The July heat is absolute, a heavy static weight that holds the smell of hay and stale Coors close to the dirt. Inside the GMC Stadium, upwards of 17,000 people shuffle to sticky plastic seats that have baked in the sun for hours. Condensation runs down the can of a Stampede-branded beer and country music mixes with excited chatter. Fireworks sound, faces briefly look up from phones and the crowd settles in, waiting for whatever version of the West they have paid to see.
The performance is an ode to a bygone era. Every July, people from all over come to see the West as the men imagined it — a chronicle of bravado and salesmanship. Dressed to the nines in showy belt buckles and boots that have never seen a farm, they eagerly take in deep breaths of fried food, manure and sweat. Looking at the arena’s dirt, one can see an architecture built, not just by the men who claim glory but also by the women who ran away from the expectations of the drawing rooms to reinvent themselves in the dust. Women whose names were systematically filed away under the grander headings of their husbands’ ambitions.
The women in dirt
The crowds wait for the version of the West that began in 1912 with Guy Weadick, an American trick roper who sold a frontier dream to the city of Calgary. The architecture of that dream was never entirely his. As documented in the online article from the Culture and Entertainment District website “Flores LaDue: The First Lady of the Calgary Stampede,” the real grit belonged to his wife and partner. LaDue did not merely occupy space as a homemaker, a lady in fancy dresses bringing sandwiches to her beau. She carved out a name for herself, winning the Champion Lady Fancy Roper four times across North America. Her history is laced with fearless trailblazing as the early Stampede was formed.
To understand the woman in the dirt, one must look past the glare of the arena lights to a time when she was still completely anonymous. Born Grace Maud Bensell in the early 1880s, she was the only daughter of a Minnesota lawyer and judge. However, the archives of Ember Archaeology’s “Flores LaDue, First Lady of the Calgary Stampede” reveal a girl who refused to let her life be written for her. Following her mother’s passing, she was sent to live with her grandparents on a Sioux reservation — and it was there that she fell in love with the sharp, unforgiving mechanics of roping and riding. When the 15-year-old returned to her father, she proved entirely too headstrong for high society. Choosing friction over conformity, she walked away from her family, her obligations and even her birth name to become “Flores LaDue,” a trick roper with a travelling Wild West show.
It was during one of these tours that she met Guy Weadick, forging a partnership that would last decades. Although history tends to gloss over LaDue’s involvement in founding and managing the early Stampede, the paper trail tells a different story.
In a letter preserved in the archives, Weadick himself emphasizes that the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” was never a solo venture; from its very inception, it was a shared vision and a joint dream.
Jessica Smallman, a Collections Specialist at the Calgary Stampede, notes just how vital LaDue was to the sport. She was a premier performer who used her leverage to carve out a distinct space for women in early rodeo events, setting a high standard of fancy trick roping and riding that inspired other performers to follow suit.
The Death of Equality
From the birth of rodeo, women played an integral role in shaping this dusty, male-dominated landscape. Bertha Blancett arrived in Calgary in 1912, ready to throw caution to the wind and compete in every event available to her. Born Bertha Kaepernick, she had already made history in 1904 by becoming the first woman to ride a bucking horse at Cheyenne Frontier Days, an achievement documented by Chris Enss in Along Came a Cowgirl: Daring and Iconic Women of the Rodeo and Wild West Shows.
Blancett walked away with $1,150 in total prize money for her fierce performances across the Cowgirls’ Relay Race, Cowgirls’ Bucking Horse Riding, Cowgirls’ Fancy Roping and Cowgirls’ Trick and Fancy Roping.
Women competed as equals to men on the dusty playing field, even in the most hazardous disciplines. While the rest of the world largely relegated women to domestic life, the rodeo provided a rare arena where skill mattered more than gender. Champion saddle bronc rider and steer roper, Mabel Strickland proved exactly that; setting records against cowboys and cowgirls alike. As The Globe and Mail reported in “The women changing the face of Canadian rodeo,” Strickland came a “breath away” from breaking the world roping record in 1922. Standing at just over five feet tall, she challenged male records, making her a powerful role model for young girls and capturing a fleeting era before gender-integrated competitions began to close.
The end of that era arrived abruptly in the early autumn of 1929 at the Pendleton Round-Up in northeastern Oregon. There, a famed and fearless cowgirl named Bonnie McCarroll was thrown from her bronc, sustaining catastrophic injuries. As preserved in the archives of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, McCarroll succumbed to her injuries eleven days later.
McCarroll was far from the first person to die in pursuit of the rodeo’s dangerous thrills. Historical records compiled by HistoryNet reveal that days before the inaugural Calgary Stampede, cowboy Joe LaMar had been stomped to death by Red Wing, an animal branded the meanest bronc in the sport.
Death had always been an accepted hazard in the world of rodeo — it lurked in the pens and slithered through the dirt. Yet, while the mortal risk had never stopped men or women from riding before, McCarroll’s death became a turning point. The Rodeo Association of America, formed early that same year, abruptly declared the sport too dangerous for women and instituted a sweeping ban on their participation. The rest of the rodeo circuit quickly followed suit. What had once been an open landscape for rolling in the dirt and capturing steers, entirely gender-independent, was systematically transformed into a holding pen.
Relegated to Royalty
Pushed to the sidelines under the loud message of misogyny, they were granted a new right to appear under the focus of glamour and aesthetics thanks to corporate promoters such as the singing cowboy Gene Autry. Women such as Strickland and Kaepernick, who had once out-rode the men, became symbols to be looked at and fawned over rather than respected.
As the 1930s rolled around, a new role for women in rodeo had been cemented: rodeo royalty. Rather than ride bucking horses and tie down calves, they were dressed in their finest western wear and plopped onto the backs of horses, crowns on their heads, to smile and wave to an adoring audience. Some were not even offered royalty status but were instead handed a flag to ride around the show pen at the start of the events.
In 1946, the Calgary Stampede named their first rodeo queen, Patricia “Patsy” Henderson Rodgers. In an interview with the CBC, 2004 rodeo queen Amy Smith shares, “She [Patsy] was the epitome of what you would think was a Stampede Queen. She had so much grace and poise and was a very kind human and always smiling.”
Unwilling to play the royalty game, many cowgirls had shunned a life of grace and poise in mainstream society, preferring their life of freedom and wildness on the ranch. But many cowgirls began to show their grit, proving they weren’t going anywhere — especially as the Second World War began and women once again became leaders of rodeos and ranches. Despite serving as the backbone of the West during the war, cowgirls saw their efforts minimized and dismissed as they were placed back on the podium with crowns and sashes.
In 1948, a group of 38 female ropers, bronc riders and barrel racers came together in San Angelo, Texas, where they created the Girls Rodeo Association, as documented in the American Cowboy website. The association approved 60 contests and a total payout of $29,000 that year. It was proof that the women knew they belonged in rodeo even if the rest of society thought otherwise.
Reclaiming the Arena
Barrel racing was the gateway event, regulated as being women-friendly. Barrel racing didn’t clash with the male-dominated roping and riding disciplines; it still maintained a graceful aesthetic that allowed male rodeo producers to accept it. As reported in the Breakaway Roping Journal, barrel racing officially debuted at the National Finals Rodeo in 1967, establishing it as the sole premier women’s sport in mainstream rodeo for over 50 years.
Women continued to demand a seat on the horse and won equal pay for rodeo competitions in 1998 before eventually banding together to get another event for women instated: breakaway roping, in 2019. While many circuits implemented this new event quickly, the Calgary Stampede did not integrate it until 2025, five years after the National Finals Breakaway Roping was established, which gave women a second major event alongside the men’s finals.
Now, in the heat of July, children with faces painted and too-big cowboy hats sliding over their eyes stand on their tiptoes to get a closer look at the ladies running barrels in the arena. Whistles and cheers go out as cowgirls such as Hayle Gibson Stillwell and Carlee Otero claim the top spots, making tight turns barely grazing the barrels. Cheyanne McCartney ropes a small calf in 3.1 seconds, and Shelby Boisjoli-Meged wrangles hers in 2.5 seconds.
Young girls in dusty boots look at the ladies in the pen, eyes sparkling in admiration.
They may be unaware of the century-long fight that went into securing these events, but because of it, the dirt beneath those boots finally belongs to them, too.
