McCarroll

Bruce McCarroll Collection of the Bonnie & Frank McCarroll Rodeo Archives, circa 1900-circa 1940
887 photographic postcards; 38 photographic prints, 11 panoramic photographs, 2 postcards, 1 box of 15 miniature photographs, 2 publications, 1 letter, and 1 scrapbook
2 cubic feet (3 postcard boxes, 2 document boxes)
Location: 0523-0524; 0526
Accession #: RC2006.076

Introduction

The married rodeo partners, Frank and Bonnie McCarroll, were an extremely popular and successful pair during the 1910s and 1920s. Frank was known for his bulldogging abilities and Bonnie for her trick riding, steer riding, and saddle bronc riding prowess.

Bonnie’s death due to injuries sustained in a bronc riding wreck in 1929 at the Pendleton Round-Up was a significant event, a turning point for women in the rodeo. It marked the beginning of the end for cowgirl participation in rodeo. The women’s bronc riding was scratched from Pendleton and by 1941 the event was banned from all major competitions including Madison Square Garden.

Biography

Frank Leo McCarroll was born on September 5, 1892 in Morris, Minnesota on a 1250 acre farm. At the age of 13 he struck out on his own drifting to North Dakota and Montana. He eventually drifted into Idaho where he took up wrestling and boxing. He took a business course in Butte, Montana where he continued to wrestle and box. In 1911, while in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he wrestled his first steer winning a dollar bet. Having taken up the sport in earnest in 1912, McCarroll broke the world’s record for bulldogging at Boise, Idaho in 1913. It was here that he met Mary Ellen “Dot” Treadwell, better known as Bonnie.

McCarroll won championships in steer wrestling at Pendleton twice, Chicago three times, Cheyenne once, Detroit once, St. Louis once, Fort Worth twice, and three times in New York at Madison Square Garden. Following Bonnie’s death, Frank became involved in the film industry in 1934 McCarroll as a stuntman in The Man from Hell and as an un-credited actor in Romance Revier. Ironically, on March 8, 1954 he died from an accidental fall in his home in Burbank, California.

Born in High Valley near Boise, Idaho in 1897, Mary Ellen Treadwell grew up on her grandfather’s 2,000-acre cattle ranch. She rode her first horse at age 10 and, she wrote, “By the time I was fourteen, I could sit most ‘broke-in’ horses.” At about this time as well, she rode her first bronc. She describes the event, “I mounted, the boys let go, and the broncho began to behave like a wild cat. I held for about five seconds and then all at once I seemed to grow wings. Up I soared, and turned a sumersault [sic], and the earth seemed about ten miles below. Then I went to sleep and woke in bed.”

Following the rodeo events at the Idaho State Fair in Boise in 1913, Bonnie persuaded Eddie McCarty to let her ride his bronc “Bear Cat.” After surviving the wreck, she said, “I was badly bruised and shaken up, but then and there I made up my mind that I would never quit until I became a champion.” It was here also that she met her future husband Frank along with Hoot and Helen Gibson and Art Acord. At eighteen, she married Frank in 1915. While she won first place at her first big show at the Pendleton Round-up in 1915, Bonnie participated that same year in her first professional contest at Vancouver, British Columbia where she rode six horses and won second place. Together she and Frank began traveling steadily the rodeo circuit in 1917.

The blue-eyed, dark-haired cowgirl was a crowd pleaser. Often referred to as “about as big as a minute,” Bonnie was a tenacious competitor while weighing between 95 and 112 pounds. She wrote once, “I don’t have to diet or attend reducing salons or do rolling exercises to keep slim, nor starve to death to wear those boyish-cut things the fashion kings are handing out now. If there is anything a cowgirl can keep, it is the slim silhouette.” When asked if a cowgirl’s life was any different than that of other women, Bonnie replied, “Not at all, I like my home. I like pretty clothes. I like to sew and do all sorts of feminine things. I live in Boise, Idaho, at home with my mother and my husband during the winter. I don’t ride much then, but I do swim and engage in all sorts of athletics to keep myself in trim for the roundup season.” Husband Frank called her “the best little cook in the world and some dressmaker, too.”

In 1922 Bonnie won the bronc riding championships at Cheyenne Frontier Days and Madison Square Garden. In fact she was the first Madison Square Garden cowgirl bronc riding champion. She won again in 1923 at Yankee Stadium and Detroit, Michigan. At the Detroit venue, in what would presage a life-ending event, Bonnie got caught in a stirrup during the bronc riding and was being dragged. Fortunately, clear thinking prevailed and she grabbed the bronc’s tail and pulled herself high enough to keep from being kicked to death.

During June 14-28, 1924 Bonnie won the bronc riding at the First International Rodeo at Empire Stadium in Wembley, England, where she procured the World Champion Cup called the Lord Selfridge Trophy. She won the bronc riding in Chicago in 1926. On July 5, 1927 Bonnie performed before President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge at Belle Fourche, South Dakota.

According to one account, when Bonnie was ready to mount a bronc, Frank would pick her up, “small-boy fashion,” and place her in the saddle. One writer declared that Bonnie had the “distinction of being the only lady rider who rides the wild ones without hobbling her stirrups.”In other words, Bonnie rode slick. When asked why she rode slick, she replied, “We cowgirls have butted in on a so-called strictly man’s game–and if to ‘play’ on the hurricane deck on a sun-fishin’, whirlly-giggin’, rearin’-up, fallin’-over-backward, squallin’, bitin’, strikin’, buckin’, roman-nosed cayuse ain’t a heman’s game, there never will be one–still, as I say, we cowgirls that like the game well enough to play it should play it just like the cowboys do. Why, I’d feel insulted…if I was told to tie my stirrups down!”

On September 19, 1929 at the Pendleton Roundup Bonnie McCarroll participated in her final rodeo. Ironically, she and Frank had planned to retire to their Boise, Idaho home following this rodeo. With her stirrups hobbled (a requirement of the Pendleton Roundup Committee) Bonnie mounted Black Cat. Shortly after his blindfold was removed, the bronc fell and, while attempting to recover, went into a complete forward somersault. Eyewitness to the event, Reba Perry Blakely described the horrific action, “Once all the way over Black Cat did the instinctive thing, he leaped to his feet and continued his bucking while Bonnie McCarroll, so obviously knocked out in that fall, hung head down, her body limp and one left foot still caught in the stirrup. For six more horrible leaps and bucks Black Cat’s weight literally shook the ground and at each leap Bonnie’s head banged on the earth with sickening repetition, until mercifully that boot came off and she lay limp upon the ground.” Suffering severe spinal injury and developing pneumonia, she died eleven days later in a Pendleton hospital on September 29, 1929.