The loneliest cowgirl in Sanders County

Matt Unrau

Sanders County is horse country, there’s little doubt about that. However, you would be surprised to learn that there is only one cowgirl in the county, that is only one cowgirl competing in high school rodeos.

Fifteen-year-old, Jessica Read of Plains has been riding her whole life, but in terms of rodeo she’s still learning. A fact, which can prove to be an interesting challenge with the lack of a local rodeo team to teach her the ins and outs of goat tying, breakaway roping, pole bending and barrel racing.

Lisa Read, Jessica’s mother, explains that different members of the community picked up the slack of coaching. It was only a year ago that Bruce Icenoggle of Plains bought Jessica her first rope and had to show her how to use it.

“It’s pretty generous of community members to just step up and help with coaching in one way or another,” says Lisa.

This last summer Chip and Ed Vonheeder have been teaching Jessica how to team rope, although she doesn’t have a partner or the experience to try it in real competition.

It isn’t just locals that have helped this cowgirl follow her interests, but after riding her first year as a solo rider Rocky and Mike Knight of St. Ignatius invited her onto their high school team with once a week practices.

As if it’s a challenge enough to have to search the Valley for coaching advice, but Jessica’s rodeo horse was diagnosed with herpes in January and Jessica had to switch to a pair of four-year-old horses. Compared to the normal age of rodeo horses being 9-16 years old, the animals that Jessica rode were just as raw as her.

“It was really hard to teach my horse how to rope and to teach me how to rope at the same time. Normally when people are learning they get on a horse that knows where they are going,” says Jessica. “I was really handicapped by both (him and I) being green.”

Despite these challenges Jessica in turn has taken all of this help she’s offered and has ran with it, growing as a competitor in leaps and bounds since a year ago when she didn’t know which rope to buy or how to use it. Of course, it helped that she has a natural gift for working with horses. She won grand champion in senior showmanship at the Fair and a slew of purple ribbons, but especially wowed the judges with a bridleless and bareback demostration.

“I’ve been horse passionate forever,” says Jessica. “I think it’s cool how you can get a huge animal…and come together and be united, not horse and rider, but be one. Anything that has a horse with it, I’ll go for it,” says Jessica who considers 4-H the foundation of her rodeoing. She says it provides the horsemanship needed to succeed at the competitions.

Adding all of this together and Jessica is rapidly improving and getting stronger throughout the year. In the last weekend tournament of the Fall season Jessica placed fourth in goat tying on Friday and 10th on Saturday. Three weeks ago she placed 3rd out of 26 competitors in goat tying with a time of 8.91 seconds. Each weekend Jessica gains points that add up towards both her Spring and Fall season, which will come into play when they hold the state tournament next spring.

More than anything else Jessica is dedicating herself to the sport in hopes of earning herself a college scholarship and being part of a college team. Right now she’s eyeing Montana State University who she says has a very strong team. In order to get to that level, Jessica says she is working on her consistency, which is the key to winning at rodeo.

In a sport where one fling of the rope is the only chance you have between recording a score or not, consistency is the most important thing. “The speed and consistency has got to be there for them to count on her as part of their team,” says Lisa.

In the meantime Jessica has one word on her mind during the next couple months between the Fall and Spring season, and that word is practice.