Prescott Frontier Days - World's Oldest Rodeo

Gates at the Prescott Rodeo Grounds on Rodeo Drive open two hours before each performance. That time is meant for the vendors: food, boots and hats, and a stage of live music. At noon before an afternoon show, and at six before an evening one, small children climb onto sheep in the arena for Mutton Bustin’. Then the World’s Oldest Rodeo begins. It runs about two and a half hours under a grandstand that federal relief crews helped build in the mid-1930s.

The program is sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. There are judged roughstock events, which are bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, and bull riding. There are also timed events: steer wrestling, tie-down roping, women’s breakaway roping, team roping, and women’s barrel racing. The rodeo stages eight performances over seven days, from late June through the Fourth of July, and all eight carry the same events and the same specialty acts between them. Most of the seats are covered. The exceptions are the west end and the arena-level rows, and those bleachers, like the upper level, have no backrests. The town sits at 5,350 feet, by the reckoning of the roadside marker north of it, and the organizers recommend a light jacket or sweater for evening shows.

Sheep, Clydesdales, and the parade on the Fourth

The acts between events change from year to year. In 2026 the trick rider and acrobat Bethany Kiesner performed, whom the PRCA named Dress Act of the Year in 2020. She works the circuit with her husband, Rider Kiesner, also a performer. The Broken Spoke Clydesdales came back again. They are a family-owned hitch of registered Clydesdales from Winfield, Kansas, and they brought two horses named Legend and Reno. Legend is named in honor of the Prescott rodeo. Beau Schueth worked as a bullfighter. Prescott’s rodeo queens, whom an Arizona’s Family segment in June 2026 described as experienced horsewomen who help keep the sport alive, ride with the show.

The arena floor has its own keepers. In September 2026 Prescott Frontier Days announced that it was one of five rodeo committees to receive the John Deere Common Sense Dirt Initiative Award. The organization credited Mike Alderete and the arena crew who prepare and maintain the competition surface.

On the morning of July 4 the rodeo parade moves through downtown Prescott to Courthouse Plaza. The organization’s press releases call it Arizona’s second-largest parade. The 2026 parade stepped off at 9:00 AM on a Saturday under the theme “Celebrating 250 years of Freedom,” and spectators could vote for a favorite entry by scanning a QR code. Two monuments stand outside the grounds. The 100 Years of Rodeo Monument is at 201 South Cortez Street. On Arizona Route 89 at milepost 306, a “Welcome to Prescott” sign put up by three Rotary clubs tells northbound drivers that Prescott Frontier Days, “The World’s Oldest Rodeo,” is held on the Fourth of July weekend each year.

The rodeo is run by Prescott Frontier Days, Inc., a nonprofit with more than 200 active members. Around the Fourth, about 800 more volunteers join them to stage the rodeo, the parade, a golf tournament, and an Old Timers Gathering. The organization counts about 27,000 rodeo spectators each year. Kym Lopez is board president. The general manager since 2021 has been Jim Dewey Brown, who won Prescott’s saddle bronc riding title in 1999 and again in 2003 and worked as a flankman there in 2016. He coached the New Mexico State University rodeo team from 2002 to 2015. The organization’s history credits him with a new arena, pens, and chutes, and with adding breakaway roping and Mutton Bustin’ to the program.

A cowboy tournament in 1888

Prescott was founded in 1864 as the first capital of Arizona Territory. According to Danny Freeman, writing for the Sharlot Hall Museum in 1997, the only people in the area then were a few gold and silver miners and the soldiers at nearby Fort Whipple. Ranchers soon brought in cattle and horses, and by 1866 they were racing their animals against one another, with betting from the start. Fourth of July celebrations went back to the town’s first year. They featured patriotic speeches, band concerts, fire company contests, hard-rock drilling contests among the miners, parades, and drills by the Fort Whipple cavalry.

In 1888, Freeman writes, the town’s merchants and professional men reasoned that if more visitors could be persuaded to stay a few days, they would spend more money. So they added a Cowboy Tournament to the horse racing. The program included bronc riding, steer roping, cow pony racing, and one major race of known horses. Contestants paid an entry fee and spectators paid admission. Winners took prizes of merchandise and cash. A trophy went to the “Best Cowboy,” Juan Leivas, a cowboy from Big Sandy Valley in Mohave County who was then working on the Date Creek Ranch southwest of Prescott. The Arizona Journal-Miner wrote up the whole event. The trophy and the newspaper are both held at Sharlot Hall Museum.

That newspaper account carries the rodeo’s claim to its title. “Others may claim to be older,” Freeman wrote, “but Prescott can prove when its rodeo started because it was written up in the local paper at the time.” The organization’s own history, by Jim Anderson and Freeman, calls July 4, 1888, “the birthday of professional rodeo.”

The first arena was a tract of unimproved ground in what was called Forbing Park, off present-day Iron Springs Road. It was roped off to keep the broncs from running away after they had thrown their riders. Purses under $1,000 were common. Until 1924 the event went by such names as Fiesta, Cowboy Contests, and Stampedes. The word “rodeo,” Spanish for a round-up, was not used for cowboy contests anywhere until 1916, and Prescott first used it in 1924.

Fairgrounds, the WPA, and the lean years

In 1913 the Fourth of July celebration moved to its present site, then the Yavapai County Fairgrounds, and the name Prescott Frontier Days came into use for a committee of the Yavapai County Fair Association. The history records that Tom Mix competed and Will Rogers attended. The fair itself shut down from 1933 until 1947, but the rodeo went on. In the mid-1930s, with help from the WPA and the CCC, crews built the Grandstand, the stone Fish Pond, and two rock buildings now called the Pardee and Freeman buildings. Artifacts recovered from that construction are displayed at the Smoki Museum. In 1937 a week-long celebration marked fifty years of Prescott rodeo, and former contestants helped put on festivities that drew thousands from around the state.

In the early 1940s money troubles led to talk of postponing or cancelling the show. A group of young local men called the 20-30 Club stepped in, led by the historian Lester “Budge” Ruffner. They promoted the “working” cowboy and barred professional cowboys from 1941 through 1946. With World War II drawing off contestants, local ranchers and volunteers kept the show going. Through the late 1940s and the 1950s, supporters including Gordon Koch, Danny Freeman, Fred Schemmer, and Andy Jauregui kept it growing. Purses often passed $20,000, and the local ranchers could no longer supply enough calves, steers, and broncs for the cowboys who came.

The Prescott Jaycees took over production in 1968. In 1972 they hired the stock contractor Harry Vold, who, according to the organization’s history, updated in 2023, still furnishes stock to the rodeo. That same year the film “Junior Bonner,” starring Steve McQueen, was shot around the actual rodeo and parade.

Notes on their houses

Prescott Frontier Days, Inc. was organized as a nonprofit corporation in 1978 and ran its first Fourth of July celebration in 1979, the year the Jaycees folded. In 1984 several members of the rodeo committee signed notes on their own houses to keep the World’s Oldest Rodeo going. On August 6, 1985, the name was registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a registration renewed every five years. In the same decade a Trivial Pursuit card asked what rough-and-tumble western sport was first formalized in Prescott, Arizona. The rodeo held its 100th anniversary in 1988. In 2004 the organization hired JC Trujillo, the 1981 bareback world champion and a five-time Prescott champion, as general manager. In July 2008 the committee was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, one of only sixteen rodeos so honored.

The 2026 rodeo was the 139th, and the organization has set the 140th for June 28 through July 4, 2027. The grounds themselves are under review. The City of Prescott has said the Rodeo/Fairgrounds needs maintenance and has facilities that no longer meet current operational needs. On September 23 the city engaged GH2 Architects to lead a master plan covering parking, lighting, sound, dust, and stormwater. A final presentation was scheduled for the City Council voting meeting on Tuesday, October 13, at 3:00 p.m., after which the council may approve the plan.