Rodeo Women Blog

Falkland Stampede was one of our first stops for gathering material for the film. Four generations of Churchill relatives working behind the scenes to make this rodeo a success for the spectators and the community. Dot Churchill has been feeding the rodeo personnel for decades now. Timers, secretaries, judges and stock contractors. And putting up with the former Rodeo Manager Merv!!!

This is what the vast majority of Canadian rodeos have looked like over time. Small affairs run by local volunteers in temporary buildings and grounds, these rodeos did not generate the mountains of paperwork and bank of professionally-shot photographs, and newspaper coverage that the big, professional circuit shows did. Most of the rare and valuable records community rodeos did produce are not yet...

Rodeo Women: Behind the Scenes will not be the first film ever made about Canadians in the sport. In 1972, Josef Reeve’s Hard Rider (National Film Board of Canada) followed the rodeo circuit from BC to Texas with Kenny McLean and his family.   The film is about Western stereotypes and their relationship to the reality of western life. It gets that across by offering viewers footage of Kenny McLean...

Rodeo was central to the development of the art of sports photography. Go online and you’ll find plenty of archives, museums, commercial image databases, and individuals supplying historical photographs of action in the arena. Before the era of digital cameras, it was not easy to capture legible images of running and bucking livestock with cowboys being thrown in the air or straining at the instant...