It almost looked judicial: his left hand at his waist, a grip on the saddle so tight it bleached his knuckles, right hand affixed at a right angle to his tassel-adorned torso, those calloused fingers — despite logical objection — tensely relaxed. The cowboy was in the position to swear himself into an oath, to testify as God’s witness surrounded by a jury of 50,000 peers to the power that hummed, mooed and bellowed on the other side of his denim clad calf.
It only takes 20 seconds for blood to travel around the body before returning to the heart. About eight seconds in, when the blood got to the cowboy’s waist, it had to fight gravity; his legs were above his head.
But that valiant eight seconds was good enough for the jury, a roar of approval filling Houston’s NRG Stadium, followed by howls of joy from our lonesome cowboy, surrounded by the true country sponsors of Coca-Cola and Miller Lite on the jumbotron above him, stretching that eight seconds of glory into what felt like a lifetime.
A few moments later, rodeo cowboy Jeff Askey can be seen puffing his chest on the jumbotron in NRG Stadium. With a wry smile, he says, “I’m here at RodeoHouston competing in the Bull Riding, ‘cause I’m tough, I’m durable and I’m ruggedly handsome.” Only 2.19 seconds later, he is flung off of a bull so swiftly that his body is parallel to the ground seven feet in the air. If he weren’t rugged before, he certainly is now. His handsomeness still remains to be seen.
Outside the venue, Houston has been transformed into … well, into Houston. At least, the Houston that New Yorkers would imagine Houston to be. Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, or as country folk call it, RodeoHouston, is less of an old school rodeo and more of a major state festival. Wild West themed roller-coasters, merry-go-rounds and country music concerts emerge like weeds from the Gulf marshland just a few hundred yards from the hundred-year-old marsh marigold of the Rodeo pit in NRG with its roots in a two-century-old tradition.
The first American rodeo started in the 1840s, somewhere in San Antonio, Texas. Or Dallas. Or Amarillo. Or Texarkana. Or hell, maybe it was Santa Fe, N.M. Point is, it started in cattle country. Some whiskey-drunk vaquero or cowboy manifested his own financial destiny one day out on the ranch during his crew’s weekly Sunday cattle round-up; the horde of cows, 2,500 strong, marching through the golden hour-lit plains, corralled by as few as six horseback soldiers and illuminated by the dusk air like living evocations of the frontier. This magnum, this mayhem, this sight — bored townsfolk would watch this, wouldn’t they?
And watch this they would, with local audiences coming in droves to watch what cowboys called the West’s greatest sight every single Sunday. But that little demonstration evolved — as the sun set (and the booze drained with it) our cattlemen stopped simply going to bed after the round-up and started fooling around, riding bareback broncs, twirling lassos, jumping barrels and soon enough — steering bulls. Honest work gave way to honest performance and competition — multiple ranches would come together to compete in their newly found drunk hobbies to show who the real cowpoke ’round here was. With the new activities came a new name. Mexican vaqueros, watching their gringo coworkers jolt and gyrate aboard the wild bucking broncs like novices, pointed and laughed at them, watched how they go round and round again or, in Spanish, watched them rodear. And so, despite the overwhelming cattle herding experience here in the heart of cattle country, this was in fact America’s first rodeo.
Clearly, it wouldn’t be the last, with rodeo culture and performance quickly building and growing into something of a counterculture movement across the plains. Each individual farm town found itself creating its own Sunday Rodeo, standing as pillars of the community that built them. Before long, the rodeo was as central to a small town as the church. So, it was no surprise that as a small-time livestock auction in the heart of Houston began to grow, it soon adopted rodeo culture as an avenue to establish itself as a cultural fixture within Houston, and Texas as a whole.
That gamble on splitting the livestock show into two — a rodeo and an auction — instantly paid off. In 1952, the rodeo section (along with a promotional 75 mile cattle drive) netted RodeoHouston a huge increase in attendees. And yet, as the years have passed since Houston evolved into RodeoHouston, it feels like the rodeo has become more and more insignificant each day.
There is an incongruence within the world’s largest rodeo in RodeoHouston. Rodeos inherently have pageantry, true, but the mayhem of Houston — its carnivals, its cowboy hats, its overwhelming Texas-ness — isn’t regular. The governmentally certified kickoff of the entire month-long event is Go Texan Day, where citizens of Houston are encouraged to wear cartoonish approximations of whatever they’re supposed to be. Hats, boots, tassels, everything else that sounds Houston. But isn’t. That sounds Southern, Western and most importantly, sounds Texan, but isn’t. So, what is it?
It started in 1869, in New York, with a lie.
Ned Buntline was, amongst other things, a drunk, a racist, a xenophobe, an honest New Yorker, an overall nitwit and, most importantly for the purposes of this article, a failing author. This wasn’t entirely his fault, of course: He was often preoccupied with other duties, such as running from angry mobs, spurring angry mobs, running from the new angry mobs he had previously spurred and somehow, most ironically, giving long-winded speeches on the virtues of temperance — only after a few boozy pick-me-ups, of course. It was during one of these speeches, his words soaked in water and his breath in whiskey that he, like that unknown vaquero decades prior, saw an opportunity before him.
William F. Cody claimed to be all sorts of things: a hunter, a Medal of Honor winning scout, a ‘49er, a soldier and, most exciting to Buntline, a real life cowboy. It didn’t matter to Buntline whether Cody’s subtitles had any credence, Ned saw rolling fields of money made from books about Cody, Buntline’s very own folk hero. Buntline took one of Cody’s many claims — his insistence that he was the world’s greatest Buffalo hunter — and used it to christen him a brand new name: Buffalo Bill.
“Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men” was an instant success among the adolescents of New York City. In an instant, the West and cattle country became an American Olympus, admired and mythologized by coastal city dwellers ad nauseam.
If you looked close enough at Buffalo Bill, he wasn’t the cash cow Buntline thought he was — he was a full bucking bull in his own right. And like everyone else that tries their hand at steering a bull, Ned flew off in just about eight seconds. About three years after his novel’s publishing, Cody and his confidant John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro (a Virginian) began to perform stage plays further exaggerating their role in the West. These plays grew in size and scale until their eventual apex: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a massive, continent-touring event complete with musical acts, barbecues, reenactments, petting zoos, horse rides and everything an East Coast cowboy lover could want.
No twister the plains had ever seen was half as powerful as what Buntline unleashed upon cattle country. Ordinary people found fragments of their culture artificially inflated and turned into caricature. Everything from their profession to the very clothes on their back were carved into individual pieces and ripped from them, and every product was willing to latch itself onto those people for as much cash as they could carry. Cigarettes, toys, furniture, everything that a New Yorker could sell, a cowboy was on.
For the plains, that approximation of their oh-so-marketable culture didn’t stay out east. After all, the very people consuming their livelihood were the same ones marketing and making pop art of it. As time went on, the reflection of themselves created by the world as a whole showed plainsmen a funhouse mirror — twisted, curved, strange and impossible. The actual visage of themselves, their actual reflection, was unseen. Covered by a black cloth like a home afraid of hauntings, listening to reverberating feedback through speakers, the hands holding the microphones looking unlike their own.
But if after decades and decades you keep being told you look like something, then, well, you might as well be that very thing. Minutia of the self and society are slowly consumed by caricature, consumed until there is no self left. Just a projection made by everyone around you. It was a twisted dance. Culture stolen, then culture overwritten.
And RodeoHouston is no different. What started as a livestock show and rodeo quickly evolved. Mutated. The rodeo, an intuitive and evocative symbol of the West and Texas, was not good enough. Wasn’t big enough. Wasn’t Texan enough. So, in the ’50s, they turned to Buffalo Bill, and turned Houston into an amusement park.
It almost looked judicial; his left hand at his waist, a grip on the saddle so tight it bleached his knuckles, right hand affixed at a right angle to his tassel-adorned torso, those calloused fingers — despite logical objection — tensely relaxed. The cowboy was in the position to swear himself into oath, to testify as God’s witness, surrounded by a jury of 50,000 peers, to the fact that no one, perhaps even including himself, truly understood who they were. Not anymore.
Daily Arts Writer Rami Mahdi can be reached at rhmahdi@umich.edu.
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