#chuckwagons

* A famous postcard of Chester Byers busting at the Pendleton Round-Up, a decade after numerous "bans" on the practice. 

Calgary’s 2019 Stampede is over and here is the tally: six horses dead in the chuckwagon races with a number of other horse injury “incidents” having taken place there. One of these was so publicly egregious that, to protect the races, Stampede officials felt compelled to ban chuckwagon driver Chad Harden from the competition permanently. This pattern of tragedy, public outcry, and incremental reform is old as rodeo, a sport whose community is far more self-aware and resilient than many people may realize.

Why do so many Calgarians and Stampede officials support the routinely-deadly “chucks”? Why won’t the Stampede’s own Animal Care Advisory Panel (formed in 2010 to manage animal treatment and serve the Stampede’s publicity goals) or the University of Calgary veterinarians engaged with the Stampede persuade event officials to phase out chuckwagon races that they know will harm horses? Is it a blind faith that the chronic “accidents” will somehow not occur next year? No. Everyone, including the adrenalin junkies who participate in the races, know the sport cannot be made safe since that would defeat its purpose.

Rodeo sports in the form of community-sponsored competitions featuring various riding and roping events have been with us for about one hundred and thirty-five years. Generally speaking, they have flourished as live performances of the violence in western history, with livestock standing in for Indigenous peoples, wild animals, and the land, and of the struggles of settlers to take control by any means necessary. Rodeo became a theatre of the myth that to be truly western, one had to do difficult things that others—city people, effete easterners, squeamish tenderfoots—would not. Or chose not to. Rodeo committees thus included show-stopper events like chuckwagon racing to promote ticket sales with claims to offering the most incredible and dangerous action in the arena.

The Stampede’s loyalty to chuckwagon racing today makes further sense if we go back to one of rodeo’s most-popular timed events and original controversies: steer busting. At the turn of the twentieth century it challenged rodeo people to find a way to adapt to hostile public contexts just enough to survive and keep going. Look at most rodeo histories and you won’t find explicit descriptions of what steer busting did to steers, just that it was “too hard on the stock,” so was “banned” in many places. To bust a steer, competitors on horseback chased down and roped around the horns a three or four-year old steer weighing around five hundred pounds. Once lassoed, the rider would pull the rope along one side of the steer while directing his horse to the other. The rope, anchored at the horns, would wrap behind the rear legs, “tripping” the steer and spinning him in the air until he landed on his head, dazing or knocking him out so that he would be more easily tied by the dismounting rider.

For steers at the tournament grounds, beyond any mental and physiological stress produced by fear, inability to graze, lack of water, overheating, or physical exertion, a minority also suffered broken horns, damaged or broken limbs, and occasionally a broken neck. Many died right in the arena as the crowd looked on. How many died is impossible to know, although the inevitability of it was plainly built into the regulation of the sport in many places like this: “Rule 6—If the steer is killed, that run and tie shall not be counted, and the party shall have chance at another steer.”

Animal advocacy organizations, members of the public, and eventually stockmen (whose cowboy employees practiced on and crippled their market herd) complained to rodeos that included busting. In 1907, an official of the Wyoming Humane Society spoke for many when he called steer busting, “a relic of barbarism … entertainment belong[ing] to a dead period of western life.” Hence, between about 1903 and 1909, laws seeming to ban steer busting appeared across the West to calm public anger.

Thereafter, near urban centers, SPCA or Humane Society officials dutifully appeared at some cowboy tournaments to enforce the law. In fact, reluctant as they were to cause controversy that would have them blackballed by rodeo officials, mostly they just looked for diseased stock or shot any animals injured on site. One noted with regret at the time that, in truth, the laws “were insufficient to cover the many diversified abuses at such exhibitions,” such that rodeo people could affect the appearance of self-regulation and reform while still giving the audience and competitors what they wanted.

Steer busting still goes on, of course, at private ranches, early morning slack rodeo competitions, or baldly out in the open at Cheyenne Frontier Days where the rodeo committee caters to local interests. You won’t see steer busting at the Calgary Stampede, though. Back in the 1920s, officials decided to instead promote chuckwagon races, a sport native to the Canadian prairies. They had tried steer busting briefly, received too many complaints, so replaced it with steer decorating competitions in which competitors jumped off a running horse to tackle a steer merely to “decorate” one horn with an elastic band bearing a small flag.

At elite levels, rodeo events are controlled by small groups of competitors and officials, dedicated to their sports and reluctant to be seen to be bowing to public pressure. The broader rodeo community, raw from decades of criticism, humors them. Yet, after the show, in the truck driving home, plenty of barrel racers and bronc riders will tell you they don’t like the chuckwagons and the bad publicity it brings, but that they keep quiet out of loyalty to a sporting community they love.