna said with a hearty laugh as she got ready to teach afternoon riding lessons at Fountain Valley School.

She said she doesn't consider herself a cowgirl, but deferred to an expert, her daughter Emily, 12, who had tagged along to help out in the barn.

Emily was born on the ranch and was riding before she could walk.

But instead of fringe and white boots, she was padding around the stables in pink Converse sneakers.

"I don't think cowgirls really live on ranches. They're more in John Wayne movies," Emily said.

That seemed to be the consensus around the corral as a handful of Fountain Valley students groomed and fed their horses before practice.

Emma Laroque, 16, who grew up on a ranch in Alberta, Canada, was scraping mud off the hooves of a hefty white horse named Trigger.

If it weren't for the 1,000 pounds of horse in front of her, she'd look like any other high school kid in sneakers, jeans and a hooded sweat shirt.

No fringe here.

Trigger, she explained, is a such a big scaredy-cat that he's afraid of cows.

Emma was trying to train him to have more courage, but it was proving to be a tough task.

This never happened to Dale Evans.

"It's not all glamour. It's not all rodeo," Emma said as she threw a saddle blanket onto Trigger, causing him to jump.

"You get dirty doing this, and when you're branding, you get bloody. We have longhorns on our ranch and a lot of times they chase you around. You have to earn the cowgirl title."