Betty Lou Martin honored as 2022 Elgin Stampede Grand Marshal

Published 9:00 am Thursday, June 16, 2022

ELGIN — Betty Lou Martin’s memories of growing up in Elgin are intertwined with the Elgin Stampeders.

The group members are honoring their longtime member as the Elgin Stampede Grand Marshal to preside over next month’s 75th Elgin Stampede and the Stampede Grand Parade.

“This honor is humbling,” Martin said. “I’m very thankful. It’s very nice.”

Martin was just a year old when her parents, Ernie and Frances Adams, became charter members of the Elgin Stampeders organization. Many years later Ernie and Frances were inducted into the lifetime registry of the Legends of the Elgin Stampede.

Since her parents were very active in the Elgin Stampede, it was only natural that their three daughters, Farrell, Betty Lou and Teri, were also involved. Martin’s earliest memories include Stampede work days over the weekends, when breakfast was prepared for the workers on an old cookstove.

At age 7, she remembered working with other Stampeders’ kids as they cleaned up the racetrack in preparation for the Elgin Stampede horse race.

“All of us kids picked up rocks on the horse racing track,” she said. “We had a track back then where they had relay races and all kinds of races on it. That track had a lot of rocks in it, and all the kids, not just me, were given the job of going around and picking up the rocks on it.”

The track went around the outside of the arena.

“It went in front of the grandstands and then behind the bucking shoots and finally came back around,” she said. “We had races for years and other clubs would come down and race. Clubs from Walla Walla and La Grande and other places came for the horse races. They did chariot races and our first chariot we ever had was made out of plywood.”

Even more exciting times came to her personally when she was age 14. That’s when Martin started riding in the drill team and competing in various events.

“My sisters and I all had horses and rode in the drill as teenagers when we reached that age,” she said.

Martin also rode her horse on the camping trips the Stampeders organized after the rodeo. One of her fondest memories is going into the Minam River country on horseback after the rodeo was over for the year. Most members went, and all gathered at the Anderson Ranch. Betty Lou has many fun memories of her times riding and camping with the Stampeders.

“Sometimes we’d start out of Wallowa and come back around the Minam that way, and other times we’d go to Joseph and come back around,” she said. “We were usually in there a week at a time. One time we had 30 head of horses, figuring a horse for every two people. Then we’d set up camp with tents and campfires. If the river wasn’t too swift or cold, we’d go swimming too.”

Long history

Martin has a rich heritage with the Elgin Stampeders. Her older sister, Farrell, was on the Elgin Stampede royalty court in 1955. Betty Lou was on the royalty court in 1962, and her younger sister, Teri, was the royalty court in 1964 at the Eastern Oregon Livestock Show in Union.

“Years ago, we would select and support a girl to represent Elgin on the Union court and Teri was one of those girls,” she said.

In 1970, Martin married her first husband, Marvin Erickson, and together they became very active with the Elgin Stampeders. Erickson acted as president of the Elgin Stampeders organization in 1985.

Despite her job as a registered nurse for 45 years, Martin also made the time to chair many work committees for the Elgin Stampede. She was deeply involved with the annual crab feed, the beer garden, and she also was an organizer of the Stampede Grand Parade.

“A friend, Cheryl Coe, and I were head of the parade for several years,” she said. “One year, the girl who was supposed to put the parade on called me at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and she told me her house just burned down and everything she had for the parade was in it.”

Martin told her not to worry about it, that she and Coe would do the parade for her.

“We were glad to be able to help her,” Martin said.

Lara Moore, Elgin Stampeders’ secretary, highlighted Martin’s family heritage with the Elgin Stampeders.

“In 1990, Betty Lou’s mother, Frances Adams, was honored as the Elgin Stampede Grand Marshal, and that same year, her daughter, Sheri Lou, was the Elgin Stampede Rodeo Queen,” Moore said. “In 2019, her granddaughter, Tymra Anderson, was one of the Elgin Stampede princesses, so Betty Lou’s family was deeply rooted in the Elgin Stampeders organization over the decades.”

Martin looks back at those early years with the Stampeders with a warm fondness.

“It was a simpler time,” she said. “There were always dances or riding events and work days, where people came to work, and have a great time just being together. Back then it was more of a family thing.”