Anna Lee Aldred

Anna Lee Mills was born in Montrose, Colorado, on April 19, 1921.[1] Her father, Tom P. Mills, was a horse trainer and racer, and raised horses together with her mother, Dottie (nee Marlow) Mills.[1][2] She had two brothers who became rodeo champions, and two sisters who also performed in the rodeo.[1][2][3]

Anna Lee began riding at a young age.[4] She won her first pony race at age 6 in an amateur competition in Montrose, and was participating in flat and relay races by age 12.[2][4] She raced at amateur tracks in Colorado and Wyoming.[5]

In 1939, at age 18, she received her professional license from the Agua Caliente Racetrack in Baja California, Mexico, becoming the first U.S. woman to receive a jockey's license.[3][5][6] Aldred said in a 2003 interview that the racetrack officials had tried to deny her application, but could not find a written rule that only men could race horses.[7]

She lost her first professional race by a nose, but went on to win "scores" of other races at state and county fairs.[3] During her racing career, she weighed 100 pounds (45 kg).[3] But by 1945, having grown too tall at 5' 5" and weighing in at 118 pounds (54 kg), she retired from horse racing.[2][3]

She opened a riding school in California, and then embarked on a five-year career as a trick rider in rodeos.[5] She taught herself trick-riding skills at night in empty arenas.[8] Among her tricks were "standing atop the saddle of a horse bolting down the arena"[3] and "hanging by her foot from the side of a running horse".[5]

She quit her professional career upon marrying in 1950,[7] but continued riding until she was 80.[2] She served as a "pony boy", leading the racehorses out to the track of the Montrose Fairgrounds before races, and also appeared in rodeo ceremonies.[5]

After breaking her hip at age 80,[2] she entered a nursing home in Montrose. There she slept under a horse blanket.[3]

Aldred was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1983[4] and the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2004.[2] She was posthumously inducted into the Colorado Plateau Horseman's Hall of Fame in 2018.[9]

In 1950, she married Wayne Aldred, a cattleman, in Raton, New Mexico.[1] The couple adopted a son and a daughter; their daughter was killed in a motorcycle accident while in her early teens.[8] She and her husband divorced after 35 years of marriage.[8]

Aldred died in a Montrose nursing home on June 12, 2006 at the age of 85.[6][8]

Her 1939 racing license, in the form of a small wooden badge, and her blue and white racing silks, are exhibited at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.[3][5]

• Simon, Mark (2007). The Original Thoroughbred Times Racing Almanac. i-5 Publishing. ISBN 978-1-933958-38-5.

• Waisman, Charlotte S.; Tietjen, Jill S. (2013). Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America. Harper Collins. ISBN 9780062041463.

• Photo of Aldred performing the Cossack Drag