Rodeo began as ranch work nobody paid for. Spanish-speaking vaqueros supplied the rope, the saddle, the spurs and the word itself, and by the 1880s towns were selling tickets to watch cowboys do their jobs. These stories run from a cowboy tournament in Prescott in 1888 to a world title won in a baseball park, by way of a hat cut into souvenirs.
Every tile in a Rodeo game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Events
nine stories
1The number that decides every roughstock ride
On the tile: Eight seconds
In bareback riding, saddle bronc riding and bull riding a cowboy has one job before anything else counts: stay aboard for eight seconds, using only one hand. If his free hand touches the animal, he is disqualified on the spot. Rodeo has its own verb for making the whistle. The ProRodeo Hall of Fame calls it covering, and offers the example sentence: he covered all three broncs he rode last weekend. Come off at seven seconds and the score is zero, however good the ride looked.
A bronc rider's score can be gone before his horse finishes its first jump. The rule is called marking out. Leaving the chute, he must have his spurs set above the horse's shoulders and hold them there until the animal's front feet come back down. Do it and he has marked the horse out. Miss it by a moment and he has missed him out, and the ride is disqualified no matter what happens in the seven seconds that follow.
At a regular-season rodeo, two judges watch a roughstock ride, and each awards up to twenty-five points for the cowboy and up to twenty-five for the animal. A hundred is perfect, and half of it is earned by a horse or bull that will never collect. The arrangement has a mercy built in. If the animal does not buck to specification, or the rider's equipment fails, the judges may offer him a re-ride on a different one: a clean slate, and a second chance at the same money.
There is no saddle in bareback riding and no rein to pull. A rider's entire connection to the horse is the riggin': a molded piece of leather cinched around the animal's girth with a stiff handhold on top, built like the handle of a suitcase and custom-fitted to one man's grip. He gets one hand into it and nothing else. Judges want his toes turned out and his spurs dragging up the horse's shoulders, and they reward exposure: the willingness to lean far back and take whatever comes.
A tie-down roper runs with a short looped rope held in his teeth. It is called a pigging string. After he catches the calf, dismounts and lays it down by hand, he gathers any three legs and finishes with the knot rodeo calls a hooey, then throws his hands up to stop the clock. The run is not over. He remounts, rides forward to slacken the rope and waits six seconds. If the calf kicks free, he gets no time at all.
In the timed events the calf or steer gets a head start, and the length of it is set by the size of the arena. The roper waits in a three-sided pen called the box, closed off by a rope barrier that releases automatically once the animal reaches the mark. Attached to that barrier is a piece of string called a pigtail, and it breaks if the horse comes out too soon. Ten seconds go onto the time, which in an event decided in single digits is not a penalty so much as a trip home.
Two cowboys break from the box in steer wrestling, and only one of them is on the clock. The second is the hazer. He rides the far side of the steer to keep it running straight so his partner can leave the saddle and take the horns. He gets no time, no score and no title, and by custom he takes about a fourth of the payoff if the steer wrestler places. A bad hazer can end a run nobody will blame him for.
Team roping is the only team event in professional rodeo. The header throws first, over the steer's horns or head, and turns the animal; the heeler comes in behind and catches both hind feet. Each wraps his rope around the saddle horn, a move called a dally, and the clock stops when the two horses face each other with the ropes drawn tight. Catch the heels before the header has changed the steer's direction and the run is a crossfire: no time at all, however clean it looked.
Barrel racing looks simple from the grandstand. Cross the line at a run, turn three barrels in a cloverleaf, come home. The margins are not simple. Riders finish so close together that electronic timers accurate to a hundredth of a second are required to separate them. Brushing a barrel costs nothing at all. Tipping one over adds five seconds, which in a race settled by hundredths is less a penalty than the end of the afternoon.
1The cowboy who invented an event by watching dogs
On the tile: Bill Pickett1905
Bill Pickett was born in Travis County, Texas, around 1870, and took his signature move from herd dogs, which controlled cattle by biting them. He would ride alongside a steer, grab the horns, twist the neck and bite its nose or upper lip until it went over on its side. The Oklahoma Historical Society calls him the originator of rodeo steer wrestling. He joined the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show in 1905 and performed with it for more than a quarter-century. The biting is long gone; the event is still on every program.
Trick roping arrived in American arenas from Mexico, carried by a charro from Puebla named Vicente Oropeza, born in 1858. Buffalo Bill's Wild West hired Oropeza's charros in 1894, and rodeo gained a new event on the spot. In 1900 he was declared Champion of the World at a contest in New York City. Will Rogers, who built a career on the same skill, said that "no other roper had such accuracy and style as Vicente Oropeza."
The story goes that Theodore Roosevelt, watching young Lucille Mulhall ride at her family's Oklahoma ranch, told her that if she could rope a wolf he would invite her to his inaugural parade, and that she came back three hours later having done it. He is also credited with calling her the first cowgirl. The Oklahoma Historical Society notes that the word had been in use since the year she was born. What Mulhall did was give it a national meaning.
Jackson Sundown, a Nez Perce rider born in Montana around 1863, was said to be a nephew of Chief Joseph. He entered the bucking horse competition at the Pendleton Round-Up in 1914, in 1915 and again in 1916. The third year was the one that counted: at an age when most cowboys had long since retired, the fifty-three-year-old took the trophy saddle. He was the first Native American to win a major rodeo championship.
Women who rode bucking horses in the early 1900s usually rode hobbled, with the stirrups tied together under the horse's belly to help them stay in the saddle. Fannie Sperry Steele would not have it. She rode slick, the way the men did, for her entire career. At the Calgary Stampede in 1912 she climbed onto a bronc called Red Wing and came off with the title of Lady Bucking Horse Champion of the World, a thousand dollars, a gold belt buckle and a saddle tooled with roses.
Tad Lucas was born in Cody, Nebraska, in 1902 and became one of the best-known trick riders in rodeo, working at a gallop, hanging upside down or even under the horse. At the Madison Square Garden rodeo she took the trick riding title five times. The Garden's all-around cowgirl prize was a ten thousand dollar trophy put up by MGM, and the rule was that whoever won it three years in succession could keep it. Beginning in 1928, Lucas won it three years in succession.
Myrtis Dightman was born in Crockett, Texas, in 1935 and reached the 1964 National Finals Rodeo as an injury replacement for Carl Nafzger, which made him the first Black cowboy to compete there. Two years later he qualified on his own, and he came back to the finals six more times. He won the bull riding at the Calgary Stampede in 1971 and tied for the Cheyenne Frontier Days title in 1972. Rodeo took to calling him the Jackie Robinson of bull riding.
Charles Sampson grew up in Watts, in Los Angeles, with twelve brothers and sisters, about as far from a working ranch as an American childhood gets. In 1982, at twenty-five, he was crowned world champion bull rider, the first Black contender to win an event championship in professional rodeo. Eighteen years earlier Myrtis Dightman had become the first Black cowboy to reach the National Finals, and no Black rider had taken a world title in the interval. Sampson is in the National Rodeo Hall of Fame.
The all-around world championship is the one title a specialist cannot win: it goes to the cowboy who earns the most across more than one event. In 1999 Fred Whitfield took it in the same season as his fourth calf roping world title, becoming the first African American cowboy to win rodeo's all-around. He had been a world champion since 1991, and he kept roping: seven roping world titles in all, the last of them in 2005.
1Three towns claim the first rodeo, and all are right
On the tile: Prescott1869-1888
Deer Trail, in Colorado Territory, held a bronco-busting contest on July 4, 1869. Pecos, Texas, held a rodeo in 1883 and was the first to hand out prizes. Prescott, Arizona, put on a cowboy tournament on July 4, 1888 and was the first to charge admission. A cowboy named Juan Leivas took that first title, and the Arizona Journal-Miner printed his name. Prescott calls the day the birthday of professional rodeo, and it registered the name World's Oldest Rodeo with the U.S. Patent Office in 1985.
Cheyenne Frontier Days began as a train-ride idea. Warren Richardson, its first chairman, said it was born on the train between Cheyenne and Greeley, Colorado, and credited it to Colonel E. A. Slack, editor of the Cheyenne Daily Sun Leader, who wanted a western show that could rival Greeley's Potato Day celebration. The first Frontier Day came that fall, in 1897, with cow-pony and wild-horse races, bucking horses and stagecoaches, and race purses running from twenty-five to seventy-five dollars. A town with no potatoes had settled on cowboys instead.
George Fletcher had been the Pendleton Round-Up's first Black competitor in 1910, placing fourth in saddle bronc. In the 1911 final the crowd was certain he had won, and the judges named John Spain champion and Fletcher runner-up. So the local sheriff took Fletcher's hat, cut it into pieces and sold them to the grandstand as souvenirs. He collected nearly seven hundred dollars and handed it over. The press called Fletcher the People's Champion of 1911.
The saddle bronc championship at the first Calgary Stampede, in 1912, came down to a horse named Cyclone, who had bucked off some hundred and thirty riders before that afternoon. Tom Three Persons of the Kainai First Nation rode him to a standstill and took the most coveted prize of the meeting. It did not open the sport to him. Barred by the racism of the day, he could not compete in the United States, and turned instead to breeding cattle and thoroughbreds in southern Alberta.
Jesse Stahl left Tennessee for California and made his name on bucking horses, at a time when the judging was as much of an obstacle as the stock. His most famous ride came at the Salinas rodeo in 1912, on a horse called Glass Eye. The National Rodeo Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1979, puts the career plainly: he placed at or near the top at the major rodeos, New York, Pendleton and Salinas, but was usually under-ranked because of his color.
In 1931 seven men met for lunch at the Texas State Hotel in Houston with a modest goal: keep the Gulf Coast cattle business alive. What they founded was a fat stock show, and the first one opened in 1932 in the Democratic Convention Hall. There was no rodeo at all. The rodeo, the horse show and the downtown parade were not added until 1938. The result now bills itself as the world's largest livestock show, carnival, horse show and rodeo.
Lu Vason founded the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo in 1984 and opened it in Denver, naming it for the Texas cowboy credited with originating bulldogging. His aim was to entertain rodeo fans and to educate them about how much of western culture Black cowboys had built. The rodeo has toured the country ever since, mixing competition with reenactments and history, and it is the nation's longest-running touring Black rodeo.
Phil Ragsdale, Emperor I of Reno's Silver Dollar Court, hit on the idea in 1975 of raising money with a gay rodeo. The earliest date the Washoe County Fairgrounds had open was October 2, 1976. When he told area ranchers who was sponsoring the event, nearly three dozen of them refused to rent him animals. The first Reno Gay Rodeo opened anyway, with five cows, ten calves, a pig and one Shetland pony. About a hundred and fifty people came, and word spread to gay communities throughout the West.
Native cowboys had been competing on reservation circuits for generations before anyone organized them, and the first all-Indian rodeo association formed in 1957. In 1976 a set of regional associations combined into one body, and the Indian National Finals Rodeo was held for the first time that year in Salt Lake City, run by eight commissioners. It has grown into a championship that draws qualifiers from tribes across the United States and Canada.
Almost everything in the arena came by way of Spanish-speaking cattle workers. The vaquero, the man working cattle on horseback, handed on the riding, the roping and the branding, along with the rope, the saddle, the spurs and the chaps. He handed on the name too. Rodeo means roundup, the ordinary chore of gathering scattered cattle, which is exactly what all of this was before anybody thought to sell a ticket to watch it.
Rodeo winners once collected ribbons and medals, which went into a drawer and stayed there. Then came the trophy buckle, and a champion could wear the prize every day for the rest of his life. Silversmiths turned them into small engraved plates of history, carrying a name, an event and a year. The Hollywood saddle maker Edward Bohlin, who outfitted the movie cowboys, built a company that turned buckles into wearable works of art.
The strap cinched around a bucking horse or bull is widely thought to be tied somewhere delicate. It is not. The ProRodeo Hall of Fame describes a soft strap lined with sheepskin or neoprene, set roughly where a person wears a belt, and PRCA rules require that lining. The PRCA states that flank straps do not touch an animal's genitals, and that they are tightened only enough to encourage kicking out behind rather than hopping around the arena. Overtightened, it adds, the strap would leave the animal refusing to move at all.
A bronc rider who has made his eight seconds is still aboard a bucking horse with no way down. Two mounted cowboys solve that. The pickup men ride in alongside at speed, let him swing across to them or drop clear, unbuckle the horse's flank strap and walk the animal out the exit gate. They are not scored and they are not competing. They are the reason a ride simply ends instead of continuing until something gives.
Cody Lambert's younger brother rode racehorses, and jockeys had started wearing protective vests. Their mother kept pestering him to get one for bull riding. Recovering from an injury in 1992, he worked out a version light enough for roughstock, with Velcro straps meant to tear open if a horn caught them. The prototype debuted at Salinas in 1993. He was the only rider wearing one at the National Finals Rodeo; a year later thirteen others had them. Vests are required at Professional Bull Riders events now, and nearly every bull rider has one.
In 1936 a group of cowboys and cowgirls walked out on Colonel W. T. Johnson, one of the biggest rodeo producers of the day, and boycotted his next show at the Boston Garden until he listened to them. They wanted better prize money and judges who understood the sport. Johnson gave in. The organization they then had to name became the Cowboys' Turtle Association: slow to act, they said, but they had finally stuck their necks out. It is the PRCA today.
Wyoming drivers have carried a bucking horse and rider on their license plates since 1936, and most of them will tell you the horse is Steamboat, the famous outlaw bronc. The state's own historians say otherwise. Secretary of State Lester Hunt, who chose the drawing by the Denver artist Allen True, said the horse was no particular horse. The earlier emblem, a World War I insignia drawn by a Wyoming soldier in France, was based on his own horse, Redwing.
Jim Shoulders owned a bull named Tornado who stayed unridden through 220 attempts. In December 1967, at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City, forty-six-year-old Freckles Brown stayed on him. Only three other men managed it before Shoulders retired the bull in 1969. Tornado is buried on the grounds of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, near the graves of the bucking horses Midnight and Five Minutes to Midnight, in what amounts to a cemetery for rodeo animals.
On February 28, 1948, thirty-eight women from Texas and Oklahoma met at the St. Angelus Hotel in San Angelo, Texas, and founded the Girls Rodeo Association. They wrote rules for all-girl rodeos and pressed for standard women's events at the men's rodeos as well. The first year brought seventy-four members and twenty-nine thousand dollars in prize money. By 1990 there were eighteen hundred members and more than two million dollars. The group was renamed the WPRA in 1982.