Western Legacy
Jean Barton Honored for Decades of Service…
Red Bluff’s Jean Barton is getting her flowers — or, more appropriately for a rodeo fan, a belt buckle — for a lifetime dedicated to ranching and rodeo. This year has been full of surprises and joys for the 94-year-old newspaper columnist and retired cattle rancher.
It started in early April when Barton was surreptitiously escorted to a front row table at the annual Red Bluff Round Up awards dinner, a location that would make it easy for her to accept the rare and prestigious President Award from John Trede, board president of the Red Bluff Round Up Association.
“Western culture is her lifeblood and rodeo is and always has been her passion,” says Trede. “She watches the Cowboy Channel every day and reports to us whatever she needs to tell us and she’s truly a premier spokesperson.” Trede credits Barton’s 60 years of weekly newspaper columns with helping to create an increasingly sold-out audience for the Red Bluff Round Up, a rodeo that just celebrated its 101st anniversary.
“It’s a beautiful belt buckle,” says Barton of her award. “And they’ve only given six in 100 years. I was really shocked and honored and surprised.”
Barton served as rodeo secretary for the high school association for many years and still refers to the young contestants that came up through the ranks as “my kids.” While she may refer to herself as “just a fan”, she can tell you exactly where all of her kids are that moved from high school competitions into the professional rodeo circuit, and she does so with immense pride.
Many readers of the Red Bluff Daily News look forward to Barton’s Saturday column that tells the news of agriculture in the area. “I try to keep it ranch because I try to help people understand ranching,” she says. “I try to let people know about agriculture.” On Wednesdays she has a photo and beef recipe in the paper.
She credits her mother with her desire to write, as well as her voracious reading habit. “My mother would go to the Salvation Army for the writing group,” she says. “Evidently I inherited that gene.”
Promoting agriculture is a mission she’s been on for decades. At the tender ages of 19 and 20, she was an International Farm Youth Exchange member, traveling 21 days on a ship to New Zealand, where she lived with 28 different farm families over seven months. “It was quite an experience,” she says, noting that she was a sophomore at UC Davis at the time.
In later years, she traveled the state and the nation in leadership roles in CattleWomen associations. “In the old days we had national beef cookoffs across the nation,” she says. “You met women from all over. You meet so many different people. Gosh, I know ladies all over the United States.”
While Barton admits that she doesn’t cook much anymore, she laughs that she was once famous in her home for what she called Taste Sensations. “In other words, I’d see a recipe, get ingredients and poor Bill would suffer through it.”
Barton came to the organizations as a bona fide cattle rancher herself. She and her husband, Bill, had commercial herds on land that was homesteaded by her great grandfather in 1874. “We didn’t have hired men,” she says. “Friends would help but it was just Bill and me.” The couple raised two girls who continue lives in agriculture and came up through 4-H.
Not long after receiving her President’s award, Barton was honored as Grand Marshal of the Red Bluff Round Up Parade. It was an honor she’d held in 2008 with her husband, who has since passed. “I knew I couldn’t climb up onto a stagecoach,” she laughs of her parade transportation. “I haven’t been on a horse in years.”
The city firefighters came through for her by bringing out Putty Putt, their 1918 fully restored fire truck. “They did the siren, rang the bell,” she says. “It was good weather that day. That was a spectacular month.”
Barton still keeps an active travel schedule and continues an annual tradition of attending National Livestock Tours with the Western Livestock Journal. This year she will put North Dakota in the books. She started the excursions in 1988 with a trip to New Mexico and has been from Texas to British Columbia on tours.
Those lucky to be on her Christmas card list have received annual letters up to 24 pages long, which she is considering collecting into a book. “It makes a good history book,” she says, noting that she keeps track of “fires, volcanoes, you name it” in her letters.
“In a way I’m overwhelmed,” says Barton of her recent recognitions. “It was quite something for this 94-year-old woman.”•
