Bucking Horse Sale: They don't call it world famous for nothing

MILES CITY — They call the Bucking Horse Sale the cowboy Mardi Gras. Some spectators even wore purple and gold plastic beads around their necks last weekend at the fairgrounds in Miles City. You could find some of these cowboys behind the auction arena and the race track — stretching sore muscles, rubbing a bruised shoulder or stretching out next to a dusty gear bag and a beat-up saddle. These are the guys who look for their 8 seconds at center stage atop a no-name bucking horse who might sell for $400. These aren’t professional rodeo competitors but ranch hands and college rodeo riders who ride bucking horses because it’s part of who they are and where they come from. Miles City is definitely the epicenter of the cowboy lifestyle. For the 12,000 spectators who took part in the four-day Bucking Horse Sale, it’s a glimpse of a life that’s almost gone. For 64 years, the Bucking Horse Sale has been held in Miles City in its current spectator format, but the event started long before that. In 1914, area ranchers discovered that if they sold a horse considered broke to the cavalry, they’d get a couple dollars extra, said Don Richards, director of horse racing for the Bucking Horse Sale committee. In the old days, the sale was known as the Miles City Roundup. “The ranchers around the area rounded up the horses for the cavalry to buy for Fort Keogh or wherever. The horse buyer would come down the river on the steamboat,” Richards said. If a ranch hand could stay on the horse for 7 to 10 seconds in front of the buyer, that was good enough to prove the horse was broke. “Somebody came up with the bright idea to charge admission and the livestock people got involved. It progressed onward and upward,” Richards said...more