Bit of Wild West : Bronc Sale: A Gathering of Cowboys

From as far away as Texas and Oklahoma they came, old-fashioned men in an old-fashioned business, and damn, they grumbled, finding good bucking stock like Skyrocket or Five Minutes to Midnight is near impossible these days.

The 20 or so horse traders had come, as they do every year in May, for Miles City’s Bucking Horse Sale, the biggest auction of its kind left in the West. It is a time for serious business--more than $200,000 changed hands as horses were bought for rodeos and canneries--and a time of such boisterous, drunken cowboy revelry that once, in the ‘70s, the National Guard had to be summoned to restore order.

Lynn Beutler, 83, here to buy bucking stock for his nephew’s rodeo in Oklahoma, stood by the chutes at the fairgrounds, checkbook in hand, and watched a young cowboy come hurtling out of the gate on the back of an ornery gelding. Beutler nodded approvingly. The horse kicked as it jumped, with its powerful hind legs extended. This was no “canner” to be sold for 30 cents a pound and served as steak in Europe or Asia.

Bidding on a Bucker

Beutler’s nod had driven up the price to $500, and in the crow’s-nest above the chutes, auctioneer Kenny Younglund, 60, sang out: “Anybody give me six, six and a half? Now there’s a seven! Going once underneath the eight!” His eyes darted from buyer to buyer, looking for a nod or an upraised hand. “Sold to Mr. Lynn Beutler! That horse is going to Oklahoma.”

Over the years, auctions such as Miles City’s have dwindled to a precious few, and the men who come here to sell horses--some bred to buck, some failed saddle stock--say that this three-day market may one day fade into history too, a victim of the diminishing role of the horse in the West and the inability of financially pressed ranchers to raise horses that serve no useful purpose except for eventual sale. With a touch of sadness, they note that neither horses nor cowboys are as wild as they used to be.

No More Wild Broncs

The great Montana buckers--like Skyrocket, one that only six cowboys managed to ride in 20 years--came from the free-spirited open range back in the days when horses were as plentiful on the northern plains as buffalo once were and Miles City was the horse-trading capital of the world. Another bronc discovered here, Dark Journey, threw its last cowboy and retired at the age of 35. Then as ranches become automated, untamed, unbroken stock became a memory of the unfenced plains. The number of horses in Montana has dropped in the past 40 years from 250,000 to 69,000.

“When the land is fenced up and your liberty’s taken away, you change, whether you’re a man or a horse,” said Bob Barthelmess, whose bronc-riding father was one of the men who mastered Skyrocket and whose grandfather was post photographer at nearby Ft. Keough during the Indian Campaigns. “You lose the spirit that makes you wild.”

Once the easiest thing to find in Miles City, besides a drink, was a good bronc. This legendary cattle town in eastern Montana’s “Empire of Grass” was the terminus of longhorn drives from Texas. It was also the shipping hub for the huge horse ranches that sprawled across the prairies after the U.S. government began, early in this century, to sell horse meat to Russia. One outfit alone, the Chapple Bros. Cannery of Illinois, used to run 60,000 horses between the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers.

Horse-Trading Center

During World War I, nations throughout the world sent representatives here to buy horses for battle, and in the 1920s, Oregon shipped horses here by the trainload as it tidied up its land for farms and orchards.

During the Depression, defeated homesteaders added to the glut by turning their stock loose on the plains before they moved on to seek new homes. The banks hired cowboys to round up the mortgaged horses.

“A hoss is like a woman,” said Bob (Wild Horse) Crosby, one of the great rodeo cowboys of that era. “They’ll mind yuh a little from love, but a lot more from fear. Of course, it’s a heap easier to get a hoss afraid of you than a woman.”

With the 17,000 surviving wild horses in 11 Western states now protected by federal law, rodeo contractors increasingly must scour the West for animals bred to buck, just as handicappers search the racing charts to pick horses bred for speed. It is one of the ironies of changing Western times that the horse, whose stamina helped to settle states such as Montana, is now most valued as a performer in the urban rodeo (the only American sport born from an industry--cattle ranching).

Buckers at a Premium

Bucking is a trait and, since most traits are unpredictable, a trader like Beutler figures he’s invested well if six or seven of the 20 horses he buys turn out to be useful as rodeo buckers. (Prices range from several thousand dollars for a proven bucker down to a few hundred dollars for unnamed non-buckers that are headed for “kill merchants” in Ft. Worth, North Platte, Neb., and Canada.)

“A horse comes out of the chute and he don’t jump high and, as we say in cowboy language, don’t kick over his head,” said Younglund, the auctioneer. “Well, he’s no prospect. With the costs of maintaining stock what they are today, he’s going to get a one-way ticket to the canneries. He’s going to be steaks or pet food. I can tell which way a horse is heading just by watching who’s bidding.”

For Miles City (population 10,000), the Bucking Horse Sale is more than an exchange of horses. It is a celebration of the Old West, a ritual that honors the alcohol-fueled cowboy world of fights and friendships. It is a time when anyone on Main Street without a Stetson, a big silver belt buckle and sharp-toed boots looks naked. And anyone at the bar without a can of Coors in his hand is dismissed as some kind of Eastern oddity.

A 10-Year Visit

“I came over to watch the sale about 10 years ago for the first time,” said Wayne Soper, then of San Francisco. “So what happens? I get drunk and buy an apartment house. Then the real estate market goes to hell in Montana and I can’t sell it and I’m still here, still just sort of passing through.”

Until a few years ago, Miles City blocked off Main Street during the sale and let everyone wander from bar to bar, drinks in hand. It got so rowdy that the town banned open containers on the street. Now the drinking is done inside the Bison Bar and the Log Cabin and Trails Inn, where the cowboys stand 10 deep, passing cans of beer over their heads to friends who can’t reach the bar and talking about taming broncs like veterans remembering a South Pacific campaign.

Although things stayed pretty orderly this year as the cowboys danced to Suzi Maki and the Trail Drive Band and applauded the Grizzly Peek-a-Boo cancan dancers from Red Lodge, Tony Harbaugh, the sheriff of Custer County, deputized seven reserves to augment his four-man force and was resigned to the fact that drinking and brawling are as much a part of the cowboy fraternity as flank straps and stirrups.

“It’s the code of the West, pure and simple,” he said. “These are men who work hard in the cowboy industry and they also play hard. The majority are just good, hard-working cowboys, and when they come to town they want to turn loose for a couple-three days.”

Parade Enlivens Event

The bars were jammed by the time the parade--celebrating the theme “Before Barbed Wire”--came down Main Street at 10 a.m. Saturday. The procession of old ranch equipment, state political candidates and marching bands had drawn ranchers from hundreds of miles around. From Sheridan, Wyo., had came an American Legion band dressed in cavalry uniforms and, instead of dispersing at the end of the route, its members reformed and marched back up Main Street, drums thundering and bugles blaring.

At the Bison Bar the band turned in unison and entered, playing, “When the Saints Come Marching In.” They were greeted with cheers and cold beers, but could stay only 30 minutes, for there were half a dozen other bars to visit on the pub-crawl back to the fairgrounds, where beer was being sold by the six-pack and rancher Ed Grebe was checking on the 67 horses and 23 bulls he had brought in for auction.

“You get attached to these damn animals,” said Grebe, who was liquidating his rodeo stock--all except Goodeye, a one-eyed horse his son liked to ride--to concentrate on cattle ranching.

“But the profit’s not there like it used to be and, well, what the heck, we all got to survive.”