Chief Joseph Days

Chief Joseph Days opens at 1:30 on the Tuesday afternoon of the last full week of July, when the rough stock is run down Main Street in Joseph. For the next five days the town of about 1,000 people grows to nearly ten times that number, by the count of the rodeo committee and the East Oregonian. Most of the week happens at the Harley Tucker Memorial Arena on West Wallowa Avenue, a short walk from Main Street. The arena is surrounded by cattle pens and vendor alleys and has the Wallowa Mountains behind it. A thirty-acre dry campground lies just west of the grounds, and the Encampment Pavilion stands just east. An all-volunteer nonprofit committee runs the rodeo. Its board president, Terry Jones of Lostine, oversees the arena during rodeo week, and the vice president, Steve Rogers, who was Wallowa County sheriff from 2012 to 2020, handles the stampede among his other duties.

Rodeo week on Main Street and Wallowa Avenue

There are four Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association performances, one each night from Wednesday through Saturday. On the morning before the first one, the arena holds a Buckaroo Rodeo for special-needs children and adults. Wednesday evening is Family Night, and children six and under sit free on the benches. Thursday begins with the Miles 4 Mammograms walk from the arena gate, and that night’s rodeo is “Tough Enough to Wear Pink” night. The junior parade goes down Main Street at 10 o’clock Friday morning. The Grand Parade follows at the same hour Saturday, with Nez Perce tribal members, rodeo courts present and past, and locally built floats, according to the Joseph Chamber of Commerce. In the 2025 Grand Parade the board of directors rode the CJD Stagecoach.

Each night’s performance is opened by the Tuckerettes, a women’s drill team. They carry flags at a run and ride fast turns and synchronized patterns before the grand entry. During the 2026 week the arena held saddle bronc riders, barrel racers, and a rider bringing in the American flag on the final night. The arena record in barrel racing, 16.99 seconds, belongs to Julie Rugg Williams of Athena and an Appaloosa gelding named Buck, a retired racehorse from a Pendleton-area veterinarian’s string that had once held three track records. The pair won six Chief Joseph Days barrel titles between 1977 and 1987. Buck was laid to rest on the ranch at age 37 and was buried with his first Joseph buckle. The spurs awarded to the all-around champion have for some three decades been made by Larry Bacon, a silversmith from the Lost Prairie country at the north end of the county, who made his first pair at 13.

The arena grounds are free to enter, and a ticket is needed only for the grandstands. Six to eight food stands sell smoked barbecue and pulled pork, street tacos, corn dogs and lemonade, kettle corn and shaved ice. Downtown, vendors licensed by the Chamber line Main Street with barbecue, elephant ears, cowboy hats, and handmade goods. After the rodeo the Thunder Room at the west end of the arena has live music for those 21 and over. During the 2026 week Slade Coulter, the Teague Brothers, and Scotty Wilson played there. Teenagers have their own dance in the Boise Building next door. The Cowboy Breakfast is served from the end of the Saturday performance until 3 a.m. and again Sunday from 6 to 10. The week closes Sunday morning with Cowboy Church at the arena, led by Tenderfoot Christian Fellowship.

Salmon and bison at the Encampment

At noon on Saturday, after the Grand Parade, the Encampment Pavilion serves the Chief Joseph Commemorative Friendship Feast. It is free and open to anyone. Salmon is prepared in the traditional style, and the bison comes from Stangel Bison Ranch. Potluck dishes are welcome but not required. Traditional Native American dancing follows the meal.

The rodeo carries the name of Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it, leader of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce, whose name the committee’s history renders as “Thunder Rolling In the Mountains.” That history gives his birth as 1840, most likely in the Wallowa Valley. White settlers called him Young Joseph. In May 1877 he led his people out of the Wallowas, and that October they surrendered at Bear Paw in Montana, about fifty miles from the Canadian border. The history records that he died in exile on September 21, 1904, and was buried in the Colville Indian Cemetery in Washington. The committee says it honors him and the Nez Perce through the opening ceremonies, the grand entry, and the feast. The Chamber’s slogan for the 2026 rodeo was “Feel the Thunder.”

An airport, a moraine, and a bulldozer

In 1946 the plan for Chief Joseph Days did not include a rodeo. The first mention appeared in the Wallowa County Chieftain on April 25, 1946. It announced “a big three-day celebration sponsored by the Joseph Chamber of Commerce” for July 26, 27, and 28, “in connection with a program to dedicate the Joseph municipal airport as a memorial to the veterans of World War II.” The plans called for a horse show, a saddle horse sale, an air show, and a “Happy Canyon” show modeled on Pendleton’s. A “Princess Josephine” was to be chosen by popularity contest. Tribes from nearby reservations would be invited, and the theme would be “the history of the Nez Perce Indians and their leader, Chief Joseph.” The Chieftain added: “If the show is well received it is hoped that it can be made an annual event which will become as famous as other well known celebrations in the West.”

The Chieftain’s own record of the weekend begins Friday, July 26, with a penny scramble for children at noon, a baseball game, and dancing at the outdoor Hells Canyon Dance Hall to the Nez Percians, a ten-piece Nez Perce dance band in native costume. Saturday brought a parade, the airport dedication with stunt flying, parachute jumps, and passenger rides, a saddle horse show at the Joseph Livestock yards, and a dance “until the wee hour.” The dance ended with the naming of the first CJD Court; the title Princess Josephine did not last long. The winners of the “Whiskeroo” beard contest were also announced that night. Under the rule for the occasion, men did not shave until after the rodeo, and offenders served time in a pillory. Ben Peal and Glen Sprague tied for best beard and split a $15 prize. On Sunday there was a cowboy breakfast at Wallowa Lake, a “manhunt” paying $100 to the winner, and at 2 p.m. a rodeo at the Lake Hill grounds. A carnival ran all three days.

Accounts differ on who started the rodeo. The Chieftain’s 2004 history says the stock came from Harley Tucker and his then-partner, whom it spells Ben Peel. A 2013 La Grande Observer piece says Tucker “got the idea to start a rodeo.” The Chieftain’s 2025 Hall of Fame profile of Ben Peal says a group approached Tucker, a local rancher who owned rodeo stock, and that the rodeo was staged Sunday, July 28, in the natural amphitheater on top of the lake’s east moraine. Tucker and Peal had already been putting on summer rodeos in the early 1940s at the Wallowa Lake grounds at the head of the lake, with Peal supplying most of the bucking horses and the pickup men’s mounts. The rodeo’s website, as quoted by the East Oregonian, says whites and Indians once raced their horses in friendly competition in that bowl, and the 1946 event also served to welcome veterans home.

Peal bulldozed the arena on the moraine and cut a narrow, twisting road up its west side. The cars of the day could not manage the road, so many were pulled up the mountain, and the show started quite late. The moraine was judged a poor place to continue. For the second Chief Joseph Days in 1947, a large number of volunteers built an arena at the present site in Joseph, and Peal supplied most of the timber milled for it. From that year the rodeo was the center of the celebration. According to the rodeo committee, the skeletal frame of the original arena still stands on the moraine.

The Tucker string and Grandpa McCoy

Harley Tucker was born in 1908 on a ranch near Joseph. He began with a small bucking string in the 1940s and built it into one of the leading rodeo companies of the Pacific Northwest. His saddle broncs PDQ, Smokey, and Brown Bomber, the bareback bronc High Society, and the bull Black Smoke were all known on the circuit. He staged rodeos with covered wagons for the parades and matching white horses for the grand entry. The rodeo’s Hall of Fame says the wagons were drawn by oxen and that his company worked twenty-five venues a year. The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum gives the number as twenty. For the first few years he supplied stock to Chief Joseph Days free of charge. With his wife Bonnie he furnished it for sixteen years.

Bonnie Tucker was born Anna Louise Knapper in Joseph in 1914 and married Harley in 1939. She was rodeo secretary for every show the company produced. She would open the rodeo office a few days ahead, take entries by telephone, do the draw by hand, make up the judges’ sheets, and print the program. Her office at the Pendleton Round-Up is still in use and is called the “Bonnie Tucker Booth.”

In April 1960 Harley Tucker died of a heart attack while flanking bucking horses in Vancouver, Washington. “He couldn’t have picked a better way to die,” an admirer said, according to the National Cowboy Museum. Bonnie and the crew finished that summer’s rodeos, and in 1961 she had the company back on the road in full force. The Hall of Fame suggests she was likely the only woman stock contractor in the Northwest at the time. In the spring of 1962 the company held a dispersal sale in Walla Walla. The arena in Joseph now carries Harley Tucker’s name. He was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1997.

Many people credit the early success of the celebration to Walter Brennan, the film actor, who bought the 12,000-acre Lightning Creek Ranch in 1940 and built the Indian Lodge Motel and a movie theater in Joseph. He arranged newsreel footage and promotional airplane tours, flying the rodeo court, local businessmen, and the cowboy actor Chill Wills around the Northwest. Brennan said he “figured the Chief Joseph Days Parade couldn’t be a parade without a marching band.” He recruited local musicians as the Chesnimnus National Marching Band and led it dressed as a hobo, holding a toilet plunger. In the 1950s and 1960s, advertising that “Grandpa McCoy” would appear drew crowds to the parade.

Among the cowboys of those years, Jack Carson of Burns won the bull riding at Joseph six times between 1955 and 1964. Les Kamm of Pendleton won tie-down roping, steer wrestling, and team roping there across two decades.

Tuckers on the court and in the chutes

The Tucker descendants have stayed with the rodeo. In 2013 a grandson and namesake, Harley Tucker, sat on the board. “As a kid, I worked at the rodeo grounds, picking up rocks and trash,” he told the La Grande Observer. “As I got older, I worked in the arena, working gates.” His teenage son presented the Harley Tucker Rodeo Series award that year. Two great-grandsons, Lane Bailey and Derek Kolbaba, rode bulls, and Kolbaba’s brother Colton came back to sing the national anthem. The Observer reported that all the Tucker women had served on the rodeo court. It also credits Sandi Turner, a family member, with starting the Tuckerettes in 1991. The rodeo committee dates the team from 1994.

Growney Brothers Rodeo of California, owners of the bull Red Rock, furnished the stock from 1992 to 2017. Since 2022 John Growney has coordinated the contractors who supply it. Since 2021 the committee has named a Rodeo Hall of Fame each year; Ben Peal entered it with the class announced in 2025.

The 2020 Chief Joseph Days was canceled because of COVID-19. The three young women chosen for that year’s court were never crowned. Casidee Harrod, Brianna Micka, and Destiny Wecks agreed to serve as a co-equal honor court for the 2021 rodeo, the 75th anniversary. At their coronation in the Thunder Room on April 17, 2021, the 2019 queen, Rylee Wilcox, joked that she had been the longest-reigning queen in the rodeo’s history, then handed three equal crowns across. Terry Jones called it only the second honor court Chief Joseph Days had had. He told the gathering that the board had chosen between another cancellation and taking its chances: “We’re full-steam ahead.”

The 81st Chief Joseph Days is scheduled for July 27 through August 1, 2027.