The Man Who Invented Rodeo

Earl Bascom, the man who invented rodeo, Aboard a saddle bronc sometime in 1932, demonstrating his winning style.

All photos courtesy of the Bascom Family.

Picture yourself sitting in the bleachers at a rodeo on a summer evening. Dust motes swirl and float in light beams illuminating the arena. The grand entry and flag ceremonies are over and horses paw and snort in the bucking chutes as cowboys stretch latigos to tighten cinches.

A rider wedges a gloved hand into the handhold of his bareback rigging, nods, and the chute gate swings open in response. The bronc between his legs leaps into the arena, lunging and jumping and kicking. The cowboy’s spur lick reaches from the break of the horse’s shoulders up the neck to the rigging, gapping wide as he reaches again for a spur hold above the bronc’s shoulders. With every lick, colorful leather chaps snap and flap, accentuating the action and adding to the excitement.

What you’ve just imagined is typical of rodeo as we know it today. And much of that picture you’ve painted in your mind comes courtesy of a man named Earl Bascom.

Earl Bascom, circa 1932

Earl Bascom? you say.

Earl Bascom. The name is familiar to many rodeo insiders. It’s a name that likely appears in more halls of fame dedicated to the sport, on more “who’s who”- type lists related to rodeo, and with more honorary memberships and lifetime achievement awards than any other cowboy. Those honors include, but are not limited to, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Rodeo Hall of Fame, ProRodeo Hall of Fame, Canadian Rodeo Hall of Fame, Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, Utah Cowboy Hall of Fame, Utah Sports Hall of Fame, Alberta (Canada) Sports Hall of Fame, Raymond (Canada) Sports Hall of Fame, Mississippi Rodeo Hall of Fame, and on and on, adding up to some two dozen in all.

The honors come for a variety of reasons. Earl Bascom was a winning competitor over 23 seasons in bareback bronc riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, and steer wrestling as well as old-time events including steer decorating and steer riding. A rodeo clown and bullfighter. A rodeo producer and provider of rodeo livestock.

“The Father of Brahma Bull Riding” makes a winning ride at a 1939 rodeo.

But given all that and more, Bascom is recognized as, perhaps, the most inventive cowboy in the history of rodeo.

Those electric lights illuminating arenas that make night rodeos possible? Earl and his brother Weldon came up with that idea for a Mississippi rodeo in 1935.

The side-delivery chute gate that opens at the hind end of broncs and bulls, forcing them to turn out of the chute rather than lunge straight ahead? Earl and his brothers Raymond and Melvin figured that out while building rodeo arenas across Alberta, Canada, from 1916 to 1919. Bronc and bull riders have been saved a lot of agony from banged-up knees ever since.

The chaps that snap and flap from the legs of bronc and bull riders? Earl designed the basic pattern for those. He altered range-riding chaps, which fastened around the leg from top to near the bottom, with a higher cut buckled only at the thigh, allowing the “batwing” to fly free below the knee. In 1926, legendary bronc rider Pete Knight adopted the style, and they carried his name among cowboys for years.

In 1928, Bascom pulled the steel springs out from under the seat of a buckboard and turned them into an exercise gadget for cowboys to strengthen and build the muscles required in the arena, decades in advance of the physical fitness and training regimens common among today’s rodeo cowboys.

Bull riding is arguably rodeo’s most popular event. Although a form of bull riding, or jaripeo, was common in charreadas, rodeo-like events in Mexico, for hundreds of years, in large part we owe the modern American version to Earl Bascom and his brother Weldon. While in Mississippi in the 1930s, they introduced floppy-eared, high-humped, big-horned, loose-skinned Brahma bulls to the rodeo arena, popularizing and lending excitement to what was primarily an exhibition event prior to that. The Bascom brothers earned the title of “Fathers of Brahma Bull Riding” for their efforts.

Rodeo cowboy, inventor, and iconic Western artist Earl Bascom.

But topping the list of useful inventions, at least so far as rodeo competitors are concerned, are two pieces of what are now standard equipment for bronc riders: the bareback rigging and the hornless bronc saddle.

Lacking any practical application on ranch or range, bareback riding originated solely as a sporting contest; a new way to test the ability of a rider to stick to a bucking horse without benefit of saddle or rein. Prior to the advent of Bascom’s bareback rigging, riders tried horses with a simple mane hold, perhaps with a loose rope held around the bronc’s girth held there only by the strength of the cowboy’s grip; Some rode clutching, with both hands, leather loops on a strap cinched around the horse.

Then, in 1924, Bascom devised the prototype for the modern bareback rigging. Earl’s original version was made from reinforced rubber belting used on farm implements. He cut a rectangular section of a size to fit over a horse’s withers—say, two feet by six or eight inches—with a narrow appendage on the center front, folded back and fastened to the base to create a handhold similar to what might be found on a suitcase. “D” rings fastened to either end held latigo straps and a cinch for securing the rigging to the horse. As Bascom improved his invention, he traded rubber for thick leather and rawhide, creating more strength and stability. Although modified and improved over the decades, the bareback rigging used by bareback riders today is the recognizable offspring of Bascom’s original invention.

Also still in use today—required by the rules as standard equipment, in fact—is the hornless bronc saddle introduced by Earl Bascom at the Cardston Stampede in Alberta, Canada, in 1924. Saddle horns then and now have caused serious injury and even death among cowboys on ranch and range. Useful, even necessary, for roping, the horn of a saddle becomes dangerous when a horse bucks or falls or rears over. Realizing there’s no need for a horn in competitive bronc riding, Bascom removed it as he made other alterations in the design of a stock saddle, resulting in the modern rodeo bronc saddle. About the only thing lost since Earl invented it is the name bronc riders initially gave it—the “muley,” borrowed from cowboy lingo for hornless cattle.

Earl Bascom with one of his bronze sculptures, “Old Time Bronc Rider.”

BORN TO IT.

Earl Bascom’s affinity for and inventiveness in the tools and trappings of the rodeo arena seem surprising—until you factor in his heritage. Descended from tough and tenacious Mormon pioneer stock with infusions from Pyrenees Basques, Narragansett Indians, and Old West lawmen, Bascom was born June 19, 1906, in a log cabin on the family’s 101 Ranch in eastern Utah’s Uintah Basin.

Horseback at an early age, he and his brothers herded cattle and horses on the ranch established by his grandfather. His first bronc ride came at the tender age of three, when a bee stung the horse he was aboard and it went to bucking. The toddler rode out the storm until plucked from the saddle by an older brother.

When he was but six years old, cancer took Earl’s mother. Fleeing the memories—and the dry and overgrazed Uintah Basin—the Bascoms relocated to the Canadian prairies, taking up residence on the Knight Ranch near the new town of Raymond, Alberta. Earl’s father served as ranch foreman, responsible for hundreds of horses, thousands of cattle, and a sizeable herd of sheep.

There, Earl Bascom grew up on ranch work and rodeo, entering his first professional rodeo at age 12 at the already legendary Raymond Stampede—Canada’s first rodeo, established in 1902. Interspersed with ranch work and other endeavors, Bascom competed professionally—with a good deal of success—for some 23 years, following the rodeo circuit across the United States and Canada with his brothers.

During the mid-1930s, Earl and his brother Weldon, along with a handful of other Mormon cowboys from the West, introduced rodeo to Mississippi in order to raise money to build a chapel. The event’s success spawned other rodeos in the Southeast, and that first Mississippi rodeo, staged in Columbia in 1935, still holds repeat performances every year.

Topping the list, perhaps, of all the trophies and buckles Earl Bascom earned in the rodeo arena is one he received in 1995 at age 89. But there’s a story in that.

The story begins in 1930 at a rodeo on the 3-Bar Ranch near White Bear, Saskatchewan. Bascom placed second in two events—bareback riding and steer riding—and the winnings earned him the title of All- Around Cowboy and a trophy belt buckle. But by the time the rodeo ended and all the winnings were tallied, Earl was long gone, going down the road to compete in another rodeo. With no address and no way to track down the winner, the buckle went on the shelf.

And there it stayed, collecting dust until 1995 when the owner of the ranch—grandson of the man who produced the rodeo back in 1930—came across the buckle. With considerable time and effort, he located Earl, then living on his ranch in California, and presented the cowboy his long-overdue trophy buckle. As the old saying goes, better late than never— even when “late” means 65 years.

Earl Bascom (right) with his friends rodeo legend Turk Greenough and cowboy celebrity Roy Rogers.

MORE THAN RODEO.

While his rodeo-related accomplishments are enough and then some to celebrate the life of Earl Bascom, there’s a lot more to the man.

He was a saddle pal of movie star Roy Rogers, appearing in a film with the legendary cowboy actor and in other Hollywood productions.

Over the years, Bascom found time to study and practice painting and sculpture. He earned a Fine Arts degree from Brigham Young University and guided art students as a teacher in a couple of southern California high schools. And, like another well-known Western artist found on a branch of the Bascom family tree— Charles M. Russell—Earl revealed an understanding of cowboy life through his art equaled by few others. His works of art are found in several museums as well as private collections.

“The Cowboy,” another of Earl Bascom’s acclaimed works of art.

The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Art Association declared Earl Bascom the first professional rodeo cowboy to become an artist and sculptor. He has been named the most famous cowboy artist Canada has produced. And his acclaim stretches across the sea, as the first cowboy ever named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of London, England—an organization first founded in the eighteenth century.

“Rodeo Bullfighter,” a bronze by Earl Bascom, is inspired by personal experience in the arena.

Earl Bascom’s rodeo story is too big to fit in a single magazine. And the story grows wider and deeper when you include his father, John, brothers Weldon, Raymond, and Melvin, and his trick-riding sister-in-law, Texas Rose.

But those are stories for another time.

The man who invented much of rodeo as we know it today nodded for the gate for the last time in 1995 at age 89 at his Victorville, California, ranch. But so long as cowboys gather to contest their skills at riding and roping, Earl Bascom will live on, his spirit mingling with the dust motes floating in the beams of the lights that illuminate rodeo arenas everywhere.

—Spur Award-winning writer Rod Miller is the author of Goodnight Goes Riding and Other Poems, Things a Cowboy Sees and Other Poems, as well as several works of fiction and history about the West. His latest novel is Father unto Many Sons. Find him online at www.writerRodMiller.com.