From The Convent To The Rawhide

Not much attention has ever been paid to the American cowgirl. We always have thought of the lonesome cowboy strumming his guitar at sunset with only his horse for company.  But history shows that women of the West helped tame it; Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats, Belle Starr, Annie Oakley, Lottie Deno, "the Gambling Queen of Hearts," the Dalton women (in particular), Eugenia Moore, Julia Johnson, and the Rose of Cimarron, to name a few.

The early cowgirl was perhaps our first professional woman athlete. From 1900 to 1929, during the early years of rodeo, women were allowed to perform the same events as men; they rode bulls and broncs, and wrestled steers. It wasn’t until 1930 that the women mostly stopped competing in these dangerous events, after Bonnie McCarrol’s death in 1929 from being thrown from a bucking horse. They competed in relay race competitions and exhibitions at rodeos, later racing around barrels, the popular modern-day women’s rodeo sport. The first lady to be called a cowgirl is a woman by the name of Lucille Mulhall. It was Will Rogers who first called a cowgirl a cowgirl. Changing times and changing economics are doing away with Western traditions. The cowgirl is vanishing from the land where corporate mergers are taking the land; however, two cowgirls in Clovis, New Mexico are alive and well; Sadie and Vi owe their existence to scarce water. It is ironic but true, that people always settle where there is the sweetest water, and the farmer and rancher get pushed aside into marginal areas. So the best land always gets covered by concrete and asphalt. Waterless lands virtually prove inhabitable unless one puts up a windmill when they spot a water source, perhaps where a patch of green clover sprouts out in the middle of arid nowhere, or another sign is where the cow-hoof tracks are filled with little oblong pools from a new spring.

Vi doesn’t complain about the job that of a windmill monkey. The open gears of the mills need greased twice a week. She climbs the wooden tower with a grease gun in her holster. Atop the twenty-foot platform at the top, soaring above it is a restored wooden wheel, twenty-two-and-a-half feet in diameter.

"Come on up and give me a hand," Vi says.

Where one goes, the other one follows. Windmill-pumped water from underground fills the stock tank. Each revolution of the wheel produces one up-and-down stroke of the pump rod. It takes considerable wind to make the wheel turn. Their particular model is the Eclipse. It is said that the Plains Indians removed the crescent-moon shaped weights, claiming the moon lost water, a result of the blades being turned down, meaning rain would not fall. Their shiny belt buckles hang from the tower, dangling in the wind. I want you, cowgirl, Vi says, pivoting the large vane to control the speed. Like a chugging steam-powered locomotive, Vi has an insatiable thirst and the windmill is the only device in sight that can slake it. Staying true to the original railroad model windmill, which the railroads bought in the 1800s to pump large quantities of water for their steam engines, Vi employs it in the most feminist way where she has her own ways of lubrication. Whir, creak, thunk, splash not the sounds we ordinarily associate with orgasm, but those noises are music to their ears these sounds sucking forth life-giving water from beneath arid plains.

All the early railroads had the Eclipse windmills spaced up and down the tracks, about thirty miles apart. Then, the Eclipse name was as well-known as Stetson or Winchester.

The windmills began disappearing with the advent or rural electricity, public water suppliers, and diesel-engine locomotives.

It is comforting to know the windmill is alive and well here on these acres. As a symbol of the American frontier, the windmill reminds us that the simpler way of life is not completely gone, where old ways should be kept alive not because they are old, but because they work, and where slow and steady still wins out over fast and electronic. It’s when these values die, that we will be gone too -  gone with the wind.