We’ve been invaded by fringe. I don’t mean a “fringe element.” I mean honest-to-gosh FRINGE, bedecking everything in sight. Fringe on jackets, fringe on vests, fringe on pants, fringe on chaps, fringe on boots.
The cowboys wear fringe, the Indians wear fringe.
The spectators wear fringe.
The horses wear fringe!
It’s Rodeo Week in Pendleton, when our little town of seventeen thousand swells to seventy thousand as the world’s sixth-largest rodeo, the Pendleton Round-Up, bucks its way to a conclusion with its best parade.
The rodeo parade’s route overlays a snippet of the actual Oregon Trail, and this parade has no motorized vehicles—only carriages and stage coaches and wagons and horses. Hundreds and hundreds of horses. A marching band on horses. Rodeo queens from all over the country, on horses. Forest service rangers on horses. A sheriff’s posse on horses. A state senator and a university president on horses. Most of the Umatilla Indian tribe on horses.
The street-sweeping posse has been working overtime!
For most of the thousands who’ve descended on the town, Round-Up is simply a diversion, a week of rodeo for people who wouldn’t touch a cowboy hat (or a fringed sleeve) for 51 weeks of the year. But as I sat with my mom and my godparents in the rodeo stands this week, my thoughts turned to the folks for whom this isn’t a week-long diversion, the people for whom this is a lifestyle.
Specifically, I was thinking about their names.
It stands to reason that a lot of rodeo riders would come from cowboying families—so perhaps that’s why so many of their names are… SO Cowboy! As the events progressed, I found myself writing down a list of the cowboy-contestants’ names. It was Stetson that spurred me to start. (Talk about being corralled into a career path by your own name… His parents really had faith in his rodeo path!) The same could be said for Colt, and even more so for Bronc. (I swear I am not making up any of these names.)
It wasn’t just context that made those names sound so Cowboy-Western; a whole passel of them were actually named for Western cities or states: Cheyanne, Cody, Calgary, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Montana, Dakota, with honorable mention going to Tex.
Then there are names that evoke the landscape of the West: Dusty, Rocky, Clay, Canyon, Sage, Bryar, Timber. Names that evoke blue-collar craftsmen: Cooper, Tanner, Taylor, Mason, Hunter.
And names that I can’t imagine on any first-grade roster because they just sound like old cowboys: Chet. Gus. Hank. Ike. Fred, Bucky, Slade. Clint, Wyatt, Zeke. And we can’t forget Howdy and Rowdy. (I swear, I am not making any of these up!)
The generations after mine have a real flair for giving their kids invented names, and on the rodeo reader-board even the made-up names sounded Very Cowboy. Riggin. Talon. Cully, Cutter, Coburn, Cord. Pake. Tuff. Brushton. Doskie, Daxton, Tyke.
The prize for Most Apt name has to go to the World Champion bronc rider whose name is… Ryder.
And the booby prize, for the name that will make you snort, is definitely Bubba Buckaloo.
Even so… even with so much Cowboyness of names in that rodeo arena… my mother leaned over during the breakaway roping and raised her voice to be heard above the crowd and announcers:
“I’ve been keeping count all afternoon. The cows are winning this thing.”
Kana's Chronicles 
You roped it! And some of us happily respond to two names!
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True enough–I’m one of them! ;)
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