Authentic Cowgirls of the Wild West

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Not much is often written about the authentic cowgirls of the American West. However, a few authors' works contribute to this interesting topic.

According to one such work, Joyce Gibson Roach's 1990 The Cowgirls, the Civil War transformed the retiring, well-mannered homemaker of the aristocratic South into a hardy pioneer woman who took an active part in her family's “survival” on the frontier.

“The cowgirl was no Guinevere,” Roach observes. “She did not stay at home weaving the events of her life into a tapestry and awaiting the hero's return” (xix). Nor were the displaced women who wandered west all from high society or from the South, for that matter: “Rich or poor, refined or rough, high born and low found that the frontier experience was a great leveller [sic]” (xix).

As in the antebellum South, women on the frontier were often called upon to do work usually reserved for men. In the absence, temporary or permanent, of their husbands, women “had to take charge of a cattle ranch” (xix), and desperate circumstances sometimes produced innovative and unusual solutions. For example, “a crippled husband caused a Montana woman to drive a team for the local stage line, in addition to managing the ranch” (ix).

The demands of ranching, driving a stagecoach, or other duties afforded cowgirls some privileges their sisters back east didn't have; cowgirls were free to “dress as they pleased” (xx), and many likely wore “britches” under their skirts (xx). Some rode horses and learned to use the weapons they carried on their persons for self-defense, including “guns . . . ropes, knives, [and] whips” (xx).

Roach's brief anecdotes about authentic cowgirls of the Old West provide her readers with an idea of these stalwart women, the lives they lived, and the adventures they experienced.

Minta Homsley

During the “early 1870s," Roach writes, while her husband was away from home, Mrs. Minta Homsley received a telegram indicating that a cattle buyer wanted an immediate delivery of their ranch's steers. She saw that the cattle were shipped; as a result, she “got top price." Two days later the bottom dropped out of the market” (8).

Lizzie Johnson Williams

Using a pen name, schoolmarm Lizzie Johnson Williams supplemented her income by writing articles for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (later called Frank Leslie's Magazine), earning enough money to purchase “$2,500 worth of stock in” a cattle company (9).

She started branding her own cattle, expanding her herd by hiring hands to capture the many unbranded cattle that wandered among South Texas “thickets” (9).

Before marrying, at age 36, Lizzie insisted that she and her future spouse, Hezekiah, would each take charge only of his or her own business dealings, and she and her fiance signed an agreement stipulating that Lizzie's personal property would remain hers alone after their marriage, as would “future profits made by her.”

Lizzie also instructed their ranch's foreman to “put the best steers in her herd” and to steal “unbranded calves” from Hezekiah's cattle and “mark them with her brand” (9).

After marrying, Lizzie drove her own herd of cattle up the Chisholm Trail, while Hezekiah drove a second herd along the same trail (9).

When her husband “went broke” through a bad investment, she loaned him $50,000 “to re-establish his business,” but made him "pay back the money” once he was on his feet again.

Despite her scheming ways, Lizzie “was fond of” Hezekiah, and, when he died, she bought a $600 coffin for him, writing on the bill she paid, “I loved this old buzzard this much” (9).