The cover of the postcard folder was interesting but unassuming. I’d seen plenty of these early folders of scenic areas around the country. Vacationers would buy them as souvenirs.
This one was a little different, though, because the cover bore pictures of cowgirls, which I found both unusual and intriguing.
I opened the folder, and an accordion of colorful postcards with beautiful prints revealed themselves. They showed cowboys and cowgirls riding bucking horses and mean steers, holding on tight or falling to the ground in contorted forms. It was like being smack dab in the middle of the action.
That’s apparently where photographer Ralph R. Doubleday was when he took the pictures. The folder – there were two of them – was an album of “famous western action,” as described on the cover. A section inside told a short story of Doubleday and his rodeo photography. The folder was copyrighted in 1943 by R.R. Doubleday of Council Bluffs, IA.
“For over two score years he has carried his camera into action in all the leading rodeos of the country. More cowboys and cowgirls – more rodeo fans know and look up to “Ralph” Doubleday than perhaps to any other person associated with Western sports-action events.”
Even cowboy and actor Will Rogers, the folder stated, credited him with being one of the best rodeo photographers around. “He’s taken 90 percent of the good rodeo pictures ever made,” Rogers wrote in 1926. “He don’t get ’em till they are doing something unusual. But when they do, he is right down under them shooting up at ’em. He has had horses jump over him, wild steers run over him. But he always comes up with an exact likeness of the animal.”
The photographer’s full name was Ralph Russell Doubleday, and he was born in 1881 in Jackson County, Iowa (Several accounts reported that he was born Edward Cochran). After his family moved to Illinois around 1900, he began photographing local events using a Kodak box camera. He told folks that he had also shot big game hunts in Africa with Teddy Roosevelt, along with views of foreign countries for stereoscopes, but some have questioned some of those assertions.
He shot more than just rodeos; he could also be found at airplane races, bridge openings and other events.
Doubleday shot his first rodeo in 1910 at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in Cheyenne, WY. He photographed a cowboy being thrown from a bucking horse, and that image was said to be first of its kind. It was followed by such reputation-building photos of Sharkey the bucking Hereford bull (1913), Leonard Stroud on Indian Tom (1918) and Smoky Branch Riding Glass Eye (1921).
His camera of choice was a Graflex that he customized to work for him. He had gotten so close to the action that more than once his camera was damaged by hooves. The bellows on the camera became so tattered that he used chewing gum, plaster and tape to keep it from falling apart.
Doubleday would spend the next 40 years at his craft, finally putting down his camera in 1952. He died in 1958, having attended more than 300 rodeos, as he recalled. He was inducted into the Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1988.
He has been called the “undisputed World’s Champion Rodeo Photographer. … Ralph was the first rodeo photographer, and noted in his field because in those days there were not many photographers who would risk camera and film, not to mention life and limb, trying to get action pictures,” said Foghorn Clancy, a rodeo historian.
His rodeo people included both women (one of the postcards shows Tad Lucas on a bucking horse) and men, African American and Native American. His collection of 4,000 negatives and more than 424 postcards are housed at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK.
Doubleday became pretty successful in selling postcards and prints of his photos. He produced the postcards in town soon after photographing an afternoon rodeo. He’d develop and print them at night, and have them ready to sell the next day.
He sold them to fans, cowboys and collectors – for prices ranging from 3 cents each to $30 for a thousand. He later sold some as prints for $300. He sold them commercially to magazines and newspapers, drugstores, souvenir shops and Woolworth stores. The photos in the folders at auction were some that he considered the best in showing the stunts of both cowboys and cowgirls.
Doubleday also had studios in various town, including Dickinson, ND, and Council Bluffs. He photographed Ben Pickett, brother of the famous bulldogger Bill Pickett, in a studio portrait. Ben Pickett is misidentified in a written note on the photo as the other Pickett. The photo is said to have been taken between 1910 and 1930.
In 1994, poor Ben’s image was also mistakenly used on a Post Office stamp honoring legends of the west that included Bill. The stamps were recalled. Ben Pickett had actually worked as a manager for his brother.
