Deborah Copenhaver Fellows of Sonoita, Arizona, is a horsewoman from stock that knows the essence of fillies well, because it is in her blood. Daughter of world champion bronc rider and lifelong horseman Deb Copenhaver, and fourth-generation descendant of horse and cattle ranchers, she rides good horses. As a sculptor, she has shown the world the essence of the horse as she knows and esteems him as mankind’s old maestro. Her sculpture of horses and horsemen could not be truer if she mixed her blood with the clay, because it comes straight from her heart.
Deborah was born in 1948 and raised on a ranch near Post Falls, Idaho. Her family used horses to make a living, and she has fed, trained and cared for them since she began to walk. As a child, she rode Bay Mare down from the ranch’s mountain headquarters to meet the school bus, then tied her reins over the mare’s neck and turned her loose. Bay Mare always went straight home. The tied reins on her neck showed Deborah’s folks that she had boarded the bus safely.
Deborah lived on the bare backs of horses. She was given her first saddle for Christmas when she was 6. Before that, her folks feared that she would fall and hang to a saddle. Bareback, she fell free of the horse. She could not be watched all the time, and she liked to chase after coyotes through the timber and across ditches and deadfalls at a dead run.
Her dad encouraged her to observe people and animals closely, so she developed a good nose for cowboys and horses.
“Dad kept mares and studs and raised their colts,” Deborah says. “He started colts early. When he weaned them, he regularly shut them up in box stalls to keep them close. When it was time to ride, he legged me up on the saddle and led them out. When I was 8, I competed as a barrel racer.
“We never had snotty animals. We dealt with them morning and night from the time they hit the ground. Kids and horses have a special way of getting along with each other. Put a kid on a horse, and they both immediately look for a way to partner up.”
Her dad rodeoed full time, but he kept an eye out for good horses and brought many home. In 1960, when Deborah was 12, he bought a bulldogging horse named Pandy Man from Bob A. Robinson. “We had only owned him two weeks when Dad matched him in Spokane for 220 yards against Lambert’s Teddy McCue, a racehorse,” Deborah says. “Pandy Man outran him going away.” Deborah barrel-raced on him until, when she was 16, he crippled himself on a nail and had to be retired.
In 1966, Deborah enrolled as a freshman at Washington State University. To help her financially, Deb gave her a sorrel stud named King A’Le Bar, “Little King” for short. “Not everybody can say that a stud horse earned her expenses,” Deborah says. “My dad stood him at stud at a vet clinic in Pullman, Washington, and I rodeoed on him. He paid off, too. Dad had him tuned up and ready to perform. We didn’t like the way other barrel racers whipped and spurred the life out of their horses in a race. Dad fixed Little King so that all I had to do was wave my hat at him when it was time to go. We won every race we entered.
“Dad put stakes in the sides of our pickup and nailed boards to them, then we just clucked at Little King to load him. The first rodeo I went to, I drove 50 miles to Umatilla, Oregon, with him in the back with his head over the cab. At the rodeo grounds, I pulled up beside a fancy-dressed little blonde who was trying to unload her horse from a new trailer that matched her new Cadillac.
“I turned Little King around in the pickup and clucked him out, then outran everybody in the barrel racing. When I loaded him to go home, the blonde was trying to load her horse and yelling at her mom. I clucked Little King into the pickup in front of them and drove away and she was still yelling at her mom.
“When I got home, my dad was in bed, so I walked Little King into the house and we stuck our heads into his room. I switched on the light and said, ‘We won.’ My dad’s grin is big, but that night it was the biggest I ever saw.”
The last time Deb Copenhaver competed as a bronc rider was in Newport, Washington, in the summer of 1966, just before Deborah started college. He won it and Deborah won the barrel racing on Little King.
“One day, while I was away, some bulldoggers practiced all day on Little King and hurt his back,” Deborah says. “I had to retire him. That broke my heart, but it changed my life. I turned to sculpture, and it has taken me around the world.”
Deborah’s mother had seen that she had talent as an artist, so she helped her enroll for her sophomore year in Fort Wright College of the Holy Names, a Catholic university. Sister Paula Mary Turnbull became her mentor. When Deborah met the lady, she wore a nun’s habit and a welder’s hood and sculpted with a welding rod. Deborah sculpted a bust of an old cattle buyer who wore a look that told the world that he always hid his hole card.
For Deborah’s senior art credits, she and her classmates accompanied Sister Paula Mary to Italy, where for six months they studied sculpture in Florence, Rome and Venice. “Sister ran us around the old cities like a hen with a bunch of chicks,” Deborah says. “And she lit fires in everybody who studied with her.”
Deborah learned on that trip that her talent would be the mainstay of her life. “It’s important for young people to travel the world to study and learn to do the work that suits them best,” she says. “They may even find that the great big world and its goals are not unconquerable.”
After graduation from Fort Wright College, Deborah launched an immediately successful interior design business in Spokane. Five years later and busy with success, she had set aside horses and art. “I seemed to have everything my own way, but I would look out the window of my office in the Davenport Hotel and see horse trailers go by and yearn to go with them,” she says.
In 1975, Deborah was hired to manage Horse World, an indoor arena in Seaside, Oregon. Her brother, Jeff, a Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) calf roper, came to stay with her. She found him 25 head of practice calves, and he roped and tied 100 head a day for three months. When he left for the PRCA winter run to Denver, Fort Worth, Houston and Phoenix, Deborah quit her job and went with him.
They went broke in Houston. Deborah hauled the horses ahead to Phoenix and looked for another job. “In the bottom of my heart I had saved my talent for sculpture,” she says. “I didn’t have anything else. I had to bring it out and use it, or starve.”
She took a job as head wrangler of the Shadow Valley Guest Ranch in Prescott, near the Phippen foundry in Skull Valley, and she plunged into her art. Jeff went on to win the 1975 PRCA world calf roping championship.
Deborah’s mother, Leslie Dinnison, and stepfather, Dean Dinnison, were her chief advisers. Dean taught communications at Gonzaga University. He advised her to focus on becoming a good artist, then to learn good business practices so she could make it pay.
“It’s important for young people to travel the world to study andlearn to do the work that suits them best,” she says. “They may even find that the great big world and its goals are not unconquerable.”
When Bing Crosby, one of Gonzaga’s most famous alumni, died, Dean told Deborah that the university would want to erect a monument to him. Through Dean, Deborah wrangled an appointment with the Rev. Arthur Dussault, vice president of Gonzaga. She walked into the man’s office and said: “Father, I want to do a monument of Bing Crosby for your university. I haven’t ever done a larger-than-life statue, but I can do it.” Dussault said: “I believe you can, little girl. I believe you can.” He granted her the commission.
When the statue was finished in 1979, Dussault flew Deborah to New York, where it was cast at the Roman Bronze Works. “My first monument was cast in the same foundry that cast Charlie Russell’s and Frederic Remington’s bronzes,” she says. “I saw my dream come true.”
To pay bills, she has sculpted other heartfelt subjects, such as the Inland Northwest Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Spokane and the Montana State Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Missoula, but horses, horsemen and pioneer women are the subjects she loves best. Today, her sculptures and monuments grace plazas, campuses, private homes and state parks all over the United States. In February 2015, her monumental sculpture of Barry Goldwater, commissioned by the state of Arizona, was unveiled in National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
In a letter of support for Deborah’s nomination to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Don Hedgpeth, a columnist for The American Quarter Horse Journal, wrote, “Deborah can, and does, hold her own equally well on a working cow outfit, in a roping arena or amidst the glitz of a swank art gallery affair. She does it all with an abundance of natural grace, style and enthusiasm.”
In 1990, Deborah married artist Fred Fellows. She and Fred did day work on the Vera Earl Ranch near their home in Sonoita. Asked if his wife is a good hand, Fred answers, “On the Vera Earl, we gathered a huge, high-horned Brahman cow who liked to quit the bunch and rim out. We held her in the bunch until we reached the pen. Deborah and I had dismounted when the old sister bowed her neck, busted through eight men and left. My horse was the closest to Deborah, so she mounted him and disappeared over a rim after the cow. When she didn’t show up in 15 minutes, I said I was sure she knew better than to try to rope the cow. After another 20 minutes, I began to worry. She was well mounted, because my horse was a big, stout rope horse, but I sure didn’t want her to tie on to that cow. I lengthened the stirrups on her saddle, mounted her horse and went to look for her. When I saw her, she was way off in the distance, headed my way, alone.
“When we met up, I asked, ‘Where’s my rope?’
“She said, ‘Tied to a tree.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’
“She said, ‘Tied to a cow that’s snubbed to a tree.’
“The ground around the tree looked like a horseshoe pit. The cow was having such a fit, she’d dug a trench around it. When I saw how much bigger and ornerier she was up close, I was just glad I got my wife and horse back.”
Though Deborah and Fred no longer rope every day, roping and riding remain their passions. And the Fellowses donate their art to raise money for the Arizona Cowpuncher’s Scholarship Organization to help the children of working cowboys go to college.
Deborah often quotes her dad’s version of Proverbs 22:6: “Bring kids up the way you want them to be, and they’ll someday make it back to you.” She has been out on a big circle, but now she can look forward to a life full of the work she wants to do. Also, her dad promises that she will inherit her family’s D Bar D brand.
Is Deborah Fellows a happy woman? In answer to that, she likes to apply Margot Liberty’s Epitaph to herself: “She never shook the stars / from their appointed courses, / But she loved good men / and she rode good horses.”