Jamie Lisa Forbes is the author of the new novel Sunny Gale. Her other books include the novel Unbroken. Also an attorney, she is based in North Carolina.
Q: What inspired you to write Sunny Gale?
A: My discovery of the rich and obscured history of daredevil women in rodeo at the dawn of the 20th century was the main impetus behind my desire to bring Sunny Gale to life.
At the time these women became professionals, they did not have the right to vote in most places. To conform to conventions, they wore long riding habits made to resemble skirts, which they sewed themselves. The fact that the scope of their achievements was so uncelebrated affected me deeply.
Ten years ago, I began to come across black-and-white photos of women in long skirts riding broncs in rodeo arenas. My first reaction was that this had to be an internet scam. I grew up on a ranch in the heart of rodeo country, Laramie, Wyoming, and I never once saw, nor heard of, a woman riding a bronc at a rodeo.
Had such a thing occurred it would have been considered scandalous. It would not have conformed with the modesty expected from girls in my community. If a girl wanted to be in rodeo, she could be a rodeo queen. Or a barrel racer. But the rough, flamboyant, and highly dangerous events in rodeo were for men. Men flirting with mortality in rodeo was part of our Western myth.
Eventually, I was intrigued enough to search for the source of these photos, and I then learned that they had come from major rodeos across the Western United States and Canada from roughly 1897 to the late 1930s.
Women had performed professionally as bronc riders, trick riders and racers. Women had left rodeo, or had been shut out of it, roughly 20 years before I was born in 1955. The 1940s saw the reintroduction of women in the rodeo arena as rodeo queens, a role far different from the one they had originally carved out for themselves.
I was disturbed that, like much of the real history of the West, this history had been paved over by a popular vision that depicts the Western landscape as a white male-dominated enclave.
Then too, I understood, maybe for the first time, that the gender barriers I had grown up with were illusory. If a woman can perform competitively in one of the world’s most dangerous sports, then there really isn’t anything a woman cannot do.
And the stubborn persistence of the conviction well into the current century that a woman is most fulfilled only when she nurtures children is an empty lie.
After reading short biographies about many of these women, I wanted to breathe life in them and see them as they must have been: passionate about horsemanship, committed to perfecting their abilities, hungry for competition and glorying in the exhilaration that comes from performing at one’s very best.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between history and fiction as you worked on the novel?
A: The issue was a hard one, I admit. In most respects, I looked to ground my fictional choices in some aspect of the history.
For example, I knew from reading early Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo programs that Native American events were segregated from the events for non-native performers.
At the same time, I had seen many photographs from other rodeos indicating that Native Americans were contestants together with non-native performers. Based on those photographs, I believed that including a Native American rider among women bronc riders and trick riders was a fictional decision that I could justify historically.
I saw my heroine, who starts out as a Nebraska pioneer, as feeling unconstrained by the Victorian era civilization east of the Mississippi. She sees life in the West as a new open chapter for women where anything is possible.
My own Nebraska pioneer forebears of the same generation did not feel that way at all. They felt that white civilization should be imposed on their new land and in large part, that view was compelled by their Protestant convictions.
Although my character’s perspective is fictional, I didn’t think it was out of step with the women performers of the period. Many of them didn’t marry. Many of them had more than one marriage. They certainly viewed their riding as a profession, and they had no qualms about dedicating themselves to it over home and family.
Again, I could justify my fictional choice in terms of the history I had learned.
I read a lot of commentary about what ended women’s participation in rodeo.
Some commentators believe the deaths of riders Bonnie McCarroll and Marie Gibson, both of which occurred from accidents while in the arena, brought about a ban of women from rodeo sports. Other commentators point out that the Depression was in full swing by the time those deaths occurred and point to the economic downturn as a precipitating factor.
My conclusion was that Western communities by the 1930s, having become more populous, more interconnected with the East and more entrenched in the notions of women’s traditional roles, would have launched a backlash once a fatality occurred. I could easily imagine that backlash being launched by my own dear outraged relatives.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I started with Heidi Thomas’ nonfiction book, Cowgirl Up: A History of Rodeo Women, which is an excellent summary of the lives of many of the major performers.
Then, I was extremely fortunate to happen on some archival material at the American Heritage Center. It was a collection of Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo programs and newspaper articles from 1897 to 1917. That proved invaluable because it was history as it was being made.
That was where I learned of many of the events that I wrote about, including the women’s relay race, which itself was a dangerous event, and the “hat race,” where over the course of a mile-long race, the rider must lean over and pick up three hats from the ground. I had never heard of that event before and it sounded so insane, I spent some time researching it.
I did read whatever I could find about Mabel Strickland, who, in addition to being a bronc rider, was an extraordinary horsewoman. Again, these biographical facts revealed to me just how committed these women were. And I read every interview I could find of Montana bronc-riding champion, Fanny Sperry Steele, because she lived well into her 90s and gave many excellent interviews.
Two things surprised me. The first was the large number of women who participated in these events over two generations. This was not a niche event at all. A rodeo exhibition that travelled to London in the early 20th century included women bronc riders. Women bronc riders regularly rode at Madison Square Garden.
The second thing that surprised me was how these women injected themselves into the major shows of the time, such as Cheyenne Frontier Days, the Pendleton Roundup, and Madison Square Garden. They had to have convinced men of their ability and their pluck in getting themselves into an arena in front of an audience was extraordinary.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: I hope readers find my story moving. Reaching for ever greater achievement, while the choices we make often undermine our endeavors, is part of our human condition. I hope readers will feel the West as I have known it: a place where we, and our stories, diminish against the landscape’s magnificence.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I hope to write another novel where the heroine is physically disabled. I have found such courage among my disabled acquaintances, and I hope to be able to turn it into convincing fiction.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you so much for your interest in my work.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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