Mission Mountain Rodeo

The gate at the Polson Fairgrounds, 320 Regatta Road, takes cash only. Before the 2026 Mission Mountain Rodeo on June 26 and 27, the fairgrounds posted the warning in capitals and noted an ATM on the grounds. Inside the gate are about 40 fenced acres on the Flathead River, next to the Polson Airport. The river frontage is kept for float planes and emergencies, and no boats launch there. The arena measures about 160 by 300 feet and is set with bucking chutes, timed-event chutes and livestock pens. A grandstand seating about 2,000 faces it, with Les Baldwin’s name painted on it. A concession stand works with electric and gas grills and beverage coolers. Travelers hauling horses can rent stalls in a 24-stall pole barn or a 20-stall inside barn. On the afternoon of the second night in 2026 the fairgrounds posted again: “RAIN OR SHINE / DUST OR MUD / THE RODEO WILL GO ON!”

Two evenings in late June

The children ride first. The fairgrounds event page for the 2025 rodeo gave 6:00 p.m. as the opening hour. A 2022 preview in the Lake County Leader put the youth events at 6 p.m., starting with mutton busting, and the main rodeo at 7. Mutton busters are five years old or younger and weigh 50 pounds at most, with up to 15 entries per event each night. In 2026 a stick horse race was added for children five and under, with the stick horses provided. In 2022 the Leader also listed mini bull riding and pony buckers, with stock from 406 Rodeo, along with junior barrel racing and junior breakaway roping.

The adult program in 2022 ran through bronc riding, tie-down roping, breakaway roping, barrel racing, bull riding and team roping. Big Circle Rodeo of Circle, Montana, supplied the stock, as it had for several years. The preview described a rodeo where whole families enter. In team roping, spouses compete both with and against one another, and some teams pair a father with a son or daughter. That year a pair of young teenage trick riders performed, and a local clown, John Blixt, worked the crowd with antics and jokes.

The 82nd edition, in 2022, drew about 100 cowboys and cowgirls, most of them from Northwest Montana. Payton Fitzpatrick of Polson won the bull riding with an 84-point ride. Only a handful of cowboys entered the steer wrestling, and Tyler Houle of Polson took top money by dragging his steer down in 8.8 seconds. Nicole Lake of Polson placed third in ladies breakaway at 5.1 seconds. Contestants ride for points toward the association finals in Kalispell, which the 2026 schedule lists for October 22 to 24. The Northern Rodeo Association’s own schedule and the 2022 preview name that association as the sanctioning body. The Leader’s 2017 and 2022 reports call it the National Rodeo Association.

At the 2017 rodeo, tie-down and team roper Donnie Benson, a real estate broker by trade, told the Leader what the circuit asks of him: “I work at the office and after work I rope until dark, get up the next morning and do it all over again. My wife is a barrel racer.” UnaRose Graham, the fairgrounds director and promoter, put that weekend’s crowd at possibly about 3,000.

Music follows the rodeo. In 2022 it was Northern Lights from Missoula on Friday night. In 2025 Caselli’s Crew, featuring Cash on vocals, played Friday, and Outlaws and Lawmen, with special guest Lorlei, played Saturday. A free fair of non-food vendors runs alongside. Admission in 2025 was $15 for adults, $5 for children 5 to 12, and free under five. In 2022 adults paid $10.

A café on Main Street and a gift of land

The rodeo takes its name from the Mission Mountains, which were named for St. Ignatius Mission, established by Jesuit priests in 1854. It began under another name.

Lester Powell Baldwin was born in Cherokee, Iowa, in 1893. According to his Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame biography, he was a man who shook hands to seal an agreement and was always neatly dressed in western attire. He and his wife Irene came to Polson in 1936 and opened The Hut Café on Main Street, a 24-hour place. Kerr Dam was then nearing completion eight miles downstream, and its several thousand workers ate there.

In 1938 Hilbert Hanson, a local businessman, gave part of the present fairgrounds to Lake County on the condition that it be used as a “public rodeo grounds.” The county bought the rest with the help of its commissioners. The fairgrounds history says the parcel was much larger then and reached all the way to the old bridge, and pieces of it have been sold off since. Baldwin offered to build the facilities. The Hall of Fame says he had “more vision than money.” He went from business to business collecting donations, and by 1939 the grounds were taking shape. Townspeople worked alongside him on an arena, a grandstand, corrals, bucking chutes and a race track, which Graham later described as a half-mile track.

The first Polson Roundup was staged in the summer of 1940. It ran on the Rodeo Cowboys Association circuit with Cheyenne Frontier Days, the Calgary Stampede and the Pendleton Roundup, and contestants from those rodeos entered at Polson as Baldwin had hoped. The program added trick riding and roping. Salish, Kootenai and Pend Oreille tribal members raised tipis near the arena, and big parades went down the streets of downtown Polson. Faye (Poloson) Haynes, the Roundup’s longtime secretary, promoted the rodeos and parades with Baldwin and was herself later inducted into the Hall of Fame.

A bomber on the Polson runway

After December 7, 1941, the rodeo was set aside. Gasoline and tires were rationed, rodeo travel stopped, and many contestants went into military service. Baldwin bought war bonds and displayed them on a wall of the Hut Café.

On the night of February 3, 1943, Polson’s telephone operators were told that a B-17 bomber from the Walla Walla, Washington, area had gone missing on a training flight. When a low multi-engine plane was heard circling, the operators called townspeople and urged them to drive to the airport, the same field that now borders the fairgrounds. People lined the snow-covered runway with headlights and flashlights. The pilot circled once more, dropped his practice bombs in a field, and set down on the 2,500-foot strip in a rooster-tail of snow with less than five minutes of fuel left. The Norden bombsight was locked in the vault of the Security State Bank. Les and Irene Baldwin and their café workers cooked the airmen a late-night steak dinner, and the Salish Hotel next door gave them beds. The café fed the crew for several days until an experienced Army Air Corps officer arrived and flew the plane out in less than the runway’s length. After the war, several of the crew came back to thank the town. The Baldwins and their café staff were among the first people they looked up.

Rodeo came back after the war. “People on the rodeo circuit, who would come to Polson traveling in between Calgary and Cheyenne, would stop in Polson in the 40s and 50s,” Graham told the Leader in 2017. Baldwin’s nephew, Jim Duford, arrived in 1945, an asthmatic boy from Milwaukee sent west for the dry air. He says Baldwin got him the medicine that let him outgrow the attacks. The Baldwins left Polson in 1953 to restore ranch properties at Camas Prairie, Arlee, Frenchtown and Lolo. They returned in the 1960s to a small house overlooking Flathead Lake, where Baldwin wrote down stories of his life. Several of them ran in the Flathead Courier. He died of a heart attack in Polson on April 1, 1978, and the arena now carries his name.

Volunteers, a grant, and a nephew’s application

By 1984 the grounds were deteriorating. County money for fairgrounds went to the Ronan fair site, and none was set aside for Polson. Volunteers from a branch of the Polson Chamber of Commerce formed Polson Fairgrounds, Inc., leased the property from the county, and began repairs. The fairgrounds history says the property has supported itself through fundraising and volunteer labor ever since. The main fundraiser is a spring Cowboy Ball, a banquet and auction that had reached its 33rd edition by the 2025 season. Between rodeos the grounds hold Cowboy Mounted Shooters, races, and Shakespeare in the park.

The grandstand Baldwin’s volunteers built lasted into the 21st century. In June 2013, Tommy Seifert of T.S. Construction told the Missoulian that the old stands dated from the 1940s and could only be replaced through a grant. His crew had been working intermittently since March to finish before that year’s rodeo on June 28 and 29.

Jim Duford, by then in his eighties, toured the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and saw that most of the cowboys honored there had once competed at his uncle’s rodeo. He wrote the application that put Les Baldwin into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2016. At the 2017 rodeo he rode out on a four-wheeler and waved to the stands on his uncle’s behalf. “When the announcer said he was out there looking down, I figured he was in heaven smiling,” Duford said. “I used to ride out and help him take out water shrubs on the fence line. He did things like plant them until they started growing.”