Great Plains Quarterly

Popular versions of the American West stylized in twentieth-century multimedia have had pop-culture consumers believing the West was mostly White. The facts, specifically within rodeo itself, are much more complex and diverse. Thanks to Elyssa Ford’s Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion, we now see the West as it was in the Great Plains more clearly: populated by people of color with a firm sense of belonging to America regardless of demographic identity, and more populated by women and diverse sexuality than society has been taught.

Ford argues rodeo itself as a “site of cultural history” with tremendous meaning and significance for Mexican, Hawai‘ian, Native American, Black, and LGBTQ groups. Through comparative, intersectional analysis of race, gender, and sexuality, her study is a cultural history exploring “rodeo as something beyond a basic competitive environment” (3). Ford also states that the involvement of diverse peoples in a “White, masculine, and heterosexual American event” (15–16) provided the opportunity for “others” to expand thought and understanding of the American West and its cultural meaning. To wit, the Great Plains Indian Rodeo Association, with three-quarters of its 2015 executive membership comprised of women (106), certainly has dismissed many stereotypes.

The study itself is concise and direct, with sufficient notes and sources. In five chapters, each covering a different group’s origins and evolution in the American West, Ford consistently emphasizes and examines gender and how each respective community used rodeo to define its own identity to meet its own needs. With connections to the present, Ford successfully explores change over time in multiple historiographical realms. Also included is a short glossary of terms (187–89), which is beneficial for all readers. Combined with Ford’s meticulous research, it is a helpful addition to keep details appropriately organized for the reader.

The association of rodeo with the American West and the Great Plains is imprinted in historical consciousness, yet Ford successfully overwrites stereotypical perceptions with her analysis. Each of the groups researched here is deserving of its own monograph, perhaps, instead of each being just one part of an overall examination of how American West stereotypes have been so misleading. Surely the third chapter—“‘Bucking the Odds and Breaking New Ground’: Native Americans Ranching for Others and Rodeoing for Themselves”—could fill 200 pages on its own, much to the satisfaction of Great Plains historians and scholars. Yet Ford’s book still is a great starting point for further research in multiple subfields, and it should be read before any scholar continues deeper into these avenues of American history.