The common saying, “this ain’t my first rodeo” is amusing, but it made me wonder, when was the first rodeo?
Some people credit Buffalo Bill and his traveling team for the first rodeo, but considering they did their first show on May 19, 1883 in Omaha, Nebraska, and they used techniques and shows that were already being used, they couldn’t have been the first ones. Many places also claim to have hosted the first rodeo, including Sante Fe, New Mexico in 1847, Deer Trail, Colorado in 1869, and Pecos, Texas in 1883, but rodeos and their events are much older than that. California even passed a law to define and even limit rodeos in 1957, “every owner of a stock farm shall be obliged to give, yearly, one general Rodeo, within the limits of his farm, from the first day of April until the thirty-first day in August…in order that parties interested may meet, for the purpose of separating their respective cattle.” I don’t know what they planned to accomplish with that law, but it existed.
Really, rodeos didn’t even originate in the US, know as the charreria, Mexico had shows that are very similar to our rodeos today. They included roping, riding wild broncs and bulls and even bull wrestling. The earlier mentioned bull riding originated in Mexico in the 1600’s, almost 200 years before Thomas Jefferson even bought the Louisiana Territory.
So really, we should be thanking Mexico for this much loved American tradition.
https://www.rtpr.com/7-short-lessons-about-history-rodeo/first-rodeos
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43606901
Fun fact: South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming all have rodeos as their state sport.