Margaret Owens Montgomery won the first world barrel racing championship the Girls Rodeo Association ever awarded, in 1948, on a horse called Pee Wee. The Texas Rodeo Hall of Fame says it was a horse she shared with a teenager.

The next year the world title went to Amy McGilvray, who was 14 years old. The WPRA’s champion-horse table lists her horse as Pee Wee too.

Nobody has ever printed whether that was one horse or two.

The names are all there, kept carefully since 38 ranch women met at the St. Angelus Hotel in San Angelo, Texas, on Feb. 28, 1948, and started the association that became the WPRA. That first year ran 60 events and paid $29,000 to 74 members. What’s thinner is everything around the names: the horses, the day jobs, the husbands, the side hustles, what these women were actually like.

Ten of them follow. Seven carried a GRA card. Three never could, because they were finished before there was one. They are here because the rodeo they rode in is the reason that meeting in San Angelo happened.

Before San Angelo

1. Tillie Baldwin

Anna Matilda Winger left Arendal, Norway, in 1902 and came to America to do hair. She was good at it, and she kept doing it between rodeo seasons well after she was famous.

In 1911 she entered her first rodeo, at Los Angeles, and won the ladies’ bronc riding riding slick, without the hobbled stirrups judges normally allowed women. The next year at the Pendleton Round-Up she took the trick riding and the all-around cowgirl title. The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame calls her the first woman to win a Roman race and possibly the first to try bulldogging. Her 1924 Roman racing trophy is in Fort Worth, where you can go look at it.

She also brought the uniform. The middy blouse and bloomers she rode in replaced the divided skirt and got copied so thoroughly that her name came off it. The 101 Ranch billed her as a real Oklahoma cowgirl, which she was not and never claimed to be.

Baldwin bought a riding school in New London, Connecticut, in 1927 and taught there. She married a lumber company executive 13 years her junior. She applied to be her township’s first female police officer. She named her place in Old Lyme “Trails End,” kept two horses, and from 1941 until she died she managed the ranch of Fred Stone, the Broadway actor who played the original Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The National Rodeo Hall of Fame took her in 2004.

2. Bonnie McCarroll

There is a photograph almost everyone in this sport has scrolled past: a cowgirl upside down over a bronc’s head, hat gone, both hands empty. Walter Bowman shot it at Pendleton in 1915. It is one of the most reproduced rodeo photographs ever made, and hardly anybody can name the woman in it.

Bonnie McCarroll was born on her grandparents’ cattle ranch near Boise, Idaho, and was riding buckers at 10. She won back-to-back Pendleton saddle bronc titles in 1921 and 1922. In that same 1922 season she took the bronc riding championship at Madison Square Garden, for a $400 purse, and at Cheyenne Frontier Days, which the National Rodeo Hall of Fame says no cowgirl had done before. She won a bronc riding at Yankee Stadium in 1923. At Tex Austin’s international rodeo at Wembley Stadium in 1924 she took the Lord Selfridge Trophy, named for the department store Selfridge, as champion lady saddle-bronc rider.

Among the events she contested were automobile jumps. She jumped a horse over a car.

Bonnie McCarroll, 1897–1929

Her ladies’ bronc saddle survives, built by O.J. Snyder Saddlery around 1925, deep-dish seat and a cantle you could hide behind, and it sits in the American Rodeo Gallery in Oklahoma City. McCarroll was killed on a bronc at Pendleton in 1929. Women did not compete there again for more than seven decades, and when they came back in 2000 it was barrel racing, on the Green Mile.

3. Vaughn Krieg

Krieg grew up on a Colorado ranch, was riding before she turned 5 and helped break horses as a girl. By 18 she was married with two sons, living near Mesa de Maya.

Her sister Gene was a trick rider with a contract to fill in 1926 when her appendix ruptured. Krieg went in her place. She was 22, and she never came back out.

She rode broncs, trick rode and bulldogged, including off the running board of a moving automobile, which the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum says no woman had done before her. In 1934 she won the bronc riding at Madison Square Garden for $615.

After marrying Lynn Huskey in 1933 she bought a ranch near Towson, Oklahoma, and named it the Flying V. She had been producing rodeos under that name since 1937, and in 1942 she incorporated the Flying V All Cow-Girl Rodeo Company and opened it at the Lamar County fairgrounds near Paris, Texas. A woman producing an all-cowgirl rodeo, in wartime, six years before the meeting in San Angelo. No published record shows she ever joined the GRA once it existed. The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame inducted her in 1989.

After San Angelo

4. Margaret Owens Montgomery

The 38 women in the St. Angelus Hotel elected Margaret Owens Montgomery the association’s first president in February 1948. One of them, Betty Barron Dusek, later told the WPRA exactly why they were all in that room: they were tired of being cheated and of there being no rules. Tad Lucas was in the room, and so was Wanda Harper Bush, who went on to win 32 world titles.

Montgomery then won three world titles in the association’s first season: barrel racing, all-around and cutting horse. She is the first GRA member to take three in a year. She is the first name on the WPRA’s roll of world champion barrel racers and the first name on its list of presidents. In 1949 she won the world in team roping, and in 1951 she won the barrel racing again.

That range is the thing to understand about all of these women. She was a Pecos regular, and the Texas Rodeo Hall of Fame has her winning the girls’ calf roping there four straight years and beating the men in the calf roping, aboard a horse called Joe Brown. The same horse carried her to that 1951 world barrel racing title.

Her husband, Vic Montgomery, was a calf roper out of Ozona and a former TCU halfback. A Fort Worth photographer caught the two of them in January 1950 at Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum, resting after his calf roping run. She was killed in a highway collision near Sierra Blanca, Texas, in October 1955, at 33. The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame honored her in 1976.

5. Amy McGilvray

McGilvray won two world championships in 1949, the barrel racing and the all-around, and she was 14 years old.

She was a rancher’s daughter out of Mertzon, Texas, about 40 miles from Ozona. She rode the bay gelding called Pee Wee. She trained and groomed her own horses, and in the same season she was winning world titles she was serving as secretary of her high school class and teaching assistant Sunday school.

And then nothing. There is no obituary, no married name, no county record, nothing in a Texas newspaper archive after 1950. The WPRA’s roll carries her name for 1949 and the trail stops there.

6. Jackie Worthington

Worthington learned on whatever was standing in the pen. The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame puts it as practicing on everything on the place, from the milk-pen cows to the broodmares. Her first exhibition bull ride, in 1940, paid $7.50.

She was 23 when she helped found the association and took the job of bareback riding director, and that same first season she won the world in bareback riding and in bull riding. The WPRA’s champion roll then has her winning the world in cutting horse in 1952, 1953, 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1966. Twenty-three world championships in a 13-year career.

She was a college graduate and an accomplished musician, and she held a pilot’s license she is said to have used to get herself to rodeos.

She was the association’s president from 1954 to 1956, and on Jan. 30, 1955, she and RCA president Bill Linderman signed an agreement: the RCA would urge its committees to hold a GRA-approved barrel race, and would contract with no barrel racing association other than the GRA. That page is why there is a barrel race at a PRCA rodeo. She quit at 32 and went home to the West Fork ranch outside Jacksboro. The Cowgirl Museum honored her in 1975.

7. Jane Mayo

Jane Mayo was born on New Year’s Day 1937 to a ranching family near Okemah, Oklahoma, and started competing at 12. At junior rodeos she entered barrel racing, calf roping, team roping, bronc riding and bulldogging. She graduated from Okemah High School in 1955 and joined the GRA the same year.

She was fourth in the world at 21. Then she won it three years running on a horse called V’s Sandy, by Oklahoma Star, Jr., a son of the foundation sire Oklahoma Star, who carries AQHA registration number P-6 and sits in the AQHA Hall of Fame. Sandy at home. The money went up every year: $5,814 in 1959, $7,833 in 1960, $8,356 in 1961. She won those three titles in three different towns, because the finals kept moving. Clayton, New Mexico. Scottsdale, Arizona. Santa Maria, California.

In 1961, at 24, she and Bob Gray published Championship Barrel Racing. It was the first instructional book the sport had, and it went to at least a second printing in 1967. Every barrel racing clinic in the country traces back through somebody who read it. Okemah declared a Jane Mayo Day on April 23, 1961.

She is 89, lives in Durant, Oklahoma, and has been donating her material to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, which put her in the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 2024.

8. Mildred Farris

Mildred Cotten graduated from Sul Ross with a degree in physical education in 1955, married John Farris in May of that year after meeting him at the Texas Cowboy Reunion Rodeo in Stamford, Texas, and won her first Texas Barrel Racing Association title. Busy 12 months.

She won the first GRA rodeo she ever entered, San Antonio in 1958, and finished that season 10th in the world. Then she qualified for the first 12 National Finals Rodeo barrel races ever contested, 1959 through 1970, consecutively, winning Denver, San Francisco, Pecos and the Snake River Stampede along the way. The WPRA’s table of fastest times at the NFR runs back exactly as far as Mildred Farris and no further: 1968, 16.60. Put that next to what it takes now.

She never won a world title. Second in 1959 behind Jane Mayo by $550. Second in 1960 behind Mayo again by $799. Second in 1969 behind Missy Long by $1,246. Three reserve world championships, all three inside about a thousand dollars, and two of the three to the same woman.

What she did instead was run the sport. She was president of the association from 1965 to 1971 and PRCA Secretary of the Year nine times, and she is credited with replacing the old no-time for a downed barrel with the five-second penalty every one of us competes under. John staked the barrel pattern and ran the timed-event chutes at every NFR from 1967 on, so for years she was running her husband’s stakes. She carried the American flag into the NFR opening ceremonies for 17 years.

Florence Youree, who ran the association the four years before her, called Farris a true person and a true friend, and quiet unless you made her mad. She and John went into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame together in 2006.

9. Ann Lewis

They called her Annie the Okie. Ann Lewis and her twin sister, Jan, were given a half-wild bay gelding when they were 7. His name was Charlie Bay Dan. Everybody called him Dan.

Lewis had already won money by then. Her first open event paid her at Atoka, Oklahoma, when she was 5, before she started kindergarten. She was an IPRA member at 8. She turned pro in March 1968, at 10, and the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame says flatly that she consistently outran more experienced racers.

She won $8,928 that season to Kay Whitaker’s $8,271, and she was the 1968 Rookie of the Year on top of it.

Then they ran a performance at Little Rock and pointed the rig at Waco, where they had slack in the morning. Sissy Thurman rode with them. Thurman was 34, the GRA’s barrel racing director and second in the world standings behind Lewis, and Waco was on her way, so she caught a ride with another rodeo family rather than take her own rig.

At 1:15 a.m. on Oct. 2, on a highway west of Hope, Arkansas, a semi struck two cows, jackknifed and turned over. The Lewis rig ran into the wreckage. Ann Lewis died. Jan died. Their mother, Rose, died. Thurman died. Two barrel horses died. Ann’s father and her brother were not in the truck.

The WPRA keeps the accounting in a footnote under its 1968 standings: Prather and McFarlane replaced Lewis and Thurman at the National Finals. Lewis’s lead held to the end of the season and the Girls Rodeo Association gave her the world championship.

Fifty-eight years later she is still in the WPRA record book twice, as youngest world champion and youngest NFR qualifier, both at 10 years old. The next names on that list are LaTonne Sewalt at 11 in 1950, Jackie Jo Perrin at 13 in 1977 and Charmayne James at 14 in 1984.

And since 1985, the fastest run at every National Finals Rodeo has won an award given in memory of Sissy Thurman.

10. Verna Lee “Boots” Booker Hightower

She got the name Boots as a little girl on her family’s fruit-tree farm in Spring, Texas, for how much she loved horses and being outdoors. It stuck for life.

Hightower worked as a medical assistant at the Lyons Medical Clinic in Houston’s Fifth Ward and was, per the Handbook of Texas, an accomplished pianist. She and her husband, Ted, raised six children and put all of them in the family rodeo business. They moved house to be near the Diamond L, J.L. Sweeney’s arena on South Main, which doubled as a music venue that booked Big Mama Thornton and Lightnin’ Hopkins. She competed in tailor-made clothes and she did not like losing.

She carried cards in the National Colored Rodeo Association and the Girls Rodeo Association, and the Texas State Historical Association credits her as the GRA’s first African American member. In 1969 she became the first African American woman to take part in barrel racing at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and the Hightowers were the first African American family listed among the show’s trainers and owners. TSHA calls her the poster girl for area rodeos.

Six years before Houston she and Ted had sued the Houston school district and won, which is how their six kids got into a school near their own house. She died in Harris County on Aug. 27, 1970, at 40. The National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum honored her in 2007, and the Houston rodeo’s Black Heritage Committee gave her a humanitarian award.