settling into retirement Her upbeat demeanor and warm, genuine laugh carried her through the rigors of the sport, the injuries, the travel and other hard- ships many others have battled, and they still carry her today. ”I know the good Lord’s been with me all the time because I should be dead. Obviously, he doesn’t want me, and I must not be bad enough to go down below. Because I’m still here.” She still rides, moving cows on the ranch in Garden Valley up to Anderson Creek, and goes up one or two times a day in the summer to get them off the road. Her very sizable fam- ily keeps her retirement years occupied with numerous events and milestones. “I tell everybody I’m the most blessed wom- an in the whole world because between Jim (her late husband) and I, we had 15 kids (eight together), 64 grandkids, 121 great grandkids, and they’re all healthy, they all have good brains, they’re great athletes, and I did some- thing I thoroughly enjoyed my whole life and had a small measure of success at it. I still get around about as good as most women my age, and they didn’t have near the fun I did.”
“He entered me in every event. I won money in the bareback and the cow riding, and I won $54 for 24 seconds of work. I thought I was on the road to riches.” Jan said she was on the road for many years traveling to rodeo competitions, “and I had a lot of riches, but not necessarily monetary ones.” For the first 25 years of her career, she worked all women’s rodeo events, including rough- stock. She competed in tie-down calf roping, team roping, and steer undecorating, “and once in a while I even goat-tied. I didn’t like it, but if that was the event I did it. My only claim to fame with goat tying was in a rodeo up in Canada when I beat the Canadian champion. I think she must have had a bad day.” Jan has taught numerous bareback and bull riding clinics to young women, in Garden Val- ley and Sweet, Idaho, plus Texas and Oklaho- ma. Her advice: “Enjoy what you’re doing and put your all into it. If you don’t enjoy it, get out of it. It’s not a case of if you get hurt, but when and how bad. If you can’t handle that, you don’t have any business in the roughstock.”
enjoy what you’re doing and put your all into it.
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Jan Youren with “Arrow” in front of the ranch’s classic Western barn, which was built around 1940.
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