IN THEIR SEARCH FOR jollification, Western settlers developed rodeo, an orginal sport probably more indigenous to this continent than baseball. Rodeo had its simple beginnings in the roundup camps of cowboys, but as an organized sport it was nurtured in the old Wild West shows.
The first modern rodeo may have been the rehearsals held at North Platte, Nebraska, in 1883, by Buffalo Bill Cody for his Wild West Show. A born showman, Cody was also a skilled rider and marksman. He had accumulated several thousand dollars touring with a stage show, and now advertised throughout the West that he was organizing a company of “cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, famous riders and expert lasso throwers.” So many applied for jobs as “actors” that he arranged a roping and riding competition to select the best. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show opened at the fair grounds in Omaha on May 17, 1883.
Many a Western town and city, however, lays claim to the honor of holding the first rodeo. In 1847, Mayne Reid reported that he witnessed a roping contest at Santa Fe. According to newspaper accounts, Cheyenne had some unorganized cowboy contests in 1872. Colorado’s state fair of 1876, held in Denver, featured a race between a cowboy and a horse. Winfield, Kansas, claims the first rodeo was an exhibition held there by the 101 Ranch in 1882.
The same summer that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show took to the road, 1883, the first roping and riding tournament was held in Texas. Some cowboys got into a friendly argument in a Pecos City saloon as to whether the Hashknife, the Mill Iron, or the Lazy Y had the best bronc riders and steer ropers. To settle the argument, they decided to hold a public contest on July 4th. Using the courthouse yard as a corral and Pecos City’s main street for an arena, the cowboys put on quite a show.
In their search for amusement. Western settlers developed rodeo, an original sport as American as baseball. Rodeo began in the roundup camps of cowboys, but before becoming an organized sport it was nurtured in the Wild West shows. The first modern rodeo may have been the rehearsals held at North Platte, Nebraska, in 1883 by Buffalo Bill Cody to select “cowboys, Mexican vaqueros famous riders and expert lasso throwers” for his Wild West Show. (Poster by Courier Lithograph Company, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Rodeo’s real origins, of course, were in the roundup camps of the cowboys. Even before the great cattle drives up the Chisholm Trail, vaqueros in Mexico were holding tournaments for the best ropers and riders. One of their favorites was throwing the bulls by the tails. It was no accident that the Spanish word for roundup, rodeo, came into use early as the name for the most popular sport in the West.
Horse racing was always a favored amusement of Westerners. The larger towns and some big ranches had racetracks, but a track was unnecessary if rival range outfits happened to get together and start boasting of the relative speeds of their cow ponies. They raced right off across the prairie. If a high-spiritied bronc turned up in a horse herd, an informal riding contest was usually arranged on the spot, the spectators placing bets as to how long each competitor could ride bareback, or in the saddle. And whenever two or more cowboys were otherwise unoccupied for a few minutes, more than likely they would compete with each other at rope throwing.
For many years, however, these local contests were purely amateur, and if an expert rider or roper wanted to earn money with his special skills he had to join a Wild West show. The success of Buffalo Bill’s “cowboys, riders and expert lasso throwers” soon brought many imitators into the business. Touring circuses added riding and roping acts, and often changed their names to “Wild West Shows.” As might have been expected, these shows were quite popular with Western settlers; they would travel long distances to see tent shows if there was plenty of roping and riding and shooting guaranteed with each performance.
Some tamed-down Western towns that had lived with wild cowboys through trail driving days were not entirely happy to see them return with the tent shows—especially if the boys slipped from make-believe back to real old-time wildness. The Cheyenne Democratic-Leader of July 22, 1884, commented on a visiting show: “Last night at 12 o’clock, cowboys belonging to Hardwick’s Wild West Show made a drunken raid on South Clark street in regular western style. They succeeded in frightening the people from the streets, and were finally captured by the police and locked up. Twelve large navy revolvers and a large knife were secured. The entire party was bailed out this morning, and this afternoon gave the usual exhibition to a crowd of 12,000 people. The cowboys in their raid last night were led by Ben Circkle, for years a celebrated character in the far West.”
Meanwhile in the Southwest, riding and roping contests were continuing to gain popularity. During the summer of 1888. cowboys from the Laurel Leaf Ranch organized a two-day celebration in Canadian, Texas. Horse racing and square dancing were on the program, but the main event was a steer-roping contest. From miles around, folks rode into Canadian on horseback and in creaking buckboards. As there were no standard rules for rodeo contests, individual champions were not officially recognized in the early days of the sport. But Ellison Carroll won the roping contest on that day, and, for the next quarter of a century, he was undisputed king of the steer ropers.
On July 4, 1888. Prescott, Arizona, initiated its famous Frontier Days, including in the celebration what was probably the first commercial rodeo, or “first organized rodeo.” Winning ropers and riders received small cash prizes, and spectators paid admission fees. For years, Arizonans had been fond of traveling street circuses, romeriomaras, which came up from Mexico with clowns and acrobats and trick riders. Arizona also is the only state in the Union which ever supplied camels for a Wild West show—nine camels which had escaped from the old War Department herd imported for desert use before the Civil War. So it is not surprising that Prescott organized the first commercial rodeo.
The hero of that Independence Day of 1888 was a cowboy named Juan Leivas who received a silver trophy inscribed as follows: “Citizens Prize, contested for and won by Juan Leivas over all competitors at the Fourth of July Tournament. Held in Prescott. A. T. 1888. For roping and tieing steer. Time 1:17½, 100 yards start.”
In the Northwestern range country, the woolly-chapped ropers and riders kept their contests on an amateur basis until 1893. In that year, E. Farlow of Lander, Wyoming, combined a cowboy tournament with a Wild West show and circus. Farlow borrowed the Frontier Days idea from Arizona, but he added stagecoach holdups and horse-team relay races to the usual bronco-busting and steer-roping events. Lander’s first Frontier Days was a grand show, but spectators were few, consisting mostly of participants relaxing between other contests.
After the slow start of Lander’s Frontier Days, rodeo languished in the thinly populated Northwest. Contests were held at some of the stockmen’s conventions in Montana, and cowboys from some of the larger Wyoming ranches occasionally met for informal rivalry. Then in 1897, Cheyenne staged its first Frontier Days, the first big-time rodeo. Cheyenne still considered itself the “cowboy capital,” but even so the rodeo organizers sought aid from local businessmen and the Union Pacific Railroad to ensure a paying crowd. Special trains brought in thousands of spectators in 1897, and the show was a success, with seats selling at fifteen to thirty-five cents.
Wyoming, the first state to give women the vote, was also the first to admit them to rodeo. The first female contestant was Bertha Kaepernick, who entered both the bucking contest and the wild horse race staged at Cheyenne’s premiere Frontier Days. “She rode a wild horse in front of the grandstand,” said Warren Richardson, one of the organizers of the celebration, “and she stayed on him all the time. Part of the time he was up in the air on his hind feet; once he fell backward, and the girl deftly slid to one side only to mount him again as he got up. She rode him in the mud to a finish, and the crowd went wild with enthusiasm.”
Cheyenne also borrowed the most popular feature of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—a stagecoach holdup. It was a “thrilling event,” according to the newspapers, but the stunt which truly gave the customers their money’s worth was the hanging of a horse thief by a vigilante posse. Bill Root, Laramie newspaperman, played the part of the horse thief up to the moment when the noose came down. Then in the confusion around the scaffolding, Root dodged out of sight, and a dummy was dangled high and riddled with real bullets.
During these early years of rodeo’s development, William Frederick Cody continued to win fame and earn fortunes with his Wild West troupe. His programs did not use the word “rodeo,” but he selected the best riders and ropers to introduce this new sport of the American West to millions of people across the country.
In the 1890s, Buffalo Bill was at the zenith of his popularity. His Nebraska friends wanted him to run for governor; other admirers backed him for president of the United States. When Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair of 1893, barred the Wild West Show from its grounds because it was “too undignified,” Cody rented fourteen acres opposite the fairgrounds, set up a grandstand for 18,000 people, and started selling tickets. Every day thousands were turned away for lack of seats, and many a visitor paid his way into the Wild West Show, believing it to be the World’s Fair.
Sir Henry Irving attended both, and decided Buffalo Bill had the better show: “Such dare-devil riding was never seen on earth. When the American cowboys sweep like a tornado up the track, forty or fifty strong, every man swinging his hat and every pony at its utmost speed, a roar of wonder and delight breaks from the thousands in the grandstand.” The cowboy band of 1893 was a feature soon to be adopted by many rodeos.
It was inevitable that professional Wild West show performers and rodeo contestants sometime would join forces for a grand extravaganza, and this event occurred at Cheyenne’s second Frontier Days, in September 1898. “Buffalo Bill’s big outfit added over six hundred to the crowd,” reported the Cheyenne Daily Sun-Leader of September 6. “Never in the previous history of the town have the streets presented so animated an appearance as they did this morning with crowds of cowboys, Indians of the Sioux, Arapahoe and Shoshone, and thousands of well-dressed people.”
As the popularity of rodeo spread across the West and more and more cities began organizing annual shows, a few outstanding performers soon became famous. No official records were kept in the early days of the sport, but Westerners seemed to know who the “champions” were.
Clay McGonigal of Texas was the “World’s Champion Roper.” He was beaten only once, and that time by Ellison Carroll, the first champion. Like Buffalo Bill’s sharp-shooting Annie Oakley, Clay McGonigal’s name became a noun in the terminology of Wild West shows and rodeos. To all pioneer rodeo performers, a fast-roping exhibition was a “McGonigal.”
Another early champion was Bill Pickett, the first bulldogger. According to rodeo legend, Pickett’s method of downing steers originated the term “bulldogging.” His technique has been graphically described by Colonel Zack Miller of the 101 Ranch: “He slid off a horse, hooked a steer with both hands on the horns, twisted its neck and then sunk his teeth into the steer’s nostrils to bring him down.”
After a tour of rodeos. Bill Pickett joined up with Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Show and became a first-rank star. He was one of the few great black rodeo performers. After he was killed in 1932 while roping a bronc, the Cherokee Strip Cowboy Association honored him by erecting a special marker at his grave, and Zack Miller wrote a poem to his memory.
Texas-born Leonard Stroud was the first “All-Around Cowboy Champion.” He was a bronc rider, a superb roper and bulldogger, and he introduced trick riding to many rodeos. Trick riders still perform his “Stroud Layout.” in which the rider swings his body free from the horse with only one foot in a stirrup, the other balanced against the saddle horn.
Westerners were Buffalo Bill’s most loyal customers, and Cody loved trouping in the country where he had begun his colorful career. In 1898, he took his show to Cheyenne for the second Frontier Days celebration. “Buffalo Bill’s big outfit added over six hundred to the crowd,” reported the Cheyenne Daily Sun-Leader of September 6. “Never in the previous history of the town have the streets presented so animated an appearance as they did this morning with crowds of cowboys, Indians of the Sioux, Arapahoe and Shoshone, and thousands of well-dressed people.” (Photograph by Lee Moorehouse, courtesy of the University of Oregon Library.)
Among the early cowgirls in rodeo were Prairie Rose Henderson and Prairie Lillie Allen. Prairie Rose started her career at Cheyenne as a bronc rider, and attracted so much attention that other rodeos soon introduced cowgirl bronc-busting contests as regular events. She decided rodeo costumes were too drab, and instead of the usual long divided skirt. Prairie Rose wore a short one of velvet with a brilliantly decorated hem. Her chief rival for the crown of champion cowgirl bronc rider was Prairie Lillie Allen. Prairie Lillie also did stunt riding for some of the early Western movies, and starred in circuses.
Lucille Mulhall was described as “the greatest cowgirl on earth” by Buffalo Bill Cody when he saw her perform. She could rope eight horses with one throw of the lariat. When President Theodore Roosevelt, an irrepressible cowboy himself, visited the Mulhall ranch, Lucille amazed him by roping a coyote from horseback.
The story of Lucille Mulhall’s career has all the ingredients of a classic American tragedy. She became a public figure in 1904 with her appearances at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Her father, Colonel Zack Mulhall, brought together a lusty troupe of riders for this show; one of his stunts was to have a mounted rider board a ferris wheel. He also advertised a bullfight and sold eight thousand tickets, but the law interfered just before the fight was to begin. The disappointed customers expressed their feelings by setting fire to the canvas-draped arena.
After leaving her father’s colorful aggregation, Lucille Mulhall worked with Tom Mix and Will Rogers in rodeo, performing in the first shows at Madison Square Garden. Later she was a queen of the silent Western movies. She made a fortune and lost it. After riding wild horses for years without an accident, she died in an automobile crash. Her old friend. Foghorn Clancy, wrote a poignant description of her funeral: “The day after Christmas she was buried on the last pitiful acres of the once great Mulhall ranch, as a wild and driving rain turned the ground into a quagmire and the horses strained to pull the hearse across the field.”
Lucille Mulhall’s fellow Oklahomans, Tom Mix and Will Rogers, used their skills to achieve national fame as stage and screen actors; their names are a part of the legend of the American West. Tom Mix was a cowboy on the 101 Ranch and did his first rodeo work with Miller Brothers Wild West Show. Will Rogers also left off punching cattle to join a small Wild West show under the name of the Cherokee Kid. In 1905, they reached New York’s Madison Square Garden. A few years later, gum-chewing, rope-twirling Will Rogers was the star of the Ziegfeld Follies, while Tom Mix was Hollywood’s king of the silent Western movies.
Another Southwesterner whose name was almost a synonym for rodeo is Foghorn Clancy. Originally christened Frederick Melton Clancy, he lost his first two names while he was a newsboy on the streets of Mineral Wells, Texas. Because his voice sounded “like a foghorn at sea,” he became Foghorn Clancy. It is doubtful if any of the thousands of rodeo performers and spectators who knew Foghorn during his half-century career as rodeo announcer, promoter, and handicapper ever suspected that he had any other name.
Foghorn Clancy entered his first roping and riding contest at San Angelo, Texas, in 1898, and was promptly bucked off a bronco. He had scarcely picked himself up out of the dust when he was offered a job calling the succeeding events; the contest manager suspected that Foghorn’s voice might be more spectacular than his bronc-busting abilities. The manager was right, and on that summer day in San Angelo, Foghorn Clancy began the long career which carried him to almost every rodeo, roundup, and stampede in North America.
While rodeo was developing these pioneer heroes and heroines, the old Wild West shows were beginning a slow decline. After his great success of the 1890s, Buffalo Bill had fallen on evil days; his health was failing, his family life was breaking apart, his numerous investments used up money faster than he could earn it. One by one his partners deserted him to start shows of their own—“Bill” shows they were called because they all copied the original. Hundreds of tawdry imitations of his exciting program format toured the country, disillusioning the customers.
Gordon William Lillie, Pawnee Bill, had the only Wild West show that rivaled Cody’s. After growing up in Oklahoma among the Pawnees, Gordon Lillie had taken a troupe of these Indians into the original Wild West Show of 1883. In later years he split with Cody and formed his own organization—Pawnee Bill’s Far East. His wife, Mae Lillie, was the “little sure-shot” of the show. Always an intrepid showman, Pawnee Bill took his performers into places where others never would have dared to go, such as Princeton University, where in 1899 a street brawl developed between Pawnee Bill’s parading horsemen and the Princeton students.
In 1908, Pawnee Bill rescued Buffalo Bill from bankruptcy, and the new organization became Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East Combined.
But even the joint efforts of the two Bills could not save the Wild West Show. Time had passed it by. After two farewell cross-country tours, with the aging Cody appearing in a carriage instead of on horseback, the public stopped buying tickets. A mortgage kept the show going for a few months, but it lost money through one hundred successive performances. Ironically, the Wild West Show made its last stand in Colorado, the heart of the land from which its name had come. There the sheriff’s men moved in to foreclose. “The show business,” said Cody, “isn’t what it used to be.” He retired to his Wyoming ranch. And Pawnee Bill went home to Oklahoma to promote rodeo shows.
As the Wild West shows folded their tents forever, rodeo sprang to full growth. Veterans of the big tents moved into the rodeo arenas as pioneers of developing circuits that swung from Texas to California, from Cheyenne to Calgary, from Pendleton, Oregon, to Madison Square Garden in New York.
Rodeo was becoming more and more popular among Westerners. When farmers and ranchers drove their buggies and early model autos to their local county fairs (such as the one at Broken Bow, Nebraska), they expected to see or participate in roping and riding contests. An Iowan recalling his boyhood told of attending a county fair where two cowboys “dressed up in leather britches, red flannel shirts and broad brimmed hats rode into the ring and took after a little herd of horses. After a good deal of galloping and circling around, they roped one of them and threw him down so hard we thought it surely had broken his neck.”
As rodeo became a standardized sport, it developed its own stars, who were as well known as the champions of other sports. Many competitors in the first big rodeos were orginally troupers with the old tent shows. Indians, being natural riders, provided both color and an element of menace for the big acts in traveling shows. Later they were among the main attractions of rodeos such as the Pendleton Roundup. One pioneer professional was Jackson Sundown, a nephew of the heroic Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. He won a riding championship at Pendleton when he was fifty years old and was billed as “the greatest rider of the red race.”
The Pendleton Roundup was born the year that Pawnee Bill temporarily rescued Buffalo Bill’s show from financial disaster. Pendleton’s baseball club that summer was as bankrupt as Buffalo Bill, and to help the team finish out the season, a group of Oregon cowboys staged a small rodeo in the ballpark. They received five dollars each for their efforts—and stole the show from the ball-and-bat boys.
Two years later Pendleton Roundup had become big-time rodeo. As an added feature to the usual program, more than a thousand Northwestern Indians set up their tepees on the grounds, donned their tribal costumes, paraded on gaily bedecked ponies, and performed war dances—making the Roundup one of the most dazzling rodeos in the West.
The golden boys of early Pendleton competitions were Yakima Canutt and Art Acord. Both were champion riders for a while, but like a number of other outstanding rodeo competitors they soon found themselves before the cranking movie cameras of Hollywood, performing silent epics of the Western range.
Last of the big rodeos to be organized was the Calgary Stampede. Canada’s Alberta Province was the last stamping ground of frontier ranching in North America, and amateur roping and riding contests were held in Calgary in 1893. Some years afterward, Tom Mix and Guy Weadick attempted to stage a full-fledged rodeo there, but the first Stampede was not held until 1912. Four Canadian ranchers backed the show, providing the largest money prizes ever before offered rodeo contestants.
“The finest gathering of contestants and ropers ever got together,” reported the Calgary Herald. The governor-general of Canada came to see the show and partook of a “typical roundup breakfast, prepared and served by men who had been in the country ever since the days of the open range.” Participating in the first Calgary Stampede were Bertha Blancett, Lucille Mulhall, and many other rodeo stars from the United States. Bertha Blancett was “champion lady bronco buster of the world.” In the winters, when rodeos were inactive, she worked in Hollywood as a stunt rider for the old Bison Moving Picture Company. She could down a galloping horse with the suddenness of a pistol shot.
And so, in the early years of the twentieth century, the old Wild West shows vanished and rodeo came to maturity. Modern rodeo has all the individual spirit of the Western settlers, yet is as stylized as a bullfight or a ballet. The programs follow a classical pattern—grand entry, bronc riding, bulldogging, calf roping, steer riding, steer roping.
The Wild West shows were based on riding and roping; the pageantry of modern rodeo in turn is borrowed from the Wild West shows. The grand entry which opens every rodeo is pure Buffalo Bill with its swirl of brilliant costumes and pennants, patriotic music, swift-paced flashing hooves, hats swept off, and trained ponies bowing to the cheering crowds.
No two bronc riders and no two bucking mounts are alike, yet in a rodeo contest rigid rules must be followed. The rider can use only a plain halter, one rein,and a regulation saddle. He must stay aboard for ten seconds after he and his bronc spring from the chute. During those ten seconds he can be disqualified for changing hands on the rein, pulling leather, blowing a stirrup, or failing to keep his spur active. Both mount and rider are judged by a point system. Yet in the rodeo arena the horse remains the king. No printed regulations forbid a horse to sidewind, corkscrew, skyscrape, sunfish, or high-dive; and all the cowboy and rodeo associations in the world can’t keep a rider in the saddle for ten seconds if the horse decides otherwise.
Bulldogging or steer wrestling is a timed event, a series of rapid actions beginning with the dogger leaping from his horse to grasp the steer by the horns. By twisting the horns, he forces the steer down until it lies flat upon the ground. No longer does he bite the steer’s nose or lip as did Bill Pickett; instead modern rules protect the animal. For instance, if a dogger lands too far forward and drops the steer’s head to the ground in a somersault, the animal must be allowed to gain its footing again before the throw is made.
Steer riding is much like bareback bronc riding. The rider has only a single rope for security and can use only one hand. To qualify, he must stay clear of the ground for eight to ten seconds. Judging is by a point system.
Rodeo rules require that calves be thrown by hand, with three of their feet tied together at the finish. Steers are roped by their heads and should be brought to a halt facing the roper’s horse.
Trick riding came to rodeo by way of a troupe of Cossack daredevils imported by the 101 Ranch. Intrigued by the Cossacks’ stunts on their galloping horses, Western cowboys soon introduced variations to American rodeo. Colorful costumes seem to be a necessary part of trick riding, and it is quite possible that the outlandish Western garb which has invaded rodeo arenas can be blamed directly on Cossacks and trick riders.
And every rodeo must have its clown, usually the “rube” type who rides a burro when he first appears in the arena. A direct descendant of combined circuses and Wild West shows of the nineteenth century, the rodeo clown is in continual hot water throughout the events. Jake Herman, the famous Sioux clown of pioneer rodeo, commented: “A clown had to be a comic in the old days. Now the bulls have taken over. Now a clown needs to be a clever bullfighter. If a clown gets hooked in the pants the people think it funny. It’s more like the olden times when the gladiators fought hungry lions in the Roman arenas. The more risk to life and limb the more laughs from the populace.”
Witth the passing of the years, rodeo had become more and more professional, bound by numerous associations and regulations. But the sport remains the favored one of the West. The odds are still on the calf or steer every time a roper takes off across the arena swinging his loop. The spectators still come up cheering when the lariat snaps tight and the critter goes spinning into the dust.