Cody Stampede Rodeo

Eight o’clock on the West Strip

Stampede Park stands at the west end of Cody on Yellowstone Avenue. A driver coming into town from Yellowstone National Park passes it first, on the left. From June 1 through August 31 the gates open at seven in the evening and the Cody Nite Rodeo begins at eight. Visitors who arrive early meet the cowboys and bullfighters and have their pictures taken with Norman, the live rodeo bull. The rodeo clowns paint faces, and contestants show children how to throw a rope. A bus picks up riders near most of the town’s hotels and campgrounds and makes the round trip for $10. Children 10 and under ride free.

Seating at the Nite Rodeo is general admission, in the Grandstand or the Buzzard Roost. A newer party deck along the southeast fence of the arena has high-top bar tables close to the stock. One concession stand is just inside the main entrance and another is at ground level on the west side of the Buzzard Roost. They sell hot dogs, barbecue sandwiches, and nachos. Beer is poured inside the front gates and on the Roost’s back mezzanine. The program runs an hour and a half to two hours:

bareback riding saddle bronc riding tie-down, breakaway, and team roping barrel racing and junior barrel racing junior steer riding a calf scramble for children 12 and under * bull riding

The Nite Rodeo is an amateur rodeo, sanctioned by no association and open to riders of every experience level. Its managers say it never sells out, and that they “try to rodeo no matter what mother nature throws at us.” The summer calendar carries special nights. In 2026 there was a Bill Smith Memorial on July 27, a bucking stock sale at the Irma Hotel the next day, and a Park County Nite on August 8 with $5 admission. The season closed with finals on August 29, 30, and 31.

The rodeo’s managers say Cody is the only place in the country with a rodeo every night. On that claim and on the Stampede, the town calls itself the “Rodeo Capital of the World.”

Stampede Week, June 30 to July 4

For five days around the Fourth the nightly show stops and the park belongs to the Cody Stampede. It opens on June 30 with the Cody/Yellowstone Xtreme Bulls, a single night of bull riding. In 2026 the Texas Unlimited Band played the same evening. The Stampede itself runs July 1 through 4 and is sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Grandstand seats are reserved and the performances sell out. The Buzzard Roost boxes go to box holders who keep them year after year, and the waiting list for them is long. Gates open at six on July 1 through 3 and at three on the Fourth. Extra food stands go up around the grounds, vendors walk the stands with food and drink, and a craft fair runs alongside. One Stampede photograph from 2026 shows the national anthem being sung while the Patriot Parachute Team came down out of the sky and bucking horses stood loaded in the chutes.

For 2026 the board put up $35,000 in added money per event. It calls the Stampede one of the largest “one-header” rodeos in the PRCA. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West says it has the highest purse of any rodeo on the Fourth of July.

The 2026 barrel racing went to Lanita Peirce, aged 76, on the mare Famous Wahini. Her time was 17.06 seconds and the prize was $11,308. Her last run at Cody had been in 1993, the year she qualified for the National Finals. She remembered that check as about $2,200. “You have to admit, Cody did pay well,” Peirce told BarrelRacing.com. “Holy moly.” The same summer the crowd stood up for Owen Monfeldt, a Cody bull rider, when he covered his bull.

On the evening of the Fourth the City of Cody sets off fireworks at about 9:30. Spectators may not stay in the seats to watch them, but the display can be seen from the parking lot and from most of town.

Floats on Sheridan Avenue

The parades run downtown on Sheridan Avenue. The Kiddie Parade goes first, on July 2 at ten in the morning, with local children in costume on decorated bikes and wagons and small floats. The main parade follows at 9:30 on the mornings of July 3 and July 4. Local businesses build floats on the year’s theme, which always honors the American West. Riding groups, marching bands, and state political leaders march with them. Gary Cooper and John Wayne have ridden down Sheridan Avenue as grand marshals, and so has Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier. Wayne led the 1976 parade for the country’s bicentennial. That parade was also the first appearance of a Winchester replica that its owner, Mike Darby, has been restoring. Mack Frost has served on the parade committee for 42 years.

Both rodeos are run by the Cody Stampede Board of Directors, local business people who work as volunteers. Together they put on more than 90 rodeo performances a summer. Jim Facinelli has been a director for 54 years, and Curt Scott is president. Jeri Gillett has taken part in the Stampede all her life and joined the board as its first woman since Caroline Lockhart. Her son Nick was killed riding saddle broncs at another rodeo, and his funeral was held in the Stampede arena.

A prince, a stagecoach driver, and a novelist

Rodeo in Cody began before the Stampede. Early ranch hands held informal bucking contests out on the prairie, inside a corral made by a circle of mounted horsemen. They brought in the wildest broncs off the winter range and passed a hat for the winners. In one early photograph, neighbors watch from the roof of a ranch house. Buffalo Bill held tryouts for his Wild West behind the Irma Hotel, on ground that is now its parking lot.

In 1913 the Park County Fair, then held in Cody, received the Prince of Monaco, who had come for a guided big-game hunt. Buffalo Bill had his arena director, Johnny Baker, stage a parade of Crow Indians led by Chief Plenty Coups, with Wild West performers riding alongside. The prince watched it from the balcony of the Irma. A local businessman, Jacob M. Schwoob, then drove him to the fairgrounds for a review of riders, horse races, and bucking contests. On September 19, 1913, the Northern Wyoming Herald reported, “No one except Colonel Cody could have done it, and it would have been impossible for him in any other place in the world except Park County where he had scores of the best riders on the globe from which to select his actors.” The Stampede’s own history calls that day Buffalo Bill’s final Wild West performance.

Buffalo Bill died on January 10, 1917. Clarence Williams was a former stagecoach driver who had hauled visitors from Cody to Yellowstone, and an early backer of letting automobiles into the park. In June 1919 he organized an “Entrance Day Rodeo” to mark the opening of the park’s East Entrance to motor vehicles. The Stampede’s history gives the dates as June 23 to 25. Young men just home from the trenches of the First World War rode against riders from the Big Horn Basin and southern Montana. There were also Crow dancers, rodeo clowns, races, and substantial prizes. The Center of the West and the Stampede both date the Stampede from that event.

In 1920 the rodeo took its new name, moved to July, and was formally organized. One account says six of Cody’s leading citizens met at the house of Caroline Lockhart, a novelist and newspaperwoman, on April 20, 1920. They named their event the Cody Stampede and elected Lockhart president. That account credits Lockhart and her friends with founding it that year. The founders left “rodeo” out of the title, Lockhart later joked, because “that sounded like a dude word and besides we did not know how to pronounce it.” The first board also included Williams and Larry Larom, owner of the Valley dude ranch, along with Sidney A. Eldred, Ernest Goppert Sr., and William Loewer.

The early programs had wild horse races, Texas longhorn steer wrestling, Crow dancers, and always a bucking horse contest. At night people danced and gambled at Wolfville, a downtown dance hall named for the fictional Arizona town in Alfred Henry Lewis’s novels. The opening parade of riders always stopped at the Irma to pay its respects to Buffalo Bill.

The Pup Rodeo and the grounds on the bench

Dude ranches in the back country made a trip to the Stampede part of their guests’ summer, and the purses grew as sponsors joined. The Park County fairgrounds eventually moved east to Powell, and Cody became the county seat as part of that compromise. The Stampede came through the Depression. The Center of the West notes that it was not held during the years of the Second World War.

In 1938 Carly Downing, a former Wild West show performer, started a nightly event first called the “Pup Rodeo.” It became the Cody Nite Rodeo and helped pay the Stampede’s way. Freckles Brown, the 1962 world champion bull rider, began his career there in 1938. So did Mel Stonehouse, a top competitor of the 1930s and 1940s. A Wyoming saddle horse named Come Apart, known for his bucking, also traces to the Cody rodeo.

In 1946 the Stampede was sanctioned by the Rodeo Cowboys Association, which became the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1975. The same year new grounds opened on the bench above town, with covered grandstands for three thousand people, beside the street still called Stampede Avenue. Nick Knight, Mel Stonehouse, and “Cody” Bill Smith competed there. The arena moved to the west end of town in 1975.

The PRCA named the Stampede Best Large Outdoor Rodeo of the Year in 1998 and 1999. The Women’s Professional Rodeo Association gave Cody its Large Outdoor Rodeo of the Year title in 2014. In 2019, a hundred years after Williams’s Entrance Day Rodeo, the Stampede entered the ProRodeo Hall of Fame among the rodeo committees.