Livingston Roundup

On the afternoon of June 30, 2026, rain beat on the tin awning over the covered grandstand at the Park County Fairgrounds in Livingston while country music played through the speakers. The music stopped when the announcer opened the slack, and the first tie-down ropers rode out after their calves. A tie-down run starts with a rider chasing a calf on horseback. He ropes it by the neck, then ties three of its legs together, and the whole run usually takes less than ten seconds.

Slack under the tin awning

Slack at the Livingston Roundup is free and open to the public, and seats go to whoever arrives first. There are no concessions. It begins at 3:00 on June 30 and covers only the timed events: tie-down roping, steer wrestling, and team roping. No rough stock competes. A second slack, for barrel racers only, runs at 11:00 a.m. on July 4.

Josh Homer, the Roundup’s media coordinator and official photographer, explained that contestants are placed in slack by random lottery, not by skill. Many prefer it because they can make their run and leave for the next rodeo on the circuit without waiting hours for their event to come up. Cindy Meredith flew in from West Texas in 2026 and tries to attend every year. “All the top names end up in slack,” she told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “You get to watch a bunch of calf ropers, bulldoggers, and team ropers all at once.”

Joel Harris of San Angelo, Texas, was competing at the Roundup for the third time and put up 7.9 seconds. “I made a good run. I had a little bit of a slower handling calf, I’ll probably win a little bit money,” he said. “The cool thing about Livingston is, a lot of the best guys come, but it makes it hard to win good checks.” Then he loaded his horse and headed for Ponoka, Alberta. Chet Weitz of London, Texas, finished in 7.7 seconds before leaving for Mandan, North Dakota. “It’s a great rodeo, especially since I did good,” he said, laughing.

Some of the crowd had a shorter trip. Cindy and Michael Moore took five minutes to get from their Livingston home to the grandstand. They have been rodeo fans since 1978 and have come to the Roundup every year since 2010. “It’s not like a Texas rodeo, but it’s big money,” Michael said. Cindy described where Livingston sits on the July circuit: “They have a lot of championship people coming through, and we’re right on that circuit where they can go from here to Cody to Red Lodge.”

Four nights, tokens, and fireworks

After slack come the four performance nights, July 1 through 4. Gates open at 6:00 p.m. and the performance starts at 8:00. The program includes bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, barrel racing, team roping, tie-down roping, and steer wrestling, all sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association. “We say the Pledge of Allegiance, and sing the national anthem and praise God before every rodeo,” Meredith said. The association says its announcer has worked the event for more than twenty years. In 2019 that announcer was Steve Kenyon of ProRodeo Live, who had held the job for many years.

Bruce Becker, then in his 26th year as president of the Livingston Roundup Association, described the end of each night in 2019: “As soon as the last bull bucks after each performance, we turn off the lights and have a pretty spectacular fireworks show.” Volunteers from local nonprofits clean the grounds after the fireworks. July 3 is Tough Enough to Wear Pink night. The crowd is asked to wear pink, and an auction during the performance raises money for the Park County Cancer Alliance. Any contestant who wins the go-round in a pink shirt earns an extra $200. Becker also mentioned a military night and an emergency services night.

Every person through the gate needs a ticket, babies on laps included, and no one who leaves during the performance may come back in. The Roundup runs its own food and drink stand, which accepts only tokens bought at the token booth. The bar takes cash or card, the other vendors take cash only, and there is an ATM on the grounds. At the rear of the fairgrounds, the contestant secretary works out of a log building behind the bucking stock pens.

Seats go quickly. In 2026 the July 3 and 4 performances had sold out before slack began, and only a few seats remained for July 1 and 2. Becker said in 2019, “We are going to sit about 15,000 people for the rodeo, and we sell out every night.” The association calls the event Montana’s oldest rodeo, and its Facebook page calls it the largest PRCA rodeo in the state. “It swells the town by roughly 5,000 people when the rodeo is sold out,” Homer said. “From the hotels to the restaurants to stock, hay, grain, it’s everything.”

The association’s officers and directors are all volunteers. For 2026 they were led by president Caroline Billingsley, vice president Gary Glass, secretary Cathy Bosley, and treasurer Peggy Glass, with Becker still on the crew. Other volunteers take tickets, sell merchandise, work the concessions, handle stock, prepare the arena, and direct parking. Over the years the association has added an arena fence, a crow’s nest, bleachers, a ticket booth and office, a tractor, and chute gates to the fairgrounds.

The Roundup also crowns its own queens. Cali Simmons was named Miss Livingston Roundup for 2026 and Lila Trzpuc Miss Teen Livingston Roundup. A Little Miss contest for girls aged 3 to 13 includes a workshop in modeling, public speaking, hair, and makeup, with no horsemanship. The winners ride in the parade, are recognized at the crowning of Miss Livingston Roundup, and help with the kiddie rodeo.

The parade on July 2

The parade on July 2 has opened the rodeo since 1924. The Livingston Area Chamber of Commerce has run it for decades, and former Miss Livingston Roundups are invited to ride. At the 100th parade on July 2, 2024, Chamber CEO Leslie Feigel counted 132 organizations in line. “We have a herd of goats. We got a mini horse team: a three-year-old and a four-year-old riding two mini horses,” she said. She named the Shriners as the longest-running entry. Tom Gelberg and Lynn Perkins of the Gallatin Shrine Clowns had ridden together in the parade for more than thirty years. “We’ve known these guys for years and years; we’re friends,” Perkins said. Governor Greg Gianforte issued a proclamation recognizing the parade’s 100th anniversary and commemorating “100 Bucking Years.” The Budweiser Clydesdales appear among the parade’s photographs from 2025.

Ringling’s horses and the Clyde Park bleachers

Accounts of the first rodeo differ. Most give 1924. Pat Miller, a Livingston historian, wrote that it began that year when 28 top bucking horses owned by circus man Richard T. Ringling “first kicked up their heels here.” There were no seats, so bleachers were hauled in from the Clyde Park ballpark. All the cowboys were local ranchers or ranch hands, and the crowd usually knew the man by his name. Laura Lambert, writing for Sports Illustrated’s rodeo site, credits Charlie Murphy, organizer of the Madison Square Garden Rodeo in New York. She writes that he “apparently had a vision for rodeos in special places” and organized a rodeo near the world’s first national park in 1924. She adds that the group that later ran the rodeo in the 1920s meant to capture tourists passing through on their way to Yellowstone, about 50 miles south. The Cowboy Lifestyle Network dates the beginning to 1926 and credits a group of local businessmen who wanted travelers to stay in town a little longer each summer.

Miller’s research found the Roundup already professional in the 1920s. In 1925, its second year, it was one of only eight Class A shows in the nation, meaning rodeos that paid at least $3,000 in prize money. Its stiffest early competition for riders and rough stock came from Bozeman.

The sources also differ on how the rodeo came back after World War II. Ernie Bullock, a former association president, said professional status lapsed during the war, when so many cowboys joined the military, and was picked up again in 1960. The Cowboy Lifestyle Network tells it another way. In the late 1940s, it says, a young Livingston resident went to a local businessman with the idea of reviving the Roundup, and in 1952 the rodeo earned professional status through the Rodeo Cowboys Association, the forerunner of the PRCA.

In the 1960s many Western towns tried to draw crowds to new professional rodeos with Hollywood names who could not ride well. In 1965 Bill Linderman, secretary-treasurer of the Rodeo Cowboys Association, wrote to the Livingston Roundup Association: “There is no need to have some ding-a-ling B-flat from Hollywood in order to get people. As I well remember, one made a tour through Montana at one time and broke every rodeo committee in the state.”

Cody, Red Lodge, and the road north

The Roundup grew quickly after 1966. That year local organizers agreed with the people running the rodeos in Red Lodge and in Cody, Wyoming, to hold all three on July 2, 3, and 4 every year. Joe Gaab, a retired game warden who was president of the association at the time, recalled that the schedules let top cowboys work all three and then point their outfits north toward the big prize money in Calgary, Alberta. “That had a heckuva effect on the rodeos,” Gaab said. Becker described the arrangement in 2019: “since we are all about a two-and-a-half to three-hour drive from each other, we decided to hold our rodeos at the same time so cowboys could hit three pretty big rodeos in a short period of time.” The rodeo falls in the middle of the PRCA’s Cowboy Christmas run.

The added money reached more than $104,000 in 2019 and $132,000 for the centennial in 2024. The record book includes 24-time world champion Trevor Brazile, who won a rodeo-record $5,959 in all-around money in 2013. At the 2024 rodeo, Tristan O’Neal rode Chandler’s Dream from Silver Creek Pro Rodeo for 89 points. Becker said in 2019 that a woman from the Netherlands had stopped by to buy tickets and planned to return in July. The 2026 Roundup was the 102nd.

“Livingston,” Miller wrote, “held on to the reins and kept building their show.”