The document details the history of the Texas Prison Rodeo, which ran from 1931 to 1986, and became known as the 'world’s fastest and wildest rodeo.' It explores aspects such as its inception as a fundraising event for inmate necessities, its cultural significance, and the public fascination with prison life. The author aims to provide a comprehensive study of this unique event and its impact on Texas history and culture.

1. ConvictCowboys
The Untold History
of the
Texas Prison Rodeo
by
Mitchel P. Roth
Number 10 in the North Texas Crime and Criminal Justice Series
University of North Texas Press
Denton, Texas

2. Contents
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 1 Texas Prisons: A Pattern of Neglect . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Chapter 2 A Cowboy’s a Man with Guts and a Hoss . . . . . . . 27
Chapter 3 The Simmons Years (1930–1935) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Chapter 4 The Only Show of Its Kind in the United States
(1936–1939) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Chapter 5 The War Years (1940–1946) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Chapter 6 A Sad State of Affairs (1947–1949) . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Chapter 7 The West as It Ought to Have Been
(1950–1953) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Chapter 8 Outlaw vs. Outlaw (1954–1959) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Chapter 9 The Fund Just Appeared Footloose and Fancy
Free (1954–1960) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Chapter 10 The Texas Prison Rodeo Goes Hollywood
(1960–1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Chapter 11 That’s More Bull Than I’d Like to Ride
(1965–1969) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Chapter 12 Huntsville Prison Blues (1970–1979) . . . . . . . . . 299
Chapter 13 The Last Roundup (1980–1986) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
Appendix I Texas Prison Rodeo Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373

3. • 1 •
Introduction
“We welcome you to the greatest
event staged by any penal institution
in the world, the Nationally
known Texas prison rodeo.”
B
etween 1931 and 1986 the Texas Prison Rodeo (TPR)—
the first of its kind—captured the imagination of America
and the wider world, earning its reputation as the “World’s
Fastest and Wildest Rodeo.” Familiar to some fans as the
“Southwest’s Greatest Show,” “The Battle of the Outlaws,”
or “The Dang’est Show on Earth,” or simply as the “Wildest
Show on Earth,” no rodeo would claim more monikers than
the Texas Prison Rodeo, held every October (except 1943)
at the Huntsville Penitentiary Rodeo Arena. Inaugurated as
both an entertainment and recreational outlet for inmates and
as a means of raising money for inmate necessities in an era
when the Texas State Legislature devoted minimal financial
support, the Texas Prison Rodeo quickly won a permanent
place in East Texas lore.
Moving to Huntsville, Texas, from Santa Barbara,
California in 1992, the author soon found himself immersed
in all things Huntsville and of course this included the history
of the Texas Prison System. It turned out that he was six years
too late for the last prison rodeo, but for many Texans the
prison rodeo had become part and parcel of the state’s history

4. 2

Convict Cowboys
and folklore, earning an entry in the magisterial six-volume
The New Handbook of Texas in 1996.
Wanting to learn more about this long-running event, I
quickly realized that a comprehensive history of the prison
rodeo had yet to be written, or for that matter, scrupulously
researched. The writer of what follows met dozens of folks
around the country in the years after his arrival in Texas who
wondered if the rodeo still existed or who asked why it ended
so unceremoniously in 1986. Further research found hun-
dreds of references to the rodeo in newspapers and in Internet
blogs, but all pretty much mulled over the same events or re-
peated a number of what I would find to be major faux pas as
I continued to research this little-known piece of Texana.
Over the more than two decades that I have taught at Sam
Houston State University in Huntsville I have heard a variety
of explanations as to why it was cancelled in 1986, none of
them satisfactory (at least to this researcher), with excuses
running the gamut from a rodeo stadium near collapse to the
lack of skilled cowboys. Most of those I spoke to in passing
about the rodeo looked back wistfully at the venue and the ex-
citement it brought to the Piney Hills of East Texas each fall,
often nostalgically recounting their recollections of attend-
ing with family members, watching convict cowboys perform
countless acts of derring-do in dangerous events that would
make a freeworld cowboy blanch.
Several years ago, I began seriously contemplating writing
a book-length study of the Texas Prison Rodeo. So I took the
proverbial bull by the horns and began looking through archi-
val materials in Austin and Huntsville to determine whether
there were enough materials potentially available for writing
one. The more I searched the more manuscript collections I
found that could be used to cobble together the book I hoped
to write.

5. • 7 •
Chapter 1
TexasPrisons:
APatternofNeglect
“Like a horrid nightmare.”
—Edward King, 1874
D
uring the years of the Texas Prison Rodeo, spectators
came not just to watch the rodeo activities but also to ob-
serve a prison demimonde that seemed dangerous if not
exotic, giving rodeo goers the chance to interact with inmates,
though safely separated by a wire mesh fence. But as will be
described below, this was just the latest flourish in a legacy of
“prison tourism” as old as America’s first prisons. The inau-
guration of the Texas Prison Rodeo in 1931 would introduce
a new form of prison tourism that allowed free-world specta-
tors to pay a small fee to vicariously participate in the prison
experience, albeit with the expectation of leaving through the
gates they had just entered when the tour was over. However,
no matter what visitors witnessed at the Texas Prison Rodeos,
or for that matter any other prisons, it was mere window
dressing, since like all prisons, Huntsville’s walls were meant
not just to “keep prisoners in,” but to “keep the public out.”1

6. 8

Convict Cowboys
According to anthropologist Melissa Schrift, who has stud-
ied prison rodeos, spectators traveled whatever distance it
took to “access one of society’s most censored realms.”2
While
she was commenting on the extant Angola Prison Rodeo3
in
Louisiana, her findings held true for the Texas Prison Rodeo
as well. Schrift probably explained the draw of the prison mi-
lieu best, writing, “The U.S. collective imagination of prison
life implicates associations with the private—hidden contra-
band, clandestine sexual relations, dark and sinister thoughts.”
Prison tourists thought that if they looked hard enough they
might find some portal into this closed-off world to satiate
their fascination about what transpired inside the cell blocks.
What surprised the Angola researcher was that “Prisons are
anti-public, institutional replicas of hell itself”; thus it was
hard to explain why “when the prison is made public, people
line up to see it.”4
The fascination with prisons that made the Texas Prison
Rodeo so successful dated back to the beginnings of the
American prison system. As early as 1839, Philadelphia’s
Eastern State Penitentiary was attracting 4,000 admiring
tourists per year, while New York State’s Auburn Prison
hosted more than 7,000 a year, this despite a substantial entry
fee of 25 cents (which would translate to the price of a first-
run movie ticket in the twenty-first century). Over the next
century some correctional institutions saw prison tours as a
source of revenue in a time when prisons were expected to
be self-supporting and could expect little support from state
legislatures.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, even the
Atlanta Federal Penitentiary was visited by close to 3,000 per
day, with permanent passes allowing citizens to roam about
any day they wanted. And when a new warden arrived at
New York’s Sing Sing Prison in 1919, he found the yard “as

7. Texas Prisons: A Pattern of Neglect

9
crowded with visitors as with prisoners. All mingled freely.”
The warden added proudly that Sing Sing was considered
“more famous perhaps than the Statue of Liberty.”5
  
At the end of the 1920s, in the decade prior to the inaugu-
ration of America’s first prison rodeo, “Throngs of curious
visitors” were still trooping through Huntsville Penitentiary’s
“ancient prison plant here at the heels of guides, paying 25
cents each to see how the caged convicts of Texas live behind
the grim gray walls.”6
According to one reporter who made
the prison trek,
There isn’t another prison in the country like this
old worn out bastille; at least none of the other
seventeen visited by the Texas prison centraliza-
tion commission on a recent nationwide tour . . .
here at Huntsville I saw many men unoccupied,
but I don’t remember seeing one with a mop or
scrub brush. . . . As for discipline, none of the
outward evidences of it that stand out in other
prisons were observed here. There was not the
rigid, businesslike, military air that makes them
so efficient. Here large numbers of convicts were
seen lolling about the grounds and cell houses—
neither locked up nor at work. Colonel Mead ex-
plained that they were mostly “knockouts,” men
not considered in condition to work.7
However, one would find a much more brutal incarnation of
the prison system if venturing out to the prison farm units
that dotted southeast Texas, where physical punishments re-
mained the rule, rather than the exception.
During the TPR8
years of the late 1930s every visitor to the
Walls was expected to pay 25 cents into the “little Commissary
Fund.” One reporter noted that in August 1937 alone more

8. • 381 •
Endnotes
Prologue
1 E. Williams, Behind the Walls (Austin: San Felipe Press, 1965), 1–2.
2 Ibid., 2.
3 Ibid., 2–3.
4 Ibid., 3.
5 Ibid.
Introduction
1 Byron J. Smith, Jr. to Texas Prison Director, Nov. 20, 1960,
Administrative Correspondence, Board of Corrections, Coffield, Jan-
March, 1961, TSLAC. Hereafter cited as Admin. Corr., Board.
2 O.B. Ellis to Coffield, Jan. 5, 1961, Admin. Corr., Board, Coffield File,
Jan-March, 1961.
Chapter 1
1 Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010, p. 237.
2 Melissa Schrift, “The Angola Prison Rodeo: Inmate Cowboys and
Institutional Tourism,” Ethnology 43, no. 4 (Fall, 2004): 331.
3 See for example, Daniel Bergner, God of the Rodeo: The Quest for
Redemption in Louisiana’s Angola Prison (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
4 Schrift, “The Angola Prison Rodeo,” 331.
5 Stephen Cox, The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 2.
6 Ed Kilman, “Trip through Bastille Bares Bad Conditions,” Houston Post
Dispatch, September 12, 1929.
7 Ibid.
8 Texas Prison Rodeo will hereafter be referred to as TPR.
9 “Visitors Pay into the Fund,” Dallas Morning News, September 6, 1937,
Section I, p. 2.
10 “Visitors from All Parts of World Inspect Prison,” Echo, 1940s clipping,
no date, pp. 1, 2.
11 Ibid.
12 Kilman, “Trip through Bastille,” 1929.
13 Cox, The Big House, 2–3.