THE EVOLUTION OF THE TEXAS COWGIRL
Mama Sugar swore she’d never move back to the country. “I didn’t want to see the back end of a horse again,” she says, offering the kind of chuckle you might expect from a woman nicknamed Mama Sugar. A chuckle with an entire narrative arc. Born in 1939 as Nathan Jean Whitaker—a boy’s name; she got used to it—Mama Sugar was raised by her uncle in a tiny East Texas community called County Line, and by age 6, she had learned the land. Working the fields, herding the cattle and horses, picking the corn and peanuts and watermelons, which were the worst—so much labor to grow those danged watermelons she refused to eat them for years.
It was a cowgirl’s childhood, though she didn’t see it that way. It was just life. At an age when other kids rode bikes, she rode a sled, a homemade wagon with a mule in front used to plow the fields. She remembers her uncle setting her on the flat metal bed and handing her the reins. “Now get on to the house,” he instructed, and she cracked the reins and let the mules glide her back.
The cowgirl is a figure both iconic and overlooked. The word calls to mind rodeo stars, or a fashion line of rhinestones and turquoise, but a cowgirl could refer to any woman tasked with the enormous upkeep of rural life. She might be outlaw or helpmate, cattle driver or keeper of books. Ranch wives like Henrietta King of the legendary King Ranch certainly qualify as cowgirls, although history has a way of only counting the women who did “men’s work,” rendering many cowgirls of the past invisible, even as their lore grew.
