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HomeCommunityShiloh Martin named 2022-2023 Cavalcade Queen

Shiloh Martin named 2022-2023 Cavalcade Queen

Martin, Osage, intends to compete in the Miss Rodeo USA pageant after she completes her royal duties as Cavalcade Queen

Shiloh Martin has been competing in rodeo pageants since she was 7, but the biggest challenge she faced this year when vying to become the 76th Cavalcade Queen was her ride: Four months before the rodeo, her faithful steed Tractor pulled up lame.

“I didn’t have a horse to ride,” Martin said. “We had some friends who had an old mare, but she had never competed in a queen contest or done any fancy moves.”

Martin borrowed Leo Gypsy Lou, a 21-year-old registered Paint mare that had been a trail horse and child’s playday mount, and got to work. Every day, they paired up for an hour and a half – and on July 24, no small miracle occurred: They took the top honor in the queen contest at what is billed as the world’s largest rodeo.

“To have her go from 0 to 100, to have her ready, was so much more important to me than winning queen,” Martin said.

Martin appears to be the first member of the Osage Nation to be named Cavalcade queen; at least two other Native Americans, Eusty Barbee and Shelby Bute, have worn the crown – and Barbee’s daughter Hannah was a finalist this year – but they are respectively Cherokee and Seneca-Cayuga. No one could remember a previous winner who was Osage in the Cavalcade’s 76-year history, including the elder Barbee, who is considered the savviest expert on Cavalcade queens.

Martin is the daughter of Jay and Stephanie Martin of Burbank. Her dad, a descendant of allottee Alex Cannon of Grayhorse, is a farrier. She developed her love of horses and rodeo while watching him work at professional rodeo events.

“He grew up cowboying and shod his first horse when he was 13,” Martin said. He and her mom, “a city girl from Blackwell,” also contributed to her rodeo habit by buying the horse named Tractor 27 years ago, when they were dating.

“I’ve been riding him since I was born,” Martin said. “My dad tried to sell him a few times but he’d buck off strangers so we had to keep him.”

Martin, 21, is also the current Skiatook Roundup Club Queen and will continue her duties until December. She has a long track record in rodeo royalty. In 2014, she was the youngest to be a top-three finalist in the Cavalcade queen contest at age 13, and five years later, in 2019, she was the first runner-up. In 2017, she won the National Little Britches Rodeo Association queen title, a nine-day marathon of horsemanship, modeling, public speaking and quizzing about everything from rodeo rules to equine health. In that contest, she had to be able to ride any horse a stock contractor put her on – a challenge that the Cavalcade doesn’t replicate.

Challenges don’t faze her, however: When she was 19, Martin became the youngest licensed insurance producer in Oklahoma, a job she still holds with State Farm while attending Northern Oklahoma University, where she majors in political science and minors in mass communication with a plan to go into broadcast journalism – after she gets a master’s degree. She also works as a photographer.

“The Osage Nation is the only reason I’ve been able to go to college at all,” she said, thankful for the education stipends the tribe offers. Before college, she was homeschooled but did attend Shidler High School for her senior year, graduating in 2019.

Her rodeo queen days are far from over with the big win at the Cavalcade. She intends to go on to compete in the Miss Rodeo USA pageant after she completes her royal duties as Cavalcade queen, which entails many public appearances at Pawhuska Chamber of Commerce and other events.

Her rock and her greatest role model, she said, is her grandmother, Donnis Cannon, who lives on her allotment in the Big Bend near Ralston.

“My grandma is strong willed,” she said. “There’s not a single person who is going to tell her what to do. She’s giving even though she’s had so much taken from her in her life.

“She’s tough. She lives on. She has overcome her circumstances. “If I’m half the woman she is, I’ll be doing well.”

Author

  • Louise Red Corn

    Title: Reporter

    Email: louise.redcorn@osagenation-nsn.gov

    Twitter: @louiseredcorn

    Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

    Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

    After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

    When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

    In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

    Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

    Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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Louise Red Corn
Louise Red Cornhttps://osagenews.org

Title: Reporter

Email: louise.redcorn@osagenation-nsn.gov

Twitter: @louiseredcorn

Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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