26 Years of Rodeo Bliss

The Hutchinson News - 10/01/2006
by Kathy Hanks

Just out of high school, 18-year-old Muriel Johnson was working in a nursing home, planning to attend Kansas State University to study animal science.

"My world was a house on Q Street with a backyard and a cat," she said. But she dreamed of being a cowgirl, and she couldn't help but notice Sandie Bonsall, in the hot pickup with the horse trailer and two horses inside. He happened to be in town for the summer building irrigation canals.

She learned he also was a rodeo cowboy and had a ranch in the sand hills of Nebraska. Immediately, she was smitten.

"He lived a big life," Muriel said, describing his night and weekend job of riding the rodeo circuit. "I had never even ridden a horse. He represented everything that was bigger than life to me."

The couple had one date that summer - he took her to a rodeo in Concordia where she watched him perform.

Then she headed to Manhattan to college, and he took off hauling cattle to Canada.

"He was a tumbleweed," Muriel Bonsall said, speaking from the couple's rural home in Ford County. He had lots of different jobs, but he loved the rodeo - team roping, calf roping, bull dogging, he did them all.

When she graduated from K-State, she became a USDA Meat Grader in Omaha, Neb. He happened to be a Nebraska state brand inspector. She had learned to ride and owned a black paint horse that liked to barrel race. It was at a Nebraska rodeo that she ran into Sandie Bonsall again.

"I was taking lessons from Joyce Loomis, a world champion barrel racer," she said. "Of course, my horse probably got Sandie's attention at first because he was a winner."

They kept running into each other at rodeos, and then they began arranging their entries so they would be at the same performances.

When they knew it was time to get engaged, Sandie Bonsall did what any romantic cowboy would. The 29-year-old sold one of his best horses to buy his fiancee, who was 27, a half-caret marquee diamond. The wedding had to be carefully scheduled not just around their rodeo events, but also those of his three brothers, who also competed.

In April 1980, six years after he first arrived in Belleville in the brand new pickup truck, the couple left the wedding in a horse-drawn buggy.

Now, 26 years later, he still is competing in professional rodeos as a single steer roper. His day job is with Roto-Mix Inc., and he covers all of Oklahoma, western Kansas and parts of Colorado as a salesman. She works as a meat grader at Excel and National Beef, both in Dodge City.

The secret of their successful marriage, she said, is sharing similar beliefs, plus the fact that what brought them together hasn't waned. Currently their attention is on their bull named Mudflap, which they enter in national bucking bull competitions.

Muriel Bonsall became that cowgirl she dreamed of as a young girl. The bonus is, she got her cowboy.

Copyright 2006 ,The Hutchinson Publishing Company

« Back to Articles