The National Cowgirl Hall of Fame recently announced that Alice Walton (pictured) will receive the Fern Sawyer Award at their annual awards banquet in Fort Worth on Friday, November 9.
Sawyer, born in West Texas in 1917, was a cowboy at heart, but loved everything about being a woman.
“Fern was destined to be her rancher father’s cowboy, born early enough to be needed and late enough to be allowed to help with cattle drives and working cattle,” said Sawyer’s longtime friend Pat Hall. “But she was as feminine a woman as I ever saw. She loved a beautiful home; she loved a beautiful table; she loved beautiful clothes; she loved perfume; she loved men. Oh, she loved all men.”
Seven years Sawyer’s junior, a young Hall once tagged along to a rodeo where Sawyer introduced her to cowboy Dan Taylor. “Dan told Fern to come sit next to him on the fence and visit,” Hall remembered. “Then he took out his tobacco and took a chew and handed it to Fern and she took a chew. They never did stop visiting while they were chewing. I was just agog. Fern was my idol.”
Gender was never a barrier for Sawyer, who competed against men in early-day cutting competition and was a founding member of the National Cutting Horse Association. The first time Sawyer went to the famous rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York City, she was 16. Her father had refused to give her permission to go, so she slipped out one night and left a note on the breakfast table: “Gone to the Garden.”
“She seemed to embody so many aspects from Western heritage and spirit to the flamboyant Hollywood image,” said her niece Candy Jacobson. “Things didn’t just happen to Fern. She created a lot of energy around her and she had a sense of her own destiny.”
“Fern never misrepresented herself,” said former Fern Sawyer Award recipient Sheila Welch. “I admired her grit. When I first met her, I thought she was the wildest woman I had ever met, dress-wise and everything else. But she was just as authentic as she could be and I grew to love her.”
Part of Sawyer’s authenticity included her language, which she peppered liberally with four-letter words. Jacobson recalled the time presidential candidate John F. Kennedy came to Albuquerque and Senator Joe Montoya asked Sawyer to pick him up at the airport. Sawyer agreed to go even though she couldn’t imagine what she and the Senator from Massachusetts would have in common. “What in the hell are we going to talk about?” she asked Jacobson.
As Sawyer pulled out of the airport with the two politicians in her car, she swerved to avoid another vehicle and matter-of-factly muttered, “Sonofabitch!”
“Fern always has used colorful language,” said Montoya, who knew Sawyer well.
“I guess that comes from rodeoing,” she added, unapologetically.
“Rodeo? Did you know Casey Tibbs?” Kennedy asked. “He was one of my idols.” Sawyer and Kennedy talked about rodeo for the rest of the drive.
“Fern had so many friends in so many different places, not just geographically, but in lifestyle,” said Hall. “Her friendship was unconditional, it didn’t make any difference what you did. But if you weren’t her friend, you were her enemy.
“One time I told her, ‘Your worst fault is that your enemies have no attributes and your friends have no faults.’ And she said, ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to be.'”
Sawyer lived her life with no regrets, according to Jacobson, who recalled someone asking Sawyer, near the end of her life, if she would have done anything differently. “The same thing, just a little more of it,” said Sawyer, whose motto had always been to “do everything as fast as you can,” even though her father had taught her that “the slowest you can go is too damned fast” in a herd of cattle.
Sawyer was horseback on the last day of her life, in 1993, when she dismounted, after riding with friends, leaned against her horse, and slipped away.
Alice Walton, a cutting horse breeder, competitor, and philanthropist, is just the sixth person to receive the special award. The five other recipients are Anne Marion in 1994; Georgia Mae Ericson in 2000; Sheila Welch in 2001; Van Romans in 2003; and Ed Bass in 2006.