Rodeo 3: Cowboys Organize
The cowboys got restless in 1936. Prize money at Madison Square Garden totalled $45,000. When they arrived in Boston, they found that the total purse there would be only $6,400. After Johnson refused to add their entry fees to the prize money, they went on strike.
Johnson tried to carry on by using grooms and stablehands as replacements for the cowboys. The spectators weren't impressed. Boston Garden officials refunded their money and told Johnson the rodeo would be cancelled if he didn't come to terms with the cowboys. So he did, reluctantly, and the following year he sold his rodeo company for $150,000 to Texas rancher Everett Colburn, who was backed by several other investors.
The rodeos weren't as successful under Colburn, who lacked Johnson's promotional savvy. In 1939, movie cowboy Gene Autry was a spectator at the Madison Square Garden rodeo and he was asked to do a song. He was such a hit that he was booked to perform at a number of rodeos in 1940 and 1941. Autry drew record crowds and his movie audiences increased dramatically.
The rodeo performances gave Autry's career such a boost that he decided to get into the business himself. He formed the Flying A Rodeo Company, which won bids to produce many of the country's biggest rodeos in 1942. Autry turned the rodeo into a Hollywood spectacle, in which the production numbers overshadowed the competition.
The Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden rodeos were still produced by Colburn's Lightning C Ranch company. But, in September of 1942, Autry bought out Colburn's chief partner and the two outfits were merged into Gene Autry's World Championship Rodeo Company, with Colburn as manager of the two big Eastern rodeos.
The loose organization of rodeo cowboys had been formalized in 1937 as the Cowboys Turtle Association (CTA). The members chose that name because they had been slow to act but had finally stuck out their necks. The CTA was made up entirely of full-time cowboys who competed in the big rodeos, including the Eastern circuit.
The association said its chief purpose was to "raise the standard of rodeos as a whole." Raising prize money had a great deal to do with raising standards, in the view of the CTA, but it also asserted that cowboys had a right to capable judges. Incompetent and biased judging was a long-standing rodeo problem.
At its annual convention in January of 1937, the Rodeo Association of America (RAA) agreed that its member rodeos would divide prize money among the top three finishers in each event to the CTA specifications. The RAA also agreed that entry fees would be added to prize money.
The success of the Boston Garden strike may have made the CTA too willing to use the strike, or the threat of a strike, in its first year of existence. In particular, the association became known for last-minute threats to strike, forcing rodeo organizers to choose between giving in to demands or cancelling the show entirely. That led to a backlash.
The Pendleton Round-Up, one of the biggest Western rodeos, in the fall of 1937 refused to allow CTA members to compete. Despite their absence, that year's show set attendance records. That success emboldened a number of other important rodeos to announced that they would stage "amateur" contests (that is, contests open only to cowboys who did not belong to the CTA) in 1938. Several of them also threatened to withdraw from the RAA because of its agreements with the CTA.
As a result, the CTA became somewhat less agressive for about 18 months. The uneasy truce ended in July of 1939, when Everett Bowman, president of the association, decreed that CTA members would not compete in the Pioneer Days Rodeo at Ogden, Utah. Rodeo organizers had refused to increase the purse from $3,100 to $4,100.
However, about 50 CTA cowboys defied Bowman and agreed to a compromise under which the rodeo raised the purse to $4,100 but also added another day of competition. Bowman resigned, though it was only temporary. He obviously realized that he was alienating too many of his members and once again the CTA toned down its public demands.