Cowgirls are big in my family mythology. For a good long time we have had the coffee table art book collection of the work of Donna Howell Sickles sitting on our living room table. Her images captivated me. The idea that the cowgirl could be a mythological figure.

At some point we went to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. (I can’t rightly tell you if it was the official, national Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Ft. Worth, or just some hole in the wall collection of cowgirl memorabilia in Colorado or New Mexico. My intuition leans to the latter.) My mother bought a postcard there, and has kept it posted to the side of her filing cabinet in her office ever since. It is a lovely old daguerreotype of a woman in chaps and Stetson covering a bull in 8 seconds. On the back are printed these words, attributed to “anonymous cowgirl”: “If a man thinks that a woman who can dog steers, ride broncs, and rope the wind is too much for him, he’s probably right.”

Damn straight.