On the morning of March 9 2005 the ranch girl from Kaycee was still holding his hand at the end of the ride. Chris LeDoux died at age fifty six inside Wyoming Medical Center in Casper with Peggy Rhoads LeDoux beside him after thirty three years of marriage that began with less than fifteen dollars in their pockets and cardboard boxes of homemade tapes in the back of a pickup truck.
Their story reached back to the spring of 1967 when Chris drove to the small town of Kaycee for a summer ranch job after graduating early from high school. He first spotted Peggy walking back toward the local high school from the cafeteria with her classmates. They met around 1970 at a rodeo in Kaycee and by the end of 1971 the young bareback rider with almost no money asked the Wyoming ranch girl to marry him.
Chris was born on October 2 1948 in Biloxi Mississippi as the son of Air Force officer Al LeDoux. The family moved around the country before Chris finished high school in Cheyenne Wyoming. During his junior year at Eastern New Mexico University he won the Intercollegiate National Bareback Riding Championship and he later endured a brief stint in the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class program that was halted by a rodeo knee injury before he returned to the circuit full time.
On January 4 1972 twenty three year old Chris married Peggy in a simple ceremony in Kaycee. Taking the hand of a professional bronc rider meant accepting a life without health insurance and without a steady paycheck or a pension and with the constant reality of broken bones and torn ligaments. Peggy saw the quiet steadiness in him even without an expensive ring.
In their earliest months as newlyweds Chris and Peggy traveled from one rodeo town to the next pulling a horse trailer behind a pickup truck and sometimes arriving at the next arena with less than fifteen dollars. To cover entry fees and gas and groceries between eight second rides Chris began writing songs in his truck about the cowboys and arenas he knew firsthand.
With help from his father Al who produced the sessions in Nashville and his mother Bonnie who painted artwork and handled orders from a basement office the family established an independent label called American Cowboy Songs. During the 1970s and 1980s Chris and Peggy sold cardboard boxes of eight track and cassette tapes from the back of their pickup at rodeos and western wear stores and truck stops across the West.
Marriage gave him a reason to push harder in the arena and in the recording studio because every ride and every song was a way to feed the family they were building.
After a string of near misses at the National Finals Rodeo Chris captured the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association World Bareback Riding Championship in Oklahoma City in December 1976. Four years later in 1980 battered by fractured bones and knocked out teeth and chronic spinal injuries from a decade in the chutes he retired from competitive rodeo to support his growing family on their sheep and cattle ranch near Kaycee.
While Chris built a touring band called Saddle Boogie and spent upwards of two hundred days a year playing state fairs and rodeo arenas and dance halls Peggy managed the working ranch and raised their five children Clay and Ned and Will and Beau and their daughter Cindy who was often known by her middle name Tessa. Through bitter Wyoming winters she handled livestock chores and kept the household running and helped pack mail order cassettes as independent sales slowly passed 250000 copies across twenty two self released albums.
Everything changed in the spring of 1989 when newcomer Garth Brooks released his debut single Much Too Young To Feel This Damn Old with a line about a worn out tape of Chris LeDoux. Months later Chris signed a major label contract with Liberty Records a division of Capitol and he earned a Gold certification and a Grammy nomination for the 1992 top ten duet Whatcha Gonna Do with a Cowboy.
Even as career sales climbed past five million albums Chris refused repeated industry invitations to relocate his family to Nashville. In a 2000 interview in Kaycee he pointed directly to Peggy sitting nearby and explained that she and the kids were the only reason he stayed grounded.
She and the kids were the only reason he stayed grounded and he could never picture living anywhere outside Wyoming.
Six months after that conversation in August 2000 Chris was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis a rare and life threatening liver disease. Peggy immediately stepped forward to be tested as a living organ donor alongside his sons and Garth Brooks before former rodeo rival Mark Mussmann proved a medical match and donated part of his liver that October.
When Chris was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in November 2004 Peggy stayed by his side through radiation treatments and remained at his bed in Casper until the end. The broke bronc rider who once proposed without a luxury jewel had built a life on rodeo winnings and songs and a Wyoming prairie promise and Peggy kept that promise beside him for thirty three years until the final ride was over.