Perry Smith and Florence “Flo” Buckskin’s mother-son relationship

The mother-son relationship between Perry Smith and Florence “Flo” Buckskin was shaped first by the close, itinerant life of a rodeo family and then by a prolonged separation that left Perry moving between his mother’s care, institutions, and his father’s custody. His memories preserve both the excitement of watching Flo perform and the pain of losing her as a dependable presence. The account does not resolve their relationship in adulthood; instead, it shows how the separation became part of a childhood organized around longing, displacement, and the search for his father.

Rodeo Family and Early Childhood

Flo Buckskin was a professional bronc rider, and her husband, Tex John Smith, also performed on the rodeo circuit. Perry’s earliest remembered scene belongs to that world: as a very young child, he sat with his siblings in the grandstand while his mother rode. He remembered her trick riding as thrilling, her bangles flashing as she performed at speed, and the crowds responding with applause. In this first view, she was not simply a parent but a celebrated performer whose skill and daring filled his childhood with spectacle.

The family continued touring until Perry was five. Their life was materially precarious: six people traveled and sometimes slept in an old truck, subsisting on simple foods, including mush, chocolate kisses, and condensed milk. Perry associated the milk’s sugar content with his bed-wetting, a condition that later became a source of punishment and humiliation in institutional care. Yet he remembered the touring years as happier than what followed, and the hardships did not erase his pride in his parents’ work. The contrast matters: the family’s poverty and constant travel existed alongside a child’s admiration for his mother’s public courage and his father’s showmanship.

Separation and Perry’s Search for His Father

After ailments forced Flo and Tex to retire, they settled near Reno. Their relationship deteriorated; they fought, and Flo began drinking. When Perry was six, she left for San Francisco with the children. Tex later recalled that he let her go as the children cried and that Flo cursed them as she departed. For Perry, the departure meant losing not only his father’s everyday presence but also the family life he had known on the road. The narrative links the separation to his repeated efforts to reunite with Tex: over the next several years, Perry ran away more than once, hoping to find the father he missed.

Perry’s memories of his mother during this period were sharply altered by her drinking. He described her as no longer resembling the limber rodeo performer he had admired, and as having become harsh and neglectful. His account portrays the change as both physical and moral in his eyes: the treasured image of the performer gave way to the mother from whom he felt emotionally abandoned. These are Perry’s recollections, not an independent account of Flo’s experience, but they make clear how he understood the rupture: as the loss of the mother he had known and the collapse of his former family life.

Institutional Care and Reunion with Tex

Perry remembered seeing his father again in a schoolyard. The meeting brought a brief embrace, but Tex told him to behave and then left. Not long afterward, Flo placed Perry in a Catholic orphanage. He said that other children there beat him for wetting the bed, and that after a couple of months the orphanage expelled him. He was then sent to a children’s shelter operated by the Salvation Army. There, he recalled, a nurse abused him because he wet the bed and was half-Indian, forcing him into ice-cold water and holding him under it. He developed pneumonia, spent two months in the hospital, and nearly died. The episodes expose how the family’s separation was followed by institutional placements in which Perry experienced his bed-wetting and Indigenous identity as grounds for punishment.

Tex returned while Perry was seriously ill and took him away after he recovered. Father and son lived together near Reno for almost a year, and Perry attended school, completing third grade. That reunion ended his period in institutional care, but did not restore a stable family household. Tex built a small trailer, which he called a house car, and the two traveled for years, moving through several states and eventually to Alaska. Perry remembered loving his father despite his roughness and strictness, and said he was glad when they moved on because other people’s judgment of Tex hurt him. In this later life, the father became Perry’s central companion; the earlier separation from Flo remained part of the route by which that bond was formed.

Family Division and the Long Aftermath

The family photographs preserved by Barbara Johnson record both the closeness and the dispersal that followed. One image showed Perry and his sister together as small children; another showed them sharing a pony. But after the children and Flo went to San Francisco, Barbara’s affection for Perry faded, and she came to regard him as wild and criminal rather than as the little brother she had once cherished. Perry’s first recorded arrest occurred on October 27, 1936, his eighth birthday. After repeated confinements in institutions and detention centers, he was returned to Tex’s custody. Barbara did not see him for many years, apart from photographs Tex sent to his other children, including pictures of Perry hunting bears and panning for gold in Alaska.

The surviving account gives no comparable later scene of reconciliation between Perry and Flo. Instead, it traces the relationship through the child’s memories of her performances, her departure, and the care he received after she sent him away. By the time Perry confronted Barbara in Denver in 1955, his anger was directed broadly at his family and especially at Tex, whom he blamed for denying him schooling and keeping him dependent. That later outburst does not establish what he felt toward Flo in that moment, but it shows how his account of childhood had hardened into a story of unequal opportunity and family grievance. The mother-son bond remains defined by an unresolved break: the boy who once watched Flo ride before applauding crowds later remembered her chiefly through absence, altered affection, and the upheaval that followed her departure.