Donald Dorrell was born February 8, 1926, “right up Beaver Creek in a log cabin across from where we live now. It was my grandmother’s homestead. She delivered me because the doctor couldn’t get there,” said Donald, who still lives on the ranch in Rifle, Colo. His dad was a farmer and Donald went to school with 14 others. “We were seven miles from the school house and we rode the horse for 8 years. Sometimes we’d leave the house in the morning it would be 20 below, so in the winter time we’d ride bareback so the horse’s body would keep us from freezing.”
He dreamed of being a pilot, but was told when he enlisted in the Navy at age 17, that he was too young, so he became a rear seat gunner on a torpedo plane. “I spent two years on the back seat of a carrier based on the First Enterprise,” he recalls. “It wasn’t very nice. On at the last, we got hit by a Kamikaze – it killed about 45 guys – and it really messed us up; so they sent us back, without an escort, to Pearl Harbor to get things fixed and we could only do about 7 knots (8 miles an hour). It took six days to get from where we got hit back to Pearl Harbor. The war got over then and I went back to the ranch.”
Donald was 21 and got married about two years later to a local girl, JoAnn. He stayed on the ranch, and he and JoAnn raised cattle (350 mother cows), and put up hay. He started competing in rodeo the same time he got married, competing in “everything that came out of a bucking chute, bulls, bareback, and saddle broncs.” He liked saddle broncs the best. “It just seemed like a better thing to do really – bulls – that was the bad thing to do, but I rode a lot of bulls. Bareback was just another event.”
He would go every weekend, traveling as far as three states, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado,. “We had an association – Amateur Cowboys Association – and I won about four belt buckles.” He never went pro. “You’d have to travel most of the year, and I couldn’t because of the ranch. You had to make a living. Back then they didn’t pay like they do now.”
He traveled to the rodeos with his wife and a horse. “I took a horse to the rodeo so I could race him. He’d usually pay the expenses; they didn’t outrun him too many times.” He competed in both the Wild Horse Race and the Relay Race. Although he roped at home on the ranch, he never competed in the roping events. He quit competing when he was about 60, when he quit riding bulls. “I didn’t get beat up too bad. If you didn’t get bucked off, it wasn’t too bad.” He still goes to the local rodeo in Rifle. “They pay a lot more money, and the bulls are a lot harder to ride.”
He still works on the ranch, but “as little as possible, I’m past 90. We sold all the cows – it got to where it was too hard for JoAnn and I to take care of them. Now we do as little as possible. I don’t get around too good. I’ve got two saddle horses; one is about like I am, Skeeter’s got arthritis, but he was my good horse. He will be 26 this year.”
Donald is glad that he rodeoed when he did. “I sure had a lot of fun,” he said. His favorite place to go was the local rodeo, in Rifle, one that he still attends today, just to watch.
