ARCHIVE: Western Photographs and correspondence.
Mother to Daughter:
letters on early 20th century life
And photos of four female rodeo stars
[Western Women] (Brown, Ella W.) Western Photographs and Correspondence. Brown-Bodell Families; Syracuse, New York, ca. 1913-1919.
Two leather-bound photograph albums (one black, one red); each roughly 4” x 7”; hinges fragile; various abrasions and light spotting to covers (red album more deteriorated than black album); heavily rubbed and edgeworn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Every page of the black photograph album is filled; it contains 109 photographs, one blank page lacking a photograph. The red scrapbook contains 95 photographs and 6 postcards, loosely inserted; with 8 blank pages lacking photographs.
Together with:
Brown, Ella. 10 Autograph Letters to her daughter Mabel; rectos and versos; various-sized leaves of paper; in black ink and pencil; ca. September to November, 1919.
This collection of letters and photographs comes from the Brown-Bodell families of Syracuse, New York, in the early part of the 20th century. All of the letters are addressed to Mabel Brown Bodell. Most of the letters are written by her mother, Ella Brown, and are unsigned; one is from a “Mrs. Blackwell,” and another is addressed to “Flora” in Brown’s hand. The scrapbooks seem to have been maintained by Brown Bodell; the letters were originally interleaved in the scrapbooks, which she probably placed there after receiving them.
The scrapbook albums feature candid and portrait photographs of family members and friends of the Brown Bodell families; in many cases, someone has written captions on and beneath each photograph; also included are photographs and postcards from family vacations, from places as widely flung as Winnipeg, Canada, Wyoming, Arizona and Holland.
The most compelling group of photographs appear in the black album. Under the subject heading, “In the Wild & Wooly West/Frontier Days/Cheyenne Wyo.,” there are ten photographs that feature rodeo stars trick riding on their horses; four of these are of women: two of the infamous Lucille Mulhall, and then one each of Miss C. Ginnis and Fay Ward. In a wonderfully composed and dramatic shot, Mulhull ties a steer on the ground, after having first roped it with a lasso; her horse anchors the rope to the steer, and Mulhall is in the foreground, with a booted and spurred foot firmly planted in front of the steer. The other photograph of Mulhall features her roping five horses together at once, with dust kicking up beneath the horse’s hooves. Miss Ginnis is seen trick riding on a galloping horse: she hangs backwards off the side of her horse, with one leg kicked up in the air and her arms flung away from her sides. Fay Ward is photographed on a bucking horse named “K.G. Roan.”
These are remarkable historical documents that show women’s participation in a popular sport before it was regulated upon the formation of the Rodeo Association of America in 1929.
Rodeo cowgirls were among America’s pioneer professional athletes, achieving financial success and international acclaim prior to the Golden Age of sport, and long before female professional athletes were widely accepted by the public. Over 450 women enjoyed professional rodeo careers between 1890 and 1943. These cowgirls were featured at many of the biggest, most lucrative rodeos in the United States and abroad, with the top cowgirls’ earnings equaling and sometimes surpassing those of the foremost cowboys. Furthermore, unlike most female athletes, cowgirls received overwhelmingly favorable and unbiased treatment from the press. (LeCompte, Mary Lou. “Home on the Range: Women in Professional Rodeo: 1929-1947,” Journal of Sport History, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter, 1990), 318)
Unfortunately for these rodeo cowgirls, their participation in the sport was severally curtailed after the accidental death of bronc rider Bonnie McCarroll in 1929, when she was thrown and trampled to death at a riding event that year. Almost immediately after her death, women were prohibited from many competitive events like bronc riding, although cowgirl relay races were still popular. This regulation of the sport would have been especially difficult for women like Mulhall, who regularly defeated men during competitions; “At the 1912 Calgary Stampede [Mulhall] told reporters that the cowboys treated cowgirls like themselves, and liked to see them succeed in public. She also noted that cowboys “…admire a girl who can handle a horse well” (LeCompte, 319).
These cowgirls were “products of the frontier ranching communities of the American West” (320), and had grown up riding horses, working on ranches, and learning rodeo tricks along the way. Even though cowgirl events were popular, publicized and produced successful women riders, after the 1929 accident, all of these factors began to diminish; by 1946, winnings for an average of seven cowgirls were reported, whereas in the period between 1929 and 1942, winnings for an average of 49 women had been reported (LeCompte, 322).
The letters in this collection document an unfortunate period in Brown Bodell family history. Brown’s son Roy had died, and she traveled to Colorado to salvage his estate; give him a decent burial (he was temporarily interred in a pauper’s cemetery); and straighten out his tangled legal troubles. From September to November, Brown writes to her daughter, informing her of her progress and requesting an extra $200 that would ensure Roy a proper burial.
Brown’s letters have an air of urgency, and also a lack of proper punctuation. On September 20, 1919, she writes: “if you send me the 200 I will take Roy from among the paupers. A man just told me Martin said he buried him just as he did the other paupers who were brought in from the mountains with no money or friends, and old Indians and that it was a pine box and cheap as possible. The man who buries the paupers would have buried him decenter (sic) and it would be a disgrace on the [ ] to leave him like that with all he owned.”
Not all of the letters focus on Roy; on October 19, 1919, she begins, “It’s the 20th but I so fell in love with the 4 – 19s (four nineteens) that I wrote it that way, just had to. I think it will bring good luck as I went to 18 Lodge last night fell in love with Mrs. Hicks who lectured and introduced me to everyone, President and all.” In that same letter, she mentions the effect of being away from home for so long: “I was in such a hurry to get any [clothes] from NJ and only more enough for 2 weeks and it has been 3 months. Mrs. [ ] gave me a skirt and two waists so I left a big goose feather pillow of Roy’s and a big vase and some lovely flowers I made to pay for it and her ironing my things.” It is unclear from the last few letters if any resolution was made of Roy’s case.
An small but pungent archive, notable for their form and content as a mother writes to her daughter about day-to-day life in the early 20th-century American West, with well-worn, oft-reviewed photo albums documenting that life, and including rare photographic evidence of women in the rodeo.
While specific birth and death dates are unavailable for Brown, she was married to Leroy Brown, and her daughter Mabel was born in 1880. Mabel married the lawyer Frederick Bodell in 1907. The Brown Bodells lived in Syracuse and had two children, Benjamin and Barbara.
(#8539)
Dealer Description – Palinurus
The Handbook of Texas Online: http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/RR/llr1.html
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