Rodeos

Popular in parts of the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, and New Zealand, countries where cattle were traditionally worked by men on horseback, rodeos are part entertainment and now part historical play-acting.

Regarded as entertainment, rodeos are more than the ritualized maintenance of stock-handling practices in competitive form. That, however, is the rodeo's background, originating in Mexican charreada—a stylized competitive celebration of the horseman's skills that has continued in parallel with the North American appropriation of it. While many U.S. rodeos have acquired more pageantry, the charreada now tends to be homegrown and a far cry from the elaborate events of the 1930s that celebrated the lost grandeur of the great Spanish colonial estates. As such, charreada remains more of an authentic cultural practice than the entertainment industry format that much rodeo has become.

In the early 19th century, the vaqueros (cowboys) of California participated in an annual round-up of cattle off the shared range in order to separate one owner's stock from another's. These rodeos culminated in a fiesta, and the charreada has preserved both its celebration of stock-handling skills and the element of community celebration. But in its guise as big business entertainment, typified by the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Nevada, today's rodeo owes as much to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as to the original charreada-inspired rodeos of California and Texas.

Frontier scout William Cody was a canny entrepreneur who adopted the popular cultural persona created for him by the dime novels of Prentiss Ingraham and [Page 605]Ned Buntline and toured America and Europe from 1883 with a spectacular entertainment show he conceived and fronted, offering eager audiences a glimpse of a mythical West. This included thrilling rodeo events, as well as grossly exaggerated reenactments of frontier history. Not only do those shows reveal something of how today's rodeo evolved beyond charreada into the realm of circus and consumer entertainment, they also remind us of the tradition in American culture of re-imagining the West as a myth of origins, a myth in which the rodeo as entertainment has played its part alongside the Hollywood Western genre, the television Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s, and of course all the “Cowboys and Indians” toys of 20th-century childhood, until newfound respect for both indigenous cultures and historical accuracy rendered these less unselfconsciously appealing. Rodeos have survived better than some of the other manifestations of this myth-making.

Hollywood Westerns told stories about the ambiguous relationship between gun-toting competitive individualism and a developing society that was increasingly uncertain of how to rid itself of its violent progenitors. From early gunmen fighting for supremacy in an essentially presocial wilderness, through Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in High Noon, abandoning the town that was embarrassed to be so reliant on his skills, to hired groups of professional mercenaries like The Magnificent Seven, the genre has sought to counterbalance the impersonality of life in corporate-dominated America with its myth of personal prowess, rooted in male violence.

As those more ambiguous but limited narratives gradually exhausted their capacity to respond to the complex realities confronting U.S. society in the latter half of the 20th century, the rodeo remained a simpler image, a distillation of essentially the same myth, its very simplicity protecting it against more critical times. The rodeo remains the last public expression of the myth of the American cowboy, preserved in a literally bounded realm of play, where he does not have to deal with society's complexities.

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