How do you turn kindergartners into wranglers?
“Little bitty saddles,” Melissa Vander Hamm said, “for little bitty kids.”
There’s a bit more to youth rodeo than that. You need your own horse. Plus a trailer to haul the horse and a truck to tow it all. To ride, you’ll need one of those little saddles and a bunch of other tack, which could put you back thousands of dollars.
In all, a youth rodeo family is an extensive, expensive commitment to living the rural Western lifestyle.
But Vander Hamm knows all that. She’s been competing in rodeo since she was nine years old. Her two sons started at age five. Now, she helps run the Young Guns Extravaganza, a youth rodeo series in Dodge City.
“It’s not a cheap hobby,” Vander Hamm said. “Drive through our parking lot on rodeo weekend and the amount of money just in pickups and trailers … it’s crazy.”
For rodeo families — most of whom, she said, come from agricultural backgrounds — the cost of competing is worth every penny as they look for ways to sustain their traditional way of life and their town’s population of young folks.
In a place where farms and ranches go back generations, rodeo is sewn deep into the cultural fabric of rural Kansas. But the number of people living in the region’s small towns has been shrinking for decades as young adults leave the rural life for bigger cities. Most counties in western Kansas have been steadily emptying since the Dust Bowl.
And parents like Vander Hamm, who lives in the neighboring town of Ingalls (population 288), hope that introducing more kids to the rodeo world might spur them to fall in love with their hometowns’ cowboy culture. Then maybe when those kids grow up, they’ll want to get back in the saddle again.
“The ones that do love it,” Vander Hamm said, “are inclined to come back and be part of the family farm.”
Despite any financial barriers to getting started, youth rodeo is growing.
Vander Hamm founded Young Guns in 2014 with a few other parents who wanted their kids to get more practice during the winter, when other competitions shut down.
The first year, she expected around 50 kids to show up. She got 120.
This season, Young Guns has welcomed nearly 400 little cowpokes into the arena, as they dummy rope, pole bend or barrel race their way to glory. And it’s just one of several youth rodeo associations across the state.
“I do think it’s a trend,” Vander Hamm said. “It’s a time when it’s cool to be a cowboy.”
Back in the saddle On rodeo day, hundreds of horses trot through an expo center on the south edge of Dodge City. They kick up fine brown dust from the arena floor into clouds that hang in the air.
The morning starts with a prayer from the rodeo chaplain. Then comes the national anthem as the Miss Santa Fe Trail Queen gallops in with a flag.
Mesa Hedland stands near the arena entrance decked out in a brown Western shirt with leather tassels dangling from leopard print shoulder patches.
She’s waiting for her favorite event, which involves chasing down a goat and untying a ribbon from its tail, with help from her trusty steed named Ott.
“He’s addicted to me,” Mesa, who’s from Anthony, Kansas, said. “We can’t spend a day without hanging out with each other.”
Mesa is only five years old, but this is far from her first rodeo. She’s been chasing those goats since she was three.
In the horse warm-up area, nine-year-old friends Paisley Davis and Braylin Barratt offer a tour of the bridles and stirrups strapped to their four-hoofed friends. The pair live a few hours apart in southern Colorado, so they’re making up for lost time here.
Listening to them as they inspect their saddles and laugh about the odd things one particularly ravenous horse has eaten, it’s not hard to spot what rodeo families see as the upside of all this and what they hope kids take away from the experience.
The hard work it takes to care for an animal 10 times their size. The hours of practice required to master skills that most adults can’t pull off. The grit they need to ride into the arena — where every kid but one ends up leaving a loser.
“Be grateful that even though you didn’t win, someone else won,” Braylin said. “Always be grateful.”
And the bonds they form — with people and animals — along the way.
Paisley walks up to her horse Thunder until the two stand eye-to-eye. She rests her hand on his neck near the black mane that she’s carefully woven into braids.
“When you do have a bad day,” Paisley said, “you can just talk to your horse about it.”
The rural mystique Gene Theodori, a sociology professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas, isn’t surprised to see events like Young Guns growing. Rodeo’s enduring appeal, he said, comes back to the idea that rural America is the last remnant of a bygone, simpler lifestyle.
He calls it the rural mystique. And rodeo is a picture of that in its purest form.
“Whether it’s real or not,” Theodori said, “in our minds, it represents that wholesome rural way of life. … And we, as a society, we yearn for that.”
What we’re seeing now, he said, is just the latest of many waves of interest in old-time Western culture that have washed over American society, especially as the country’s become more suburban and urban.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a surge of interest captured by the popularity of cowboy songs from Marty Robbins and Roy Rogers and big-screen Westerns starring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
Now, the Old West has come back again in a big way. Theodori describes the current wave as the “Yellowstone” effect, in reference to the TV show about a powerful Montana ranching family that’s become the most-watched drama on television.
And he predicts that the “Yellowstone” effect could drive a spike in people from all walks of life wearing more cowboy hats, boots and Western-style dresses in the coming years.
“It’s perpetuating. It’s continuing,” Theodori said. “And truthfully, I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.”
The sport of rodeo was born from genuine cowboy work. After long cattle drives, men from competing ranches would get together to one-up each other and see who’s the best. It would have been common, Theodori said, to see folks compete to rope a steer or ride a bronco after driving livestock up the Great Western Cattle Trail that passed through Dodge City in the late 1800s.
But what started out as a pastime for tough guys on the range has become big business all over the country.
A nationwide youth rodeo organization called the National Little Britches Rodeo Association fielded more than 1,400 competitors in 2022 and paid out nearly $275,000 in prizes.
There are now adult rodeo associations that cater specifically to women, Black Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ folks, too.
“The idea (is) that this is one way we can preserve our Western heritage,” Theodori, who competed in high school and college rodeo, said. “To me, that ties directly back to the rural mystique.”
Source: kmuw.org
Categories: Kansas, Rural Lifestyle