Ennis 4th of July Parade

At ten in the morning on the Fourth of July, the highway through Ennis becomes a parade route. The Ennis Chamber of Commerce closes Main Street to traffic for one hour. Because the closure can run no longer, the parade is held to 60 floats. In 2024 the chamber’s events coordinator, Heather Brunner, gave the schedule: Highway 287 closed at all three entry points into town at about 9:45 a.m. and reopened at 11. That year the line formed on Comley Way, above the Ennis school, and ran the length of Main Street. Volunteers stand at the road entrances to keep cars and walkers off the route. When the chamber asked for ten more of them in 2026, it noted that the post comes with a saved front-row seat.

Candy, horses and a water fight

The shops along the route put up red, white and blue decorations and flowers. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle described the 2023 parade. Horses, Jeeps, side-by-sides and old cars carried floats. Children were wrapped in blankets against a cool morning, and spectators drank bloody marys from the beds of pickups parked along Main Street. The Lions Club, the American Legion and the Madison Valley Women’s Club had floats. Ennis youth baseball players threw candy into the crowd, and a group on horseback pulled candy from saddlebags for the children. A float from Willie’s Distillery carried someone dressed as an abominable snowman, who fired toy water cannons into the crowd. One group answered with water guns of its own. “Don’t hit me, it’s too cold,” a woman shouted.

Joel Church of Bozeman rode in his restored M151 “Mutt,” a Vietnam War-era vehicle, with the Montana Military Vehicle Collectors. “Mostly I just like watching how excited the kids get,” he said. David and Fraulein Jaffe of Bozeman had come for years. They wore red, white and blue western wear and brought their labs, Mabel and Ruby, for the first time. “It’s a little slice of small-town Americana,” Fraulein Jaffe said. George Gonzalez came from Manhattan with his wife, Cookie, and wished for more music. When the parade ended, people stayed in their spots to watch the first traffic roll through, and a band started up outside a bar.

Eight thousand on Main Street

Crowd figures vary by year and by source. Tri-State Livestock News counted nearly 7,000 along Main Street in 2010. Brunner put the 2023 crowd at about 8,000. KBZK reported in 2024 that the parade draws between 5,000 and 10,000 people every year and marks the start of the summer tourism season. “People come from all over the country,” Brunner said. “It’s generations of families that come back every year.” KBZK talked to some of them that year. A man named Brent had come from Georgia because his son and daughter-in-law told him, “Dad you gotta go.” Shaun, from California, said he and his wife had married on his grandparents’ property near Ennis and came back every year for their anniversary. Amy and her family had traveled from Australia because they had always wanted to see a rodeo.

The hour limit came with changes in 2024. That year unexpected news from the Montana Department of Transportation sent the chamber after new permits so the parade would not be cancelled. KBZK reported that the chamber reached a temporary deal with the department that only put off new costs. The new time limits also cut the number of people who could walk in the parade. Carrie Stoner, the chamber’s president, grew up in Ennis. “It’s my hometown. We love Ennis and want to see it succeed year after year,” she said. Brittani Cooper, the chamber’s vice president and owner of Black Butte Coffee, described the money at stake: “I think all businesses double, triple, quadruple their sales in July.”

A doctor and a calf roper

Each parade has a theme and grand marshals. The 2024 theme was “Wranglers and Anglers,” and older wranglers and anglers rode as grand marshals. The honoree was The Madisonian newspaper, then marking its 150th anniversary. The 2026 parade, the 90th by the chamber’s count, took the theme “Our Town, Our Story,” for 90 years of gathering on Main Street and the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Its grand marshals were Dr. Maura Davenport and Pokey Armitage. Davenport grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She went to medical school at Michigan State and did her residency in Grand Junction, Colorado. “Madison Valley Medical Center was advertising for a doctor in a fly fishing magazine and that was how we got to Ennis MT,” she wrote for the chamber. Twelve years later she is the hospital’s chief medical officer. She is also medical director of the Madison Valley Ambulance Service and volunteer medical director of Madison County Search and Rescue. The chamber billed her as Montana Physician of the Year; in her own account she was nominated as the Montana Family Physician of the year. Her husband is a fishing outfitter. “Ennis is pretty much a giant playground for us,” she wrote.

Richard Thomas Armitage was born in Dillon on September 13, 1958. He is a fourth-generation Armitage of the Madison Valley, whose great-grandparents homesteaded the Armitage Flats south of Cameron. Two junior-high teachers, Mr. McGowen and Mr. Cleverly, noticed he was always the last one out of the locker room after practice and started calling him “Pokey.” He roped and rode calves as a boy and rode rough stock in high school. He coached Ennis students for 28 years, the last eight as head girls basketball coach, and in 2013 moved to Hamilton to manage the Skalkaho Creek Ranch. At the parade he rode with his wife, Melissa, their daughters Timbre Pederson and Kimberly Waggener, and five of their twelve grandchildren.

A C-47 over the parade

On the Fourth of July in 2021, the parade had an aircraft overhead. Miss Montana is a restored C-47 built in 1943 for the European war. She never saw combat. After the war Johnson Flying Service used her to carry smokejumpers. In 1949 fifteen of them jumped from her cargo hold into the Mann Gulch fire, and all but three died. She later sat at the Museum of Mountain Flying in Missoula. Then the museum’s owner, Eric Komberec, and a crew of volunteers made her airworthy and flew her to Normandy for the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019.

On July 4, 2021, The Madisonian reported, she carried a delegation of Montana veterans over celebrations in Drummond, Deer Lodge, Whitehall and Twin Bridges. She then flew over the Ennis parade and landed briefly at the Ennis-Big Sky Airport before going on to Dillon and Thompson Falls. “What’s unique about our airplane is we take the whole state with us,” said Komberec, her chief pilot. Aboard were brothers Richard and Fred Raunig, both in their 90s, who grew up on a ranch at Stockett, and Fred’s grandson Shaun, an Air Force veteran. Bill Drew of Missoula, a Marine from 1970 to 1972, described the ride: “Beautiful. I felt like a little kid.” Keely Flatow, an Air Force veteran, said she thought about the soldiers who flew into combat on D-Day in the same kind of plane, and about the Mann Gulch smokejumpers.

Rodeo on a dirt street

The parade’s numbering does not run evenly in the sources. The Chronicle called 2023 the 87th, KBZK called 2024 the 89th, and the chamber called 2026 the 90th. ERA Landmark Real Estate dates the Fourth of July rodeo and parade to 1936. The town itself, according to the Southwest Montana travel guide, began as William Ennis’s homestead in 1863. Tri-State Livestock News gives a looser date, the mid-1900s, for the first rodeos. It says they were held on Main Street, then a dirt road, and that the rodeo has been on the Ennis Rodeo Grounds since the early 1950s.

Pokey Armitage’s father, Jim, was a contractor and one of the original stockholders of the Ennis Rodeo Association. He helped take down bleachers in West Yellowstone and haul them to Ennis for the arena that still stands at the grounds. Jim was killed in a car accident during Pokey’s junior year of high school. Pokey later served as a director and then president of the Ennis Rodeo Association. He counts among his best memories trailing bucking stock from Boulder to Ennis for the Fourth of July rodeo.

In 2010 the parade’s grand marshal was Johnny France of Ennis. He was Madison County sheriff from 1980 to 1986, and at seventeen, in 1957, he won the Montana Rodeo Association bull riding title. Max Robison of McAllister, the association’s 1953 all-around champion, rode with him. “It’s wild and western and a true Montana rodeo,” France said. “Others liked it as well and that’s backed by the size of the crowds on Main Street for the parade. Many of them stayed for the actual rodeo.”

The rodeo now runs at 7 p.m. on July 3 and July 4 at the Ennis Rodeo Grounds, with rough stock and timed events. Arlene Haugland of Belgrade has been a timer there since 1978. She first came to Ennis in 1953 with her late husband, Bob, and ran her first barrel race there in 1954. “When the rodeo first started,” she said, “contestants competed in two go-rounds and an average, so we always stayed overnight and we danced and had fun.”