Working The Trapline — Big Ponderoo, Outlander & Tom Horn Days

Had the great pleasure of interviewing Corb Lund for The Nugget Newspaper in advance of his appearance here in Sisters, Oregon, at the Big Ponderoo Festival. As I wrote here 10 years ago (!):

The Alberta-based songwriter, singer and bandleader serves up the best shit-kickin’ music going nowadays. His thing is right in my wheelhouse — we’ve got the same influences and share an abiding passion for history, especially that of the West (Canada and the U.S.).

As you’d expect, it was a lot of fun shootin’ the shit with him. He may be the Coolest Cat in the West. I’m thinking so. I’ll post the feature after it publishes next week.

If any of you are within a reasonable shot of Sisters, you oughta come out for this festival. It’s a big, juicy cut of Americana in a fantastic setting. (Based on our track record, Clan Cornelius’ definition of “reasonable” is a 14-hour drive; that’s a big circle). I’m working the fest, including introducing Corb Lund. Hope to see you there.

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Lady Marilyn and I have both been absolutely slammed at work — which will make it all the sweeter when we get to hunker down Friday night for the premier of S7 of Outlander. All I can say is…

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Cowboys & Indians Magazine has a feature on a Wyoming ranch rodeo that started during the pandemic and has grown powerful, bucking horse legs. Started by rancher and Wyoming historian Rand Selle, t’s named for a legendary FrontierPartisan who haunts those parts…

Rand Selle got the idea during the early days of the pandemic. “It started during COVID,” he says. “After Cheyenne Frontier Days and the bigger rodeos cancelled, I didn’t think we needed to shut everything down. I figured we could social-distance by staying in our cars. The old-school rodeos didn’t have arenas, and people sat in cars to watch.” 

So in July 2020, like-minded folks traveled to Bosler, Wyoming, outside of Laramie, and did just that — they made an arena out of their cars and had themselves a rodeo. This July marks the fourth annual Tom Horn Days rodeo and rendezvous in the small community along the Laramie River.

“My ranch is just 20 miles north of Laramie,” Selle says. “It’s just a little ranch in between two mountain ranges, the Sierra Madres on the left and a little range of hills between here and Cheyenne in that low spot, on the Laramie Plains.” 

It’s really pretty, he says, and kind of important in the life of the rodeo’s namesake Tom Horn, the famous cowboy, soldier, range detective, and gunman who became famous — or infamous, depending — around these parts and was hung at the age of 42 in Cheyenne.

“Bosler is the town that Tom Horn got his mail from,” Selle says. Now that his rodeo keeps gaining momentum, plans are in place to move the small house Horn lived in on a nearby ranch to Bosler. “We have permission from the current ranch owner to pick up the house and move it here. It’s a log cabin-style house where Tom lived when he was at the Wallis headquarters of the Two Bar Ranch, which was originally the spread of the Wyoming-Colorado cattle baron Ora Haley; his name’s on title of the land I own. John Coble’s Iron Mountain Ranch, north of Cheyenne, was another well-known headquarters for Tom Horn; it’s now owned by the Farthing family, and the Farthings are regular contestants at Tom Horn Days every year.”

Well, now. This certainly gets a Frontier Partisan’s attention. Here’s what the outfit has to say for itself:

Three days of action-packed events featuring concerts, pasture bronc riding, pasture team roping, muley roping, stray gathering, camping, vendors, Sunday morning cowboy church, area history presentations from local historians, and more. If you want a real 1890s feel and authentic celebration, join us!

Not this year, but 2024 beckons…