Florence Buckskin

Florence Buckskin, known as Flo, was a champion bronc rider whose marriage to Tex John Smith and life on the rodeo circuit shaped the family’s first years. After illness forced the couple to leave their profession, hardship and conflict unsettled the household. In the family history remembered by Perry Smith and Barbara Johnson, Florence’s departure and alcoholism mark a painful break between the children’s early admiration for their parents and the instability that followed.

Rodeo performer and family life

Florence was a professional rodeo performer. She and Tex John Smith, an Irish cowboy and fellow rodeo performer, met while touring the Western circuit, married, and had four children. Their work took the family across a broad stretch of the country, and the children sometimes watched their parents perform from the grandstand. Perry remembered Florence trick-riding at speed, her wrists adorned with silver and turquoise bangles, while crowds responded to the spectacle. His recollections preserve a child’s view of a mother whose skill and stage presence made her an object of pride.

The parents’ partnership was known as “Tex & Flo,” and it continued on the circuit until Perry was five. The family traveled and lived in an old truck; sleeping in it and subsisting on simple food were part of the work’s demands. Perry later connected the family’s diet of condensed milk to his childhood bedwetting, a difficulty that would shape his experiences in institutions. Yet he remembered the touring years as happier than what came afterward: the family’s material circumstances were hard, but he admired his parents’ courage and showmanship.

Illness, separation, and hardship

When ailments forced Florence and Tex to retire, they settled near Reno, Nevada. Their relationship became troubled, and Florence began drinking heavily. When Perry was six, she left for San Francisco with the children, leaving Tex behind. Tex’s account, as preserved in the narrative, describes the children crying as she departed and Florence telling them they would run away to join their father. In the years that followed, Perry repeatedly did run away, hoping to find Tex. The departure thus divided the children’s home life from the touring family they had known and intensified Perry’s longing for his father.

Barbara Johnson’s recollections also place the family’s later travels against widespread material deprivation. Photographs from Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon record a family no longer working as rodeo performers but moving in search of employment. A 1933 photograph captioned as the family picking berries in Oregon shows four children in worn circumstances. Barbara remembered that they sometimes ate little more than berries or stale bread with condensed milk, and that the family once lived for days on rotten bananas. Perry suffered colic during that episode, while Barbara feared for him. These details make hardship concrete without reducing the family’s circumstances to Florence’s choices alone: illness, the loss of their livelihood, and the difficulty of finding work also shaped their decline.

Perry’s memories and the family’s divisions

Perry’s account of Florence is deeply bound to his experience of separation. He remembered thinking constantly about Tex and holding onto the hope that his father would come and take him away. When Tex appeared in a schoolyard, he hugged Perry, told him to behave, and left. Not long afterward, Florence placed Perry in a Catholic orphanage. Perry said that he was punished there for wetting the bed; after a few months, he was sent to a Salvation Army children’s shelter, where he also felt rejected. His recollection connects the family’s dispersal to a longer sequence of displacement, while making clear that these institutions and their treatment of him formed part of his own account rather than an independent portrait of Florence’s intentions.

Perry’s understanding of his mother grew harsher as her drinking altered the family’s life. He recalled that she had once been a sinewy, limber performer, but that alcohol changed her appearance and behavior. He came to despise her and associated her departure with the loss of both parents: his mother had taken him away from Tex, while Tex’s brief return had not restored the home Perry wanted. The narrative also reports that Florence was an alcoholic and later died in an alcohol-related choking incident. These facts frame the family history as a sequence of separations and losses, but they do not erase Perry’s earlier memories of her as a skilled performer or the pride he felt in his parents during the rodeo years.

Family legacy and narrative perspective

Florence’s place in the story is filtered through the memories of her children and the family record, rather than developed through a sustained account from her own point of view. Barbara’s response to a 1922 studio portrait of Tex is ambivalent: she recognized her parents’ mismatch but understood the photograph’s appeal, and respected her father’s fortitude. Her perspective provides a reminder that the children’s later judgments of their parents were not identical. Perry’s memories, by contrast, emphasize the separation, his search for Tex, and the hardships that followed Florence’s move to San Francisco.

The children’s later fates deepen the sense of family loss that Perry attached to his history. Barbara was the only one of the four children to enter what the account describes as an ordinary adult life, marrying and raising a family. Fern Smith died after going through a hotel window in San Francisco; Perry struggled to believe that her death had been intentional, remembering her as artistic and gifted. Their different outcomes form part of the family history through which Perry questioned whether something was wrong with them, perhaps something present from birth. That is Perry’s anguished interpretation, not a conclusion established about Florence or her children. Her narrative significance lies in the contrast between the family’s once-public life of rodeo performance and the private instability, separation, and grief that later defined Perry’s memories of home.