Cowboys


Over
the loudspeaker, a disembodied voice announces that the Stampede has
made some big changes this year. Calf roping is now “tie-down roping”
and the wild horse race has become the “Stampede horse race.”

The wild horse race comes straight out of the early days of rodeo, and some say it is more dangerous than bull riding.

Sixteen
unbroken horses are released into the ring and forty-eight cowboys go
after them in teams of three men each. The object is to saddle a horse,
then ride it across the finish line in front of the grandstand. The
teams compete every afternoon for the full ten days of Stampede, the
cowboys nurse their injuries with five-dollar beers, and on the last
day the winning team splits ten thousand dollars.

Down in the
chutes, “Big Joe” Lisk and his team are struggling to halter a black
horse. Joe is a rancher from Quesnel, B.C., and he is on the far side
of fifty, which makes him one of the oldest cowboys competing. He came
to his first Stampede in 1973, rode bareback and, he says, “didn’t get
nothing except for a hangover.”

His dad rodeoed back in the
days when the men pulled cars into a circle to form the corral. The
last real cowboys were Big Joe’s babysitters. “It ruined me for life,”
Joe says. “They told me all about whiskey and wild women. Once a year
they went shopping and bought jeans and a Levi’s jacket. They pulled
their own teeth. Come to think of it, most of them didn’t have many
teeth left. They called me Boy.”

When the gate swings open, the
black horse leaps forward and Big Joe strains to hold the lead rope as
the animal bucks and pulls. One of the other horses escapes from its
cowboys and runs across the infield, hitting the fence at full tilt,
knocking it back a couple of feet and sending the tv
cameraman who was filming behind it up in the air and into the arena.
He lands in a heap and lies still for a moment. When the horse starts
toward him, he jumps up and leaps over the fence in a single motion.
Meanwhile, Big Joe and his team have got their horse saddled and Blue,
their rider, is aboard. He hangs on as the horse bucks and moves
farther and farther from the finish line. Joe cuts them off, waving his
hat to redirect them, but Blue still crosses the finish line after
several others, too late to place.

After the race, Big Joe sits
in the dressing room clenching and unclenching his fist and saying that
it hadn’t been the cakewalk he was expecting. He’d had a hard time
getting the halter on and the horse had slammed into his arm and pinned
it against the chute. He cradles a bag of ice cubes against his forearm
and walks to the infield bar. “Those horses were kicking and biting,”
he says. “That one we had today was thirteen, maybe fourteen hundred
pounds.”

Big Joe sits down at a table of wild horse racers.
He tells about the time he was working around a chute and had his
thighs pressed up against the rails when he noticed the other guys were
laughing. He looked down. A horse had its lips curled back and was
stretching its teeth through the rail, biting the air inches from Joe’s
fly.

Big Joe wears a black vest from the horse racing
association with four or five titles stitched on it, including one from
South Dakota, where his team placed sixth in the World Finals a few
years ago. “When you get too old to rodeo,” he says, “you do something
like this and then you get beat up some more. I feel like a dinosaur.”

“Well, I wished last year that you were extinct,” another guy says. “It was too hard beating you.”


Two days later, an afternoon thundershower turns the arena into a mud
bowl. Big Joe loses his footing and goes across the arena on his
stomach, a two-hundred-pound man unsuccessfully trying to anchor a
thirteen-hundred-pound horse. That day he arrives at the bar with his
right arm tucked against his body, because his shoulder got dislocated
when the horse dragged him across the arena. He relocated it after the
race by bracing his elbow on a urinal and getting his teammate to push
it back into place. “When you leave in a white truck with a light on
top, then you’ve got trouble,” he says. He did that once. “Doc told me
I had fifteen minutes.” When the doctor looked at the x-ray, he said
that Big Joe’s ribs had been broken so many times he couldn’t tell
which breaks were old and which were new.

The cowboy sitting
next to Big Joe tells about the time he was trying to hold a horse and
it bit his shoulder, then picked him up and threw him to the ground.
When he got up and grabbed the horse again, it reached down and bit his
thigh. “Horses bite and they don’t let go,” one of the other guys says.


An Edmonton cowboy said that he broke his nose four times the
first year he raced. He was a skateboarder, born and raised in the
city, and one night a bunch of guys in a bar said, why didn’t he try
horse racing? He’d seen it once or twice but didn’t know what he was
doing when he went into the arena. The horse threw him around and he
came out saying, “I love this shit! When can I do it again?”


His role on the team is mugger, the same thing Big Joe does. “Shanking,
they call it,” Joe says. “Just an anchor. I’m the guy who hangs onto
the rope and gets drug through the dirt.” He says some of the best
muggers are city kids who don’t know any better. “I guess you’d call it
macho or stupid. The closer to the edge, the more we like it. It damn
sure ain’t the money we do it for.” I ask what he does do it for. “Pure
adrenaline,” says Big Joe. “It’s a hell of a rush out there when you
could just about be killed.”

Indians

Ed
Calf Robe sits in a lawn chair beside his teepee, watching the
children’s parade and talking with his wife Marie and the old lady who
owns the teepee next door. The kids are dressed in Native regalia, and
as they pass each teepee, treats are slipped into the shopping bags
they carry. The first time Ed came to the Stampede he was six months
old. That was 1939 and he’s been back every year since. As a kid, he
looked forward to the Stampede like it was Christmas.

“In
those days you took your time going places,” Ed says. “Indians never
rushed before. Not like crazy white man now.” Back then, the Calf Robes
left their home on the Siksika reserve 100 miles east of Calgary early
in the morning and set up camp twice before reaching the Stampede. The
boys rode on horseback, the women rode in the wagon, supper was cooked
over a fire and the family slept on the prairie. When they arrived in
the city, people shouted, “Here come the Indians!”

The
children’s parade ends and the kids go to the stage for the dance
competitions. A photographer from the Calgary Herald comes over to take
Ed Calf Robe’s picture, and Ed puts on his feather headdress with his
T-shirt and fleece vest, then looks into the camera. He used to wear a
headdress that belonged to his dad, but the feathers became worn and
thin. A man on the reserve made a new one, the headdress Ed wears now,
with eagle feathers that the Calf Robes received from Fish and Wildlife
many months after applying to obtain feathers for ceremonial use.


In the morning, Ed Calf Robe’s son brings the Calgary Herald into the
teepee, where Ed is having coffee. The photo is on the front page of
the Stampede section and the headline reads: Culture by Word of Mouth.
The article tells how, like his father before him, Ed has given his
life to sharing stories about Native traditions. “We’re trying to
educate you guys about Indians,” Ed says. “All that bad publicity we
got from Hollywood.” Two of his granddaughters are listening. “Cowboys
and Indians really got along; it’s only in Hollywood they fight. As
kids, we watched these movies where the Indians turn around and take
one shot, two shots, they empty the whole barrel and one cowboy falls.
The cowboys come, shoot once and ten Indians drop. We used to all want
to be cowboys.”

“All Indians are cowboys at one time or
another,” Ed Calf Robe says. “Look at Tom Three Persons.” Tom was a
Blood Indian from southern Alberta, and at the first Stampede he drew
Cyclone, a horse that had never been ridden and had bucked off a
hundred cowboys. In front of a sold-out crowd, Tom rode the black horse
to a standstill, becoming Saddle Bronc Champion of the World and the
most famous cowboy on the northern plain.

Ed rode saddle bronc and bareback in the 1950s. “Cowgirls like those Indian cowboys,” he says.

Marie Calf Robe comes into the teepee, and she and Ed exchange a few
words in Blackfoot, which she spoke until she went to school. She was
nine years old and didn’t know a word of English when she left home and
moved into the dormitory at the school run by Catholic nuns. As long as
they were good, the kids got to go home on Friday nights. They returned
to school on Saturday before supper. Ed says that if you had braids,
the first thing they did was cut them off.

“We couldn’t talk
our language,” Marie says. “They were really against it. But they could
talk French in front of us. And the way they talked, you know, I don’t
think they were saying nice words about us.”

“Sauvage,” Ed
says. “I always wondered what that word meant when I was growing up.
And when I finally learned what it meant, I told them: ‘We’re not
savages, we’re Indians.’ I told them that a couple of times. Boy did
they ever change their faces—from white to pink to red.”

Later
in the afternoon, Marie pulls out the buckskin she sewed for Ed, and
beaded during the winter months. “Dad’s gotta put on his business
suit,” their daughter jokes. As an elder and active member of the
Indian Village Committee, Ed Calf Robe has many official duties and
dons his buckskin and headdress almost daily during Stampede. “My
family has a long background of what you call ‘politics’ these days,”
he says. “The theme always seems to be cowboys and Indians. I told
them, how come the cowboys always come first, Indians second? How about
Indians and cowboys?”

In the evening, Ed and Marie Calf Robe
leave the Village and walk down to the seats on the south end of the
arena, where they always go to watch the chuckwagon races. When Marie
was young, her uncle had a wagon in the races. She would go with her
mother to the old grandstand, where they would identify the uncle’s
wagon by the little oxford shoe that was tied on the back. Now, in
their usual seats in the new grandstand, Marie and Ed and several of
their adult children watch for Shawn, the oldest grandson, a popular
outrider in the chucks. “I taught Shawn the same way my father taught
me,” Ed says, pride in his voice. “My dad bought me a horse, a pinto
horse, and he made me ride that horse. I used to keep falling off. I’d
cry my head off, but he’d throw me back on the horse. That’s the way I
taught my boys to ride. They were fast learners.”

One
afternoon, more than twenty tourists are lined up outside the Calf Robe
teepee. The family spent the morning moving their camping supplies
outside, piling the mattresses and suitcases behind the teepee. Buffalo
robes and beaded buckskin were moved in and everyone worked stringing
up ropes to drape the buckskin for display, laying skins on the floor
and setting out family heirlooms.

Marie and her daughter are
inside, sitting in lawn chairs on either side of the door, sweating in
T-shirts in the hot air. Half a dozen tourists are looking at the
headdress, the bright beadwork and the faded buckskin tunic Ed’s father
used to wear, which is a hundred years old and worth thousands of
dollars.

A small boy points at the wooden bowls of berries and
dried meat on the grass in the middle of the teepee. “Ooh, Dad,” he
says, “there’s ants in that one.” His father shushes him up.
“Pemmican?” the man asks, pointing at the bowls. Marie nods.


Most visitors don’t say anything. Those who speak ask questions like:
“Do you still live in teepees?” “Do you fight with cowboys?” “What do
you do when it rains?” A sign on the teepee says Please Do Not Touch
Anything, but every few minutes Marie’s daughter has to stop people
from rubbing the buckskin between their fingers.

Marie Calf
Robe picks up the bowl of pemmican, dried meat mixed with Saskatoon
berries. “We don’t have this very often,” her daughter says.

A
woman asks what the stripes on the Hudson’s Bay blanket mean. Another
visitor holds her cowboy hat in her hands as she stands in the doorway
and speaks without looking at Marie or her daughter. “I love the smell
of the skins, the grasses, the meat,” she says. “It must be quite
nostalgic for you.” Marie doesn’t say anything.