Around these parts—north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi—rodeo seems like a romantic and quaintly exotic pastime, like bull-running in Spain or céilí dancing in Ireland. “Cowboy” is a costume you wore for Halloween or the role a Hollywood stud pursues to establish his hotness. Yet on a recent autumn afternoon, the University of Wisconsin–River Falls Rodeo Club was keeping alive a tradition it’s maintained for forty-two years.
At the rodeo grounds, the aroma of manure wafted through the air, and Rascal Flatts blasted from the loudspeakers. Children shrieked, a horse whinnied, and a sparse crowd gathered to watch the show. A couple cowgirls were in charge of wrangling cars into parking spots, and what immediately stood out were their scuffed and dusty boots, peeking from beneath the flare of their jeans. Young men and women of all shapes and sizes adhered to the old boots/ jeans/plaid shirt/hat standard.
What seemed like a spaghetti western trope was, here, real and elemental—its timelessness making many of the spectators and participants appear ageless. On closer inspection, however, some were clearly quite young, with baby faces smiling beneath the wide brims of their hats. Others had a grave, premature, John Wayne quality, the skin around their eyes creased from many an hour spent in the sun. Most sported solid-color vests with their college insignias embroidered on the back—the “jersey” they would wear to identify them during the competition. For the time being, though, they simply milled about with their horses.
The rodeo began when the announcer, Jesse Knudsen, entered the ring on his strutting horse. The reaches of his thick twang defined the limits of the arena and set the tone for the day: sincere, but sort of lackluster. While he rhapsodized about freedom and cowboys, the competitors started suiting up in their protective vests and mouth guards. Horses were outfitted with the flank strap—a tight belt that cinches the horse’s haunches and incites them to buck. The buzzer sounded, a metal gate crashed open, and the first horse let fly.
There was something mesmerizing about the way the horse and cowboy moved together; how the rider tried to keep one hand high in the air, his feet thrashing back and forth in rhythm with the horse’s leaps and spins. The whole day was full of such images: clichés of rodeos and cowboys—the myths of the American West that are imbedded in our collective memory from films and television. As the day wore on, what was even more surprising than these living, riding archetypes was how unassuming and ordinary the actual people were. Their boots were meant for barnyards, not dance floors. Their jeans were scarred by the dirt and sun. They were there for the rodeo, not for the show.
The participants came from the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska—cowboys and cowgirls representing ten college rodeo clubs. Some had earned their first rhinestone belt buckles by the time they were three years old, but in River Falls, most would garner little more than dirt in their jeans and half-hearted applause. Yet weekend after weekend, they drive all over the Midwest to face off against animals that are supposed to be angry. Jessica Painter—the women’s all-around winner and former state high school champion from Buffalo, South Dakota—talked about the satisfaction of belonging to a “community you can trust,” noting, “the people are the same wherever you go.” Pretty and diminutive, with heavily mascaraed eyes, Jessica didn’t seem like a girl who would excel at jumping off speeding horses and wrestling animals in the dirt, but her poise and eloquence were evidence of the confidence her impressive record has given her.
In contrast, a handful of cowboys relaxing in the bleachers after their events were nearly impossible to understand. Clearly pleased by the attention, but bashful, they mostly joked with each other in an indecipherable, accented slang. They were utility-line and irrigation majors from Nebraska: boys who had grown up on ranches, for whom hard outdoor work—including rodeo—was a fact of life. They placed their hopes in rodeo and betrayed their bitter disappointment in snide comments and grimaces, though most acknowledged matter-of-factly that they would probably never win. Yet they persisted all the same, said Dirk Dailey, a fair steer wrestler who spoke only when he had something to say, “for that one perfect ride”—those eight seconds (or less) when horse and human are bound, when “time stands still, and then everything just explodes.”
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