Cheyenne Frontier Days: The Daddy of Em All

In September of eighteen ninety-seven, a Union Pacific Railroad employee named Frederick Angier organized a one-day outdoor rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to draw passengers to the off-season railroad line. He called it Frontier Days. Four thousand people came to watch. The following year, twenty thousand came.

The event has run every year since, including through both World Wars, and it has never missed a summer. Over one hundred twenty years later, Cheyenne Frontier Days is now the largest outdoor rodeo and western festival in the world. During its ten days each July, the city's population of roughly sixty-five thousand swells with nearly two hundred thousand visitors, making Cheyenne briefly one of the busiest cities in the Mountain West.

The early editions included events that would be considered reckless today: automobile races on dirt tracks, wild horse chases without safety fencing, steer roping in open fields. Native American participants, including members of the Arapaho and Shoshone nations from the Wind River Reservation, rode in the parades and camped adjacent to the grounds from the earliest years. Their participation is documented in the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum's photograph archives.

The name Frontier Days stuck partly because Cheyenne's boosters understood that the frontier, as a lived experience, was already over by eighteen ninety-seven. The event was always a performance of something recently past.

It was marketed from the beginning as the 'Daddy of em All.' That marketing language is now one hundred twenty-seven years old and has never been retired.