Pendleton Round-Up: The Rodeo That Put a Town on the Map

The Pendleton Round-Up started in September of nineteen ten, when community leaders staged a frontier exhibition of horsemanship for a crowd of spectators, timed deliberately for mid-September when harvests were finished and ranchers had completed their brandings.

The goal was to put Pendleton on the map, drawing inspiration from Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows and the Portland Rose Festival. It worked. Today the Round-Up draws roughly fifty thousand visitors each September and operates as a nonprofit, donating surplus funds to local civic causes. The Hall of Fame beside the stadium, founded in nineteen sixty-nine as the first hall of fame started by a single rodeo, preserves saddles, Native American regalia, wagons, and photographs going back to that first September. Ten men and five horses were the original honorees.