T
Illustration by Chris Ruggia
T HE O THER A MERICAN P ASTIME
by Danielle Gallo
10
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2013
his time of year in the Big Bend is one
of my favorites, for a lot of reasons. I
like the heat. I like the quiet. I like the
long days and the sound of crickets plotting
entry to my bedroom. Most especially, I like
the rodeo.
This isn’t my first rodeo. My first rodeo
was in Clovis, N.M., more years ago now
than I care to consider. I remember sitting on
the sun-bleached stands with a smattering of
ranch folk, all with their jeans pressed and
their cleanest straw hats cocked back on their
heads—the better to appreciate the warbling
of the national anthem by a terrified fourteen-
year-old girl while the color guard trotted
around the arena, the riders reining in the
horses’ heads to make them as dignified as
ranch horses can be in such a cluster. Various
local dignitaries made brief remarks; the
Baptist preacher blessed the proceedings. The
July sun blazed down on a powder of hay,
sawdust and old manure and the rich hot
smell of livestock and corndogs hung heavy in
the still atmosphere. There was an anticipa-
tion of thunderstorms—the air felt pregnant.
Humans domesticated the horse a mere
6,000 years ago, though horses have been
thundering across the landscapes of the world
for 50 million years. They arose from the New
World and migrated across the Bering land
bridge to Eurasia, yet had to be imported
back to their cradle of existence by the
Spanish, having become extinct in North
America some 13,000 years ago. It is believed
that early North American people hunted
them to the brink and disease may have fin-
ished them off, as they disappeared around
the same time as the wooly mammoth. The
conquistadores were given magnificent horses
by the King of Spain, yet they traded them for
small, hard working Andaluz mustangs.
Cortes imported 15 of them to North
America in 1519, and within a century and a
half there were herds of millions roaming the
plains once more, along with herds of millions
of cattle. The vaqueros began the quintessen-
tial American tradition of cattle ranching, on
a scale the world had never seen, on the vast
plains and rich valleys of the New World.
At the International Working Ranch
Rodeo finals in Amarillo about a decade ago
I saw my first wild cow milking. I’ve always
been a little ambivalent about the rodeo: I feel
for the animals, especially in working ranch
events where the cattle and horses come from
ranches and are unused to the noise of a
crowd. Though I’ve always found to my relief
that my anticipation of the animals’ discom-
fort is unnecessary, still every time I go to a
rodeo I feel a little worried for their sakes. So
when the gate was pulled and the massive
black cows were released into the arena I was
silently rooting for them as they tore toward
the other gate, where their calves were lowing
for them. One team member managed to