Chapter 9 Veronika Schuchter “Don’t Expect Rodeo to Be a Sweet Sport” Ambiguity, Spectacle, and Cowgirls in Aritha van Herk’s Stampede and the Westness of West

“There Is Only One, and That Is Calgary’s”: The Stampede Between Imaginary and Authentic Westernness

The collection’s first piece, “The dreaming,” charts the Stampede as an inevitable event that has become a fixture in Calgarian life: “Stampede coming. A certain anniversary that will arrive despite resistance / or annoyance, despite the strange thrum of ‘until.’ Not tomorrow, but / always in the seventh month, the off-centre pivot of the year turning on its axis, saturnalia biding its time” (11). Here, the event is presented as an unavoidable part of the Calgarian social calendar that occurs every year, whether it is loved or loathed by locals. The piece humorously suggests that no matter how locals feel about the Stampede, it is central to their identity: “Some say / you’re not a true Calgarian until you leave town to avoid the Stampede” (11). The importance of the Stampede to Calgarians’ self-concept, whether in terms of attending or avoiding the event, is in fact not a recent development but has accompanied the event since its inception in 1912.

Questions of identity, self-transformation, and authenticity were front of mind for Guy Weadick, the Stampede’s founder, when he first held the event in Calgary. Weadick himself was born on the east coast of the United States and although he organized the first Calgary Stampede in 1912, he didn’t permanently settle in Calgary until 1920. There, he became a passionate advocate for the history, traditions, and stories of western Canada. Ellen Kelm argues that Weadick envisioned the Stampede as a multi-day, community-oriented event that would allow Albertans to connect with their collective, western history and, more than this, “eventually contribute to their distinctive identity within Canada” (2009, 715). In this endeavour, the concept of authenticity became a key element: Weadick rejected the supposed inauthenticity of American Wild West shows, which he perceived to be “staged exaggerations” (Foran 2009, 254), and aimed to depict cowboy lifestyles “more accurately” through his curation of the Stampede. One might question Weadick’s claims about the authenticity of the Stampede considering his practice of hiring predominantly American cowboys and his own origins in the States, but for Weadick, a key aspect of western authenticity was adaptation, the ability to transform oneself in order to survive what was, at least for recent settlers to the area, a new environment, a new climate, a new way of living (Kelm 2009, 717). Weadick “personified the promise of the West as a place of transformation” (715) and was a “genuine Westerner” according to his own definition: “If you live in Calgary—you are a Westerner—it does not matter how long you have been here” (in Kelm 2009, 729). Through the Stampede, Weadick was, in effect, “making himself over into a local” (728) while at the same time offering “authenticity to all who, like himself, had been transformed by the West” (729).

Several of van Herk’s pieces in Stampede pick up on the ambiguity of the Stampede’s relationship to authenticity, transformation, and identity, in particular by exploring the purpose of the event. For example, she dedicates a three-page piece to Weadick in which she explores his aspirations as a writer and his keen interest in preserving the stories of the Canadian west and its ranching and rodeo traditions. The piece explores how he came to Alberta by chance and how the place piqued his interest, highlighting the perceived western authenticity that would ultimately tempt him to stay and transform local events. Van Herk writes in her poem “Weadick” that, before Weadick’s arrival in Alberta, “[t]here were plenty of counterfeit wild west shows, disputable and fraudulent, pretending to be authentic. Plenty of circus tricks and bluffers. And what does authenticity measure except its own imitation? The vanishing west, gone to fence, memorialized” (58). It was Weadick’s mission to transform these fraudulent events and memorialize a western lifestyle. As Max Foran points out, “Weadick had . . . a keen interest in the stories of the old-timers. He was acquainted with hundreds of cowboys and ranchers and was interested in preserving their stories.” Foran adds that “it is unfortunate that his role as a chronicler has gone largely unnoticed” (2009, 254). Van Herk highlights the side of the Stampede that is meant to preserve history through her depiction of Weadick as a passionate promoter of rural western traditions, writing “letters until his hand was sore” and “hammer[ing] out his pleas and persuasions” on the typewriter he travelled with (Stampede, 58–9). By including these details of Weadick’s life, van Herk insists on the history-preserving aspects of the Stampede’s beginnings, suggesting that these aspects are woven into the fabric of the event. Other pieces explore the Stampede in a different, less historical register, giving voice to both those who are annoyed that the event takes over the city every year, and those who wait for it with anticipation. “The dreaming,” for instance, considers the criticism the Stampede faces from locals who see it as a primitive and excessive event for the masses—a criticism that, in van Herk’s words, treats “popular jubilation” as “suspect” and gives joy “no respect” (11). The poem “Anticipation,” meanwhile, focuses on the joy itself, and the excitement the event brings to both locals and visitors: “Stampede on its way. A rush, a flight, a charge, headlong” (14). This line encapsulates the overall spirit of the collection, which, though critical of some aspects, also translates an enthusiastic viewpoint to its readers.

By placing the dimensions and intentions of historical preservation that Weadick brings to the Stampede’s origin story alongside depictions of the event as an extravagant affair that attracts opposing viewpoints, van Herk insists on the ambiguous identity of the Stampede itself, somewhere between popular spectacle and display of authentic, traditional western lifestyles. She makes this ambiguity even more visible in the questions she raises about the purpose of the event in the poem “History”: “Where does Stampede come from, history and its bones rattling down the / road? It’s the old pretending to be new and the new pretending to be old” (42). “History” gestures to important issues of authenticity—in particular, the intersections of authenticity with myth, contradiction, and performance—that are further elaborated in “Apology”:

What “History” and “Apology” have in common is a kind of self-conscious negotiation of the Stampede as an event caught between paying homage to its origins in a western tradition of farming and horse culture and its modern-day, circus-like spectacle that is embraced and enjoyed as much as it is criticized and rejected. This ambiguity is encapsulated by the last line of “Apology,” quoted above. A statement more than a question, it nonetheless ends in a question mark, leaving these last words open to interpretation and giving readers space to come to their own conclusion. The piece “Surprise” articulates some of the questions readers may ask themselves: “What is the attraction? / Nostalgia for the past . . . ? / Mourning the recent past? / Claiming the future?” (76). What constitutes an authentic West is ambiguous when it comes to the Stampede and has been since the beginning. The event itself is neither authentic nor inauthentic. Its many meanings solidify only at the individual level.

“Eight Seconds Is a Long, Long Time”: Performing Rodeo at the Stampede

The various rodeo competitions featuring well-known cowboys (and cowgirls, whom I discuss in the final section) have been integral to the Stampede since it began. Van Herk examines rodeo like she does the Stampede: with a measure of ambivalence, positioning it between a sporting event and a theatrical performance, and observing the tensions and apparent contradictions at its heart. Rodeo occupies several unique places in the world of sports. Because of its roots in ranching and farming culture, it is considered a work-based sport that also keeps close ties with the animals, communities, and traditions of specific geographical locations in western North American.

Many different kinds of competitions take place under the umbrella term of rodeo, but I will use it to refer to perhaps the best known of these competitions: the event in which a cowboy or cowgirl tries to remain on a horse (referred to as a “bronc”) or a bull while it “bucks,” trying to shake off its rider. The earliest rodeos at the Stampede did not have a time limit for this event, which would usually go on until the rider fell or the animal came to standstill. Now eight seconds, an interval “unique to rodeo in sport,” is “synonymous with rodeo, even if its origins are hazy” (Canadian Press 2018). One of the most successful bronc riders explains that when “you get on a horse that’s bucking really hard, they’re exerting as much energy as they possibly can. . . . Six seconds I don’t believe would be long enough to showcase to the best of your ability or the livestock’s. Ten might be a little bit too long” (Canadian Press 2018). This short but intense timeframe showcases rodeo competitors’ abilities and forms the climax of van Herk’s prose poem “The infield,” which refers to the eight seconds as both “impossibly short and impossibly long” (12). “The infield” highlights the performativity, danger, and joy of rodeo and, interestingly, does so without ever referring to the sport by name. The second half of the piece consists of two lists of six lines each. The first list reflects on instances in which eight seconds might seem like an eternity, such as the audience eagerly waiting in anticipation or the eight long seconds after a rider enters the arena. In a mode that highlights the stylized nature of rodeo as a complex sporting competition, van Herk juxtaposes these experiences with the second list, which reflects on brief, everyday activities that make eight seconds pass in an instant, such as answering a phone or falling in love at first sight.

This same piece takes up themes of anticipation, theatricality, and authenticity in the sport of rodeo, which, as we have seen, are also central to the evolution and character of the Stampede as a specific event. The “[s]howdown hovers at the fringe of the arena” (Stampede, 12) as the rider and audience collectively wait for the next eight-second eternity to begin. Once in the arena,

[i]n the combed dirt of the ring, cowboys and horses pretend this tournament is not theatrical, a choreographed dance with fortune, and possibility roster of rules, a wager of prediction, a struggle between balance and bruises. Hazard the probability. A chance to slip the blood, a chance to claim injury, a chance to bite the dust. Gambling the true sport for those who would court thoracic compression, strained biceps, torn posterior cruciate ligaments, C2 fractures, and sheer terror. (12)

In this extract, one can trace an almost comical engagement with the work-based sports competition. Once again, van Herk brings to bear the question of authenticity. Can a sporting performance that seeks to imitate an authentic ranching lifestyle ever be more than just an imitation? She draws attention to how the sport needs this act of pretence to uphold its claim of authenticity, but this same pretence simultaneously feeds into the sport’s performativity. Rodeo is a spectacle that draws large crowds who must be entertained. The extract further highlights the deep physicality of rodeo, an aspect that is integral to most sports. More than this, though, it emphasizes the risks cowboys and cowgirls are willing to take by engaging in rodeo in order to satisfy both themselves and their audiences.

It is in poems that centre the performativity of rodeo and Stampede in Stampede’s dominant mode of ambiguity that the relative privilege of van Herk’s narrator becomes most palpable. While individual pieces reference larger systemic modes of marginalization and oppression at the Stampede, they do so only peripherally without asking bigger questions about who the spectators and benefactors of the rodeo events are and how the events perpetuate colonial violence, not to mention patriarchal and heterosexist gender binaries. There are sparse traces of the presence of Indigenous Peoples in Stampede, and their stories in connection with the Stampede are largely elided. The reader learns that “[t]he First Peoples called Calgary ‘horse town’ because the settlement was a social hub for horses” (22), but van Herk’s narrator gives no further specification about who these generalized First Peoples are. The closest van Herk comes to the treatment of Indigenous Peoples at the Stampede is in the piece “Treaty Seven,” which asks, “The participation of First Nations people: celebration or exploitation?” (65), but again provides no context and doesn’t go into detail. The narrator’s ambiguity in these instances serves as a tool to avoid scrutiny of their own privilege and entanglement with the Stampede’s problematic enactment of the frontier myth and settler colonialism while also providing a similar tool to readers by not explicitly inviting them to reflect critically on their own positionality and relationship to the Stampede. Ambiguity in the face of inequality and oppression is anything but a neutral stance. As a result, pressing questions about who is entertained by these performances, by whom, and at whose expense are never fully answered.

The theatrical performances at the Stampede are venues for the reproduction of sexist, racist, and classist exclusionary mechanisms that must be deconstructed. Kimberly A. Williams’s excellent book Stampede: Misogyny, White Supremacy, and Settler Colonialism (2021) outlines how exclusion and discrimination based not only on race, but also on gender, class, and other factors, are significant components of the history of rodeo in Canada, and more specifically the history of the Stampede. Curiously, as Williams points out in her introduction, her book is the first comprehensive critical study of the Stampede in its century-long history. Synthesizing a decade of research and reading, Williams’s overarching argument is that “the Stampede is, at its core, a misogynistic, white supremacist institution that is both product and active purveyor of Canada’s ongoing settler colonial project” (2). Chapter three, “Who’s Greatest Together?”, and chapter 4, “Colonial Redux: The Calgary Stampede’s ‘Imaginary Indians’,” provide detailed analyses of how Indigenous Peoples, in particular, have and continue to be part of the Stampede in complex ways. Interestingly, despite Williams’s strong, critical point of view, she, like van Herk, also states that her “intention in writing this book is neither to dismiss nor vilify the Calgary Stampede” (17). Overall, however, compared with Stampede and the Westness of West, Williams leaves a lot less room for ambiguity around what this statement means. Her goal, explicitly stated, is not simply to let the ambiguity stand, but “to encourage a more complex understanding” of the ways in which the Stampede’s “constructed narrative(s) both helped to create and continue to perpetuate systems and structures that cause many of us to be vulnerable to gender- and race-based violence and exploitation” (17).

While Williams’s critique highlights current issues of gender and race at the Stampede and argues for their basis in the event’s history, it is almost impossible to reconstruct discrimination at the intersection of gender and race in the early years of the event. There exist few records that document the participation of Indigenous women and women of colour in rodeo, a lacuna that is emblematic of a wider lack of sources that trace the presence of non-white women in sport (Young and White 2007, 143). As the final section details, the ample records that we do have today extensively document the lives of predominantly white women’s participation in rodeo, and it is these women’s experiences that we most often encounter in van Herk’s Stampede.

“And They All Won Against Cowboys”: The Gendered Politics of Rodeo in Stampede and the Westness of West

Many sports have historically relied on masculinist traditions of participation, and rodeo is no exception. Tensions between masculinity and femininity, and the limitations that come with such binary constructions of gender, can be observed throughout rodeo history, including at the Stampede (on the performance of masculinity in particular, see Stoeltje 1988; Seiler and Seiler 1998; Pearson and Haney 1999; Joudrey 2016). Originally, cowboys entered into the sport by asserting their physical strength and skilled handling of farm animals. Many women, particularly those who were expected to fulfill more traditional roles of femininity aligned with Victorian ideals, did not participate. However, through its unique configuration as a “work-based competition” (Kossuth 2021, 158), rodeo did not outright exclude women. If they had sufficient skill, women were allowed to participate—but many aspects of femininity were not.

At the turn of the twentieth century, “the public image of rodeo cowgirls was as ‘loose women’ because they participated in a tough, dangerous men’s occupation; traveled around the country with men, and often wore men’s clothing” (Thomas 2014, 3). The development of rodeo as a professional sport at the intersection of women’s athleticism and viewed through a gendered and (proto)-feminist lens is especially compelling. Women’s sports in the early 1900s were generally perceived as incompatible with femininity and heterosexuality, and even considered unnatural. It was believed that sport would make women too masculine. Concerns about women’s roles in rodeo reveal a hyperfocus on the apparent detrimental effect of the sport on women’s reproductive capabilities and a more general concern for how physical exercise would render women unfeminine and therefore undesirable to men. In short, women’s sport defied the narrow gender stereotypes of the time (16–17). While the conduct of many professional cowgirls in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be viewed as subversive and proto-feminist as a consequence of their defiance of traditional gender roles and ideas of femininity, it is important to note that most grew up on ranches in rural parts of the United States and Canada where riding and roping were normal parts of their everyday lives. As Mary Lou LeCompte details, many cowgirls were much less influenced by urban Victorian middle-class notions of female fragility than their urban counterparts, and rodeo allowed some of these women to win “several hundred thousand dollars through sport without having to be exceptionally beautiful or deemed ‘sex symbols’ by the press.” Therefore, LeCompte argues, “though few if any cowgirls were feminists, and several insisted they were certainly not, they still helped to change the public image of women and advance the feminist cause” (2000, 3–4).

The lives of successful cowgirls like Lucille Mulhall, Margie Greenough Henson, and Fannie Sperry Stelle feature in pieces in van Herk’s Stampede, especially in “Horse women.” This poem opens with a statement from Stampede organizer Guy Weadick in 1912, saying that the event would be “allowing in the ladies contest, the contestants to hobble their stirrups if they so wished.” Speaking of wild horse racing, however, he notes that he would “not advise any lady to participate in this particular event as it is rough enough for the men let alone for the Ladies.” The poem’s narrator counters, asking, “Who the hell ever told you I was a lady?” (44). The piece then introduces six notable cowgirls who had highly successful rodeo careers. The reader learns about Tilly Baldwin who was a trick and relay racer, the first woman bulldogger, a champion of the Roman standing race, and a rider who rode No Sir, a particularly lively bronc, to a standstill; Bertha Kaepernik Blancett, the first woman to ride broncs at Cheyenne and the only woman to enter all women’s events at the Stampede in 1912, placing in several of them; Fannie Sperry, who rode to a standstill a horse that had stomped a man to death a few days earlier, and who could “shoot cigars out of her husband’s mouth from the back of a galloping horse”; Lucille Mulhall, the first woman to compete against men in roping and riding—a “cow woman,” not a “cowgirl” who was “bossy” and “brusque” paving the way for other women; Goldie St. Clair, who came second in the first Stampede in 1912; Flores LaDue, who could “hang from her horse upside down and rope anything moving or motionless,” and who was married to Weadick—as van Herk writes, “Enough said”; and Linda One Spot, who disguised herself as a man for a riding competition in 1952 (45). The piece culminates in a simple, “They all won against cowboys” (45), underpinning the recurring pattern of discriminatory exclusion of women from rodeo competitions, and other sports, despite their superior athletic abilities.

Over the course of the twentieth century, women pushed back against some of the sexist standards in rodeo that initially viewed femininity, both its lack and its excess, as a detractor from cowgirls’ actual rodeo skills. As the sport became more popular and rodeo organizations began to pop up, women remained welcome to participate in rodeo events, but their “involvement became increasingly marginalized” (Kossuth 2021, 161). To counteract this development, the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association (WPRA) was founded in 1948. Known as the Girls’ Rodeo Association until 1981, the WPRA is the oldest organization of female professional athletes in North America but is nevertheless a blind spot in the literature on women’s sport history (LeCompte 2000, 4–5). The association “provides opportunities for women across the United States and Canada to compete in the timed events of barrel racing, team roping, breakaway roping, and tie-down roping” (Bleiker 2023), affirming women’s longstanding place in rodeo competitions. As of 2023, the WPRA has more than 3000 members. This kind of institutional grounding is important to note as it demonstrates how women were able to successfully cement their presence as amateurs and professionals within rodeo sporting culture and the Stampede.

Today, ideas around women in sport have changed, and femininity is no longer considered antithetical to rodeo. However, at the Stampede, this fact is highlighted through stereotypical and outdated traditions in its daily programme. Each year, “Stampede royalty” are elected, with a long list of requirements that women must fulfil to be eligible. Van Herk tackles the sexist and ageist undertones of these contests in her piece “Queens and princesses.” In it, the reader learns that to become Stampede Queen, a woman must adhere to the following rules:

These requirements reveal a classist, heteropatriarchal world order reproduced at the Stampede. In the Stampede royalty contest, a woman is measured by her age, her familial status, and her public record. It is assumed that she is heterosexual and in need of a husband and children, and that after the short, five-year window of eligibility she is “too old.” The other requirements exclude those whose lives have taken different turns, including children, ex- or current spouses, leaving school, or being arrested. These rules further construct an implied image of women’s desirability viewed through a patriarchal lens where a woman loses value once she is “claimed” by a man through marriage. “Queens and princesses” juxtaposes these rules with questions and commentary that destabilize the patriarchal order. By asking, “Does a married woman ride less well? / Does a married woman refuse to be a queen, give up all rights to royalty?” (36), van Herk’s narrator exposes the dated and heteronormative values that centre women’s qualifications in relation to men and their reproductive qualities instead of centring their riding ability as one of the core selection criteria.

Along similar lines, given this historical pre-eminence of men in rodeo and the Stampede, the prose poetry collection makes a concerted effort to highlight women’s stories alongside those of their spouses or fellow rodeo competitors. One such example is the piece “Turning trick,” which continues the story of the founder of the Stampede, Guy Weadick, uncovering the name and life of one of his wives:

Dolly Mullens, a figure in the shadows, married Weadick after Flores died. There has to be a story there, a sleight of hand. Difficult to cut that knot.

In the archives a cursive note from Dolly, dated May 11, 1953. She gives him a scolding, tells him, “I am very sick and tired of putting up with and is [sic] one of the reasons which I have definitely decided to dissolve this unpleasant partnership and there is nothing you can say or do which will make me change my mind. I want to forget the whole affair. . . . Please don’t make yourself a nuisance by knocking on my door at all hours of the night.” (63)

Here, van Herk gives Mullens agency and presents her as a whole person with a voice and trajectory of her own, rather than casting her in the passive role of female companion.

Another instance of women’s presence in Stampede is the story of the inventor of barbed wire, Joseph Glidden, who “[s]tole his wife’s hairpins to fashion into spikes,” making him rich and her mad (57). The poem that tells this story, “Fence/lines reprise,” is an open-ended piece that gestures to the fragmented recording of women’s history and invites the reader to do their own research into the fate of Glidden’s wife.

While these pieces render visible some of the exclusion and objectification of women in Stampede and rodeo history, other poems seem to revel in the traditional displays of masculinity in cowboys. The poem “Lust” is one such example. In it, the narrator reports:

In this piece, the reader can observe a playful inversion of the heteropatriarchal gaze of “Queens and princesses.” The narrator is infatuated with the figure of the masculine cowboy whose appeal is also connected to his central role in rodeo sports. The first half of the prose poem indicates an objectification of the cowboy’s body through a female gaze in which his traditionally masculine attributes are at the centre of desirability. However, as more personifying features are revealed, the focus shifts and the greedy consumption of the cowboy is turned back onto the spectators who are chided for their voyeuristic fascination.

“Lust” hints at the intersectional entanglements of masculine identities at the Stampede. These entanglements are scrutinized by Mary-Ellen Kelm, who observes that there was “no unified masculinity crafted in this era [the early twentieth century]; rather, it was always inflected with racialization and sexuality, the interest of class, and the contingencies of place.” Kelm concludes that, “[g]iven the pervasiveness of the ongoing (and seemingly never-ending) struggle over masculinity, it is not surprising . . . that the Calgary Stampede should have been yet another arena in which masculinities were articulated and contested” (2009, 714). The question of masculinity and its projections onto a “new kind of man . . . the rodeo cowboy” (715) are especially compelling in the context of Guy Weadick’s creation of the Stampede, which was conceptualized as an authentic event breaking with what were then stereotypical images of the Wild West to allow for a new kind of identity for Calgarians. Most interesting in terms of gendered rodeo identities is that Weadick was welcoming of women riders from the beginning and, in fact, “[l]ocal journalists praised women riders as ‘real cowboys’ who demonstrated ‘skill and pluck’” (Kelm 2009, 721). The concept of the cowboy in the context of the Stampede has been rather flexible and inclusive, if not unproblematic, from the beginning.

* * *

“It is easier to shoot a saskatoon than to name this awesomely confounding, / unlimited and undefinable space, the westness of west” (Stampede, 97). This is the last line of van Herk’s Stampede and the Westness of West, underlining the slippery nature of the collection’s main tropes: Stampede, rodeo, cowboys and cowgirls. Instead of offering tight definitions of these tropes, van Herk presents a mosaic of anecdotes, historical facts, and observations. The playfulness of the prose poetic form allows for a versatile, humorous yet subversive engagement with the Stampede through a contemporary lens. The collection traces the unique history of the rodeo event while staying true to van Herk’s claim that she understands her work to be neither a critique nor total praise of the event. She leaves space for ambiguity, enabling readers to reflect on the fine line between orchestrated spectacle and necessary preservation of a historical western lifestyle, or whether such distinctions matter at all today, more than a century after the Stampede first took place in Calgary.

Works Cited

1. Bleiker, Ann. 2023. “Celebrating 75 Years of Women in Rodeo.” Women’s Professional Rodeo Association (blog), April 16, 2023. https://www.wpra.com/womens-professional-rodeo-association-celebrating-75-years-of-women-in-rodeo/.
2. Canadian Press. 2018. “Calgary Stampede’s Bull and Bronc Riders Say 8 Seconds Is Enough.” CBC, July 5, 2018. www.cbc.ca/sports/calgarystampede/calgary-stampede-8-seconds-1.4734652.
3. Foran, Max. 2009. “A Lapse in Historical Memory: Guy Weadick and the Calgary Stampede.” American Review of Canadian Studies 39 (3): 254–70.
4. Joudrey, Susan L. 2016. “What a Man: Portrayals of Masculinity and Race in Calgary Stampede Ephemera.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 16 (1): 28–39.
5. Kelm, Mary-Ellen. 2009. “Manly Contests: Rodeo Masculinities at the Calgary Stampede.” The Canadian Historical Review 90 (4): 711–51.
6. Kossuth, Robert. 2021. “The Development and Organization of Professional Sport.” In Sport and Recreation in Canadian History, edited by Carly Adams, 149–72. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
7. LeCompte, Mary Lou. 2000. Cowgirls of the Rodeo: Pioneer, Professional Athletes. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
8. Pearson, Demetrius W., and C. Allen Haney. 1999. “The Rodeo Cowboy: Cultural Icon, Athlete, or Entrepreneur?” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 23 (3): 308–27.
9. Polić, Vanja. 2016. “Performing the Canadian West: Chuckwagons, Cowgirls, and New Westerns.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 16 (1): 40–47.
10. Roberts, Katherine Ann. 2010. “Sundance Style: Dancing with Cowboys in Aritha van Herk’s (New) West.” Journal of Canadian Studies 44 (3): 26–52.
11. Seiler, Robert, and Tamara Seiler. 1998. “The Social Construction of the Canadian Cowboy: Calgary Exhibition and Stampede Posters, 1952–1972.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études Canadiennes 33 (3): 51.
12. Stoeltje, Beverly J. 1988. “Gender Representations in Performance: The Cowgirl and the Hostess.” Journal of Folklore Research 25 (3): 219–41.
13. Thomas, Heidi. 2014. Cowgirl Up: A History of Rodeoing Women. Guilford, CT: TwoDot.
14. van Herk, Aritha. 2016a. Stampede and the Westness of West. Calgary: Frontenac House.
15. van Herk, Aritha. 2016b. “What Does the Stampede Mean to Us Calgarians? Author Aritha van Herk Explores These Questions and More in Her New Book.” Interview with the Calgary Stampede. Calgary Stampede (blog), June 23, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20221007102652/www.calgarystampede.com/blog/2016/06/23/what-does-the-stampede-mean-to-us-as-calgarians/.
16. Williams, Kimberly A. 2021. Stampede: Misogyny, White Supremacy, and Settler Colonialism. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
17. Young, Kevin, and Philip White. 2007. Sport and Gender in Canada. 2nd ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.