Cowgirl Hall Of Fame Honorees
On Hand To Open New Facility

FORT WORTH — Last Friday marked the grand opening of the 33,000-square foot National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in the heart of Fort Worth’s cultural district. As the newest inductee into the museum, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner cut the ribbon.

The facility is meant to honor and document the lives of women who have distinguished themselves while exemplifying the pioneer spirit of the American West.

The National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center was established in Hereford in 1975 by a group of visionary women with Margaret Formby in the lead. It started out in the basement of the Deaf Smith County Library and later was relocated to a home donated by a local Hereford couple.

The museum collection quickly outgrew its available space and a search was initiated to find an alternative site that promised greater audience exposure. Fort Worth was the natural choice, and in 1994 the move was made and plans were immediately initiated to build a new permanent home to house museum artifacts and memorabilia.

That dream is now reality. Groundbreaking for the new museum took place in February 2001. Today this breathtaking work of art houses more than 2000 artifacts and information about more than 400 remarkable women. The 158 honorees include pioneers, artists, writers, entertainers, humanitarians, businesswomen, educators, ranchers and rodeo cowgirls.

Elaine Agather, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase-Dallas, managing director of Morgan Private Bank Southwest and member of the board of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, was the emcee for the opening ceremony on Friday.

"It’s a good day for cowgirls and the people who love them," Agather told the large crowd gathered in front of the new museum.

"Our dream was to give cowgirls and their stories a permanent home — a place where our daughters and their daughters could learn about the courageous and determined women of the West — the pioneer women, ranch women, rodeo cowgirls and women of arts and history who shape our culture."

In addition to Justice O’Conner, other dignitaries on hand for the ribbon cutting ceremony included Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison; Governor Rick Perry; Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr; Congresswoman Kay Granger; Kit Moncrief, president of the museum; and executive director of the museum, Pat Riley.

Acknowledging the forty-some hall of fame inductees on hand to witness the opening, Perry said, "This is about the ladies who surround us here on the front row. They’re reflective of the women who day in and day out held families together, who did a good part of the work. It’s reflected in their faces, but it’s also reflected in their history and in their hearts and spirit. They have forever impacted this state and the Western heritage. This will forever be a better place; we will forever be a better people because of the cowgirls who came before us."

Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the museum was opened to hall of famers and their families.

The $21 million museum is a sight to behold, both inside and out. The museum’s interior houses three gallery areas, a multipurpose theater, hands-on children’s areas, a flexible exhibit space, a research library, a catering area and a gift store.

On the bottom floor a 45-foot high domed rotunda houses the honoree exhibits. It is here that the new inductees will be showcased each year.

Twelve LIFETILE murals, animated ribbed glass tiles created by artist Rufus Seder, ring the perimeter of the rotunda at ground level.

Upstairs there are three different galleries. Claiming the Spotlight focuses on cowgirls in popular culture, from film, television, advertising, literature and music.

In the Kinship with the Land gallery, visitors survey the vast expanses of the horizon as they experience both the harshness and the beauty of the land and hear first-hand accounts of the trials and tribulations of the women who made their lives there.

Into the Arena tells the story of the great cowgirl champions as they witness the greatest rides in history on three swinging projection screens that rotate much like the gate of a rodeo chute.

Dora Waldrop was just one of the many on hand to witness the occasion. Waldrop was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1979 as a Texas horsewoman. She competed in barrel racing and pole bending, winning her first saddle in 1947. She competed for well over 40 years, up into the late 1980s.

"It was a big honor for me to be inducted," Waldrop said. "I didn’t think much about it my first few years that I was in the museum, but then I got to thinking that those are my kind of people — normal people, they’re the best."

Another inductee at the opening was Barbara Van Cleve, 1995 Western Heritage honoree. Through her photography, Van Cleve has captured western women and the ranching way of life.

Mitzi Lucus Riley, a 1996 cowgirl honoree, and daughter of the famed world champion cowgirl Tad Lucus, was born into the sport of rodeo and traveled and performed with her mother as a daring trick rider in rodeos all over the country.

One hundred year-old Connie Reeves, a Western Heritage Honoree, vowed she wouldn’t miss the event. She saddled up last year at the groundbreaking and she was back just as she said she would be for the grand opening. Reeves’ most quotable quote, "Always saddle your own horse", was made when she was inducted back in 1997. It was a quote used frequently during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Suzanne Norton Jones was there with her husband, lifelong rancher R.C. "Punch" Jones of Tatum, New Mexico. Suzanne was recognized in 1999 as one of the most influential trainers, breeders and judges in the equestrian world. The daughter of an Army Cavalryman, she began showing horses at the age of four.

Georgia Connell Sicking, from Kaycee, Wyoming, commented, "If you have something in your mind that you want to do, don’t believe the word 'can’t'."

Sicking has been cowboying all her life. She grew up on a cow outfit in Arizona. When she was three years old, her dad cracked a riata and told her, "From this day forward when a cow moves, you move with her."

"I started riding when I was two," Sicking says.

She learned to rope in the branding corral when she was nine. The kids roped and their dad worked the ground.

Her first goal, which she said took her 18 years to accomplish, was "to be a good enough hand to hold down a job on a cowboy outfit in spite of being a girl.

"It was a lot of work," Sicking admitted. "I wouldn’t say difficult. You learned to shoe horses, pack mules, ride colts, rope and tie a cow down by yourself to doctor it…there are many things. It takes a lot of doing.

"A lot of people figured that cowboys are rough and so they assumed that the women that worked with them were rough. I had to watch how I walked, how I talked, because I knew if they didn’t respect me as a women they would ignore my ability, so in order to get them to recognize my ability I had to get their respect as a woman."

She knew she’d attained her goal when the man she was working for told her, "Those sons of bucks can go out the same gate they came in." He was referring to the other cowboys in the outfit who didn’t particularly care to work with a woman.

Her second goal was to be a mother.

"I told my husband that I wanted to have a baby. He said, ‘You’re off a horse for three days and you’re so damn cranky that no one can get along with you. Do you think you can be a mother?’ I told him for a baby I can."

She and her husband had made a pact that they would wait to have children until they had a ranch of their own or until she was 25.

"In the meantime, other women were saying to me, ‘When you going to have a baby? Don’t you like babies?

"Then they were so shocked when it did happen after six years because they had predicted that it would happen before I got married."

In 1954 the couple moved off the big ranch in Nevada and leased a farm. They put it on a paying basis, and in that way were eventually able to get a loan to buy a farm of their own.

"It was an old run-down place and people were saying we would be going out of there with nothing but the shirts on our backs. Twenty-one years later I had it free and clear," Sicking said.

Her husband died after 19 years on that place and she sold all the cattle and paid it off and went off to Arizona to gather a bunch of wild cattle.

"People thought I was absolutely out of my mind to go to Arizona and gather wild cattle," Sicking recalled. "It would have been all right had I taken a Caribbean cruise, but to haul horses 500 miles to gather wild cattle…"

She went to gather the cattle as a favor to the man who helped raise her. She hadn’t been back there in 30 years, and when they sent word for her to come, Sicking knew it was serious. The old man had lost his help and wasn’t able to keep up the place. The cattle hadn’t been branded in eight years.

"I told him I’d be back to clean it up," Sicking said. "I only had three weeks to get it done, so when I returned I made some makeshift pens with bull wire, fixed some water gaps and then went to gathering cattle and branding them."

Sicking said she helped load the trucks but never saw them leave the place because she passed out from what she said must have been exhaustion.

The cattle were shipped to Phoenix, and when those big, fresh-branded cattle hit the market some of the curious buyers followed up to see where the cattle had came from. When they found out a woman had done it they were impressed.

She met up with a fellow poet some years later in Elko, Nevada, and Sicking said she was surprised to learn that he knew of her.

The man told her, "You left a wide trail in Arizona that won’t be covered for years." He was referring to the roundup of those wild cattle.

Sicking also shipped two truckloads of those wild cattle back to Nevada. She had a lease up on the Carson River. There was no house.

"All I had was a bedroll — what we call a greasy sack outfit — a Dutch oven and my bedroll. I stayed there that summer, and every day I would ride those cattle and get out in front and stop them and hold them up, and by fall they were essentially tame."

Later on, the government needed the water on her place. Sicking assessed the situation. She could either stay and starve out or sell out. The government was offering a good price, so she opted to sell. She took that money and in 1975 bought a place in California. She was there for four years. When she lost her driver’s license, Sicking came to the conclusion that she could no longer do her cows justice, so she sold them. She found a little place in Wyoming. It was 2.5 acres and close to a post office and a grocery store. It was all she needed, and where she now calls home.

When asked what it is that she loves so much about the cowgirl way of life, she said, "The freedom, the smell of the earth in the early mornings, the smell of wild roses in the canyons, the shape of the rocks, wild animals and seeing what they do, a drink of cold water out of a stream that’s running. There are so many things, things that most women never get a chance to experience. It’s hard to explain what it is, but it’s all those things…the feel of a good horse under you, the first breath of a baby calf when it’s born and seeing that shiver of life. That’s pretty special."

Sicking’s poem entitled Be Yourself probably best describes the life of this self-made cowgirl. The poem is printed in the back of the new commemorative book Saddle Your Own Horse.

When I was young and foolish
the women said to me,
"Take off those spurs and comb
your hair, if a lady you will be.

"Forget about those cowboy ways.
Come and sit awhile.
We will try to clue in on women’s
ways and wiles.

"Take off that Levi’s jumper, put up
those batwing chaps.
Put on a little makeup and we can get a
date for you perhaps.

"Forget about that roping, that will make
callouses on your hands.
And you know it takes soft fingers
if you want to catch a man.

"Do away with that Stetson hat for
it will crush your curls.
And even a homely cowboy wouldn’t
date a straight-haired girl."

Now being young and foolish,
I went my merry way,
And I guess I never wore a dress
until my wedding day.

Now I tell my children,
"No matter what you do,
stand up straight and tall.
Be you and only you.

For if the Lord had meant us all
to be alike and the same rules to keep,
He would have bonded us all together
just like a flock of sheep.