At one time, Huntsville’s Texas Prison Rodeo was the place to be for the state’s wildest rodeo action.
In 1894, Marshall Lee Simmons was about to graduate from the University of Texas and start work at his brother’s law firm when he was arrested for shooting a man who had bad-mouthed one of his relatives. The shooting was ruled self-defense, and Simmons went on to become a businessman, banker, sheriff, and eventually general manager of the state prison system.
It was in this capacity that he came up with the idea of having a rodeo for prisoners in Huntsville. He billed it as “the fastest and wildest rodeo,” and even though Marshall Lee Simmons retired in 1936, his rodeo—which earned the nickname “the Wildest Show Behind Bars”—rode on for another 50 years.
Simmons’s Texas Prison Rodeo started out as a way for the inmates and staff to have a little fun. The Depression was in full swing, and the people of Huntsville needed some entertainment. Plus, the prisoners were often clamoring for something to do. Bullriding, calfroping, wild horse racing, and bronco busting seemed like the perfect solution.
The prison usually held the rodeo on Sunday afternoons—occasional weekday shows were added—in a baseball field near the Walls Unit (Huntsville’s death row). Inmates from all of the area prisons were welcome as long as they had a record of good behavior. In fact, any inmate who kept his nose clean for a year was eligible.
By 1933, the audience was 15,000 strong, and it continued to grow, sometimes doubling from year to year. Soon the prison needed to build wooden benches to hold all the spectators. The rodeo also brought lots of business to Huntsville: even retail shops and restaurants stayed open at a time when most places closed on Sundays.
The guards were paid for overtime, and the prisoners got to see the fruits of their labor—not just all that rodeo practice, but the planning and preparation work as well. The wild cattle the farm prisoners rounded up for the event were finally put to work, the uniforms sewn by women prisoners stretched across the backs of the bull riders, and a midway full of prison-made arts and crafts found a market.
As word caught on about the rodeo—so much so that people had to be turned away at the gate—the wooden bleachers were replaced by a concrete megastructure. Over the years, the rodeo had invented its own unusual tongue-in-cheek events, like “Hard Money,” where convicts in red shirts tried to remove a sack of cash from between a bull’s horns, or the greased pig contest in which female prisoners tried to put greased pigs in a sack. By the mid-1980s, the event was grossing almost half a million dollars, all of which was used to help run the prison.
The lineup also included exhibitions by the top rodeo stars from around the country and entertainment courtesy of the likes of Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn. By then, the rodeo was attracting 100,000 people a year.
For more than 50 years, the Texas Prison Rodeo was a popular local tradition. But in 1986, engineers declared the prison’s rodeo facility unfit to safely hold the massive crowds. The prison couldn’t afford to pay for the necessary reconstructions, so the Texas Prison Rodeo closed for good.
Lots of Texans have lobbied to bring it back, but as Dan Beto, director of the Sam Houston State University Correctional Management Institute of Texas, told the Houston Chronicle: “When we had a prison rodeo, we had a lot of inmates who had some agricultural background . . . Most of the inmates who come to the prison system now are from major metropolitan areas. You’re dealing with a different kind of inmate, a different culture, a different time.”