Agnes Morley Cleaveland, Pamela Mann,
Ella "Cattle Kate" Watson, Elizabeth Taylor

A six-shooter makes men and women equal
Agnes Morley

In the decades following the Civil War cattle raising became big
business on the Western frontier. Although cattle ranching is usually
portrayed in movies and television as a completely male world domi-
nated by gun-slinging cowboys and outlaws, the cattle culture had its
share of women. A number of women were wives of ranchers and
worked side by side with them in keeping books, managing the feeding
of cowboy employees, and caring for stock. A number of women
actually owned cattle ranches themselves.

Some had inherited them on the death of their husbands and, like
Henrietta King of the mammoth King Ranch of Texas, acquired
capable managers to oversee operations. Other women, like Mary
Meagher of Washington Territory, managed their ranches directly. A
few, like Mrs. Bishop Hiff Warren of Colorado, who ran her assets up
to ten million dollars, were highly successful in what was a very
volatile business.

In 1886 a young girl named Agnes Morley came to a New Mexico
cattle ranch high in the Datil Mountains along with her mother,
stepfather, brother Ray, and sister Lora. Agnes later wrote:

Cattle-raising on a grand scale was the Great Adventure of the hour.
Railroading had become a matter for experts, but anybody with suffi-
cient cash could become a big rancher. My imaginative mother had
about as much fitness for the role of cattle queen as could be expected
from a young woman who had always leaned upon some "natural
protector," but she had had her years of training in pioneer uncertain-
ties, so she followed the new husband as confidently as she had her first.

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