CALGARY STAMPEDE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 7

CALGARY STAMPEDE

THRILLS FOR SPECTATORS

OLD DAY’S RELIVED.

KING’S DESIRE TO WITNESS GATHERING.

The King has expressed a wish to see the Calgary stampede when he visits Canada. The stampede has ho counterpart outside the West. For a fortnight each year, in mid-summer, the people re-live the days of the early West when Calgary was a cow town.

Calgary, now a city of 100.000 people, is rebuilt tin the occasion of the stampede. Merchants put false fronts on their shops, to reproduce the log cabin stores of the 80’s. Everyone wears a huge cowboy hat, cowboy shirts and scarves of gaudy colours. Motor-cai parking gives way to hitching-posts foi saddle horses. All the colour of the West is caught, again, to reproduce the days when the buffalo roamed the prairie at will, and was hunted by the Blackfoot, Stoney and Sarcee tribes. Scarlet-coated riders of the plains, men of the old North-west Mounted maintain order. The city looks back to the day when the first train rolled in—the White Man’s Fire Waggon.

The stampede officially opens with a parade—five miles through the streets —of Indians, in paint, feathers and beaded buckskin; horsemen from the western provinces and a dozer, western and southern states —the cream of bronk riders, steer decorations, calf ropers, red men and white, ready to risk life and limb for the pot of gold and the title of world champion. In the parade they rub shoulders with oldtime packers, trappers, ranchers and whiskey traders. COWBOY LANGUAGE. Everyone talks cowboy language. If an outlaw throws his rider, he is “piled.” Roping a calf is “tying up a bunch of veal.” A “pick-up” is a horse trained to ride close to bronks, to herd them back to the chutes after ' they have disposed of a rider. ‘’Spilling the loop” is failing to rope an animal. The word “lassoo” is not in the cowboy vernacular. Cowboys must wear regulation costumes —10gallon Stetson hat, coloured shirt and scarf, leather chaps, high-heeled boots, and spurs. The steer-decorating event is one of the thrills of the stampede. Steers, brought in wild from the range, are penned in a chute. The decorator, mounted, takes up a on one side; his “hazer,” also mounted, on the other. When the steer is cut loose, the decorator rides after it, drops on to its horns, slips a red ribbon over a horn, gets clear, and signals for his time to be clocked. The record time for steer decorating is five seconds! CHUCK WAGGON RACE. The chuck waggon race is another thrill for the uninitiated. When the boys go to the round-up twice a year, the chuck waggon carries. their bedding. In it their cooking is done. The round-up boss is the “wrangler.” In the race, chuck waggons drawn by two or four horses, dash to a given point, halt, build a fire, take it aboard in a brazier, and speed to the winning post. The pace is terrific. Accidents are frequent. The stampede winds up with the cowboys’ ball, held in the palatial Canadian Pacific Railway Hotel. The rank and file and their partners, numbering 10,000 dance in the streets to the music of a score of bands. The first stampede was held in 1912, when a young cow-puncher urged the Big Four, the four leading citizens, to put on a “show” that would be a picture of the. West. He is now general manager of the stampede. The first bronk-riding championship was won by a blood Indian, “Tom Three Persons.” Stampedes are now held in many of the Western States. One will be staged at Sydney for the first time at the Royal Agricultural Show next Easter. A committee last summer selected a number of performers in Canada and the States who will proceed to Australia next March.