Research Guides: Digital Exhibit: Prison Rodeo Programs: Resources Beyond SHSU

Resources Beyond SHSU

TDC Texas Prison Rodeo Records
Records consist of rodeo programs, clippings, brochures, and photographs documenting the Texas Prison Rodeo. Specific items present are photographs from rodeos, a scrapbook of black-and-white photographs, rodeo programs, clippings about the rodeo, dating back to the first rodeo in 1931; and some undated brochures about the rodeo.

Texas State Historical Association
Texas Prison Rodeo.The Texas Prison Rodeo, instituted in 1931 by general prison manager Marshall Lee Simmons as recreation for inmates and entertainment for staff and their families, soon earned a reputation as the wildest of cowboy shows, attracting huge crowds and favorable publicity to the Huntsville unit. After securing the blessing of local clergy to hold the rodeo on Sunday afternoons in October, Simmons trucked in livestock, participants, and spectators from the outlying prison farms to a vacant field behind "The Walls." Within two years public attendance swelled from a handful of outsiders to almost 15,000, prompting prison officials to erect wooden stands and charge admission.

East Texas History - Texas Prison Rodeo Arena
The rodeo proved enormously popular with both inmates and the public--in 1977, at the height of its success, an estimated 90,000 visitors attended. Along with more traditional rodeo events, inmates would perform popular crowd-pleasers like "Hard Money" where the goal was to retrieve a sack full of cash from between a bull's horns. Female inmates participated in calf roping and greased-pig sacking. Only one rodeo-associated escape was ever reported: two inmates who had been given civilian clothes by an accomplice were ejected from the grounds on suspicion of having snuck into the arena without paying!

Texas Highways - The Wildest Show Ever Staged
The roots of Huntsville’s infamous prison system are inextricably intertwined with those of the city itself. In 1848, just a few years after Huntsville’s founding, the Texas Legislature chose the city as the location for the state’s first enclosed penitentiary. While it proved to be critical during the Civil War, it was the prison’s transformation during Reconstruction and into the early 20th century that set the stage for the prison rodeo.

Texas Monthly - Prison Rodeo Gone, But Not Forgotten
With barely a peep from preservationists, another piece of Texas history was razed in mid-January 2012 as bulldozers unceremoniously demolished the prison rodeo arena in Huntsville.
The brick-and-concrete building, which hadn’t held a prison rodeo since 1986, had structural problems, and prison officials determined that repairs to the unsafe stands would be too costly. Representatives from the city offered to help pay for the repairs, but as with all similar entreaties involving the arena over the years, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state prison system, rebuffed the offer.