Lander Pioneer Days

On the morning of July 4, Lander’s Main Street is given over to people on foot. Under the city’s 2025 notice, cars had to be off the street by 2 AM. At 9 AM it closed between First Street and Amoretti Street, and traffic went around by Amoretti. Lawn chairs line the sidewalks well before then. A month ahead of the 2026 parade, the committee asked on its page, “Do you have your lawn chairs put out yet?” The city allows chairs at the owner’s risk, so long as room is left for walkers and for the ADA platforms. By the town’s own count, Lander’s population doubles for the holiday.

The runners come first. The Challenge for Charities half marathon, 5K, and 1-mile race fill the early hours. In 2025 the starts were at 6, 7, and 9:05 AM, and the children’s portion closed the Fifth Street crossover. Breakfast is pancakes from two kitchens. The Kiwanis serve on Main Street, and the Lander Senior Center holds its annual breakfast, which in 2025 ran from 7 to 9 AM for $5.

The Pageant of the Old West

At 10 AM the Lander Pioneer Days Parade starts down Main Street. Its organizers call it the Pageant of the Old West, and entries must keep to an old-west historical theme. In 2021 the committee reminded entrants that music, dancing, and drama were encouraged on the floats. Horses walk in the procession, and the city bars water balloons and fireworks near the route partly to protect them.

The 2026 parade was the 132nd rendition. That summer the Fremont County Pioneer Association added $1,000 to the prize money, and a late $250 prize went up for the best float themed to the nation’s 250th anniversary. Paula McCormick, president of the Lander Old Timers Rodeo Association, gives the town’s claim as the “World’s Oldest Historical Pageant Parade.”

The storefronts along the route compete as well. Businesses decorate one to two weeks before the Fourth, and the best patriotic window wins the traveling bronze boot trophy. “They get the privilege of housing the bronze boot in their business for the year, while also getting their name engraved and added to the trophy,” the committee told County 10 in 2021, when Central Bank & Trust held the boot.

Buffalo at noon, broncs after dark

After the parade the crowd moves to City Park for the Lander Rotary Club Buffalo BBQ. In 2025 it ran from 11 AM to 2 PM, at $15 for adults and $10 for children 12 and under. In 2021 the 67th Army Band marched in the parade and then played on at the park through the barbecue.

The evenings of July 3 and 4 belong to the Fremont Toyota Pioneer Days Rodeo. The Lander Old Timers Rodeo Association, known as LOTRA, puts it on and bills it as “The World’s Oldest Paid Rodeo.” The 2026 rodeo was the 132nd.

Junior steer riding, mini bulls, and junior barrels open at 6:30 PM. The grand entry follows at 7. After it come saddle bronc riding, tie-down and breakaway roping, steer wrestling, ranch bronc riding, barrel racing, team roping, a Businessmen’s Ribbon Roping, and bull riding. Indian relay races for youth, women, and men are run through the program, and on July 3 children run foot races in the arena.

The night closes with fireworks behind the Wyoming Life Resource Center. In 2025 they went up at 10 PM from the DEQ parking lot there, and Mount Hope Cemetery stayed open until midnight for viewers.

Ed Farlow’s place

The rodeo’s origins lead back to 1894 and to Edward J. Farlow. He came to Wyoming from Iowa in April 1878, a 17-year-old riding the Union Pacific as a hobo with his friend Bill Frakes. Blizzards killed most of his cattle in the winter of 1882 to 1883. He spent the following winter herding horses for Jules Lamoureaux and living in a cold, damp dugout. In September 1883 he won the hand of his employer’s daughter, Lizzie Lamoureaux.

The #Lookback series of the Fremont County Museum System, published by County 10, describes Lizzie as half Sioux and a niece of the war chief Gall. She had won a Lander contest for the most popular girl in town, held to raise money for the Catholic church. Her father gave the couple land on what is now Lander’s north side. Their house still stands on Washakie Street, set at an angle to the street. Farlow learned the Arapaho language and sign language and counted Chief Washakie a friend. He and Lizzie kept a tipi on their lawn for Native visitors.

The sources differ on where the first show was held:

• The #Lookback says the Farlows started the first paid Wyoming rodeo and Wild West Show in 1894, with the arena at first in the 200 block of Main Street.
• LOTRA’s history says the rodeo began on Bill O’Neal’s ranch with a ten-mile relay race. In this telling it moved in 1900 to Farlow’s property in West Lander, where he built a grandstand and track.
• A 1970s newspaper article, found by LOTRA board members among stored rodeo papers and quoted by McCormick in 2025, puts the 1894 event “on his place on the outskirts of Lander.” It calls the event “the first paid admission rodeo in the world.”

Farlow owned the grounds for 25 years and directed many of the shows. His Wild West programs included Indian horse races and wolf dancers.

Cheyenne Frontier Days calls itself the “daddy of ‘em all.” Because of the Farlows, the #Lookback writes, Lander can claim to be “the granddaddy of them all.” LOTRA puts Lander’s start three years ahead of Cheyenne’s.

Farlow’s showmanship reached well past the arena. In 1907 workers laying water lines on one of his properties dug up the skull of Harvey Morgan, with a queen pin hammer still embedded in it. The skull became the first artifact in the Pioneer Museum collection.

Farlow later recruited Shoshone, Arapaho, and Bannock performers for the silent film The Covered Wagon. He then escorted a troupe to Europe to promote it, and he carried Morgan’s skull along. In New York the troupe camped in Central Park, and Chief Goes-In-The-Lodge described the subway this way: “Waugh, all the same prairie dog, go down in one hole and go a long way and come up out of another.” In London they performed for 25 weeks at Piccadilly Circus.

At home Farlow served as mayor of Lander and in the state House of Representatives. He died on April 8, 1951, at the age of 90.

By 1912 his celebration was called “Rocky Mountain Round-Up Days.” It moved among several sites until 1934, when it settled at its present grounds under the Chamber of Commerce. According to LOTRA, local tribes often saved the event through the Great Depression and the Second World War. In 2025 the Chamber gave LOTRA its Anchor Award for “surviving the challenge of time.”

The rider on the plate

Farlow’s son Albert Jerome “Stub” Farlow was born in Lander on February 2, 1886. His widow, Netta, wrote in the 1973 Pioneer Days Parade booklet that he started riding at five, when his legs were too short for any stirrup to fit. That was how he got the name. At 15, she wrote, he began riding in rodeos and “nearly always was in the prize money.”

In 1913 Stub was photographed on a bronc named Dead Man. By Netta’s account, the photograph went to the artist Allen T. True, who was paid $75 for the print he made from it. In 1935 Secretary of State Lester C. Hunt chose that image for the 1936 Wyoming license plate. The Wyoming State Journal of December 26, 1935, quoted Hunt calling Stub “The most typical cowboy I know.” That article also says the photograph was taken at a rodeo in Idaho.

Late in life Stub wrote to a student researching his family. “I never did go for publicity,” he told her. “I just like to be plain Stub to everyone.”

Some claim the plate’s rider is instead Clayton Danks or Danks’s brother. Danks does not appear to have made that claim himself. Randy Wise, site manager of the Pioneer Museum, says all of his research supports Stub Farlow.

Danks had his own Lander Fourth. As he later described it, in 1907 the Erwin brothers brought in a black bronc for the festivities and offered $100 to anyone who could last six jumps on him. The horse was Steamboat. He threw a number of riders in Lander that day, and Danks won the $100.

Danks later served as Fremont County sheriff from 1936 to 1951. Afterward he worked at the Wyoming State Training School, now the Wyoming Life Resource Center, the grounds behind which the fireworks now go up. He died in Thermopolis in 1970, and that year’s Pioneer Days Parade was dedicated to him.

A pirate parade in 2020

In early June 2020, the Pioneer Days Committee announced that it was unsafe to hold the usual events during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rachel Good and other residents could not picture the Fourth without a parade, so they organized the first “Lander Pirate Parade.”

“Our plan originally was to make it kind of like a Friday night cruise. You know, start at the high school and everyone drives down mainstreet,” Good told Wyoming Public Radio. “We definitely didn’t anticipate such a huge response.”

The event’s Facebook group grew past 1,300 members. Senator Cale Case and city officials then helped the organizers get a WYDOT permit to close Main Street. “If [the parade] is going to happen anyway, we want everyone to be as safe as possible,” said Assistant Mayor RaJean Strube Fossen. The city supplied police officers and extra staff.

The Pirate Parade stepped off from Lander Valley High School at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and County 10 streamed it live. The following July the committee’s parade came back to Main Street at 10 am on the Fourth, ending what it called a 2020 hiatus.