Western American Culture, Rodeo, Big Bill Haywood

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note by Hunterbear:

[Although always a good union person, I'm never very interested in the fine
points of Left ideology and which group "begat" which -- I tend almost
always to look at the person -- I've been relaxing over at the Lynx and
Bobcat discussion group.  But now I'm back.]

Occasionally, in addition to my much more predominant emphasis on presenting
Native issues of concern to the good people [most of them good most of the
time] of various Left discussion groups [to whom Native Americans are often
invisible], I also try to interpret to them the Real West of the Mountains
and Plains [and the Pacific Northwest coast.]

This is a post I made a year and a half ago -- which was well received and
carried by Portside. [It's now on our large website.]

A couple of extremely zealous animal rights types took exception to the
post.  Well, I am pretty much an animal rights type myself -- to a point.  I
am, after all, totally owned by my extremely possessive and burningly
jealous one-half Bobcat, Cloudy.  Occasionally, she's even pushed
[consistently good humored] Eldri out of my office -- and Eldri and I have
now been together for 42 years.

Animals are very rarely hurt in rodeo.  No so with humans.  As I note in the
piece, I've had buddies who've been multi-injured via rodeo by the time they
were in their very early twenties.  One, at that age, could never ride
again.

In addition to deeply resenting Bush's absolutely fraudulent "cowboy"
posturing -- a brazen calumny vis-a-vis bona fide cowboying which is a
deeply courageous and vital line of human endeavour -- I've lately had this
wild and wooly stuff close to home.

My youngest  daughter [23] and her [steady] boy friend have been gently
"breaking" a three year old Quarter Horse that he's just gotten.  In the
process, he was tossed -- but no injuries.

Hunter [Hunterbear]  Eastern Idaho


WESTERN AMERICAN CULTURE AND RODEO AND BIG BILL HAYWOOD -- AND MORE [HUNTER
GRAY]

The American West is always changing these days -- for sure:   new people
and sprawling cities, paved highways and Interstates, television and
computers -- all that and more.  And more.

But much of the West doesn't change -- ever:  The Big Sky; the  Land -- the
Earth and Plains and Mountains and Deserts; and a great many of the
people -- the native homegrown Westerners and the people who come into the
West and who [naturally] convert to Our Way of Life.

Rodeo doesn't change.  It's like it always was -- brave men [and now a few
brave women]  and wild beasts:  mutually adversarial right down to the dirt
and the bloody bone [sometimes literally.]

I don't claim to be a rodeo man in the participant sense.  One of my younger
brothers was a very good calf-roper for years.  But, although our family had
horses -- on very good lower Oak Creek land south/southwest of Flagstaff in
the Verde Valley, not far from the old copper camp of Jerome -- I've never
really been a horse person.  I am, however, a very good mule man:  a mule is
always smart; always very stable -- doesn't shy in a skittery way, say, from
a rattler as will a horse; and a mule is extremely surefooted.  I like mules
and know them well.  [The best one with which I was closely associated, and
which I rode much indeed for work  and other purposes, always tried,
cunningly, to carry me under low hanging pine limbs -- but, once you knew
that little idiosyncrasy, no sweat and no fall from the saddle.]

Most radicals these days don't know much about William D. "Big Bill"
Haywood, who started out in Mormon Utah in 1869 [hatched Episcopalian] and
died lonely at Moscow [the other one, not Idaho] in 1928: half his ashes in
the Kremlin wall and the other half at the consecrated-for-radicals Waldheim
Cemetery at Chicago.  In between, of course, Bill Haywood was the cutting
edge of the legendary Western Federation of Miners and a key founder of the
Industrial Workers of the World.  He was the major defendant in the infamous
Steunenberg  murder frameup trial at Boise in 1907 -- where, defended ably
by Clarence Darrow and others against the forces of the Mine Owners'
Association and the Pinkertons, he and his WFM colleagues -- Charles Moyer
and George Pettibone -- were freed. In Darrow's eleven hour address to the
jury, the great Artist of the Defense roundly attacked "The Spiders of Wall
Street" while much of the courtroom wept.  On that, see my rather extensive
1997 review/essay on the background and development of the Boise Trials and
related matters -- published in the Butte regional newspaper:
http://www.hunterbear.org/jhg_review_of__big_trouble.htm

Bill Haywood was many good things: great courage and great commitment, great
organizer, creative strike activist and tactician and leader, top speaker,
Red Socialist -- much more.  And, for all of this, he was  seized and
imprisoned  by the Feds in 1917 with 150 other prominent IWW leaders.  They
were eventually tried at Chicago and Wichita and Sacramento under the
hastily concocted and Wilsonian "Espionage Act" which, ostensibly targeting
anti-War activities [it reached out and grabbed Gene Debs and others as
well], was really of course aimed against social justice -- and especially
militant labor -- radicalism.  In the end, an ailing Haywood and a few
others, out on bail pending appeal,  understandably enough under the
horrific circumstances fled to Russia.

Most radicals of today couldn't tell you much at all about Bill Haywood and
that very fine crew of trail blazers who "saw the elephant and heard the
owl" in some very, very tough crucibles. They might know that the copper
bosses got the great Wobbly martyr, Joe Hill, but they probably couldn't
tell you when; and they've heard some about the gentle Debs -- but probably
not the fact that  Debs several times publicly threatened that legions of
armed Westerners  would converge on Boise and free Haywood et al. if the WFM
leaders were convicted.

But even the more informed radicals of today probably don't know that, in
addition to being a highly skilled hard-rock metal miner, Big Bill had also
been a prospector -- and an extremely successful Nevada cowboy.

And hardly anyone now would know that his brother-in-law, Tom Minor of
Nevada, was a very top United States rodeo champ for a good and super long
spell.

In fact, both Haywood and Minor structured a dimension of the IWW especially
for cowpunchers, "bronc riders" and rodeo men -- and some did indeed sign up
in the  fighting Wobblies.

Rodeo is like the rugged Real West In The Flesh, so to speak:  it's
equalizing and egalitarian.  You're face to face in the Real West with raw
nature:  big sharp mountains, furnace deserts, the wild and roily rivers of
no return, wild critters and wild people.

With rodeo, it's wild bulls and wild horses and wild men [and now a few wild
women.]

And it's a setting where, as in the mountains and deserts and on the wild
rivers, you're taken for what the Real You is and can do and does.  Long,
long before the Movements great and good, and all of the important Civil
Rights Acts and such, and reflecting the ethnic demography of the West,
Native Americans and Chicanos who rodeoed won not only  their spurs as
men -- but were fully accepted by their rodeo colleagues and many others as
the humans they indeed were. And there've always been some Blacks and some
Orientals  who rodeoed, risked much -- and who forced recognition of
themselves as  people.

[Kind of like the military for ethnic minorities -- especially after Harry
Truman's sweeping military integration order. "If you could shoot good . .
."]


Anyway, I like rodeo.  Sometimes a guy gets killed and I have good buddies
who were crippled for life by the time they were 21.  But most people get
through it OK and almost all of the animals always do.

This  coming-up newspaper article talks about one of the  bigger ones -- but
the little rodeos in the backwoods settings of the West, the little towns
and the great rural sweeps, can be really first-rate.

And then there are the Great All-Indian  Rodeos:  Flagstaff with its annual
three-day Indian Pow-Wow over the Fourth -- and then the Gallup Indian
Ceremonial early in August.  In each of those and others like them -- full
of top-flight Native dancers from a myriad of tribal nations in the 'States,
Canada, and Mexico and hundreds of first-rate Native artisans and
craft-people -- rodeo is a great big piece of the Experience for everyone.

Anyway, I [a faithful mule man] always like good Real Western Rodeo -- and I
always will.

So find one -- a good one, big or little -- and try it, folks.  If you don't
think it's becoming a socialist, then always remember Big Bill and tip your
Stetson or  your little Eastern-type cap to a guy who, among everything else
he did, was a renowned Nevada cowboy.

Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]

=========================================

Date:  Fri Jan 25, 2002  9:24 am
Subject:  SD, Ride'em cowboy Rodeo's best to compete in 25th anniversary
performance


Ride'em cowboy Rodeo's best to compete in 25th anniversary performance

By Jim Thompson Special to the Journal
http://rapidcityjournal.com/stock_show/stories/ridemcowboys.htm

PHOTO:
http://rapidcityjournal.com/stock_show/photographs/reeves1st_perf_36P.jpg

The newly built Rushmore Plaza Civic Center was dark in the rodeo arena that
cold January night in 1978, with only a spotlight shining on the dirt floor.
The chute gate opened, and the great Sutton Rodeo bucking horse, Night Raid,
and his rider exploded into the darkness.

The horse was so exact in his bucking style that rodeo producer Jim Sutton
was able to predict to a fraction of an inch where he would finish his 8
seconds
of mayhem. So when his rider reached that spot, the spotlight was already
there. Larry Mahan, the rodeo legend, bailed off in a perfect landing, took
the
wireless microphone from Jim Sutton, and, never missing a note, sang "Mamas,
Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys."

Only 100 fans were there to watch that bit of rodeo history. The next night,
200 showed up, prompting announcer Hadley Barrett to declare "the Black
Hills Stock Show Rodeo is the fastest growing in South Dakota!"

Much has changed in the past quarter century, as a ticket to the Black Hills
Stock Show Rodeo now is one of the hardest to find in the entire area.
Sutton Rodeos expects this year's 10-performance attendance to surpass
50,000.

The rodeo begins on Friday, Jan. 25, as more than 1,000 contestants begin
their qualifying runs to be in the elite group that makes the Wrangler Pro
Rodeo Tour Finals at noon Sunday, Feb. 3.

Other features of this year's rodeo includes one of the highly rated
specialty acts in rodeo, The One-Armed Bandit and Company. John Payne began
this unique act after an accident with a power line took his arm. Today,
both his son, Lynn, and daughter, Amanda, travel the country representing
their father and his award-winning horse, dog and longhorned cattle
performance. Rapid City will be graced with Amanda Payne for the first
weekend of the BHSSR.

Returning for the second weekend's entertainment in the arena will be Flint
Rasmussen of Stevensville, Mont. The 34-year-old barrel man has won Clown of
the Year honors in the PRCA the past four years and will come to Rapid City
following his debut at the Denver Stock Show in Colorado.

Another feature of this year's BHSSR is the inclusion of the Badlands
Circuit Finals Rodeo in the first weekend. The two-performance event will
feature the top 12 in each event battling for the circuit title and the
right to
represent North and South Dakota at the Dodge National Circuit Finals in
Pocatello, Idaho, in March. The circuit finals rodeos will be held at 1:30
p.m.
Saturday, Jan.26, and 5:30 p.m.

Sunday, Jan. 27. The Sunday performance also will be Family Day at the rodeo
with 5 tickets selling for $25 in specific parts of the civic center.

Something else for this year's rodeo will certainly be popular with fans:
the instant-replay screen sponsored by Smart Lic. The large screen will
allow
the review of spectacular rides or the agony of the buck-off. Staff of area
television stations will be in charge of the pictures for replay.

Among the 1,000-plus contestants entered this year are every current world
champion except the injured All-Around and Calf Roping champ Cody Ohl. Ohl
was injured in the ninth round of the 2001 National Finals Rodeoand is still
healing from surgery.

Just about every cowboy or cowgirl hero that both old and young seek out
will be in Rapid City: Jesse Bail, Jake Barnes, Ote Berry, Thad Bothwell,
Trevor
Brazille, Roy Cooper, Rorey Lemmel, Stran Smith, J.D. Crouse, Frank
Thompson, Billy and Robert Etbauer, Marvin, Mark and J.D. Garrett, Kappy
Allen and Janet Stover.

Further adding to the interest in the BHSSR is the fact that the
Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association is undergoing some radical changes.
The long time rodeo administrator, T.J. Walters, it is rumored, has been
fired and to this point no replacement has been named. That could complicate
or perhaps facilitate some growth within the rodeo world.

Commissioner Steve Hatchell has promoted advanced television coverage,
putting more weight on the promotion of large rodeos and promoting rodeo
stars that the public can relate to and recognize. The acceptance of any of
these goals is contingent on accepting that Pro Rodeo will change and there
is the rub. At this point the speculation is that the PRCA will increase its
Wrangler Tour concept and require that a minimum purse be offered.

Sutton Rodeos has increased the purse at the BHSSR through the past
quarter-century anyway and the $10,000 per event would be a natural growth .
In addition it appears that these Tour rodeos will accept fewer contestants
in
each event, which will mean, at long last, an end to two of rodeos biggest
bugaboos; turnouts and slack. For the uninitiated, a turnout is when a
contestant enters a rodeo and then decides to not attend. The contestant
must call the central entry office within a given time window to declare the
intention of not competing in a given rodeo.

That creates a public relations problem with the well-known names of rodeo
when fans assume that someone will compete and then not show up.

By adding more prize money and having fewer cowboys allowed to enter each
event, the need to "pick" the best won't be as large an issue. The best
cowboys will want to compete in the best rodeos. Regarding "slack", that
part of the competition that is held prior to or after a paid performance,
the same is
true, fewer cowboys means that everyone will compete within the performance
eliminating the need for rodeo slack.

Whatever transpires in the PRCA, one fact remains. This is the 25th
anniversary of the Black Hills Stock Show Rodeo.

Now if only Larry Mahan could make that jump in front of 7000 fans on a
screaming Saturday night!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear]
www.hunterbear.org
  [social justice website]
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunterbear]