Me? Controversial?

In June of last year we attended the Cody, Wyoming nightly rodeo. Denny and I had a new camcorder that we had purchased to take with us to Alaska for our land tour/cruise and we wanted to practice using it so we took it along to the rodeo with us. I posted a video of a cute young lady riding a miniature horse in the barrel racing competition and seven months later I am still getting comments on a video clip that I innocently posted as something cute.

So what do you think?

Cold at the Rodeo

Because the sun had come out and the 50 mph winds had died down, Denny and I decided to attend the Cody Rodeo.  Held nightly, the rodeo starts at 8 PM and runs about an hour and a half.  After the brief opening ceremony of a prayer and the National Anthem and a little sketch by the rodeo clowns, they got right down to it with the bronc riding, followed by some barrel racing, bull riding, calf roping and a little fun with the audience involving some young men and a dancing competition and a "get the flag off the calves" chase with a large group of children under 12 that had us all laughing.

Although this isn't a huge rodeo like the Stampede that is held here in July, there were enough competitors to make it interesting, both at the adult and junior level and since it was all new to Denny and I it was fun.  At least until the sun went behind the mountains and the wind kicked up again.  The wind threw off the cowboys doing the calf roping and it just downright chilled us to the bone.  The smart people who had been here before brought heavy winter jackets and blankets--us, not so smart with a windbreaker for Denny and a hoodie for me.  Yep, we were cold. So the rodeo ended none too soon for us but it was a lot of good clean and occasionally hokey fun. Located just a couple of miles from the center of Cody, we'd come back the next time we hit town, but we'd come back a little better prepared.  After all, as they mentioned during the beginning statements of the rodeo, just the Saturday before it snowed during the performance.  

To set the scene for my video clip; barrel racing is the sport of circling a series of barrels on a horse as a timed event.  The trick is to get your horse to circle the barrel as close as you can, then racing to the next barrel, circling it and then to the third barrel, after which you race for the finish line.  This clip is of the "littlest" barrel racer of the evening, followed by a clip of the young but fierce competitor who won. 

Old Trail Town and a Little Girl

One of our temporary neighbors in Yuma this past winter was from the Cody area and when I asked him what was a "must see" in town he told me we had to see the Old Trail Town museum.  The brainchild of Bob Edgar, a local man with a passion for Wyoming history and architecture, Old Trail Town consists of a series of log cabins and buildings that Mr. Edgar salvaged from different parts of Wyoming, tearing them down and then rebuilding them on the edge of what Buffalo Bill wanted to be "Cody City".  Each individual building, be it school house or livery stable or saloon or homestead is filled with artifacts, furniture, clothing, coats, pictures and other memorabilia from the late 1800s and early 1900s which is the time period of all these buildings.  Most notable is the cabin that was used by the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid along with the rest of the "Hole in the Wall" gang as well as a saloon they and other assorted bandits and bad guys frequented.

 The Hole in the Wall gang's hideout.

 The River Saloon, frequented by Butch Cassidy, where you can see the bullet holes in the door.  Also in this shot is the obligatory German tourist.

What is evident here is Bob Edgar's love not only for the buildings he so carefully brought here but for the people who lived life so fully back then.  Mr. Edgar wanted people to learn about those pioneer spirits who lived, fought and died here, so he also created a memorial cemetery to the free spirits who were a part of the wild West; Jeremiah Johnson who was a hunter, trapper, scout and war veteran, Jim White, a prolific buffalo hunter thought to have killed thousands of buffalo for their hides, W.A. Gallagher and Blind Bill, two cowboys killed over a woman and Belle Drewry--the woman who loved outlaws who was herself murdered.  Bob Edgar actually located the gravesites of these people and had them reburied here at Old Trail Town.

As always, I enjoyed the history, the artifacts, the pictures and the amount of work involved in creating a town of treasures like this, but this day I also found a great deal of pleasure in following a three generational family from building to building.  Since the cabins were small, you couldn't help but overhear the conversations and at one point we looked in a closed off building to see an oddity that was inside--a two headed calf.  The grandfather in the group told the granddaughter that he had seen the calf years ago so then he brought his daughter (her mother) to see it and now he was bringing her, his granddaughter to see it also as a family tradition.  Unfortunately, the young lady who was perhaps eight or nine years old turned out to be very afraid of mounted animals and there were a lot of dead animals in the complex.  A lot!

The two headed calf had been real and not something pieced together by a taxidermist.


Certainly there was a lot to see and read about at Old Trail Town and we really learned a lot about life in Wyoming in the late 1800s but my favorite part of the whole shebang was at the end of the displays where they had set up a small roping area with a pretend steer and lariat for children to use to try to lasso a cow.  The little girl with the family group was trying to toss the lariat without success so Denny stepped in to give her a hand.

What I didn't catch here is that on her second attempt after Denny showed her the proper way to enlarge the loop and hold the lariat near the knot for better control, the young lady lassoed that critter and hauled it right over.


It was a fun way to finish off our day trip.