These women were the toughest performers in the Wild West
Don’t try horse diving at home
Civil War hero Buffalo Bill Cody changed the face of entertainment when his Wild West show began touring the country in 1883. Buffalo Bill’s operation, which included mock bison hunts and Indian war reenactments, bronco riding and roping, and marksmanship competitions, went on to engender a number of other imitators, including Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show, the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show, and California Frank Hafley’s Wild West Attractions, which traveled the United States from 1905 to 1940.
While displays of masculinity were prominent in these shows, just as important was their showcasing of the skills necessary for “surviving” in the “Wild West,” abilities that women like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane had in spades. Hafley’s show heavily featured women in rodeo events like the sharpshooting comedy routine in which Lillian Smith, a former competitor of Annie Oakley’s and Hafley’s first wife, shot targets from the mouth or head of Mamie Francis, Hafley’s second wife.
Among the most popular performances at Wild West Attractions was a new sport with a dubious connection to the West: horse diving, an event in which a horse and its female rider jumped from a 50-foot tower into a small pool of water. It took more courage than all the other events combined, and only Mamie Francis had the gumption to do it. Between 1908 and 1914, Francis and her Arabian horse Babe completed 628 dives from five stories up a rickety wooden scaffolding. Sonora Webster Carver, herself a horse diver, describes the first diving performance she witnessed, in 1923, in her autobiography, A Girl and Five Brave Horses:
As she galloped past the girl on the railing the girl jumped on. They drew up together at the head of the platform, where there was a sheer drop-off … he hung for a moment at an almost perpendicular angle, then pushed away from the boards and lunged outward into space … then her beautiful body arched gracefully over and down and plunged into the tank … For a moment nothing happened, and then the horse shot up, rocketed from the bottom by her own impetus, but as if catapulted. The girl was still on her back.
Though the origins of horse diving are somewhat muddled, Webster Carver attributed its invention to her father-in-law, William F. Carver, a contemporary and friend of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok, the former “Champion Rifle-Shot of the World,” who set records in both marksmanship and endurance, including one for shooting 10,000 glass balls a day for six days running in 1885. He claims to have come up with the idea while starring in The Scout, a play about the American West that premiered in Melbourne, Australia, in 1891. In one scene of the production (in which the shooting champ played himself), Carver rode over a bridge rigged to break away and send his horse plunging into a “river” of water flowing across the stage.
The horses in the show were so frightened to perform this fall that Carver had to use a different one each night. Eventually, having run out of horses, Carver went back to one of his “old faithful” mounts and found that not only was he willing to perform the drop, but after falling, he trotted up the embankment of the water tank, ready for an encore. What if, Carver posited, horses could be trained to dive for entertainment?
By the time Webster Carver joined “Carver’s High-Diving Horse Act and the Girl-in-Red” in 1924, the show had been running for at least a decade, placing the act’s debut somewhere around 1914. If that timeline is correct, Mamie Francis would have been horse diving for six years at the competing California Frank’s Wild West Attractions by the time Carver’s show opened. But how Hafley came up with the act — whether he copied Carver’s idea or came up with it independently — is unknown.
Regardless of how horse diving originated, both Carver and Hafley had a hit with their horse-diving acts. The feat successfully combined beautiful women, danger, and the allure of the “Wild West,” each of which drew crowds independently, let alone combined. Perhaps because horse diving required such a high degree of risk for both the horses and riders, it wasn’t imitated by other western shows the way trick riding and shooting were, giving these two companies and their diving girls a leg up on the competition.
While women had been appearing as a novelty in Wild West shows since the early Buffalo Bill Cody days, female and male sharpshooters and trick riders were often interchangeable. Horse-diving acts, though, always used women riders, in part because Carver’s horses could support riders only up to 135 pounds.
According to Mary Lou LeCompte’s Cowgirls of the Rodeo, prior to World War II virtually all “cowgirls” were “working-class, first- or second-generation Americans with no more than an eighth-grade education.” Most grew up on ranches in the western half of the United States, where “athleticism, skill, competitiveness and grit were acceptable traits for women.”
Though incredibly skilled and hugely courageous, Francis and Webster Carver did not fit the typical mold of the era. Mamie Francis, born Elba Mae Ghent in 1885, was raised by her mother, a housekeeper in Janesville, Wisconsin. Her first introduction to the kind of riding and shooting skills that would become her lifelong calling card came with a performance of Pawnee Bill’s Historical Wild West Indian Museum and Encampment Show that she attended at the turn of the 20th century. In 1901, at the age of 15, she left home to join the show.
Webster Carver, too, hailed from east of the 98th meridian, growing up with a restless mother who frequently moved the family from place to place throughout the state of Georgia. Webster Carver had a lifelong love affair with horses, often cutting classes in high school to ride, though her family apparently never had horses of their own. It was her mother who first encouraged her to consider diving for Carver’s act, which was in search of a new “Girl-in-Red,” when Webster Carver was just 19.
She was a good rider, but nothing in her experience prepared her for diving. “I had no saddle, no bridle, no stirrups to brace myself, and the horse had no bit in his teeth … there was nothing for me to hold onto except the strap of the diving harness,” she wrote in her autobiography. Within days of joining the act, Webster Carver was so covered in bruises that she could hardly move, and she hadn’t even attempted a dive yet. When the day finally came, William Carver’s son Al, Sonora Webster’s future husband, advised her:
When the horse first drops his feet over the edge, you’ll have the feeling that he’s going to turn a somersault and that you’re going off over his head but you won’t, and once he actually dives, this sensation will leave. In the meantime don’t panic. One girl we were training got so scared she let go of the harness the same time the horse kicked off, and she shot off his back like a cannon. She landed in front of the tank, and all that saved her from breaking her neck was that she landed flat.
Indeed, there was great risk in diving into a pool from heights of up to 60 feet on the back of a 1,000-pound wingless animal into a pool of murky water, sometimes at night. Remarkably, both Francis and Webster Carver managed to survive their diving careers more or less intact. Francis once broke an arm when Babe landed on her and nearly drowned in June 1909 when she was pinned underwater, but neither injury stopped her from performing. Webster Carver had a rougher go of it. Eight years into her performances, a dive in which she hit the water with her eyes open resulted in a retinal detachment that blinded her for the rest of her life. As portrayed in the 1991 film Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, against all odds, Webster Carver continued to dive at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier, where the show was permanently installed in 1929, until the age of 38. For their courage, horse-diving women were compensated better than women in most other professions at the time. When she signed on to Carver’s show in 1924, Webster Carver earned $125 per week ($1,800 a week in today’s sums) during the summer, when she would dive up to five times a day — more than eight times what she had been making as a department store bookkeeper in Savannah.
By the 1940s, the impending world war put the final nail in the coffin of Wild West shows, which had already been slowly on the decline for more than a decade. The horse-diving acts, in particular, needed men to excavate the diving tank, laborers to set up the tower, and grooms to tend to the horses — the same men whose service was needed elsewhere in wartime. Unable to secure workers and facing restrictions on the tires and gasoline needed for a touring act, the Carvers were forced to close down. In the spring of 1942, Sonora Webster Carver took her last dive, blind.
