Home of Champions Rodeo

The rodeo grounds at Red Lodge sit on a bench above the town, about a mile west of Broadway, at over 5,500 feet. The Red Lodge Rodeo Association built the arena and grandstand there in 1932, and the Home of Champions Rodeo still runs in them each year around the Fourth of July. A profile in Raised in the West magazine says spectators look out on the surrounding mountains, and that in midsummer the grounds sit high enough to catch a slight mountain breeze. The arena has no lights. “We wrap up everything in 2½ hours,” Shari DeSaveur, the rodeo’s marketing director, told the magazine. “We have to be done by dark because we don’t have lights.” At the 2026 rodeo, the July 2 and 3 performances began at 5:45 in the evening and the July 4 performance at 2:45 in the afternoon.

Vendors at the grounds sell food, souvenirs, tack, and drinks, including alcohol. The crowd has its own custom. For decades a self-proclaimed group of fans in the arena’s north-end bleacher has greeted any cowboy who misses his loop or gets bucked off with a long shout of “Ohhhhhhhh Sh….t!” According to the magazine, the announcer and the clown have been known to join in.

Noon on Broadway

Each rodeo day begins downtown. At noon a parade heads north on Broadway from 16th Street to 5th Street, and each day has its own theme. July 2 is Children’s Day, with prizes for Best Bicycle, Best Comical, Best Costume, and Best Pet. July 3 is Mining and Agricultural Appreciation Day, which judges two categories: Best Motorized and Best Otherwise. The Fourth is the traditional Independence Day parade, with prizes for floats, harness, mounted, motorized, and musical entries, and for the best-dressed junior and senior cowboy and cowgirl.

The 2026 grand marshal was Hank Tuell of Luther, Montana. He served 28 years in the Army, including flights as a MEDEVAC helicopter pilot in Vietnam under the call sign “DUSTOFF,” and his decorations include the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. In Red Lodge he worked with Operation Second Chance, which supports wounded, injured, and ill service members and their families. After years of study he was ordained the first deacon of Calvary Episcopal Church in Red Lodge. The association’s parade page records that he often says, “The sermon starts when you walk out of the church and how you behave.” The same page remembers Glory Mahan, the longtime parade director, whose memory, it says, still inspires the parade.

Four afternoons and evenings in the arena

The 2026 rodeo opened on July 1 with one night of the PRCA Xtreme Bulls Tour, which is bull riding only. Every rider competes in a first round, the top performers advance to a final, and the best two-head average takes the title. The Xtreme Bulls night was first added when the rodeo returned from a cancellation, the first in over 90 years. “Montana only has a handful of Xtreme Bull events and we’re blessed to be one of the rodeos offering it,” Maverick Bushnell, a Red Lodge native, former bull rider, and committee member, told the magazine that year. “No one liked to be shut down last year and this year we’re coming back bigger and better.”

The full program follows on July 2, 3, and 4. The roughstock events are bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, and bull riding, in which a rider must stay aboard for eight seconds with one hand free. The timed events are tie-down roping, steer wrestling, team roping, breakaway roping, and barrel racing. At the 2026 rodeo:

• Audrey Kremer won breakaway roping with a 2.1-second run.
• Bridger Anderson won steer wrestling in 3.8 seconds.
• Brye Crites and Ross Ashford won team roping in 4.3 seconds.
• Montana cowboy Haven Meged won tie-down roping in 8.6 seconds.
• Morgan Addison won barrel racing.
• Daxtyn Feild won bareback riding with 86.5 points on Brookman Pro Rodeo’s Ruffie’s Rage.
• Dawson Hay scored 89 points on Brookman Pro Rodeo’s Flirtatious.

The July 3 performance was the Tough Enough to Wear Pink night, which the magazine says began as support for victims of breast cancer. The final performance on the Fourth was billed as a celebration of America’s 250th birthday. The association’s pages disagree on the count: the home page called 2026 the rodeo’s 97th year, while the program and calendar pages called it the 96th Home of Champions Rodeo.

Before each performance, children aged 4 to 7 sign up behind the Bucking Chutes Grandstand for mutton busting, riding sheep instead of broncs. Ten are drawn at random each day. DeSaveur told the magazine that the drawing once pulled from a pool of more than 50 children, some from as far away as Billings, and that “Red Lodge was one of the first rodeos to offer it.”

Doug Mathis calls the action. He is a PRCA announcer from a ranch outside Stephenville, Texas, and was named WPRA Announcer of the Year in 2019. The magazine reported he had been with Red Lodge for 15 years and “comes up a few days early to make sure everything is right.” The same article named the clown as Whistle-Nut, who performed with a pet bull, Ole, and traded banter with the announcer and the stands. The association’s own pages now list Scot Allerdings as clown and barrelman. Allerdings started as a bull rider in 1994, earned his PRCA bullfighter card in 2003, and teaches high school physical education; he was Wyoming’s teacher of the year in that subject in 2021. In August 2026 the association announced that its bullfighters, Dakoda and JD, had retired. Physical therapists and athletic trainers from Beartooth Billings Clinic work the arena alongside on-site paramedics.

Planes beside the arena

The days around the Fourth are known in Montana and Wyoming as “Cowboy Christmas,” a stretch when contestants can win money and points quickly. Many Red Lodge contestants also try to make the Livingston Roundup Rodeo and the Cody Stampede, and some rope or ride at two rodeos in one day. The airport runway runs parallel to the rodeo grounds. The magazine describes small planes unloading a couple of cowboys and their riggings. The riders cross the runway to the arena, compete, climb back aboard, and take off for the next rodeo while fans cheer. Contestants who cannot fly, or who must haul horses, drive Highway 212 south to Cody or north toward I-90 for Livingston, pulling loaded trailers.

Sunday broncs at the stockyards

According to the association, the rodeo began in the late 1890s, when local cowboys gathered on Sunday afternoons at the railroad stockyards to ride exhibition broncs. In 1929 a group of local cowboys built an arena, gathered wild horses, charged admission, and contested the rides. The event went well enough that the Red Lodge Rodeo Association formed in 1930. Two years later it acquired 180 acres and built the present arena and grandstand.

The event was called the Red Lodge Rodeo until a local cowboy gave it a new name. Bill Linderman was born April 13, 1920. In 1950 he became the first man in professional rodeo to win three world titles in a single season: all-around, steer wrestling, and saddle bronc riding. He won six world titles in all and was the first professional cowboy to win more than $500,000. The association says the name Home of Champions was adopted in 1954, after his third World All Around title. The magazine tells it differently: Linderman began winning world titles in 1943, took three in ten years, and the association renamed the rodeo then.

Linderman also served rodeo’s governing body. He joined the RCA board at 27 in 1947 and was its president from 1951 until he declined renomination in 1958. He qualified for the first National Finals Rodeo in 1959 but withdrew from competition to serve as arena director. He was the association’s secretary and treasurer from 1962 until he died in a plane crash in Salt Lake City on November 11, 1965.

The Riding Greenoughs and their neighbors

Red Lodge was also home to a second rodeo family, the Riding Greenoughs, who, like the Lindermans, competed from the 1930s on. The Carbon County Historical Society & Museum on Broadway keeps trophies, photographs, press releases, and personal belongings of Alice, Turk, Marge, and Bill Greenough, and of Bill, Doug, and Bud Linderman.

A later Greenough, Deb, was named after world champion Deb Copenhaver. He earned his PRCA card in 1986, qualified for the National Finals Rodeo thirteen straight years from 1988 through 2000, and won the bareback world title in 1993. The association’s history pages also claim neighbors from down the road. Clint Branger, a retired bull rider from Roscoe, twice rode the bull Bodacious and now raises bucking broncs on the family ranch at the base of the Beartooth Mountains. Scott Breding, a bull rider from Edgar, won the 1982 college national bull-riding title for Miles Community College.

Deb Greenough described his first ride in the Red Lodge arena this way: “The roar is louder, and riding there for the first time, boy, you just feel like a million bucks. You got so much adrenaline running through you, you could share it with a football team.”