(Beth Clifton collage)
Neither Stampede’s signature event resembles any authentic Old West or Native American tradition
OMAK, Washington; CALGARY, Alberta––The 2026 “stampede” subset of the rodeo season, consisting most notoriously of the annual Calgary Stampede and Omak Stampede, ended on August 16, 2026 with the fourth and last running of the year of the Omak “Suicide Race.”
Riders in the “Suicide Race,” held since 1935, run horses over an approximate 60% grade, 210 to 225 feet down to the Okanogan River, through the river, up the other side into the Stampede rodeo arena.
The rest of the Omak Stampede is a typically mundane small-town Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association multi-night event, featuring bull riding, barrel racing, and roping, plus alcohol-fueled parties every night, at which brawls involving both men and women are posted to social media.
Names all but promise mayhem to animals
The Calgary Stampede, held from July 3 to July 12 in 2026, is a big-city rodeo best known for chuckwagon racing, annually attracting about ten times the Omak crowd.
The Calgary Stampede and the Omak Stampede have in common that both purport to represent Old West and Native American traditions, neither does any such thing, and both promote themselves with names all but promising mayhem to animals.
A stampede, according to Merriam-Webster, “is a sudden, wild rush of frightened animals or a large group of people running together in an uncontrolled way, usually out of fear or excitement,” which can also “refer to a North American outdoor festival and rodeo.”
“Tonight just shook me”
“Y’all, I am never one to complain or say something, but tonight just shook me,” posted Omak Stampede attendee Carrie Dylan Parker, of Packwood, Washington, to Facebook on August 14, 2026.
“We took [one of her daughters] to the Omak Stampede as part of her 18th birthday present,” Parker recounted.
“I grew up around the rodeo and same with my kids. My kids have participated in rodeo since they could climb on the back of sheep for mutton busting,” Parker testified.
“My girls barrel race and we fully believe these animals are bred for and love their jobs. But what we witnessed tonight,” Parker declared, “was not the sport of rodeo or anything a horse would enjoy.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“Pure & simple animal abuse”
“There is a race called the Suicide Race,” Parker explained, “that is supposed to be around Native traditions. What we witnessed tonight was pure and simple animal abuse.
“Tonight we saw a horse come back with a fully broken front leg. The only thing that kept this poor horse’s leg on was some skin and athletic wrap. I did some digging because as a horse woman myself, I knew I couldn’t be the only one who was uneasy about this race before it started.
“I was right. Turns out this is normal occurrence for this event,” Parker said.
Parker’s account was seconded by an anonymous participant on the Omak/Okanogan Community Forum.
“I will never again support this rodeo”
“I will never again support this rodeo,” the Omak/Okanogan Community Forum participant pledged. “The severity of the injuries we witnessed are horrendous and cruel. The second to last horse who came in had completely broken his cannon bone on his front left leg to the point the leg was swinging as he tried to continue using it! The horse actually ran into the arena this way!
“Can you imagine the pain and terror that horse went through for the purpose of entertainment? eMy heart breaks for that horse,” the Omak/Okanogan Community Forum participant said.
“I’m only grateful my young children did not actually see this horse’s injury! My husband is haunted by the image of it all. I have raised horses much of my life and would never think of putting a horse through an event such as this for sport. This race needs to be a thing of the past!” the Omak/Okanogan Community Forum participant finished.”
Similar testimony has come almost annually from witnesses at least since 1939.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Horse fatalities almost every year
Only one rider is known to have died in connection with the Suicide Race, a cowboy named Bev Connor from Tonasket, a town about 10 miles north of Omak, who fell off his horse and drowned on his way to the starting line in 1942. Horse fatalities, however, have been documented almost every year that a humane society observer was there to keep track.
Bizarre, and perplexing, is that the 12 Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation embrace the Suicide Race as their own, despite the history of the race having apparently originated with white men celebrating what they saw as the expendability of both Native Americans and horses.
Indeed, the race appears to have been inspired by a 1924 horse massacre resembling the Suicide Race, except that the wild horses who were deliberately driven off a cliff just upstream from the Suicide Race course had no riders.
From the Klan to ICE
This occurred in an epoch of local political dominance by the Ku Klux Klan, focused on repressing the Colville tribes.
See Did the Omak Suicide Race start with a horse massacre & the KKK? for full details.
Ahead of the 2026 event, organizers warned that “Colville Tribal Members are concerned about U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE ) being in Omak during the 92nd Annual Omak Stampede,” but assured prospective attendees that “their powers are limited by tribal sovereignty, constitutional protections, and warrant requirements.”
Nonetheless, attendees were asked to “Please carry your tribal or state ID, passport, or birth certificate and Social Security card.”
“What happened to animals at the 2026 Calgary Stampede?”
Meanwhile, rhetorically asked the Vancouver Humane Society via Facebook, “What happened to the animals at the 2026 Calgary Stampede?
“One horse was seriously injured. A calf appeared motionless after being roped. A horse was handled roughly. The Vancouver Humane Society asked the Calgary Stampede for the animals’ status and the total number of injuries and deaths at its 2026 events,” but did not receive “a response or even an acknowledgment.
“This silence comes,” the Vancouver Humane Society mentioned, “after Alberta changed its animal protection law to specifically exempt rodeo and chuckwagon racing from certain distress protections.”
The serious horse injury, the Vancouver Humane Society narrated, came “after two [chuckwagon] teams collided while attempting to round the barrels” that mark the course.
Near head-on collision
Video posted to Facebook showed a near head-on collision, in which at least four horses appeared to slam into the side of a chuckwagon after narrowly missing the oncoming team.
Outriders and other chuckwagon race personnel immediately surrounded the fallen horse with tarps to keep spectators from seeing the severity of the horse’s injuries.
“Stampede representatives state ‘an initial exam revealed no fractures,'” the Vancouver Humane Society acknowledged, but added that, “The incident again highlights the inherent risks of the chuckwagon event—by far the deadliest animal event at the Calgary Stampede, with one death of a horse used in chuckwagon racing occurring for every 4.9 race days since the Vancouver Humane Society began tracking fatalities at the Stampede in 1986.
“Overall,” the Vancouver Humane Society said, “an animal has died in the combined rodeo and chuckwagon races for every 3.6 event days at the Stampede.”
(See Three more chuckwagon horses killed as Calgary Stampede 2019 ends.)
Chuckwagon racing saved failing fair
The Calgary Stampede introduced chuckwagon racing in 1923, in evident hopes that the possibility of violent accidents might boost faltering crowds.
Widely recognized as the oldest rodeo still in existence, the Calgary Stampede traces origin to an annual livestock show founded in 1886. Rodeo events as they are known today were not introduced to the Stampede, however, until 1908, more than a decade after the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo debuted in the U.S.
Exhibitions of roping and riding flopped with Calgary Stampede visitors, and failed again in 1912, and 1919, though the livestock shows of 1908, 1912, and 1919 were economically successful. By 1922, however, the Calgary livestock shows had lost money for several years in a row.
Inspired by Roman chariot racing
Attempts to promote rodeo in Calgary, led for 10 years by former rodeo performer Guy Weadick, might have ended then, had Weadick not borrowed inspiration from the chariot races described in the 1880 novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace.
Adapted into a stage play by Abraham Erlanger in 1895, Ben Hur toured as a traveling show featuring climactic chariot races until 1920, when Erlanger began work on the 1925 black-and-white film hit Ben Hur, featuring a chariot crash that killed several horses.
Gambling prize money of $275 that chuckwagon racing based on Ben Hur-style chariot racing would also be a hit, Weadick drew record attendance to the 1923 and 1924 Calgary Stampedes by promotionally linking the Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races to Ben Hur.
After the 1925 Ben Hur film was released, screenings were often followed by screenings of a promotional documentary called The Calgary Stampede, a double bill that soon made the Stampede world famous.
Where is the Calgary Humane Society?
The Calgary Stampede crowd more than doubled by 1928, and despite occasional declines, has mostly kept on growing. 2026 attendance was claimed to be 1.4 million.
The Vancouver Humane Society, incidentally, monitors the Calgary Stampede because the Calgary Humane Society, founded in 1922, mostly hasn’t.
Currently a Calgary Humane Society position statement “opposes high-risk rodeo events—including chuckwagon racing, calf roping, and steer wrestling—due to the demonstrated risk of injury or death to participating animals.”
But finding that position statement on the Calgary Humane Society web site is no easy matter.
Why Stampede victims matter?
Omak Stampede and Calgary Stampede defenders commonly ask in social media flame wars why animal advocates focus on the relatively few animals who are killed and injured in those events, when millions more suffer, often for far longer, in the beef and horse slaughter industries.
The short answer is that the beef and horse slaughter industries both draw far more animal advocacy activism at the present point in time than has been directed at either the Omak Stampede or the Calgary Stampede or any event in rodeo since the late 20th century.
The animal advocacy cause, especially in urging veganism, is very much focused on the “big picture” issues. But what is tolerated in the name of entertainment tends to set the floor standard for how animals may be treated in any aspect of life.
If a horse may be run into a rodeo arena with a visibly broken leg, who will intervene on behalf of an injured steer? If chuckwagon races piling up horses are acceptable, why should the public worry about runaway carriage horses in Central Park, New York City?
“Habits of a Horse”
As to what extent either the Omak Stampede or the Calgary Stampede, or for that matter any rodeo resembles authentic Old West tradition, a look backward at the origins of the events and terminology suggests that very little of it does.
Use of the word “stampede” to describe either animal or human behavior appears to have originated with an April 1838 essay “Habits of a Horse,” by Thomas Ritchie (1778-1854), who from 1804 to 1845 was editor of the New Market Richmond Enquirer in Richmond, Virginia.
Ritchie went on to use “stampede” in a similar context many more times, over many years, before Newspaper Archive documents anyone else using it.
“A Ride On A Wild Bull”
Though cowboys had verifiably held informal roping, riding, and bucking horse “breaking” competitions among themselves for more than 100 years, the first “rodeo” event identified as such was bull-riding, in “A Ride On A Wild Bull,” a widely syndicated account originating in the Jacksonville, Oregon Sentinel in March 1881.
Narrated the anonymous author, “A year ago since there was a ‘rodeo’ out on Lost River, in Lake County.”
A “rodeo,” at the time, was simply a round-up of cattle and newly born calves on the open range for branding.
A dispute over ownership of a bull calf, “A Ride On A Wild Bull” detailed at length, was resolved by an agreement among the round-up participants that whoever could ride the bull calf without saddle or halter would “be declared owner.”
But after initially there were “no volunteers” to try riding the bull calf, ownership was won by “a vaquero named Frick.”
“Stampede” & “rodeo” met at the O.K. Corral
The first known pairing of “stampede” with “rodeo” in a single sentence came in a Tucson Weekly Citizen editorial on May 21, 1882, suggesting that “The Democratic horde of Arizona” might be “more likely to end with a stampede than with a successful rodeo.”
The editorial as a whole urged that then-lawman Wyatt Earp (1848-1929) be hanged for the alleged murder of Frank Stilwell (1856-1882), a member of the politically well-connected Cochise County Cowboys criminal gang.
This is as close as “stampede” and “rodeo” together came to ever being part of Old West lore.
Stilwell, summarizes Wikipedia, was “closely involved in the events leading up to and following the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” in Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881, “and was suspected in the murder of Morgan Earp on March 18, 1882.
“Two days after Morgan’s death, Frank Stilwell was killed by deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp in a Tucson train yard. Wyatt Earp admitted late in his life to killing Stilwell,” who was wanted for stage coach robbery as well as murder, “at close range with a shotgun.”
Wyatt Earp & rodeo definition
The authentic meaning of the term “rodeo” was introduced to a national audience by John Milton Scanland (1843-1935) in “With the Cattle Kings,” a description of western life syndicated by the Denver Letter in June 1896.
“In the early spring or summer,” Scanland explained, “there is a round-up, or ‘rodeo,’ the significance of ‘rodeo’ being ‘to gather.'”
Scanland, a career western journalist, previously had edited newspapers including the Ojai Valley View and Santa Paula Graphic. Scanland, according to Wikipedia, also wrote “an early 1908 biography of Pat Garrett, the sheriff who killed Billy the Kid.”
Today, however, says Wikipedia, Scanland is “best known for writing a scandalous 1922 Los Angeles Times article on Wyatt Earp that infuriated the legendary lawman and indirectly prompted Earp to secure a written retraction and pursue his own accurate biography.”
“Chuckwagons” came from Washington D.C.
The term “chuckwagon” appears to have entered print in a Christmas 1891 feature entitled “Texas Cowboys,” syndicated by the Washington Post.
According to the anonymous Washington Post author, a working cowboy gets “his meals from the ‘chuckwagon,’ which drives over the prairies from the ranch house to wherever the boys may be at meal times.”
But did Texas cowboys, or cowboys anywhere, actually use the word “chuckwagon,” or get hot meals on the range at all?
The evidence for such a custom is scant.
Further mentions of “chuckwagons” in print remained rare until the Washington Post from 1906 to 1915 syndicated sporadic columns of cultural commentary by “Chuckwagon Cal,” an evident inspiration for “Will Rogers Says,” syndicated by the New York Times from 1922 to 1935.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Western Cowboy & Indian Stampede”
Finally, the original promoters of the Omak Stampede, said to have borrowed inspiration from the Calgary Stampede, might also have been inspired by the “Western Cowboy & Indian Stampede & Rodeo” held as part of the 1928 Virginia State Fair in Richmond, Virginia.
Certainly the Ku Klux Klan was there, as well as in Omak.
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Senseless, unjustifiable, disgusting, cruel, and a big lie on many levels.
With gratitude for your continuing coverage of yet another event that might make even the Romans roll their eyes.
Thanks for all this pertinent info, Beth & Merritt–I’ll be dispersing accordingly.
The Calgary chuckwagon races and the Omak Stampede should all be outlawed–they are inherently cruel and often fatal. LET YOUR REPS HEAR FROM YOU!
Relatedly, California has the most comprehensive rodeo law in the country, PENAL CODE 596.7, enacted in 2000; amended in 2007 so as to include the Mexican charreada events common throughout the state. EVERY STATE SHOULD HAVE SOMETHING SIMILAR, MINIMUM. Again, let your reps hear from you.
The Code requires advance notice to Animal Control of any upcoming rodeos & charreadas; requires either an on-site OR on-call veterinarian at all events (should be amended to drop the “on call” vet option, thereby requiring ON-SITE vets at all rodeos & charreadas. The PRCA, racetracks, horse shows and endurance rides all require ON-SITE VETERINARIANS. So should all rodeos & Charreadas. Also requires that animal injury reports be submitted to the State Veterinary Medical Board, public record free for the asking: VMB@dca.ca.gov
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Eric Mills, coordinator
ACTION FOR ANIMALS
Oakland, CA
email – afa@mcn.org
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Eric Mills, coordinator
ACTION FOR ANIMALS
Oakland, CA
Recent letters in response to the animal injuries at the Calgary and Omak Stampedes bring to mind a quote from a 1990 letter to me at ACTION FOR ANIMALS from the late Cesar Chavez:
“Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bullfighting and rodeos are cut from the same fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves.” Words to live by.
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Eric Mills, coordinator
ACTION FOR ANIMALS
Oakland, CA