She hasn’t quit winning those buckles. She doesn’t ride in the big rodeos like Cheyenne Frontier Days and the Greeley Independence Stampede anymore, but she continues to steal the thunder from riders half her age at jackpots in southeast Wyoming, western Nebraska, and northern Colorado.
“There are people who say, ‘I’d never do that. I’m too old for that,’ ” she says. “They’d rather just sit around. Who wants to do that? They think people should bow down and kiss their feet because they’re old. Bull crap. They need to get up and get moving.” 
And Vi lives that advice.
“I was riding at the Riata Ranch series this year,” she says, referring to a jackpot series at an indoor arena just east of Cheyenne. “It was the last day, and it was a double-header. My hands don’t always work right anymore, and that day, my left hand just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. When I got to the second barrel and went to switch the reins to the other hand, I dropped the rein, but Gator helped me out. We got second on that run.”
She says she was thinking about opting out of the second go, but several friends convinced her to make another run.
“We came back for that second run, and we ended up with the buckle.”
There’s just no quit in Vi. She could have hung up her spurs when her old horse, Wilson, reached retirement age. Instead, she went looking for a new horse, and she found one in Gator Jones.
“Gator’s a cowboy’s horse,” she says. “He takes pretty good care of me on the barrels, but if he gets spooked, wow, he can buck. I’ve been lucky enough he’s never bucked me off, though.”
Keep in mind that Gator isn’t some used-up, broken-down trail horse. He’s usually kind and gentle, but he’s a running, gunning barrel horse when Vi turns him loose in the arena.
“He was just started (on his training) when I got him,” she says. “We had a few ‘understandings’ to get him where he is now.”
Vi gives full credit to a friend in Torrington for helping teach Gator the ropes.
“Linda Lay helped me understand how to make a good barrel horse out of him,” she says. “And she didn’t have to do that. Linda had horses for sale, too, but I didn’t buy Gator from her. She could have just said, ‘you didn’t buy him from me, so he’s your problem.’ But she didn’t. And if she sees me doing something wrong and tells me what I need to do, I listen to what she says.”
That constant learning is one of the big reasons she keeps riding. She says there’s always something to learn, and learning new things is what keeps you young.
At the Skylynn Hall Memorial Barrel Race in Albin, Wyoming, over the Fourth of July weekend, she says she came out of the first run mad as a hornet at Gator.
“He balked on that first barrel,” she says. “He just shut down and sucked up. I came out of there wanting to choke him.”
She said before she could chastise her horse, a friend of hers who used to train race horses stopped her.
“He said, ‘Do you know why he did that, Vi?’ He told me a whirlwind of that red arena dust had come up just as I came around first barrel, and it got in Gator’s nose and mouth. You’d think I’d know that after riding for 70 years, but I didn’t. There’s always something to learn.”
And for Vi, there’s always someone to teach. She’s one of the many volunteers who make Cheyenne Frontier Days happen every year. She oversees the barn crew on the Parades Committee that exercise the horses the chairmen and chairwomen ride, and she teaches a fair number of those VIPs how to ride. Each year, there are several people on horseback in the parades and the rodeo grand entries who never sat on a horse before Vi taught them how to do it.
But she doesn’t gloat about it.
“We’re just the barn help for the chairmen’s horses and the color guard,” she says.
Despite her humility, it’s an important job, and she’s earned the highest honor Cheyenne Frontier days has to offer for her dedication. Last year, she was inducted into the CFD Hall of Fame.
“I never expected that,” she says. “I just got a good draw and got the top of the ground.”
It was an honor many CFD volunteers say was long overdue, though.
“She’s not a horse whisperer,” says Terry Cook, a member of the Military Committee and Color Guard coordinator. He chuckles as he adds, “She doesn’t do anything with a whisper. It’s more a command. But I say that with the utmost respect.”
At the end of a day of color guard practice, after the saddles and tack have been put away, the horses have been fed, and the younger members of the committee are heading to their trucks, Vi sweeps up the alleyway of the barn.
“Some people laugh at me for sweeping up a barn,” she says, “but I just think you need to keep it looking good. And besides, I just can’t stand to sit still.”
She waves her hand dismissively at people who say she’s never slowed down. “I used to do a lot more,” she says. “I made the finals here at Frontier Days in 1971. I wish I could ride like I did when I was 20 years old.”
But there are plenty of 40-year-olds, 30-year-olds, and even 20-year-olds out there who wish they could ride like this 78-year-old cowgirl does.
