Wheatland County Youth Fair

Small animal judging opens the Wheatland County Youth Fair at nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, at the county fairgrounds on Rodeo Drive in Harlowton. By noon the indoor exhibits are being checked in, and at half past twelve the interview judging begins. That was the order the 2025 entry book gave for the first day. The Wheatland County Chamber listed the 2026 fair on the same plan: Wednesday, July 29, for the Small Animal and Indoor Show; Thursday, July 30, for the Horse Show; and Friday, July 31, for the Large Animal Show.

The Central Montana tourism office puts Harlowton at 4,185 feet and 945 people. The town sits on the Musselshell River, east of the Crazy and Castle Mountains and south of the Little Belts and the Snowies. The fairgrounds has a concession area, restrooms, picnic tables, back pens, five chutes, calf chutes, and holding and watering corrals. Concessions are open each day of the fair, and awards are given as it goes. The 2023 and 2025 entry books both carried the same line: “There will not be a dance this year.”

The horse show starts at 8:30 on Thursday. Friday is the long day.

Friday in the arena

Livestock weigh-in is at seven in the morning and judging at 8:30. The classes come in a fixed order: swine, then beef, dairy, sheep and goats. Each opens with showmanship, followed by the market, feeder and breeding classes. Exhibitors wear a white long-sleeved collared shirt, black pants, and boots or closed-toe shoes. Tennis shoes are not allowed, and western hats are optional. Swine may be oiled or powdered for showmanship, and sheep may be washed. Market lambs are shorn. Exhibitors nine and older lead their lambs into the ring without halters, while the youngest may use one or not.

The scales decide which animals sell. Under the 2025 book, a market steer or spayed heifer had to weigh at least 950 pounds, a hog 210, a lamb 100 and a goat kid 50. Anything lighter went into a feeder class and was not sold. The 2023 book had set the lamb floor at 90 pounds. Exhibitors eight and under may not show beef, dairy or swine, except in the bum calf and bum piglet classes. Those classes are judged on showmanship alone, and their animals do not go to auction.

Every youth who shows livestock is entered in the herdsmanship contest automatically. One junior, one intermediate and one senior take the award. It is judged on the neatness of animal and stall, sportsmanship, handling, and “courtesy towards the public.”

The buyers’ dinner is at 4:30 and the auction at 5:30. Blue-ribbon animals sell first, then red, then white, with the order inside each ribbon drawn at random. An exhibitor may sell one beef, or two of the smaller animals from among hogs, lambs and goats. A sold animal belongs to the buyer, though the fair will care for it and deliver it on request.

An open fair on the Musselshell

The fair is open to all: no enrollment in 4-H or FFA is needed, and there is no fee to enter. Exhibitors come from all of Wheatland County and from a territory drawn past its lines:

• west through the Musselshell drainage
• east to Ryegate and its school district
• north to the Buffalo Canyon Road
• south to Melville and its school district

Juniors are eight and under, intermediates nine through twelve, and seniors thirteen and up. No one may compete for premiums later than the first fair after high school graduation. The entry book states the aim: “The main purpose of the Wheatland County Youth Fair is educational.” The board, it goes on, hopes to give the youth “a deeper interest in their ranches and homes.”

A board runs the fair. In 2025 Lysee Gaugler was president. Shawn Peters was vice president and livestock chairperson. Bethany Cooney was secretary, handled awards, and shared the indoor exhibits with Gaugler. Christy Jones chaired the horse show. Mandie Reed, the MSU Extension agent for Wheatland County, chaired the small animals. Her office at 201 A Avenue NW, where Amber Bosch is administrative assistant, answers the fair’s questions and rents out the grounds. The entry book’s cover counts the 2025 fair as the 71st. In its September–October 1969 issue, the Milwaukee Road Magazine, published for the railroad’s employees, named Kathy Winsky as grand champion fat lamb exhibitor at the Wheatland County Youth Fair.

A grandstand below the hill

The ground is older than the youth fair. Origin and History of Harlowton, Montana was printed as the program for the 1989 Harlowton Rodeo. According to it, A. C. Graves, principal owner of the Graves Hotel Co., cleared the area at the bottom of the hill and to the west in 1910, starting the present fairgrounds, and built the grandstand. That August the Meagher County Fair Association held its first fair there, and the first Harlowton Rodeo at the location ran with it. In 1915 Otto Timm piloted the first airplane to appear at the Harlowton Fair.

On April 1, 1917, Wheatland County was created from Meagher and Sweet Grass counties, the 41st county in Montana. The fairgrounds had its first official use as the Wheatland County Fairgrounds on June 5, 1917, at a celebration of the new county. Senator C. P. Tooley, Senator William Jones and Representative E. C. Baxter spoke.

Bronc riders and a bear

The program traces rodeo in Harlowton to the early 1880s, when it was a Sunday event put on by roundup crews to entertain the cowboys. In the 1920s American Legion Post 15 sponsored rodeos in Harlowton. The Fourth of July celebration in 1922 included a bear roping contest, horse races, foot races and baseball, and a grand ball at Liberty Hall at 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children.

The first three-day rodeo came in 1923, on July 3, 4 and 5. John Christensen of Two Dot won the saddle bronc riding and Jack Tracy the bareback. One photograph in the program shows Christensen winning first place on July 4, 1923, riding “Bue Elephant.” Another was taken in front of Graves’s original grandstand during the rodeo of 1923 or 1924.

Through the depression and drought years of the thirties, only a few ranch rodeos were held. The Legion sponsored the rodeo again in 1947 and 1948, an RCA show with stock from Greenough and Orr of Red Lodge. The Chamber of Commerce rodeo began in 1952, largely through Frank Holloway and Louis Kalberg, both early contestants. It started as a one-day show with 30 to 40 cowboys, mostly local, on stock from local ranchers. Lights went up in 1961. From 1968 the stock was contracted, and the Dale Small Rodeo Co. had furnished it for 21 years by 1989. By then the show drew approximately 400 cowboys and cowgirls from across the Northwest, and the founders’ sons, Howard Holloway and Stan Kalberg, had run it for 26 years. The grounds still hold a rodeo on July 3rd and 4th and a high school rodeo on Memorial Day weekend.

The same program reproduces a photograph of Fair Week in Harlowton, printed on one side of a penny post card addressed to Miss Annie Arthur (Cosgriffe) at Wallis, Montana.