Career
She is considered "hands down the first rodeo queen."
Orr broke horses while she was growing up on a ranch near Red Lodge, the seat of Carbon County southwest of Billings, Montana. At the age of fourteen, she left school to deliver mail by horseback over a 35-mile route. She intended to become a forest ranger until the return of servicemen from World War I made such employment unrealistic for women at that time.
Ultimately, Orr performed in rodeos in forty-six states and in Madison Square Garden in New York City as well as Australia and Europe, where she was once invited for tea with the Queen of England.
Orr also did occasional stunt work in films. Because competitors were sometimes cheated by tour operators, Orr joined a group which in 1936 organized the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.
The couple married in 1958. The Orrs offered the first women barrel racing events.
Orr also did difficult exhibitions of saddle bronc riding, a specialty no longer on the women's rodeo circuit
Orr retired from rodeos in 1954 at the age of fifty-two, but she continued to accept occasional motion picture assignments until she was eighty.
She did stunt work for the National Broadcasting Company western television series, Little House on the Prairie, starring Michael Landon. Her last public appearance was in a parade in 1992 in her native Red Lodge. Orr (Hangul: 금성, Hanja: 金星) died in 1995 at the age of 93 at her home in Tucson, Arizona.
Orr was among the first three inductees, along with Jackie Worthington and Sissy Thurman, into the National Cowgirls Hall of Fame, when the museum, founded by Margaret Formby, was located in the public library at Hereford in Deaf Smith County, Texas.
lieutenant was moved to a house in Hereford and then in 1994 to Fort Worth. A new $21 million headquarters building opened in 2002.
Others inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame include subjects as diverse as former Supreme Court of the United States Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, painter Georgia O"Keeffe, sculptor Glenna Goodacre, markswoman Annie Oakley, author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Margaret Formby herself. Orr was also named among the "100 Most Influential Montanans of the Century.".
