Rodeo began as Spanish American cattle round-up skill
Rodeo is competitive equestrian sport grown from Spanish and Mexican cattle herding, later spreading across the Americas. The English word arrives from Spanish rodeo, “round up,” from rodear, “to surround,” and meant a cattle gather by about 1834 before naming cowboy contests. Wyoming, South Dakota, and Texas claim it as official state sport.
In Spain the word once named a cattle pen at a fair or market, traced to Latin rota, to rotate. Across Spanish America a rodeo was the vaquero round-up that moved herds to fresh grass, sorted animals belonging to different ranchers or gathered them for slaughter, with a Juez del Campo settling ownership disputes. Some of the skills go back to sixteenth-century New Spain. After the Civil War the first competition was staged at Deer Trail, Colorado, in 1869, and Prescott, Arizona, claimed the first professional rodeo because it charged admission.
Encyclopaedia Britannica calls a Fourth of July 1883 contest at Pecos, Texas, sparked by an argument between the cattle driver Trav Windham and the roper Morg Livingston, the first public cowboy contest. Madison Square Garden carried rodeo to Eastern crowds, but events had no standard form until associations formed in 1929. A young, often urban new breed fuelled growth in the 1970s, and by 1985 a third of PRCA members had college degrees while perhaps half had never worked a ranch.
Women were there early: Prairie Rose Henderson rode at Cheyenne in 1901, and by 1920 women competed in rough stock, relays and trick riding. The deaths of Bonnie McCarroll at the Pendleton Round-Up in 1929 and Marie Gibson in 1933 led to limits on their participation.
Calf roping, called rope and tie in Australia and New Zealand, is the oldest timed event. In breakaway roping a lightly tied, flagged rope snaps free once the calf is caught, and team roping, pairing a header on the horns with a heeler on the hind legs, is the only event where men and women compete together. Barrel racing around a cloverleaf is a women’s event at professional level, and bulldogging, leaping onto a Corriente steer to wrestle it down by the horns, is probably the most dangerous. Goat tying trains younger riders but is absent from professional shows.
Source: Rodeo
