SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER

Cowboy Christmas brings on the red and green

By Julie Carter

As America celebrates 229 years of Independence on July 4, rodeo cowboys across the country will observe an annual tradition of their own: “Cowboy Christmas.”

This summer holiday season is one of the rodeo circuits richest weekends of the year with at least 35 professional rodeos and several hundred open rodeos held annually to celebrate the holiday.

Cowboys and cowgirls will try to get to as many rodeos as they can in a 4-5 day period by driving and flying (and sometimes not in a plane) from one to the next, competing day and night for more prize money than is offered any other time of the circuit season.

Those grueling days and nights of endurance give new meaning to the traditional Christmas colors of red and green. For the rodeo cowboy, they are days and nights of burning red gritty eyes while they pursue their high hopes of winning a lot of green money.

The name rodeo comes from the Spanish word “rodear” which means to encircle or to surround. To the Spanish, when they arrived in Mexico in the mid-sixteenth century, a rodeo was a cattle roundup. The competition of showing off their skills in breaking broncs and roping wild cattle eventually evolved into organized contests in the mid-eighteen hundreds.

Every year about 24 million people go to rodeos and the sport ranks seventh in attendance ahead of pro-golf and tennis. Some 60 million more watch televised rodeo events and the cowboys that “yusta ride’em” will tape it and watch it several times.

In l997 Texas named rodeo as their official sport. Texas would like to take credit for the first rodeo celebration. In the early l880’s in the West Texas town of Pecos, cowboys would get off work and come into town on the Fourth of July. They would thunder down Main Street roping steers and then corral them in the courthouse square. By some historical accounts, this was the birth of rodeo in the United States.

Deertrail, Colorado also lays claim to the earliest rodeo but it was a group of Texans that started one of those earliest rodeos in Cheyenne, Wyoming in l872. The occasion was the forerunner of the current weeklong Cheyenne Frontier Days.

As the story goes, some Texas cowboys had arrived in Cheyenne and decided to celebrate the Fourth of July with an exhibition of their steer riding prowess. The event was successful enough that the next year to celebrate Independence Day, some local cowboys decided to do a little bronc busting down the middle of one of Cheyenne’s main streets.

Here in Lincoln County, hundreds of contestants will compete in two rodeos a day for the four day holiday. The afternoon performances of the Mescalero Apache Ceremonial & Rodeo include a pow-wow, Dance of the Maidens and other traditional Apache dances.

Those same competitors, and many more that will come through the county on their way to other rodeos, will compete in Capitan at four nights of the 50th Annual Smokey Bear Stampede.

You’ll spot them around the county as they pull in to buy fuel--both for their truck for themselves as they get a “for the road- heartburn burrito.” By Sunday they’ll look haggard and worn, but at each rodeo they’ll perk up about the time the National Anthem is played signifying to the bareback riders that their event is about to begin.

For the world beyond rodeo, I’d like to designate the Fourth of July as a “Be kind to a rodeo cowboy” holiday. They don’t all win, they can’t all afford it but across the board they all love it with a passion only they feel and no one understands.

When the rodeo cowboy lays his hat on his heart in honor of the American flag, let us tip our hats to them for being an enduring part of American history.

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net

© Julie Carter 2005


Where shall we hide?

by Larry Gabriel

Does anyone else get tired of the constant national media barrage of things to fear? You know the things: wars, old age, sharks, kidnappers, global warming, asteroids, mad cows, etc….

Luckily I only have to deal with questions about the smaller ones like BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) more commonly called "mad cow disease".

We finally found a USA-born (prior to the 1997 feed ban) cow with BSE after testing 338,309 cattle since June, 2004. It made headlines all over the world. Taiwan immediately re-closed its borders to beef after opening them for the first times since a Canadian BSE cow was found here in 2003.

It is frustrating to watch the news media wipe out a year of work with a one-minute blurb. They leave out "little" facts like: all high-risk cattle and specified risk materials are banned from the human food chain. Those are "key facts".

The BSE risk to humans is minuscule. BSE in cattle is suspected of causing a similar disease (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or vCJD) in people who ate infected meat containing spinal or brain tissue.

World-wide there are 153 people cases. Most of them were found in Great Britain after they began vCJD surveillance fifteen years ago.

Great Britain had 180,000 confirmed cases of BSE. We have had two. The difference between two cows and 180,000 is significant. Even with the massive contamination in their food supply (homogenates of cow brain were used commonly to bind ground beef in burgers) relatively few people died from it.

Don't get me wrong. Every one of these deaths is a tragedy, but life is filled with tragedy. About 13,000,000 people die each year from communicable diseases and another 62,000 in disasters. On an average day about 24,000 people starve and another 1,400 are murdered. Someone commits suicide about every 40 seconds.

The leading dangers to your life in the United States are in the order of greatest to least risk: heart disease, cancer, stroke, accident, motor vehicles, suicide, falling down, assault, fires, nature, electrocution, drowning, air travel, food.

As near as I can tell about one in a million people develop CJD and fewer than that develop the variant.

Your chances of being killed by an asteroid or tsunami are greater than your chances of getting vCJD. As a matter of fact, if you are reading this you survived a risk that is probably twice as dangerous. You survived fireworks on the 4th of July.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Liberty has its prices (like having to listen to sensationalism) but it beats any other option.

Larry Gabriel is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture

I welcome submissions for this feature of The Westerner.

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