At the Bucking Horse Sale, It's a Wild Ride

Montana Event Is Part Auction, Part Rodeo and One Long Celebration

MILES CITY, Mont., May 16 -- Spanish explorers brought the horse to the New World, and the first herds cantered onto the Montana high plains around 1730. Almost immediately, it can be assumed, somebody here got on a horse that didn't like it and promptly fell off.

This interaction between human and horse is replayed again and again during three days every May in one of America's most exhilarating -- and remote -- parties: the annual Miles City Bucking Horse Sale, which concluded here Sunday. By day it is a lot like a rodeo, but it isn't a rodeo. At night it is a street celebration billed as the "cowboy Mardi Gras," but that doesn't get it right either.

This is a raw, beer-soaked anachronism closer in mood and action to the annual bullfighting festival in Pamplona, Spain, than to anything else, though you won't hear many people in eastern Montana use the word aficionado.

Miles City, about 150 miles east of Billings, with a population of 8,400, is one of two incorporated towns in Custer County. The other one, Ismay, has 20 residents.

The sale almost doubles the population here. It takes place across from the stockyard, at the southwest edge of town, on the windswept threshold of a stark landscape once known as "the Great American Desert." It's not called that on maps anymore, but few people here would argue with the description. For as far as one can see, the landscape is all prairie grass and sage, seared and brown, rising and falling over steep hillsides against a horizon broken by sandstone buttes standing under high clouds that often threaten rain but rarely bring it.

"This is the real West," said Bill Broadbent, an institutional broker with Lehman Bros. in New York, who was here for his 14th consecutive Bucking Horse Sale. "This is one of the greatest unspoiled places left in the Lower 48 states. And it's also one of the best parties."

At the time, it was either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, and Broadbent was in front of the packed Montana Bar. The action on Main Street was just beginning in earnest. There were a few couples twirling through their two-steps, with boot heels digging into the pavement. But they were lost in a larger, oceanic swelling of people.

The mostly young, decidedly unsteady crowd moved from one jammed bar to the next. Lean men in tall hats eyed groups of women in low-slung jeans and loose, shimmery tops weaving paths among the cowboys, a lurid mix of laughter and cigarette smoke and bawdy invitation rising into the chilly spring air to a thumping beat from the bands lining the sidewalks.

"This is fabulous!" Stephanie Seitz hollered over a song from a group called 37 Clark, which was playing on a flatbed trailer parked between the Montana and the Hole-in-the-Wall cafe. Seitz, who just graduated from Texas Christian University, is from McAllen, Tex. She came to the Bucking Horse Sale with a friend from college.

"There's a lot of stuff going on here that I haven't been exposed to before. The bars are fun, but I think the actual sale is really the best part," she said.

That is true. When it isn't about drinking, which is for a few reverent moments before the first Bloody Mary is poured each morning, the Bucking Horse Sale is about horses and cowboys. The sale goes back to the late 1800s, when nearby Fort Keogh was a remount station for the Army. The rodeo has long since replaced the cavalry as a market for unbroken horses, and this is one of the largest bucking horse auctions in the country. Organizers expected the sale of upward of 250 horses.

Miles City is famous for its roughstock -- "green" horses that either have not been ridden or cannot be ridden. The horses are "bucked out," which is to say ridden for a few seconds, by local cowboys, young amateurs with dreams of making it in professional rodeo someday. Buyers standing in the ring bid on the animals immediately after each ride, so that the event itself seesaws between spectacular, intensely brief rides, and the rattle and roll of an auction. In between come horse races and bull riding. Spectators, most drinking a beer with one hand while dangling the balance of the six-pack from an opened loop of plastic, mill and cheer and gasp appreciatively.

Riding a green horse is something nobody is really eager to do. The horses are unpredictable, and the risk of injury is high. A few come out and buck magnificently, pitching forward and back, heads down, forelegs planting stiffly and hind legs kicking high in the air. That's the horse you want, said Spike Buffington, an affable Miles City saddle-bronc rider who is a rising star. Like all the cowboys here, he looks the part, chiseled and bandylegged.

"Riding a good horse is the only way to pull a paycheck," Buffington, 20, said.