Cowgirl Up! (14 page)

She won a spot in a Wild West show, and she was off to see the world and prove what a Montana cowgirl could do. Unfortunately the show folded after a few weeks and left her stranded in Detroit, with nothing but her ropes and a harmonica. Noticing that nightclubs were booking specialty acts, she got an audition with an agent—“in my rundown boots, jeans, and hat.”

The agent watched her perform and asked, “Do you perform in that?”

With a certain amount of embarrassment and trepidation, she told him that she did.

He shook his head. “Your figure is stunning. You might have a better chance if you change your costume.”

The agent then encouraged her to adopt a “short wardrobe,” an abbreviated skirt and skimpy top.

“I'd never heard of such a thing,” she said, but she went along with his suggestion, which did make her rope-trick performances easier. She was one of the first rodeo women to wear fringed buckskin shorts, a beaded buckskin bra, white boots, and silver-concha gauntlets in the arena.

The agent also decided Eithel wasn't really catchy as a stage name. “‘Trixi' sounds good,” he told her, and because she'd been married to a man with the last name McCormick, she went by that name from then on, even changing it legally.

Trixi later made her own costumes, which were considered a bit scandalous, since they showed her knees, legs, and a bare midriff.

At a Guy Weadick Stampede in Calgary one year, Trixi performed in tights and a skimpy halter top. “Sure enough, people were screaming the Cowgirl from Montana was riding nude,” an Ovando neighbor, Howard Copenhaver related. “It made all the papers in the East. And it sure enough put Calgary on the map.”

But the trick-roping cowgirl was not one to be put down by criticism. Once, while riding in Omak, Washington, she was wearing skintight pink pants. “I started into the hippodrome stand—feet in harness, body arched, reaching for the sky—when my trousers split in the rear. The show had to go on, so I filled in the rest of my act with stunts requiring less ‘back exposure.'”

The cowboys teased her afterward, saying she “looked like a white tail deer bounding down the arena.”

“My act really began to take on excellent dimensions when I found the perfect horse, an Arabian gelding I called Silver Dollar,” Trixi told a writer from the
Great Falls Tribune
in 1971. The well-trained palomino added to her glamour and exhibited almost human intelligence. He was calm and “housebroken,” and Trixi was able to take him into hotel ballrooms or barrooms, elevator lifts, nightclubs, and theaters. She used the gentle, well-mannered palomino as a part of her act until he was twenty-three.

The horse would always stand quietly wherever they performed—in a rodeo arena or on stage—with a big spotlight focused on Trixi standing in the saddle spinning her ropes. During her twenty years and thousands of miles on the circuit, she owned five trick horses, but Silver Dollar was her favorite.

One of her horses, another palomino named Buddy, apparently wasn't quite as housebroken. “Once when I was performing in a plush theatre in Canada, the M.C. was narrating my act,” Trixi told
Hoofs & Horns
magazine. “At one appointed time in the script, he asked, ‘What do you do when you want to go home?' Buddy was supposed to push me and propel me along ‘home.' Instead, the palomino picked that particular moment to go to the bathroom. I was mortified, but the audience laughed heartily.”

When asked about traveling the circuit alone, she said, “I was never alone. I had my horse and my dog. My trailer was divided in half, my horse in one half and my dog and me in the other. In the summer we hit the rodeos and fairs and in the winters, hotels and nightclubs.”

Building on the basics Rooker taught her, Trixi began to develop a critically acclaimed showmanship. She was one of the first rodeo performers to use fluorescent ropes and costumes.

When a nightclub was too small to accommodate her horse, she performed her acts on a unicycle. “Sometimes I'd spin two ropes, play the harmonica and tap dance at the same time,” she recalled. “I sometimes did a takeoff of Will Rogers.”

Another act that thrilled audiences was when Trixi dressed in an Indian costume, complete with an authentic war bonnet. “We would do ‘End of the Trail' at the climax, with the orchestra playing the ‘Indian Love Call,'” she said. “It often made a good night club finale.”

One advertisement in the Cass City, Michigan,
Chronicle
, invited the public to a “Big Free Family Party, Monday January 22 [1951], with top talent in a New and Different Entertainment Program. No sales talk, just entertainment.” Receiving top billing was “Trixie McCormick, novelty rope and unicycle act.”

“I always performed to music, and Silver Dollar seemed to enjoy a rodeo band. I met the ‘greats' in rodeo and show business,” she told the
Great Falls Tribune
.

Trixi performed in nearly every state in the United States, in Canada, and in Mexico. She traveled coast to coast with Ken Maynard's Western Review, and during that time performed with fan dancer Sally Rand (who was married to Turk Greenough, brother of Alice and Margie), Johnny Mack Brown, Gene Autry, and Rudy Vallee. She also rode with the Lindermans and Greenoughs, Paddy Ryan, Bob Askin, Ray Maverty, and other Montana rodeo personalities.

In late 1939, Jasbo, a cowboy clown and friend, told her that a rodeo company was being formed to go to Australia. She applied to go along and was booked as a trick rider in the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, Australia, along with famous bronc and trick rider Tad Lucas.

“I was scared to death,” she said, “but the gang [rodeo friends] told me not to worry. When my name was announced, they set me on a horse, pushed me over backwards, and said to go to it.”

Her debut “drag” ride was featured in a picture on the front page of the
Sydney Herald
the next day. “That was one of the biggest thrills of my life,” she said. “There must have been thousands of people there and they were all on their feet yelling and screaming for me. I'll never forget it.” This Australian tour launched Trixi's career, with magazine and newspaper articles lauding her success there.

The press apparently couldn't decide what name to use, and she appeared over the years as Tricksy, Trixye, Miss MacCormack, Mrs. Mcormack, Maxine McCormack, Ethel McCormick, and Dixie McCormick. She was also written up as being from Butte, Deer Lodge, Missoula, Hamilton, Havre, Bozeman, and Billings. Papers described her alternately as a Texas cowgirl, a Chicago showgirl, a New York dancer, a Hollywood starlet, and a California cutie.

Tom Bryant wrote in the 1990
Western Horseman
article, “What probably kept the press confused was that they were not used to dealing with such a dual dynamo. Trixi performed in nightclubs with grace and aplomb and in rodeos with derring-do. She was, and still is, very hard to categorize.”

In her twenty years of performing, she had only one “casualty,” breaking her right ankle in three places while practicing trick riding in New York. Her horse “suddenly went sidewise and I fell. It took three months for my bones to heal,” she related in the newspaper article.

Trixi also had a close call in Caldwell, Idaho.

I was doing the Cossack Drag, which is hanging by one leg sidewise from the saddle, hands and arms hanging almost to the ground. My pinto, Tango, was running straight-away, but for some reason I'll never know I pulled up out of the trick just a second before his feet went out from under him.

He fell and could have broken my back had I been in the earlier position. As it was, neither of us was hurt.

In the 1950s Trixi toured with the USO in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, Australia, and the Philippines, performing with many well-known celebrities such as Bob Hope and Slim Pickens. She spent twenty years touring the country with her horse and dog, performing rope tricks, and was internationally billed as “Trixi McCormick: the Cowgirl from Montana.”

When she was in large cities, Trixi took time out to visit hospitals and city parks and perform for young people who normally wouldn't have had the chance to see a cowgirl act.

“She was a great pro,” Turk Greenough (brother of Alice and Margie) told
Hoofs & Horns
. “No other woman could duplicate her act. Wherever she appeared, she got stellar billing.”

Greenough also praised her strength. “Although Trixi presented the picture of a petite woman, she was well muscled and strong. She would have to have strength in her arm to spin a 75-foot rope. This she did, encircling both herself and her horse.”

In 1960 Trixi had had enough of traveling, and she bought the Brand Bar in Ovando, about sixty-five miles north of Missoula, Montana. Later, when Highway 200 bypassed the little town, she established and ran Trixi's Antler Saloon on the hill just above Ovando for twenty years. She was well known for her Western artifacts, excellent down-home cooking, and providing clean cabins for hunters, fishermen, and other travelers.

“She was a marvelous cook,” her neighbor Margaret Copenhaver said. “Everybody would agree with that.” She often held barbecues, using wagon wheels as giant platters with aluminum foil between the spokes.

“The rumors that Trixi's was a brothel is not true,” granddaughter Kay related. She explained that the original bar building had been a brothel in Helena many years before it was moved to Ovando.

Trixi lived in a room in the back of the bar, and Silver Dollar, now also retired, had a stall right next to her. Kay said he would come into the bar, eat popcorn, and drink beer, right along with the patrons.

The favored trick horse was nearly thirty years old and in pain, and one day when he went down and couldn't get up, Trixi was forced to put him down. “A little bit of my heart went with him,” she said.

Kay and her sisters, Kerry and Karla, spent summers helping Grandma Trixi at the restaurant/bar. “She taught us how to cook. When I was little, I would stand on a stool to cook hamburgers, then I would have to clean it the right way. Sometimes we'd go camping and she made beer pancakes.”

Trixi also taught Kay to bartend when she could see over the bar—at age fourteen. Kay was always close to her grandmother, and her favorite memory of many was the first time they catered together. She also wanted to trick ride like her grandmother.

“I grew up getting bucked off my horse because I wanted him to do tricks,” Kay said. Her grandmother did teach her to do some tricks with the rope and riding. “Except for the unicycle. I never did master that.”

The former cowgirl remained a formidable character even in her later years. “If a boy even looked at us, she'd lead us out by the hair,” Kay said.

Trixi kept a sawed-off baseball bat, along with a wagon-wheel spoke and an old single-action Colt, under the bar, and more than one person witnessed her using these tools on misbehaving customers.

One time, when a group was creating trouble in the bar, Trixi kicked them out. About three o'clock the next morning, she heard a noise. The men were “messing around” with her car parked outside her bedroom window. “She didn't open a window to yell at them or try to get away. She grabbed her 9mm pistol and shot right through the wall,” Kay related. “Unfortunately, she shot the engine block” and ruined her car.

Trixi finally retired for good in the early 1980s, sold the bar, and moved back to Hamilton, where she performed with the Back Country Horseman Saddle Club. She continued to ride in local parades, still spinning her rope at age seventy.

The Montana Cowgirl died at the age of ninety-one on April 6, 2001, in Coalinga, California, where she lived with her son Jack. She was remembered by many friends and neighbors for her generous spirit and hospitality. “She weighed no more than 120 pounds,” said Howard Copenhaver, “and ninety pounds [of that] was her heart.”

Trixi had instructed her granddaughters what to do when she died, and so the family cooked for two days, preparing macaroni salad, potato salad with dill pickles and black olives, ham and roast beef, rolls, chili, soup, raw vegetables, and chips and dip. A keg of beer rested next to the coffee pot. Visitors were invited to the Drummond Community Hall to celebrate her life and remember her as a grandmother, friend, cook, hostess, saloon keeper, outdoorswoman, character, trick rider and rope spinner, and inspiration.