The California Rodeo Salinas

Every July, on the grounds of the Salinas Sports Complex on North Main Street, the California Rodeo Salinas runs for four days and draws some of the best professional rodeo competitors in the country. It is the largest rodeo in California and consistently ranked among the top fifteen professional rodeos in the United States out of more than six hundred sanctioned events.

The rodeo began in nineteen eleven as a Wild West Show on the site of the old race track fairgrounds. It was incorporated in nineteen fourteen under the name California Rodeo. The history it draws on is older than that. The Spanish ranchos that occupied the Salinas Valley from the late eighteenth century through the eighteen forties were cattle operations, and the rancho economy required periodic roundups, called rodears in Spanish, the word from which rodeo derives. Vaqueros, the Mexican horsemen who did the actual work of the ranchos, developed the roping, riding, and livestock handling techniques that became the foundation of Western ranching culture and eventually the formalized competition of the rodeo.

When American settlers arrived in California in the eighteen fifties and sixties, they inherited this cattle culture along with the land, and the California vaquero tradition became absorbed into what later generations called cowboy culture. By the time the Salinas rodeo was formalized in nineteen fourteen, the specific skills it was testing, calf roping, bareback bronc riding, bull riding, steer wrestling, had been refined over a century of actual ranch work in exactly this valley.

The evening parade that was once a central feature of the California Rodeo Salinas held, at its peak, the distinction of being the largest night parade west of the Mississippi River. That parade was eliminated in nineteen eighty-five and later reinstated in a different form.

The rodeo was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in two thousand eight. For the people who compete in it, Salinas is a major stop on the professional circuit, a venue where national titles and significant prize money are at stake. For the community it serves, it is the oldest continuous civic celebration the city has, predating the lettuce industry's rise and surviving every subsequent chapter of the valley's complicated history.