The Saga of Rodeo has no beginning or end. As a matter of course it must be taken in both the open range of the past, and the rodeo arena of the present, for the contesting cowboy is whittled from the same timber that once supplied the riders of the open range.

The great American sport of rodeo came into being during the early days of the cattle industry. it took form in the cow camps of the West, gathered speed along the trails to the Northern feeding grounds, and moved ahead to spectator acceptance in the arena of a more modern era. And in the arena to this day the life of the West and the work of the cattle ranch unrolls before great crowds in contests between wild cattle, wild horses, wild bulls, and even wilder men.

The sport of rodeo was not born. Like Topsy, it just "growed." The assertion that Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1847, Deer Trail, Colorado, in 1869, Pecos, Texas, in 1 883, was the birthplace of rodeo can be accepted in terms of locality, and tied to certain conditions.

Agua Fria, Brannock, Phoenix, Prescott, and Williams in Arizona all had early day rodeo contests; so also did Dodge City, Kansas; Denver and Grand junction in Colorado; Lander and Cheyenne in Wyoming; Miles City and Wibaux in Montana.

Between the birth of the cattle industry at the end of the Civil War and the dates of the earliest rodeos, ride the trail driving cowboys. They were the bronzed and weather-beaten riders from the Texas pampas who brought herds North with all the thunder and pomp of frontier progress.

The animals were Texas longhorns, a throwback to the species shipped from Andalusia in the days of the Spanish conquest. They were lean and lithe, alert as a deer, half-wild, half-savage, half-human. Their long, polished horns sometimes ran six feet from tip to tip, curved like scimitars, and could be used with the deadly effect of a bayonet. The longhorn is gone now, wasted away and bred out of existence like the buffalo and wild mustang. Only a drop of the wild longhorn spirit runs through the veins of the sleek Shorthorn, the Black Angus, or the Whitefaced Hereford now grazing the ancient ranges.

Once the open range, the wild horse broken for the cowhand's work, the Texas steer carrying a fortune of beef on the hoof, provided a way of life for a generation of cowmen, But the open range is gone. The land is quartered like a steer on a meatblock, and only the lusty blood of the pioneer cowman is not dead. It surges through the veins of the rodeo cowboy, and gives life to the sport that makes a focal point of the West still leaping, pitching, twisting in the golden sunlight of the rodeo arena.

From the moment that a rider leads the grand entry parade into the rodeo arena until that same arena becomes a yawning oval of empty planks and seats, rodeo bears the mark of the last frontier. The men who follow the sport, know its hardships and comfort, apathy and thrills, grow old and wise and confident that in the rodeo sport they have achieved a satisfaction that can go to only a few shrewd and genial connoisseurs of life.

Cody Nite Rodeo and Cody Stampede Program 1996, page 76
written by Chuck Walters
appeared in the 1957 "Pony Edition" of the "Rodeo Sports News Annual"