by Judy Alter
Cherokee Rose
Real Women of the American West
Book Three
by
Judy Alter
Award-winning Author
CHEROKEE ROSE
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"Judy Alter melds romance and western genres effectively... an entertaining novel with a memorable heroine and great passion for life."
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For Uncle Bob, who made riders of my children and, sometimes, a better person of me, in grateful memory.
Chapter 1
Men and horses—I've known a lot of both in my time, but the horses never caused me any trouble, only the men. Whether I was roping or riding or both, I could always make a horse go the way I wanted. But men, from cowboys and presidents to husbands and lovers, baffled me—and still do to this day. But I wouldn't have traded a minute of my life as a cowgirl for anything, especially not a life that some would think more "respectable." I've ridden with Wild West shows from Oklahoma to New York to London, and along the way there've been exciting times, a few romances, and a few women I called sister and meant it—not that silly feminist business they talk about today.
Everyone thought President Theodore Roosevelt first called me a cowgirl, but in truth, some snobbish girls in a St. Louis convent had christened me that earlier. Still, when Roosevelt made the name public, it stuck. For a time there, when people heard the word cowgirl, they thought of me. Sometimes folks would say, "You mean like Annie Oakley?" but the question made me furious. Annie was a lot older than me, for one thing—she'd been in Wild West shows since about 1886, before I was born, for goodness' sake! And she wasn't a westerner, she hadn't grown up roping and riding like I had. She was from Ohio, of all places, and she told me once she never rode a horse until two or three years after she joined Buffalo Bill's show.
And Annie, she was flat dull. They used to talk about how she "tripped" onto the stage, smiling and bowing like everybody's little sister. She spent her free time sitting in a tent sewing a fine seam. That's what she was like off the stage and out of the arena—everybody's little sister. She married Frank Butler before she was old enough to know what men were about. I made that early marriage mistake myself, but I didn't stay with it.
The big thing about me and Annie, of course, was that neither one of us was a trick rider. Somehow people got the notion that any woman in a Wild West show was a trick rider. But Annie was a shootist, the best there ever was, and I was a roper, and I'll be bold to say it—the best there ever was. Oh, I rode my share of broncs—wasn't afraid of the wildest horse you could show me, and I had a horse that could do some tricks—but I never had the stomach for the Roman ride, where you stand with each foot on a different horse, or all those fancy tricks that call for you to crawl under the belly of a galloping horse. The best I could do was to stand in the saddle, and by the time I'd learned to do that, it seemed to me every fourth girl I met could do the Roman stand. And then something happened that made me never want to trick ride again, but that's further on in my story.
Early on, some folks thought I was a man, 'cause everyone called me Tommy Jo. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances, all due to my mama, who named me Thomasina after her father, long departed this earth when I was born. My own father, a determined but eternally poor cattleman, shortened it to Tommy and added the Jo because, as he said, "it fits." Fight though Mama would, nothing else ever stuck on me. I was Tommy Jo "Cowgirl" Burns in the show ring and out—until I changed it to Cherokee Rose. And I had a good reason for making that change.
Once some folks set out to prove I was a boy—wanted to undress me, I suspect because I was tall and thin and built like a boy till I was nearly grown. My hair was sandy-blond, like Papa's, and I wore it pulled back till I was eighteen, so that maybe from the front I did look like Papa's son, not his daughter. Papa thundered those folks off in no uncertain terms, let them know that I was a girl—and then added that I could ride better than any of their sons.
The Wild West shows are long gone, and few folks realize the truth of what women did in those shows—riding broncs, roping steers, all the things the men did. Some married cowboys and raised families; some greeted queens and rode for royalty in Europe; a few were hurt bad, like Fox Hastings, whose horse fell over on her, or Florence Randolph, who was carried out for dead several times. But up or down, we were bound together in a world no one understands—and we had more fun, more pure excitement than any movie star today could know or dream about.
There's one more thing—or maybe one more misconception: it's easy, all these years later, to think that all the cowgirls who rode in Wild West shows were cowboys in feminine garb, women who would rather be men. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I guess I'm the living proof. Oh, sure, I was a tomboy, but my mama sent me to a convent where I learned to talk properly, to mind my manners, and then I mixed with some swell folk because of the shows... at my best, I could have drunk tea with the Queen of England and never slurped a sip. But that was a long time ago, a different life it seems, now that I'm growing old back on an Oklahoma ranch, actin' just like the plain folks that I come from.
So this is a story of a special band of women, the times they shared, the men they loved—and the horses they rode.
* * *
Like lots of ranch-bred girls, I was more boy than girl as a youngster, mostly because Papa didn't have a son to teach everything he knew about horses and cattle. Papa was a born cowboy from down in Texas. He'd ridden up the Chisholm Trail behind great herds of cattle with his own father, just after the Civil War, and he'd never known any other life but being a cowboy, never had much schooling beyond a few years in Texas while his father was off fighting for the Confederacy. When my grandpa—whom I never knew—came back from the war, he pulled Papa out of school and put him to work herding cattle. After Grandpa Burns died—thrown off a cantakerous horse—Papa drifted a few years from this ranch to that and finally settled in the Cherokee Strip, only because Mr. Luckett offered him a job. Mr. Luckett lived in Guthrie and didn't have much to do with the ranch, other than to check the books, so Papa got to act like he owned it, and that suited him fine. I suspect sometimes he even passed himself off as a ranch owner, when he was sure it was someone who'd never find out the truth—like a city slicker in St. Louis.
His years in the saddle had made Papa tall, lean, bowlegged, and permanently sun
burned, though his forehead above his hat line was startlingly white. Papa was a man who, as some folks said, "cut a wide swath." Everybody else in the world called him Sandy—yes, it was a corny name and sounded like every third cowboy you met, but it really fit Papa because his hair was a reddish-gold color and even his mustache matched. His face was generally burned the same shade. The whole effect when you looked at him was like looking at a man who was all one color—sand color, with lots of red highlights like our Oklahoma mud.
But Mama always called him James.
We lived on the Luckett spread, some fifteen miles north of Guthrie, which was a city full of red brick buildings, lots of history, and as far as I was concerned, all the things interesting in the world, from Miss Lizzie's boardinghouse—Papa always rushed me by it, though I asked about the music coming from upstairs, and he once turned red when a pretty lady stuck her head out the window and hailed him by name—to the printing company where great presses clacked and rolled. I used to peek in the basement windows to watch them, and then Papa let me read the newspapers they printed.
"'Course," he said, "the St. Louis paper is better."
Papa always took the St. Louis paper and read it like he had a fortune invested in that city. "Man needs to know what's going on in the world," he'd say pompously. I always thought he subscribed to the St. Louis paper, way out there in the Cherokee Strip, because he wanted to impress Mama.
Mama was as dark as Papa was fair and far prettier than I could ever hope to be. She was tall like Papa—I got my height from both of them—and as graceful when she walked as Papa was on a horse. They'd met in St. Louis, where Mama was teaching school and going to afternoon tea dances—she could dance like the angels had taught her—and thoroughly enjoying the life of a young woman in the city.
Papa rode in with some cattle and met Mama in the city park—she always swore that someone introduced them because she never would have spoken to a stranger—and fell right in love with her, or so he said. I suspect he saw her as a challenge. Anyway, when she allowed him to walk her home, he asked her to marry him, and she was indignant.
"I will not follow a cowboy around from pillar to post," Mama told him, in a story that she often repeated. In the telling, she would be seated placidly in a rocking chair in our house in Oklahoma, but her description conveyed the splendor of a fine home in St. Louis where she'd boarded as a teacher. Behind her words though, I heard the angry frustration of a woman who now had little control over where and how she lived.
"You'll have a house and we'll raise babies—and, oh, it will be fine," he told her.
Now Mama never confessed it, but I suspect she had been a little bit lonely in St. Louis. She had no family except an aunt who had raised her with propriety but little love, and she probably didn't see much future for herself beyond teaching and boarding in that fine house for years and years and growing old alone, though Papa always said he had to steal her before all those "city swells" turned her head.
But I think there was more than that. He was handsome, very masculine, determined, and very different from the men she met—and probably she thought him irresistible. Mama left that house in St. Louis with its polished wood floors and velvet drapes, its gas chandeliers and fine oak furniture, and moved to a one-room dugout in the Indian Territory where the floor and walls were dirt, the nearest neighbors were six miles away by horseback, and Papa sometimes left her alone for long spells of time.
"We lived in that dugout two years," Mama would tell me, smoothing back a strand of gray-black hair that had escaped its pinning at the back of her neck, "and I hated every minute of it. I got so mad at your father that I barely spoke to him, but he never seemed to notice. He was hell-bent on raising cattle and horses, and that was all he thought about."
And whether she talked to him or not, the babies came along—two little boys were born before me, but neither lived over a few hours. There were two tiny graves on a hillside not far from the dugout. Mama never spoke of them—and she sure never hinted that they might have lived had she not borne them in a dugout far from anybody—but those graves must have silently accused Papa each time he looked in that direction. And I suspect he gave up on having sons—I always thought that was why he was so ready to give up his dream of being a big rancher himself and go to work for Mr. Luckett.
Papa was gone a lot—"ranch business," he would tell me—for days at a time, just long enough for Mama and me to settle into a routine and for her to think she could civilize me, and then Papa would come home, and I'd be out on the range again.
Mama and Papa loved each other—I never doubted that—but I never understood how they could love each other and yet be so angry so much of the time. She should have loved a banker in St. Louis, not a rancher in Oklahoma, and he should have had a wife who could ride and rope, the kind of woman he was training me to be. I used to think God had gotten his signals crossed when he let those two fall in love. I had no idea then how often those signals get crossed.
* * *
My first memory is of horses, of being held in the saddle in front of Papa while he rode across the prairie. The land was rolling prairie—not as flat as Kansas to the north nor as barren as eastern Colorado beyond us. Bluestem grass was horse-high in some places, and there were streams aplenty for horses and cattle to water. Sometimes the banks of a stream, hidden in a shallow valley, would be tangled with wild plum thickets and shadowed by tall pecan trees. Wild turkey and prairie chickens flew up when you rode through, and deer were plentiful. "No wonder the Indians wanted to keep this land," Papa said more than once. "But God made it for horses and cattle and ranchers."
So much for the Indians' right to the land.
When he spurred his horse to a gallop or turned it quickly to rope a balky steer, Papa would say, "Hang on to the horn, Tommy Jo!"
And my hands would grab tight to the horn while the world tilted crazily as the horse wheeled and turned, the wind flew at me, and the earth rushed by as we galloped. Papa, his hands busy with a rope and his attention on his cattle, never held on to me.
"She'll fall and be killed by the horses' hooves, James," Mama would say with a frantic tone edging into her voice, as Papa recounted our latest adventure. He and I would still be sitting ahorseback, and Mama, her long skirts blowing around her, would shade her eyes with her hand and stare up at Papa, anger in her clear blue eyes. Mama had ridden with Papa a time or two—at his insistence—but she was much more comfortable on the ground. She'd never in all her life understand the way Papa and I felt about sitting ahorseback.
Papa, mounted, towered over her, and maybe that was why he stayed mounted. On a horse, Papa was impressive, even commanding—and Mama knew it.
"Tommy Jo will learn the feel of a horse, Jess," he'd say when Mama met him in the corral, and I, young and not knowing any better, would echo, "I'll learn about horses, Mama. I'm safe, I really am."
Mama would turn away in defeat, and I was too young to understand her fears and her resentment of Papa. Her name was Jessica, but he always shortened it to Jess, just like he called me Tommy. Mama didn't look like a Jess to me—she was far too ladylike.
By six or seven, I was riding a big horse alongside Papa when he worked his cattle. He had given me a bay horse named Sam. Riding a horse instead of a pony meant that I could keep up with Papa, and to me riding Sam was the most wonderful thing in the world. Sitting on the back of that big horse, I was queen of all I surveyed.
Sometimes in the mornings, Sam was hard to ride. He'd pitch and toss, as though daring me to stay on his back, but stay I did. The few times he threw me off, I got right back on. Papa had taught me well that whenever you were thrown, you got right back on. Sam was never the boss—I was.
But then, that's what I say about horses—they never gave me any real trouble, and I could always get them to do what I wanted.
"Pretty soon we'll be letting you break the green horses," Papa laughed one morning, after he watched me disagree with Sam and win the disagreement.<
br />
"Could I, Papa?"
"No."
But he had planted the idea, and riding rough horses became a goal tucked in the back of my mind. Sometimes I goaded Sam into his pitch-and-buck performances just so I could ride out the storm on his back. By the time I was ten or twelve, I was sneaking rides on the green horses without Papa knowing. One time it got me in real trouble.
"Bet you can't ride that gray," teased Casey, one of the cowboys who worked for Papa on the Luckett spread. The gray—a strong horse, just a shade taller than the others, with a fine head and strong neck—was really midnight black with a dusting of light gray, as though river dust had drifted down over him. The animal reared back and lashed out with his hooves when Casey and his helper, Wilks, tried to blindfold him and put a hackamore on. They cursed and yelled and held tight to the rope, and eventually the horse was snubbed to a post in the middle of the corral.
"Bet I can," I answered.
"Just teasin', Miss Tommy Jo, just teasin'. Your pa'd skin me alive if I let you on this horse."
"He'll never know till it's over—and then he'll have to give me the horse."
"You've got Sam," muttered Wilks, who rode a horse clearly inferior to Sam.
"Just hold him," I ordered in a commanding tone of voice. I'd learned early that if I gave commands instead of asking favors, I usually got what I wanted—later I'd get into disastrous trouble with that philosophy, but this time it worked.
I looked at the horse again—there was probably just a little mustang in him, but he wasn't too far from pure quarter horse, with powerful hind quarters and a strongly muscled chest. But it was that dusted black coat that set him apart from any other horse I'd ever seen. "Devildust!" I breathed.
"What kind of nonsense are you talking now?" Casey demanded.
"Devildust," I said. "That's his name."
"You don't go namin' some range horse that'll go to the show ring," he said.