Every Rodeo Event Was Somebody's Job First

On the Fourth of July, 1883, cowboys from a few ranch outfits around Pecos, Texas, stopped arguing about who had the best ropers and riders and settled it in the open, on the courthouse flat, with cash on the line. Pecos still calls it the world's first rodeo. Prescott, Arizona, which charged admission and handed out a trophy in 1888, disputes that. Deer Trail, Colorado, points to a bronc riding contest in 1869 and the title of "Champion Bronco Buster of the Plains," which the town's account gives to an Englishman named Emilnie Gardenshire.

All three can be right. The argument is more interesting than the answer.

Rodeo is the only major American sport where nearly every event was somebody's job first. Football borrowed from rugby. Baseball came from bat-and-ball games in the field. Rodeo came from payroll.

A Spanish word for a roundup

The word is Spanish. Rodear means to surround or encircle, and a rodeo was the roundup itself: gathering scattered cattle so they could be counted, branded and sorted. The vaqueros of Spanish and Mexican ranch country worked out most of the skills long before an Anglo cowboy picked up a rope. The lariat, the saddle horn you dally around, the hackamore. Mexico's own competitive tradition, the charreada, grew from the same roots and is still going.

After the Civil War, Texas had millions of longhorns and almost no market. The railheads in Kansas did. For about two decades, crews of young men drove herds north along trails like the Chisholm to towns like Abilene and Dodge City. The work was long and dull. Then it was suddenly dangerous.

When outfits met at a roundup or the end of a drive, the bragging started, and bragging among working men has always ended the same way. Prove it.

Every event was a chore

Look at the program at any rodeo and you're reading a job description.

• Saddle bronc riding is breaking a horse, which ranches needed done constantly and paid a specialist to do.
• Tie-down roping is catching a sick or injured calf on open range, getting it down and tied so you can doctor it, and doing it fast because you're alone and the calf disagrees.
• Team roping is the two-man version for bigger cattle. One ropes the head, one ropes the heels.
• Steer wrestling came from a cowboy getting a steer down by hand.

Now the honest concession. Bull riding was never a ranch job. Nobody on a payroll rode bulls to get anything done. It came into rodeo from Mexican riding traditions and from the plain fact that young men will ride anything if someone's watching. Barrel racing grew out of horsemanship contests, not cattle work. Purists can grumble. The crowds decided long ago.

The showmen, and the man who bit a steer

By the 1880s the open range was closing. Barbed wire and railroads meant fewer long drives. Just as the working cowboy was fading, the show business cowboy arrived. Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West opened in 1883 and carried roping, riding and trick shooting to the East Coast and Europe.

The Miller brothers' 101 Ranch in Oklahoma ran its own Wild West show, and its biggest draw was a Black cowboy from Texas named Bill Pickett. Pickett had watched ranch dogs hold cattle by biting their lips. So he jumped from his horse onto a steer, twisted its head, and bit its upper lip until it went down. He called it bulldogging. Rodeo dropped the biting and kept the rest. That's steer wrestling.

Pickett worked the 101 for most of his life. In 1932 a horse kicked him while he was working stock on that ranch, and he died of the injury. Decades later he became the first Black cowboy inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame. The event he invented is on the program everywhere.

The towns caught on fast. Cheyenne Frontier Days started in 1897. The Pendleton Round-Up in Oregon in 1910. Guy Weadick put on the first Calgary Stampede in 1912.

Pendleton, where the crowd kept score

Pendleton gave rodeo two of its best stories within five years, and both are about the judges getting it wrong and the people getting it right.

In 1911 the saddle bronc final came down to three men. John Spain, who was white. Jackson Sundown, a Nez Perce rider. And George Fletcher, a Black cowboy who'd grown up near the Umatilla reservation. The judges gave it to Spain. Much of the crowd thought Fletcher had won. Sheriff Til Taylor took Fletcher's hat, cut it into pieces, sold them as souvenirs and handed Fletcher the money. Pendleton has called him the people's champion ever since.

Sundown came back. He'd been a boy among the Nez Perce during the flight of 1877 and made it to Canada when much of his people didn't. In 1916, past fifty, an age when most bronc riders have been retired a long time, he won the Pendleton saddle bronc title outright. No argument that year.

Character shows up in rodeo the way it does in battle. You can't fake eight seconds.

The day the cowboys sat down

For years the riders took the risks and the promoters took the money. Purses were thin. Rules changed from town to town.

In 1936, at a big rodeo in the Boston Garden, the cowboys refused to compete unless the purses went up. The promoter, Colonel W.T. Johnson, gave in. They organized afterward and called themselves the Cowboys' Turtle Association, because they'd been slow to stick their necks out. It became the Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1945 and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1975.

That's a very cowboy way to start a union. No speeches. They just sat on the fence until the man with the checkbook came over.

The women who rode the rough stock

Women were in rodeo from the beginning, and not just as trick riders. Lucille Mulhall roped steers against men in the early 1900s and beat a lot of them. Women rode bucking horses at Pendleton and Cheyenne.

Then in 1929 Bonnie McCarroll was thrown at Pendleton. She was riding with her stirrups hobbled, tied under the horse's belly, a practice that kept her from coming off cleanly. She died days later. Pendleton dropped women's bronc riding, and over time most big rodeos followed.

The women didn't go home. In 1948 a group of them met in San Angelo, Texas, and formed the Girls Rodeo Association, now the Women's Professional Rodeo Association. Barrel racing became their event, and today it's one of the most watched runs of the night. Their grandmothers would've recognized the grit. If you've read about the pioneer women who wrote it all down, you've met their family.

Freckles and Tornado

Rodeo needed a championship, and the National Finals Rodeo started in 1959 in Dallas. It moved to Oklahoma City, and in December 1967 it gave the sport its best night.

A bull named Tornado had bucked off more than two hundred riders. Nobody had covered him. He drew Freckles Brown, a former world champion who was forty-six years old, which in bull riding is roughly the age of a cathedral. Brown rode him to the whistle. The arena came apart.

He didn't win the title that year. Nobody remembers who did.

The bill always comes due

Rodeo doesn't pretend the cost isn't real, and you shouldn't either.

Lane Frost was the 1987 world champion bull rider, a polite kid from Oklahoma whom other riders genuinely liked. On July 30, 1989, at Cheyenne Frontier Days, he rode a bull named Takin' Care of Business to the whistle and got off. The bull turned and hit him. He got up, took a few steps, and collapsed. He was twenty-five.

After his death, protective vests spread through bull riding. They've saved riders since. They didn't save him. In 1992, twenty bull riders broke off and started the Professional Bull Riders, betting that the event the ranches never needed could carry a whole tour on its own. They were right.

The National Finals moved to Las Vegas in 1985, and that's where most people see rodeo now. Big lights. Big money. Same eight seconds. It's one more chapter in the story of the men who built your ordinary Tuesday: work nobody thanked them for, turned into something worth a ticket.

Go see a small one

Skip Vegas for your first. Find a county fair or a small-town rodeo this summer and buy the cheap seats near the chutes.

Watch the pickup men, the riders on horseback who pull a bronc rider off when the whistle blows. Watch the bullfighters step between a downed rider and twelve hundred pounds of bad temper, for a fraction of the prize money. Watch the cowboy who gets thrown in the first second, picks up his hat, and then climbs the chute to help pull the next guy's rope tight.

He's competing against that man. He's helping him anyway.

That part was never in the program. It came from the ranch too.