CLAREMORE (OK) — Will Rogers gained world fame as a performer, writer, speaker and philanthropist. But whatever else he was, he was born to the land and born to be a cowboy.
At the Will Rogers Museums, National Day of the American Cowboy, July 22, designated by the United States Senate, will call attention to “Will Rogers … A Salute to America’s Most Beloved Cowboy.”
Will knew good horses and he knew cattle. It was how he made a living before he found a more exciting, different way to use horses and ropes.
Although he managed the family ranch for a short time, he yearned for new adventures, new frontiers.
It was the cowboy in him that his wife, Betty, who first saw him rope in 1901 at a Springfield, Mo., Elks Convention Rodeo, wrote much about in a book published in 1941, six years after his death.
She spent her last evening with her husband at a rodeo. After that rodeo, he hopped a plane and a few days later died when it crashed Aug. 15, 1935 in Alaska.
It is the cowboy in Will Rogers that permeated the lives of his children and left its most indelible mark on his grandchildren, born after he died.
His son, Jimmy, although he tried his hand at acting, was most at home on the range — riding, roping and raising cattle and horses. Like he and his brother, Will Jr. and sister, Mary, Jimmy’s children grew up with horses.
Sons Kem and Chuck, have made their living in the cowboy business. Kem as a cattleman and Chuck as a polo player and polo horse trainer. Kem remembers receiving a Shetland pony as a gift from an Oklahoma friend, Lew Wentz. “Oklahoma King” was delivered to them in California by train and brought home in a wooden crate in the back of their car.
Bette, the only granddaughter, showed horses as a child, spent her life as a farm and ranch wife and in widowhood and retirement still keeps a few horses.
As a youngster, Bette asked her father how much different their lives might have been had her legendary grandfather lived. His answer was not some great philosophical meandering, but “well, you would have probably had better horses.”
Will won his first money as a cowboy in a steer roping in 1899. Two years later, he was in a group of Cherokee cowboys who formed a stock company to give a bronc busting and roping exhibition at the Confederate Reunion in Memphis — some 40 cowboys and a sprinkling of halfbreeds from spring roundup in Indian Territory, he said.
Family remembrances of his great-nieces and nephews are more about cowboys than the movies that made him so famous.
Tom Milam, son of Will’s niece Maude Irene McSpadden, remembers the days of his youth roping goats on the old Rogers’ ranch near Oologah, then managed by his mother’s brother, Herb.
On a visit to the California ranch, Milam observed his Uncle Will rising early for work as an actor, then coming home to afternoons roping in the ranch arena.
In his writings, Will Rogers left lasting impressions of him as a cowboy; his horses were always a part of him. Letters home consistently admonished his father to take care of his ponies “and don’t let anyone use them.”
July 22 will be very much a day for Will, a beloved cowboy.