AR-News: [US] Montana Event Is Part Auction, Part Rodeo

[Andrew Gach]

washingtonpost.com 
At the Bucking Horse Sale, It's a Wild Ride 
Montana Event Is Part Auction, Part Rodeo and One Long Celebration 

By William Souder
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A03 


MILES CITY, Mont., May 16 -- Spanish explorers brought the horse to the New World, and the first herds cantered onto the Montana high plains around 1730. Almost immediately, it can be assumed, somebody here got on a horse that didn't like it and promptly fell off.

This interaction between human and horse is replayed again and again during three days every May in one of America's most exhilarating -- and remote -- parties: the annual Miles City Bucking Horse Sale, which concluded here Sunday. By day it is a lot like a rodeo, but it isn't a rodeo. At night it is a street celebration billed as the "cowboy Mardi Gras," but that doesn't get it right either.

This is a raw, beer-soaked anachronism closer in mood and action to the annual bullfighting festival in Pamplona, Spain, than to anything else, though you won't hear many people in eastern Montana use the word aficionado.

Miles City, about 150 miles east of Billings, with a population of 8,400, is one of two incorporated towns in Custer County. The other one, Ismay, has 20 residents.

The sale almost doubles the population here. It takes place across from the stockyard, at the southwest edge of town, on the windswept threshold of a stark landscape once known as "the Great American Desert." It's not called that on maps anymore, but few people here would argue with the description. For as far as one can see, the landscape is all prairie grass and sage, seared and brown, rising and falling over steep hillsides against a horizon broken by sandstone buttes standing under high clouds that often threaten rain but rarely bring it.

"This is the real West," said Bill Broadbent, an institutional broker with Lehman Bros. in New York, who was here for his 14th consecutive Bucking Horse Sale. "This is one of the greatest unspoiled places left in the Lower 48 states. And it's also one of the best parties."

At the time, it was either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, and Broadbent was in front of the packed Montana Bar. The action on Main Street was just beginning in earnest. There were a few couples twirling through their two-steps, with boot heels digging into the pavement. But they were lost in a larger, oceanic swelling of people. 

The mostly young, decidedly unsteady crowd moved from one jammed bar to the next. Lean men in tall hats eyed groups of women in low-slung jeans and loose, shimmery tops weaving paths among the cowboys, a lurid mix of laughter and cigarette smoke and bawdy invitation rising into the chilly spring air to a thumping beat from the bands lining the sidewalks.

Full story

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31676-2004May16?language=printer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/attachments/20040518/0518e4c5/attachment.html