Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West by Rebecca Scofield (review)

This book examines the American popular cultural form of rodeo from roughly 1900 through the 1990s, but is not a traditional history of the industry. Instead, Outriders analyzes rodeo from its edges. An American history and gender studies professor at the University of Idaho, Rebecca Scofield relies on extensive archival records that document performances, organizational records, and media narratives to examine rodeo’s vexed relationships of exclusion and belonging.

Scofield highlights the double bind at the center of the book with her use of the term “outriders.” Historically, the term refers to riders at the literal margins of a cattle drive who contained and enforced its boundaries. In applying this metaphor to the rodeo world, she argues that “the very process that allowed rodeo outriders to decenter and broaden western identity with their presence also ultimately strengthened the imagined West’s normative center” (11). In other words, this is not a celebration of diverse rodeo identities, but rather a troubling vision of marginalized communities laying claim to a form of cultural power that reproduces, rather than revolutionizes, the forces of exclusion it represents. In carefully attending to race, gender, and sexuality, this book presents both the real and transformative work and activism of marginalized communities, which Scofield documents extensively and treats with care and respect, and the harmful exclusions that accompany claims to western heritage, even by marginalized communities.

Scofied organizes the book’s chapters using chronology and community. Through her analysis of Tillie Baldwin’s performances in the first decades of the twentieth century, the development of the Texas Prison Rodeo during the middle of the century, black cowboy performances in the 1960s and 1970s, and the International Gay Rodeo Association through the 1980s and 1990s, Scofield explores how dominant expressions of masculinity, freedom, and national belonging infused the narratives of women, immigrants, incarcerated people, African Americans, and queer men as they carved out rodeo performances for themselves.

Scofield pulls no punches in her analysis. One of her key insights is that laying claim to rodeo’s narratives is problematic because it involves reclaiming a place in the history of settler colonialism. For example, her nuanced historical exploration of the complex nineteenth-century relationships between black freedmen and Indigenous tribes in Oklahoma makes the erasure of these ties in black rodeo performances during the civil rights era excruciatingly clear. And while the specific contours of power and vulnerability are different in each case, her chapter on gay rodeo performers likewise shows how men could use rodeo to claim a dominant definition of masculinity—one that had been denied to them through their sexuality—but at the expense of expansive or transformative expressions of masculine identity itself. Her meticulously researched chapter on the Texas Prison Rodeo, which ran annually at Huntsville from 1931 to 1986, throws the contradictory impacts of this performance—for the prison, the public, and incarcerated people—into sharp relief. In light of Scofield’s overarching and powerful arguments, however, I found it curious that she did not include a chapter on Indian rodeo, an “outrider” space dramatized recently in Chloé Zhao’s film The Rider (2017), and I would like to know more about that choice.

What surfaces throughout Scofield’s book is a sense of how rodeo offers people who have been marginalized from western narratives a way to assert a sense of belonging in American history, but not to diffuse its danger. For Scofield, rodeo is a way to taste the power that has been denied, but not an effective tool to challenge the dynamics of power. For westerners looking to reframe how we think about history, heritage, and inclusion, this book offers a bracing set of arguments from which to work.