On the way home from the Will Rogers Medallion Award festivities with a couple of medallions for short nonfiction stories about women of the Wild West. It was a great time spent with extraordinary writers. Book signings, school presentations, the introduction of the WRMA scholarship for junior high and high school students, and of course the award ceremony itself. The 2026 event will feature more opportunities for authors, poets, screenwriters, and songwriters to showcase their work.

America’s earliest movie creators learned quickly that audiences expected to see more than just a few pretty faces on flickering screens. Moviegoers wanted action, danger, heart-stopping shootouts, and startling displays of horseback heroics.

Chris Enss’s lively new nonfiction work, Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women, delivers eye-opening looks inside the risky careers of more than two dozen female horse riders who became stunt performers in the early decades of the 20^th century.

Filmmakers could not jeopardize the looks, careers, and lives of their high-paid stars by making them actually fall off horses or roll down dusty hills. But stunt doubles could take those risks—and more—at very low cost to a movie’s budget.

Some of the intrepid young women who became stunt doubles for well-paid movie stars were self-taught. Others had learned trick riding skills while working in open-air vaudeville shows such as “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” and Oklahoma’s “101 Ranch Wild West Show.”

In either case, “Hollywood couldn’t have gotten along without them,” Enss contends.  “Many cast as stuntwomen were fated to spend a considerable amount of their motion picture career accumulating a large variety of cuts and bruises. Even when they were granted a small speaking part, there was always a fall, a dive, or a wagon collision to go with it. Talented stuntwomen took backward, forward, head-first, and feet-first falls into water, ditches, and nets, over chairs and tables, from the tops of pianos, out of high windows, through trapdoors, and down haylofts. Some rode wild horses; worked with bears, goats, pigs, and cows; and chased donkeys and steers. They doubled for such luminaries as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur.”

It was a risky arrangement to be a stuntwoman. To get paid, a stuntwoman had to create a stunt, negotiate a price for it, rehearse it, and successfully pull it off on camera. If you got hurt and could no longer work, you were just out of luck.

The stuntwomen profiled in Daughters of Daring include five who rode in the Wild West shows, six who did stunts in the silent-movie days, and six who were standouts in “the talkies,” the movies made after the introduction of sound revitalized the motion picture business.

Helen Gibson, Texas Guinan, and Ruth Roland are three examples of Enss’s focused profiles. Gibson, who grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, is “recognized by film historians as the first professional American stuntwoman,” Enss notes. Guinan, a Waco native, preferred to have speaking parts in movies and but often did her own stunts; and Ruth Roland, a San Franciscan who became known as “the queen of the early movie serials.”

In 1921, Guinan formed her own film company and produced and starred in numerous Western shorts. “I had twelve real cowboys, a scenario writer, a cameraman, a carload of cartridges, my horse ‘Waco’ from Texas, and went to work. We made a picture a week,” she remembered years later. “We never changed plots, only horses.”

Regarding Roland, Enss writes: “Whether in chaps or an elegant gown, Ruth was always just a hair’s breadth away from the most appalling situations in her pictures. Her director, with an astute comprehension of how to build suspense, would leave her tied to a railroad track with the express thundering around the bend or leaping on horseback from the edge of a cliff to escape a fate worse than death.”

Daughters of Daring is fun, informative reading. It offers significant insights into how experienced stuntwomen helped shape and boost the motion picture business in the Southwest and kept audiences coming back for more.

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Sacagawea was the young Shoshone Indian woman who served as Lewis and Clark’s translator on their 1803 expedition to explore the uncharted western regions of America.  She made the entire journey to the Pacific, and the return trip, with a newborn baby on her back; many believe without her aid, the journey, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, would have ended in failure.  Some accounts say she died in 1812 at age twenty-five of putrid fever, while others believe she died in 1884 on an Indian Reservation in Wyoming.

The child she carried in a papoose was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, nicknamed Pompy, meaning first-born, who eventually attended St. Louis Academy with tuition paid by Clark.  Pompy later met Prince Wilhelm of Germany while on a natural history expedition and traveled back to Europe with him, where Pompy learned to speak four different languages.  But by the time he was twenty-four Pompy was back in North America, living as a mountain man.  When the Gold Rush of 1849 started, he got caught up in the fever and died from too much time wading through cold rivers panning for gold.  His cause of death was bronchitis at age sixty-one, and his portrait is the only one of a child on any U. S. coin.

To learn more about the deaths and burials of some of the West’s most legendary figures read

Tales Behind the Tombstones

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Tales Behind the Tombstones:

The Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s

Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen

On the afternoon of August 18, 1895, United States Marshal Bill Tilghman and Deputy Marshal Steve Burke led their horses toward a small farm outside of Pawnee, Oklahoma. The lawmen had tracked a pair of outlaws to the location and were proceeding cautiously when several gunshots were fired.

Marshall Tilghman caught sight of a Winchester rifle sticking out a broken window of a dilapidated cabin. He spurred his horse out of the line of fire just as the weapon went off. He drove his mount around the building and arrived at the back door at the same time sixteen-year-old Jennie Stevens, alias Little Britches, burst out of the house. She shot at him with a pistol while racing to a horse waiting nearby.

By the time Marshal Tilghman settled his ride and drew his weapon Jennie was on her horse. She turned the horse away from the cabin, kicked it hard in the ribs, and the animal took off. Tilghman leveled his firearm at the woman and shot. Jennie’s horse stumbled and fell and she was tossed from the animal’s back, losing her gun in the process.

The marshal hopped off his own ride and hurried over to the stunned and annoyed runaway. Jennie picked herself up quickly and cursed her misfortune. She charged the lawman, dug her fingernails into his neck, and slapped him several times before he could subdue her. He was a battered man when he finally pinned her arms behind her back.

Back at the cabin, Deputy Marshal Steve Burke wrestled a gun away from thirteen-year-old Annie McDoulet, alias Cattle Annie, a rail-thin, young woman wearing a gingham dress and a black, wide-brimmed straw hat. The pistol she tried to shoot him with was lying in the dirt several feet in front of her.

Two years prior to their apprehension and arrest, Cattle Annie and Little Britches were riding with the Doolin gang, a notorious band of outlaws who robbed trains and banks. Enamored by the fame of the well-known criminals the teenage girls decided to leave home and follow the bandits. They helped the criminal steal cattle, horses, guns, and ammunition and warned them whenever law enforcement was on their trail.

Legend tells that Bill Doolin, leader of the Doolin gang, gave Cattle Annie and Little Britches their nicknames. Cattle Annie was born Anna Emmaline McDoulet in Kansas in 1882. Jennie Stevenson was born in 1879 in Oklahoma. Both girls had run afoul of the law before joining the Doolin gang. Each sold whisky to Osage Indians. According to the September 3, 1895, edition of the Ada, Oklahoma newspaper the Evening Times, Jennie seemed to have “plied her vocation for a long time successfully, going in the guise of a boy tramp hunting work.”  In between selling liquor to Indians and life with the Doolins, Jennie had marred a deaf mute named MidKiff and Annie rustled livestock.

News of Cattle Annie and Little Britches’ arrest was reported in the August 21, 1895, edition of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa newspaper the Evening Gazette. “A deputy marshal and a posse arrested two notorious female outlaws but had to fight to make the arrest,” the article read. “The marshal’s posse ran into them and they showed fight. Several shots were fired before they gave up. One was in men’s clothing.”

The teenage outlaws were held in the jail in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory until a trial was held. They were found guilty of horse stealing and sentenced to ten years imprisonment at the Farmington Reform School in Massachusetts. Cattle Annie and Little Britches were model prisoners and only served three years of their sentence.

Annie returned to the Oklahoma Territory where she met and married Earl Frost in March 1901. The couple divorced after eight years. In 1912 Annie married a house painter and general contractor named Whitmore R. Roach. They had two sons and lived a respectable life in Oklahoma City. Annie McDoulet Frost Roach died from natural causes on November 7, 1978, at the age of ninety-five. Her obituary ran in the November 8, 1978, edition of the Oklahoma City newspaper The Oklahoman. The article noted that “she was a retired bookkeeper and member of the American Legion Auxiliary and the Olivet Baptist Church. She had five grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren. She was laid to rest at Rose Hill Burial Park in Oklahoma City.

Little Britches returned to Oklahoma as well as Annie. She married, raised a family, and lived a life of quiet solitude in Tulsa. How long she lived and where she passed away is unknown.

To learn more about how famous Western legends died read

Tales Behind the Tombstones:

The Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s

Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.