Fort Worth Stock Show: Cowtown's Living Tradition

Fort Worth has called itself Cowtown since cattle drives pushed through here in the eighteen eighties, and nothing sustains that identity more stubbornly than the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, the oldest continuously running livestock show in the country.

It began in eighteen ninety-six with a conversation between rancher Charles McFarland and Charles French, a marketing manager for the Fort Worth Stockyards. They organized what they called a fat stock show, held under shade trees along Marine Creek on the North Side. There were no buildings, no enclosures, and no admission charge. The animals on display numbered only a few dozen cattle. The event was modest enough that organizers did it twice that first year.

By nineteen oh one it was officially the Texas Fat Stock Show. In nineteen oh three, Armour and Swift opened their massive packing plants nearby, and the show grew alongside the industry. By nineteen oh five, roundup demonstrations and ranch-work exhibitions had been added, billed as a Wild West Performance. The addition of an indoor rodeo came in nineteen eighteen, and in nineteen twenty-seven the show introduced the first side-release chutes for bucking horses and bulls, an innovation that became standard across the sport.

A devastating North Side flood and the disruptions of the Second World War eventually pushed the show to its permanent home at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, a complex built in nineteen thirty-six and named for the beloved Oklahoma humorist who had died in a plane crash that same year. The first full indoor rodeo at Will Rogers in nineteen forty-four, opened by Governor Coke Stevenson, drew three hundred ninety thousand visitors.

Today the event runs three weeks each January, drawing more than one point two seven million visitors in two thousand twenty-three, generating over one hundred forty-two million dollars in local economic impact. More than twenty thousand animals compete, and rodeo competitors ride for a purse of one point two million dollars. What started under those shade trees along Marine Creek has become one of the largest livestock exhibitions on earth.