The following story appeared in SWERVE Magazine in July 2009.

IF ANYTHING, SHE DRESSED TOO WESTERN. The jeans were hot and the shirt she borrowed didn’t fit right. By noon she wished she had worn shorts but getting dressed that morning it had seemed so important to look the part: thirteen years old and let loose at the Stampede for the first time, just her and a friend. In the exhibition hall, the flashing lights of a fortune-telling computer convinced them to part with five dollars each. When they compared their neatly printed fortunes they were disconcertingly similar, identical in fact. They ate corndogs, drank root beer, rode rides until the guy across from them puked and then they felt sick themselves after that so they played whack the mole instead and, thrilled by the flirty talk of the carnie, played again. By mid-afternoon they had spent everything except their bus fare home.

She learned to two-step the year she turned twenty, taught by a grad student from England who sold jewelry in the exhibition hall. They went to Dusty’s after his shift where he showed her the steps and they danced in sawdust on a wooden floor, then drank from pitchers on a table shared with a forty-something couple from the country who knew all the moves, the two of them spinning smooth and fast through the others.

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LOVE IT OR HATE IT, the Calgary Stampede is public theatre on a grand scale. Each year a million of us recreate what Guy Weadick accurately envisioned as the biggest Wild West show of them all. Soon to be one hundred, the Stampede is now the number one tourist attraction in the world in the month of July, the richest hour in rodeo, a force of volunteers in the thousands, a sacred cow and a favorite whipping post. The city is split down the middle between those who go and those who don’t. When I left Calgary in the mid-1990s, I was one of the later. The Stampede is a license to act like cowboys after a cattle drive. As a sign on newspaper boxes one year said: Drink triple. See double. Act single. Married by then, I had started to look for my wild times in other places. Like the clerk at the bookstore who tells me she usually goes away because the city is so busy already and at Stampede it gets busier and more crowded, I wanted sunrise in the mountains, food over an open fire, that kind of wild.

It was a few years before I came back for Stampede. Since then, without really intending to, I have returned repeatedly from my home in B.C. to observe the theatrics. What started as a self assignment turned into an article for one magazine and then for another. I walked the grounds from end to end, bumped elbows on the concourse in front of the rodeo arena, sat alone on a tractor seat in the grain museum in front of a film about the history of the prairies. Professors at the university who study the Stampede call it a mega-event, a multi-headed beast that brings sports, culture and commerce together with lots of media buzzing around. The nonprofit community organization that runs the show calls it a brand. For me it has become an annual passion play that depicts the West as a place of freedom, wide open spaces, strong hand shakes. A place where, as the sign in front of Fitz Flooring on Bow Trail that displayed a different Code of the West each day said on the last morning of Stampede, Some Things Are Not For Sale.

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IN A SHINY INFINITY, windows up, AC on, a man wearing a white Stetson talks on a cell phone. Beside him, a billboard tells drivers to Party ‘til the cows come home.Overhead on the Plus-15, a cartoon horse kicks up his heels. A twenty minute crawl and traffic loosens beside Fort Calgary where a truck pulls a horse trailer down a bicycle path and the field is filling with the RVs of those who will ride in the parade tomorrow morning.

One of the Mounties who helped build Fort Calgary told of this valley black with buffalo, their shaggy coats as far as the eye could see. The Blackfoot used to camp here. The last of the great North American herds roamed this place, attracting whiskey traders from Montana in search of the hides that had become a kind of woolly gold, the target of a shooting spree that killed millions of buffalo between Texas and the Canadian border before the people of the northern plains were paid in whiskey to help finish the job.

The only buffalo today is a life-size bronze beside Ninth Avenue where the Steele Scouts set up camp. They arrive in campers and vans, unload their horses into makeshift pens, set up lawn chairs, crack a beer. The scouts are mostly old-timers who look good in buckskin and can still sit a horse well. By suppertime the field around the fort is overflowing. Scouts and their wives sit between RVs, the evening sun still hot, a good breeze blowing, a beautiful Appaloosa in the pen. They talk about property taxes, grandkids, the parade in the morning.

The original Steele Scouts were called the Cowboy Cavalry, local ranchers and cowboys led by Mountie Sam Steele who rallied them to pursue the Cree to Loon Lake, Saskatchewan where they captured the chief known as Big Bear. The scouts today look much like the scouts did then: fringed buckskin, Bowie knife, Winchester. One of their traditions is a pre-parade ride through downtown where outdoor bars overflow with the giddy energy of the night before it all begins. Catch a scout after a few beers and he might tell you about the time one of them rode up the steps of the Palliser Hotel, through the lobby and into the elevator. 

By the first drum roll next morning, some spectators have been shifting in their seats since dawn. Only the Rose Bowl parade is bigger. It is over an hour before the scouts ride into view looking like the Wild West. The crowd cheers. A girl climbs on her dad’s shoulders to take a photo. They are followed by a plastic bucking horse on a float with miniature office towers and a sign for the real estate board.

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ONE OF MY FAVORITE VIEWS in the world is from a hill on the edge of the city looking towards the mountains – few things say West with so much fresh air and the finality of that jagged horizon. Guy Weadick chose well when he picked Calgary. Go any further west and you’re no longer in the West. At least that’s how it felt when I moved to B.C. For years I was confused by road signs that said Calgary was east because driving home to Alberta meant returning to the West.

The last few years my Stampede accommodations have been a tent pitched in a grove of aspen on top of that hill. The view I fell in love with as a child has more houses and roads in it now and by six a.m. the sound of commuter traffic plays a base line to the chirp of robins. The hill that was marked only by animal trails wears a hundred fancy houses, their manicured lawns interspersed with the odd clump of fescue grass that still persists, its roots reaching down as much as eight feet into the earth, its resistance to drought and palatability to cattle one of the things that made these foothills prime cowboy country.

I returned here each night after walking the grounds and fell asleep pondering Calgary’s love affair with the cowboy. While there is something deeply ironic in a homage to the open range held in the middle of a city, I’ve come to think that perhaps it is a reflection of the tension inherent in a story that is framed as a contest between wild and tame.

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A DRUM BOOMS in the distance, then closer. Louder. People peer over their shoulders to see a marching band bearing down on them. A father hurries a toddler aside. Teenagers in red jumpsuits pass at a rapid pace, wave their hands in the air and yell “Yahoo!” The players at the pea wheel don’t even glance up. They put their toonies down and watch the wheel spin. “Easy money,” the carnie calls out and turns the head of a straw hat cowboy with a sexy girl on his arm. “Easy money,” he says and reels in three guys in football jerseys, one wearing a gigantic cowboy hat made of orange foam.

The midway is the commons. Everyone is here, even if only in passing, the rodeo cowboys unmistakable in their crisp shirts and sense of purpose, their boots taking them quickly to the grandstand. The rodeo faithful trot the same trail through the shorts and tank tops, as do Stampede committee members, their dark-pressed denim as much a tell-tale marker as the discreet pins on their collars.

In the exhibition hall, a couple of teenage girls tour the fifth wheel being raffled off by the Kinsmen. There is a microwave in the kitchen. The bathroom has a shower and a tub. The girls check out the plush recliners in the living room and one exclaims to the other, “If you need this to go camping, doesn’t that say something?”

On the midway anyone can take a wild ride, the sliding scale of options topping out with the Skyscraper’s offer of “airgasms” for forty dollars. Two monks pass in saffron robes and black sneakers. Urban professionals carry cell phones on their hips like six shooters. The line for the water ride stretches back to the candy apple booth. Punk teenagers in camouflage wait behind a Native man wearing a button on his T-shirt that says “My horses have always killed cowboys.”

In front of the Saddledome the military parks jeeps and tanks and sometimes even a jet airplane for the public to climb inside. The navy brings a torpedo, a dozen feet of tubular steel with a saddle cinched on to it. One bright morning, a woman helps her young son climb up into the saddle and says to her husband, “You’d better take a photo. That’s the closest he’s going to get to a horse today.”

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COWBOYS WILL ALWAYS LOOK SEXY TO ME. As a girl, I used to read my dad’s Louis L’Amour novels, the heroes tough and weather-beaten. On summer holidays at Grandma’s farm I had handsome uncles who drove pickup trucks and hoisted us onto the back of a saddle horse named Heather. We lived in the city where my dad was an engineer. During Stampede he went to the office in his only pair of jeans and the hat he got years before at Woolco.

When I started going to the Stampede again, I resisted dressing western but cowboy hats are so well suited to standing around under a hot sun that within a year or two, I had started acquiring them. Four hats. Two pairs of boots. No longer a spectator, I joined the cast of would-be cowboys who make this one of the biggest masquerade parties in the world.

For awhile my media pass got me a rodeo box seat. A folding chair actually and sometimes not enough of those for all the reporters and photographers vying for them so some of us stood. The media boxes at either end of the arena were great places to watch rodeo. While my sympathies originally lay more with the folks holding the Rodeo Kills banner on top of Scotchman’s Hill, I learned to watch with interest. Now, a good ride, even if seen on the Jumbotron from the cheap seats, gets me clapping. As sport goes, rodeo is a rush.

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THE WILD HORSE RACE IS WHERE THEY TAKE THE BODIES OUT. That was what a medic told me in the dressing room behind the chutes amid strong young men stretching their hamstrings in preparation for tamer pursuits like bronc riding. The wild horse race was the event for the crazy ones. The money wasn’t great and while riders or ropers went four days at the Stampede and then came back for the finals if they were lucky, horse racers went ten days straight. The race set three cowboys against a horse that had never been ridden. At most rodeos, six teams compete at one time but at the Stampede, sixteen horses were released at once, followed by forty-eight cowboys intent on getting them saddled and then ridden.

Big Joe was the last of the old guys, the beat-up die-hards like the Siksika guy in the 1990s who was still racing at sixty. When his kids were young, Joe stopped horse racing for awhile and did team roping at rodeos near his home in northern B.C. instead. The precision and horsemanship of team roping was catching on and starting to draw crowds but Joe found it boring so he went back to horse racing. In this contest between man and beast, the beast usually wins. Bull riding is like that, more guys get bucked off than go those eight bone-jarring seconds. The horse racers like to take the piss out of bull riders and vice verse. Joe would tell his still-in-high-school daughter who swiveled heads when she threaded her way through the infield bar that she should always ask a guy whether he is a cowboy or just a bull rider.

Some days the horse race was a gong show but the injuries were real enough. The time his team won Ponoka the arena was so damn muddy you couldn’t tell who was who by the time they were done. Another time, the weather was so bad the rodeo was almost cancelled. The horse racers were out there, lightning popping, rain so heavy you couldn’t see, and Joe says to his team, “Boys, this may be our epitaph but if we’re going to go, we may as well go in a blaze of glory.”

At the Stampede, the horse racers drank in the corner of the outdoor bar near the parking lot where limos with horns on their hoods drop movie stars off so they don’t have to walk through the midway to reach their box seats. Tom Selleck one year. Kevin Costner too. The horse racers were the guys whose wives and kids joined them around the plastic patio tables. One of them, often Joe, would be holding an ice pack to an elbow or a knee. They would be drinking $5 draft while behind them in the arena the bull riders did their thing.

Then one year two hundred unbroken horses spooked as they were being herded under a freeway that is named after a famous Blackfoot runner and nine of them died. The ride was being held in remembrance of the old days when stock for the rodeo arrived over land. Seasoned ranch hands oversaw the six-day trail ride held to celebrate Alberta’s 100th birthday. Twenty wealthy men paid $15,000 each to ride along. One of them, a former Ontario premier, described what happened as a mad stampede. The headlines went around the world: “Wild Horses Die in Calgary.”

Joe’s team sucked that year and the wild horse race was won by his friend who works as a Calgary fireman. The next year the horse race was cancelled along with the wild cow milking contest that used to start the rodeo each afternoon. Joe and the boys blamed the bunny-huggers but the official line was that the rodeo was too long. The audience was getting restless. Urbanites and tourists don’t understand the intricacies of roping and riding – they come for spectacle under a hot sun. The redesigned rodeo came with the slogan Richer, Rougher. At the infield bar, the plastic tables where the horse racers used to drink were replaced by a Calgary Stampede store that sold hand-tooled leather daytimers and Western greeting cards with sayings like When you climb into the saddle, you'd better be prepared to ride.

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IF IT WEREN'T FOR THE WHIFF OF ROAST BEEF, most people would walk right past the nondescript door in the middle of the barns that leads to the cinder-brick room called Mel’s Place. The cashier says there was a Mel once but that was before her time. From where they sit stirring creamer into coffee, patrons can watch miniature donkeys enroute to the show ring. In the corner, a TV plays chuck wagon highlights from last night’s race. Underneath, an older couple lingers over coffee with another couple, long-ago acquaintances they have run into by chance. One of the men does most of the talking.

“When Mother and Daddy brought the farm,” he says, “they put 30 acres in potatoes. It took two weeks to harvest. Now it takes half a day.” He grew up riding a horse to school. So did his wife. Like their parents, they farmed. Now their oldest son has taken over and the wife says how proud they are of him.

“It has never been easy,” the talkative fellow says. “Take my brother. He ran the farm after Daddy died. They were haying and he was pushing hard. Bad weather can close in fast and spoil a crop. They didn’t have a crew, just the family. Mother came out to help. They never even stopped for lunch that day. When my brother’s hat blew off, he left the tractor in low, hopped down to grab it but slipped getting up. Mother got off to help him and it happened so fast. The combine wheel killed her instantly.”

He pauses. “That was a sad year.”

From the TV comes the muted sound of Joe Carbury: “And they’re off!” The four wagons in the final heat of last night’s race careen around the barrels. At the table, the couples talk about their plans for the afternoon, push back their chairs and get up. 

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THE COWBOY WAS BORN in the popular imagination at the same time the epic cattle drives came to an end. Within twenty years there were more jobs for cowboys in vaudeville than in Wyoming and the pay was better too. The cowboy became one of North America’s few homegrown folk heroes. First in dime novels and Wild West shows and then in movie theatres, audiences around the world fell in love with the man on horseback and the landscape that surrounds him.

One year I went looking for real cowboys, the kind who get on horses in the morning and ride around after cows all day. I left the Stampede and followed the Cowboy Trail south to Longview, that bracing stretch of landscape where the grasslands meet the mountains. The famous Bar U is here. The outlaw known as the Sundance Kid worked as a Bar U ranch hand for a few years in the 1880s before Butch Cassidy wrote a letter asking him to move back to the States. Harry Longabaugh was the name under which Sundance drew his pay at the Bar U, and it was as Harry Longabaugh that he stood as best man for his buddy Everett, the Bar U foreman, when Everett got married. And it was Everett’s life that inspired The Virginian, the first novel to have a cowboy as its hero.

These days there aren’t many jobs for mounted cattle shepherds. The biggest employer of cowboys today is feed lots where guys spend twelve hour days in the saddle riding pens. The big ranches still hire riders but rarely more than a dozen. A lot of ranchers are too poor to hire guys so they do the cowboy work themselves – sharing shifts during calving season with their wives and kids, riding out every day and chilly night through March, April and into May. The rich ranchers hire cowboys and come for brandings or bring business associates out for weekend cattle drives.

I found what I was looking for in a foreman named Todd who manages a ranch that began back in the days of the Bar U and has been conserved by a legendary oilman who bought it twenty years ago. The ranch is in the high foothills, up against the mountains. They jingle horses at six in the morning. The foreman loves his job and can’t think of anything he’d rather do but says that when the snow is flying horizontal, it ain’t all that fun. Same thing when it’s thirty-five degrees out and the bugs are chewin’ your ass.

Though he is barely forty, the foreman finds he is generally the young fellow at brandings these days – the cattle business can’t afford to pay much of a wage and isn’t attracting guys like it once did. He figures the romance that surrounds the cowboy comes from the image folks have of a man and his horse among the wildlife out there on the open range. He chuckles about how cowboys are supposed to embody freedom. He says there’s not a lot of freedom cowboying, the demands of caring for cattle tie you down. He has busy days, nights too, and not much time off. He says the idea of being a cowboy is pretty good but the reality of it is a lot different.

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THE STORIES THAT FUEL OUR COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION are powerful and mysterious, a source of shared values that shape us more profoundly than we might expect. The Stampede is a spectacular demonstration of how the narrative of the West has infused everything from poetry to home furnishings. For awhile now I have tried to watch the annual drama as one would watch a play. The city is the stage but the backdrop is a big sky underlined by blowing grass. The hero is the cowboy in every guise from fresh-faced kids showing their 4H cows to the cleavage of Nashville North on a Friday night. The plot line varies but is always some version of how the West was won. Along with the drum roll of freedom and rugged individualism, the soundtrack hits a note of melancholy. The wilderness that makes the cowboy heroic is ever in the process of vanishing, sometimes through his own efforts. The West is a tale of conquest that is nostalgically regretted even as it is celebrated. As a play, the Stampede has no shortage of comedy, but beneath the groovy costumes and behind the painted facades, it is perhaps more of a tragedy.

On a scorching afternoon when the exhibition halls are full of bodies seeking air conditioned relief, a rancher from Saskatchewan who paints landscapes during the winter tells me that people are loving the West to death. She grew up in the 1940s on a ranch in southern California where she rode a horse to school. The grasslands she knew as a girl are all suburbs and pavement now. She can no longer find where her family’s house once sat. The hill itself is gone.

A few years ago the community organization that runs the Stampede made a short film that portrayed their brand as an old cowboy in a cabin in the foothills who dips pen in ink and writes a letter to the future. The old man tells those who would follow in his footsteps that life comes from the soil. He asks them to care for the land as he has done. He writes in a curling script that conscience not profit should be the guide. He says these principles are the most important possession he has, signs the letter C.S. and places it in a metal box. In the early dawn he rides to a spot overlooking a river where he buries his treasure before turning his weathered face to survey the untouched landscape. Then the frame fills with dirt in a close up of an excavator digging into the earth. The teeth of the bucket scrape against metal. The camera pulls back and we are in a construction site in the city. A worker in a hard hat with the C lazy S brand motions for the excavator to stop. Presumably this is the expansion of Stampede Park. Snow is falling, covering the bare soil. The excavator operator comes over and the two men, construction crane silhouetted behind them, examine the box with a great sense of occasion as the film cuts to black.

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SHE WAS MAYBE SEVEN YEARS OLD and her dad had bundled her and her sisters into the station wagon when they were already in their pajamas. He wrapped them in blankets and they sat on the grass in the gathering dusk amidst other families and the odd vendor selling candy and souvenirs. Far below the wagons were running. Her dad had brought binoculars and gave them each a turn but she preferred to just sit, a bit breathless from the height and the view that took in the whole city.

She didn’t watch the chucks again from Scotsman’s Hill for many years. When she went back the road was blocked so she had to leave the car and walk. A family of Hutterite boys in suspenders and dusty cowboy boots peered down at the wagons below. A couple kissed on a bench. There were a few people walking dogs and a young family out for a stroll and that was it. You could hear the announcer at the track saying that driver Kurt Bensmiller is handsome and single too. In the west the sun was dropping towards the mountains. On the escarpment the caragana was in bloom. A fence stood on the edge of the hill where it fell away to the river so you could no longer scramble down the steep face. The mosquitoes were bad. When she drew a deep breath, the air smelled of dry grass after a hot day.

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