Darby's Wild West Rodeo

The Richard Cromwell Memorial Rodeo Grounds lie on the west side of Highway 93, just north of Darby and northwest of the high school, on land the Town of Darby owns and operates. The Darby Rodeo Association puts on a summer of events there. The Wild West NRA Rodeo is the one with the whole card: bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, barrel racing, team roping, steer wrestling, ladies’ breakaway roping and men’s tie-down roping. The StockFarm Club sponsors it. It runs over two evenings, July 31 and August 1 in 2026, with gates at 5 and the rodeo from 7 until about 9:30. It has moved around the summer: it opened August 16 in 2024 and was held in August in 2025.

The association’s 2026 schedule filled the hour before the first chute. At 6:40 the Mountettes and a set of trick riders were to perform, followed by the annual tug-of-war among the valley’s volunteer firefighters. A championship buckle, paid for chiefly by Blackfoot Communications and Full Curl Manufacturing, was set out as the centerpiece of the arena. On the Saturday, children in red, white and blue competed in a kids’ rodeo clown contest for the title of Mini Rodeo Clown of the Night. In town, the Sapphire Restaurant advertised cold drinks and cocktails for the weekend.

The tug-of-war pays out. At the 2025 Wild West Rodeo it raised $28,000 for the departments that entered. First place took the largest share and the rest followed in order of finish. The checks were handed over in late September, at the Bulls, Broncs and Barrels rodeo.

The arena Ruark cut in half

The arena is smaller than it once was. “I cut the arena in half,” Cal Ruark, the association’s president, told NBC Montana in 2016, “so the action is right in your face. There’s not a bad seat. That’s what people like.” That year’s renovation brought seating to 3,200 and added a sky box built from materials out of the old S&W mill just down the road. From the box, fans look over the arena and, behind them, onto the corrals where the bulls wait before the chutes. Ruark said the boxes sold for $5,000 a year and were all sold. By 2018 the Missoulian described a $220,000 sky box section perched above the chutes and an arena ringed with sponsors’ signs. “You can go to other rodeos around the state and you might see 10 signs in the arena,” Ruark said. “When you come here, you’ll see 60.”

The work continued. In 2018 the sponsor R&R Conner rebuilt the holding pens. The 5280 Group and the Let ‘R Buck Posse paid to replace the East Side Run & Gun seats with a party deck of pub tables, benches and a bar. Ravalli Electric Co-op installed a 50-foot lightning rod at the north end free of charge, and a Job Corps crew refurbished the east bleachers. In August 2026 Ruark told the Bitterroot Star that the association had put more than $1.4 million into the facility over the previous four years and had given more than $142,000 to local causes. “The thing that I’m most proud of is that the Darby Rodeo Association is debt free; we don’t owe anybody any money,” he said.

Jim Hale’s bulls and a $50,000 risk

A decade before that 2018 account, the grounds on the outskirts of Darby “were in disrepair,” the Missoulian’s Perry Backus wrote. “It had been years since the town had hosted a major rodeo. About the only people even using the arena were a few women who thought it was a nice enough place to do some horse training.” The Bitterroot Star called Darby a “down-and-out timber town.” In 2016 the Bitterroot Valley Chamber of Commerce credited Ruark with working to bring the south valley’s economy “back from the brink after the collapse of the logging industry.”

The start came from Jim Hale, a Darby man and a partner in Hoefer and Hale Bulls, who asked Ruark to help him put on a bull riding. Hale would bring the bulls and the cowboys, and Ruark would handle the promotion. Hale already had years of putting on rodeos around the country and drew on those connections. “Most people kind of poo-pooed the idea when we started talking about it,” Hale said in 2018. “Yet, on that day when we had that first rodeo, there wasn’t a place to park a car in the parking lot. We literally had people standing four deep along the fence to watch. That’s a fact.” Had it failed, the two men would have owed a bill of $50,000. “There certainly was some risk included,” Hale said. Standing at the chutes with Ruark that summer, he added: “You wouldn’t even recognize this place from when I brought in the first bulls 10 years ago. Nothing about it is the same.”

The sources count the years differently. The association’s history page says Ruark set out to restore the grounds in 2009. The Bitterroot Star in 2016 counted seven years since Hale’s approach. NBC Montana called the 2016 bull riding the seventh annual, and the Missoulian billed the 2018 edition as the tenth anniversary. The event was the Elite Bull Connection, sanctioned by the Elite Professional Bull Riders Association, and by 2018 it drew upwards of 2,000 spectators to a town of 700. After five years Hale stepped down for his health. By the Bitterroot Star’s account, Ruark then assembled the Darby Rodeo Association from people around the valley who wanted to promote rodeo. The association’s own 2018 newsletter dates its founding to ten years before.

Cal Ruark and Darbacious

Ruark grew up in Darby and spent a few summers riding bulls and calf roping, entering, he said, all the crazy events that used to happen at the Ravalli County Fair. After high school he worked in the woods. In 1971 he joined the Forest Service, and he retired around 2013. He has multiple sclerosis and calls the rodeo work his therapy. “There’s no pain, I just get deathly tired,” he told the Bitterroot Star in 2016.

He tied the bull riding to causes. The Elite Bull Connection partnered with Tough Enough to Wear Pink Montana and Wrangler and, by the association’s count, raised nearly $100,000 for the cancer center at Bitterroot Health. In 2016 each team drew a pink “Bounty” bull worth an extra $1,000 to a cowboy who rode it. If he was bucked off, the money went to Tough Enough to Wear Pink. Ruark bought a Brahma cross bull named Darbacious to carry Darby’s name around the valley, to Hamilton’s Downtown Tonight and Stevensville’s Western Heritage Days. Darbacious lived at Ruark’s place, could not get enough of having his head and back scratched, and still bucked with the rest of the stock. “He loves kids,” Ruark said, “and kids love him.” The same 2016 card included an exhibition by Hailey, a Queensland blue heeler, riding a mechanical bull named Samson. The event later became the Twisted Nut, a roughstock competition raising money against testicular cancer, held in 2026 three weeks before the Wild West.

Bareback in June, little cowboys year-round

The Wild West sits in a season built outward from that bull riding. The Darby Xtreme Bareback in June began as the Darby Riggin’ Rally. In 2023 it paid a $54,050 purse, which the Bitterroot Star called the largest in history for a stand-alone bareback event. Kaycee Feild, the six-time world champion from Genola, Utah, won with 93.5 points on Pickett Pro Rodeo’s Night Crawler. “When you’re writing down your goals at the start of the year, Darby’s right there at the top of the list,” he said. The seventh edition, in 2026, carried $60,000 in added money under the name Dutton Ranch. That August the association added a barrel race, the Darby Sho’ Down, and Darby Xtreme Bulls, a PRCA Division 1 bull riding with $60,000 added. “This magnitude of event, to a small town, is almost unheard of,” Ruark said. The season closes in September with Broncs, Bulls & Barrels, the finals of a four-part Montana series. In 2026 weather canceled its Saturday kids’ rodeo.

The association crowned its first rodeo royalty in 2017, a court of Queen Madison Louvar, Princess Cassie Turner and Lil Miss Addison Jo, and awarded its first rodeo scholarship. It hosts the Ravalli County Jr. Rodeo Club at no cost to the young contestants. Over 2025 and 2026 it started Kut-R-Loose, a trailer of saddles, ropes and gear that children ages 4 to 18 can use to try the sport before their families buy any. A new bronc saddle, Ruark said, runs around $2,000. Red Eye Rodeo of Deer Lodge, Kaehl Berg’s company, furnishes the stock for three of Darby’s rodeos a year and will match animals to the children’s experience. “You gotta have little cowboys and cowgirls to have big cowboys and cowgirls,” Ruark said.