The Jane West Chronicles
Jane West—The Moveable Cowgirl
Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1967. Age 6.
She came out of the MARX toy box with 3 different hats, 2 skirts, 2 blouses, 1 gun belt, 1 kerchief, 1 frying pan, 1 trunk, 1 pistol, 1 mug, 1 coffee pot, 1 rifle, 1 deringer, 1 knife, a couple of branding irons, a purse, and more. Lips lacquered a perpetual fire-engine red, she was the most totally prepared woman I’d met. Even if it was kind of strange that you put her fringed plastic skirt and vest on over her painted-on western shirt and jeans.
Maybe that was just part of Jane’s delusion about traveling light. Because most of her changeable western gear didn’t fit into the saddlebags that came with her palomino horse Thunderbolt.
So on Jane’s epic and often lonesome horseback journeys across the black linoleum floor of our rental house (My parents were on a tight budget, and I didn’t have her partner Johnny West, daughter Janice, the brunette girlfriend, or faithful ranch dog), I toted the fully jointed cowgirl’s stuff behind her in a Florsheim shoe box.
I loved her anyway.
Photo sources: Vintage Toy Room ; appaloosa
