Same Guys Dancing

[{"type":"text","text":"Til Tuesday -- Voices Carry"}]

Mix Collage 07 Sep 2024 02 31 PM 2334

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Sunday Morning Dance Party: Til Tuesday -- Voices Carry | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Til Tuesday -- Voices Carry

Sunday Morning Dance Party: Til Tuesday -- Voices Carry

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

The first time Farmstead Cider went after old apples in Jackson Hole, it was just for the flavor. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It soon became about the bears. "}]

Every fall as apples drop and ferment in the backyards and ghost orchards of Jackson Hole, grizzlies and black bears do what comes naturally. They follow their noses straight into trouble — calorie-rich fruits that taste oh-so-good when you’re a bear desperate to fatten up for winter. 

The first harvest, though, was all about the homesick wives, Farmstead Cider’s co-owner Orion Bellorado said. They had grown up on the East Coast, where apple harvests are a big deal. 

“We started harvesting the apples in our neighborhood off of peoples’ trees that were kind of derelict,” he said. “And they were tiny, so we pressed a bunch of juice and made some cider out of it.”

The party was great and word soon got around. 

“Someone from the county found out about it and said, ‘Hey, you should really put in for this community grant to start a business,” Bellorado recalled. “‘Because we’ve really been having issues with bears.’”

That was in 2016, and the business has been going ever since, bottling 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of native-yeast cider a year and selling it across Wyoming as well as other states such as Washington and Montana. 

In the process of climbing into backyards and abandoned orchards, Bellorado stumbled onto a bigger realization. Wyoming is curiously — if quietly — rich in apples across the state.

“They are everywhere,” he said. “I mean, Lander was called Apple Town before it was called Lander. It’s full on part of this interesting tidbit of our culture and our history that’s really been left behind.”

That history is being rediscovered thanks to a project called the Wyoming Apple Project. Through it, researchers have been cataloguing a hidden network of heritage and volunteer trees that have somehow survived a century or so of drought and neglect. Researchers say these hardy survivors might point the way to a new kind of apple economy in one of the harshest fruit-growing climates in America.

You wouldn’t know it from today’s landscape of hay bales and cattle, but Wyoming was once thick with apples. Homesteaders brought apple seeds to plant in their new homes, carving out orchards that were just as essential as a root cellar to their survival.

Apples meant sauce, butter, cider, vinegar and livestock feed. They were essential calories, but also comfort — the kind that could be stored up through a long, hard winter.

By the early 1900s, experimental orchards and private growers had tested at least 218 named apple cultivars across Wyoming, including 11 that were Wyoming-bred. 

Among the most ambitious of the early apple pioneers was an experimental fruit farm in Lander, which trialed 175 different cultivars under superintendent John Steinbrecht, who also developed 10 of the 11 Wyoming-bred cultivars. 

Not far away from Steinbrecht was Lander orchardist Ed Young, who planted a prodigious 3,000-some apple trees in 1882 — an act of faith in a place better known for blizzards than fruit blossoms.

At the time, Wyoming was held up as a national example of what’s possible on the frontier. 

“A lot of those early settlers, such as Ed Young, and their success in growing apples was used in news articles back east, to bring hope to people thinking about moving West,” University of Wyoming graduate and plant physiologist Jonathan Magby told Cowboy State Daily. “It helped show them that you can successfully inhabit this remote location of the United States.”

Wyoming’s apples at that time came from everywhere — Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Canada and even Russia. Several nurseries were involved in seeing which varieties could stand up to Wyoming’s brutal mix of cold, drought and wind, including 

At one point, at least 70 out-of-state nurseries and 20 in-state nurseries across 11 Wyoming cities were selling apple stock to Wyoming growers.

Then, slowly, the state forgot about its apples.

Wyoming’s agricultural identity shifted solidly toward cattle and general row crops. Many orchards were abandoned. Irrigation ditches shifted. Families moved away or sold off land.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Winters kept coming. "}]

And the apple trees that had been left behind continued growing. They became part of an unintended Darwinist experiment — one where only the fittest would survive. 

What’s left of the apple trees that once dotted Wyoming are now the toughest of the tough. Trees too full of Wyoming grit to give up and die.

Among the most interesting is a gnarled apple tree in Lander. Its limbs curl up to the sun like an insect on its back, and its trunk is so hollowed out, one wouldn’t be surprised to find a hobbit — or some other creature of legend — sleeping inside.

Somehow, though, this ancient tree is still alive, still leafing out, still stubbornly insisting on producing apples, despite a century or so in a place that routinely tries to freeze them to death.

Wyoming is not a state known for hardy trees. It is, after all, among the coldest and driest of states in the Lower 48. And apple trees aren’t known for being especially long-lived, either. Most never see a 100th birthday.

That makes this particular apple tree special. It’s passed a 100-year stress test, one where Wyoming wind and drought are separating the true pioneers from the pretenders.

To Magby, the Lander tree is far more than a curiosity. It’s a symbol of what Wyoming apples once were, as well as what they could be again. 

These survivors could help develop ever more hardy Wyoming stock, making apples a potential new and viable agricultural commodity. Because of that, the tree’s tissue was pulled and grafted onto new stock, so it can keep growing for another 100 years.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Like A CSI Detective"}]

Magby has been searching out all the old heritage apple trees of Wyoming using DNA finger-printing techniques more often associated with crime shows like CSI. 

So far he’s sampled 510 trees at 91 locations in 19 cities, from Lander and Sheridan to Buffalo and Casper, to figure out which trees match known cultivars and which might be lost or forgotten varieties. So far he’s found more than 150 unique genetic fingerprints that don’t match anything in old reference collections. 

Some of those varieties show up in multiple towns, suggesting they are long-lost cultivars that no longer exist anywhere else. hey are a living link to an era when Wyoming was serious apple country.

Two varieties that keep showing up, meanwhile, are Wealthy and Haralson, both bred in Minnesota. They are roughly one-third of all the identified surviving trees in his data set.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Than Charming History"}]

Magby doesn’t see Wyoming apples as a charming historical footnote. He believes these survivors are pointing the way to a viable agricultural commodity for the state, one that could lead to more products that are made in Wyoming, such as Farmstead Cider in Jackson Hole. Making products in Wyoming — referred to as value-added products — is a better bang for the buck. It keeps most of the economic value chain in-state.

Apple cider production makes a lot of sense in Wyoming, alongside the growing microbrewery scene, Magby said. People also just enjoy fresh produce that’s been grown in Wyoming, whether that’s an apple or other fruits.

“We take pride in anything that’s been produced in Wyoming,” Magby said. “So I’d love to see someone take a strong stance of producing and backing development of cultivars and revamping testing of grape and pear varieties and other small fruits, just to provide that diversity, not just in fresh food products, but also diversity of economies.”

Bellorado is already living that future at Farmstead Cider, thanks to bear-safety grants that helped launch a business to haul apples out of backyards and ghost orchards. 

Now, instead of attracting trouble, those apples are a useful and delicious product in a growing business. It’s more joy to the human world, all from abandoned, pioneer apple trees.

Apples Ian Mc Gregor co owner of Farmstead Cider Courtesy Photo 6 27 26

<title>Wyoming’s Ghost Apple Orchard Trees Have Been Rediscovered And Are Producing | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming was once thick with apples. In fact, it was a top apple producer. Now those forgotten apple trees are being rediscovered by small cider houses. "They're everywhere," said one cider house owner. "Lander was called Apple Town before Lander."

Wyoming’s Ghost Apple Orchard Trees Have Been Rediscovered And Are Producing

Heinz mark

Mark Heinz

Wildlife

A wildlife rescue hospital on the fringe of the Denver metro area’s urban sprawl is accustomed to taking on tough cases. A young red fox with a severely broken leg is among the latest.

Rocky Mountain Wildlife Alliance’s critter hospital in Sedalia, Colorado, has taken in 627 patients so far this year, founder and executive director Emily Davenport told Cowboy State Daily.

This spring, the center treated a bald eagle 

, after eating a carcass with bullet fragments in it.

June and July are typically the busiest time of year, with roughly 200 animals per month arriving. Roughly one-third have suffered injuries from vehicle collisions or some other sort of physical trauma, she said.

The young fox (or kit) was likely born in April and was brought in June 6, Davenport said. The kit is believed to have been struck by a vehicle at a remote county road intersection near the small prairie town of Elbert, Colorado.  

At the hospital, he joined a coyote pup recovering from head trauma after being hit by a vehicle, a red-tailed hawk that suffered bone fractures in a vehicle strike, and many others.

“We’ve had 110 different species in this year. That’s a 26% increase in the number of species over last year,” Davenport said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Little Fella, Big Surgery"}]

Davenport runs the center with the philosophy of returning wildlife to the wild whenever possible. She likes to give every animal a chance, even against long odds.

The fox kit was such a case. He had severe bone fractures in his right front leg.

An orthopedic surgeon was brought in to realign the bones and install a metal plate to keep them in place. The center raided enough money through donations to pay for the surgery.

“The surgery went well and there were no issues. He was standing on the leg the day after the surgery,” Davenport said.

“We take on some of the more difficult cases, where other shelters might euthanize (the injured animals,” she added.

But she sees it as a matter of doing right by wildlife.

Some might argue for “nature taking its course” with injured animals, and Davenport understands that, when the circumstances are natural.

“I’m a big believer that it’s not nature taking its course if an animal is hit by a car or bird flies into a window. That’s human-caused,” she said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘A Pretty Good Plan’"}]

The plan is to keep the little fox at the center until late August or early September, helping it to learn how to hunt and then turn it back loose in the wild, Davenport said.

Biologist Robert Crabtree told Cowboy State Daily he thinks the fox has good chances of survival.

“It it’s a pretty good plan. The fox should be fine, as long as it’s learned to hunt on its own,” said Crabtree, the founder, chief scientist and president of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Montana.

Canines such as wolves are on the “social end of the spectrum” and are raised into supportive packs, he said.

Foxes are on the “more solitary end of the canine spectrum, he said.

However, they typically mate for life and “dad is involved” in helping to raise the kits, he said.

Kits typically disperse on their own in September, Crabtree said.

There might be one, usually a female, that still hangs around with the parents.

“There is often a helper, that helps mom at the fox den,” he said.

Retired biologist Franz Camenzind of Jackson also gave the fox kit good chances of returning to the wild on his own.

“If it’s physically all good, it should have a good chance, said Camenzind, who studied coyote behavior in and around the National Elk Refuge near Jackson.

Foxes also adapt fairly well to human development, so long as they can find natural food sources, such as mice, and stay out of trouble, he said.

“If there is a group that’s trying to heal an animal like a fox and put it back into the wild, I would certainly encourage it,” he said.

Davenport said foxes play a vital role in the ecosystem and can be beneficial to humans.

“Not only are they cute to boot, they serve a really important ecosystem function with pest control,” by devouring mice and voles, she said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Urban Sprawl"}]

Davenport doesn’t expect business at the wildlife hospital to slow down anytime soon.

The Denver Metro area is growing, with no end in sight.

“As the human environment expands, we’re seeing more and more conflict with wildlife,” she said.

There are “lots of massive housing developments bringing changes that animals can’t adapt to quickly," she said.

Sedalia is nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountain front and has so far escaped the worst of it, and Davenport hopes it stays that way.

"We’re in this amazing little rural pocket surrounded by the Denver metro area,” she said.

Rocky Mountain Wildlife Alliance 685362380 959399060172653 9117888975218967458 n 6 27 26

<title>Urban Sprawl Is Flooding Wildlife Rehab Center With Eagles, Foxes and Coyotes | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Amid Denver's urban sprawl, Rocky Mountain Wildlife Alliance is rescuing a fast-growing number of injured animals. The animal hospital has taken in 627 patients this year with roughly one-third having suffered injuries from vehicle collisions.

Urban Sprawl Is Flooding Wildlife Rehab Center With Eagles, Foxes and Coyotes

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Around Wyoming

New research indicates that Wyoming’s prehistoric hell pigs had different diets based on their size. The bigger they were, the wider the menu.

Brynn Wooten, a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published 

 in Archaeotherium, a prehistoric mammal that’s better known as “the North American Hell Pig.”

“They look similar to pigs, but they’re actually more closely related to whales and hippos,” Wooten told Cowboy State Daily. “They were one of the largest things capable of eating meat in their ecosystem.”

Wooten’s study focused on the teeth of hell pigs, including specimens in the collections of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. She studied the microwear on the tooth surfaces of multiple species to get an idea of what they were biting and crunching.

[{"type":"text","text":"Even she was surprised by the results."}]

“I was shocked,” she said. “We found a really interesting phenomenon that is uncommon in modern mammals. In fact, we actually see the exact opposite. It’s surprising and really interesting.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Hell Pig Person"}]

Hell pigs are an extinct group of large mammals that were widespread in North America, Europe and Asia from 36 to 19 million years ago. The first fossils were found near Fort Laramie in 1850. A food cache fossil is on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.

These had enormous heads with thick jaws and powerful teeth. If that wasn’t frightening enough, the largest entelodonts could grow to the size of a horse.

Hell pigs weren't quite that big, but it was one of the largest and most successful mammals in North America during the Eocene and Oligocene periods. Its fossils are common in 

, which stretches across the western U.S.

Wooten became enamored with “hell pigs” when she saw their massive skeletons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a child.  Her latest research is the first chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation on hell pigs.

“When I go to conferences, I’ll tell people when and what I’m presenting, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re the hell-pig person,’ and get really excited.”

That excitement stems from the fact that while hell pits and other like creatures are legendary in paleontology, there’s been little research done on them. Wooten’s focus on the paleoecology of hell pigs is, in many ways, the first of its kind.

“Everything else has been inferred by looking at and measuring bones,” she said. “I'm taking a more quantitative approach, and that’s excited a lot of people because we’ll get to learn a little bit more about a truly lost lineage.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"You’ll Wreck Your Teeth"}]

Modern pigs aren’t picky. They’ll eat anything, making them true omnivores.

Hell pigs aren’t really pigs, but it’s always been assumed that they were similarly omnivorous. The first step in Wooten’s research was to see whether she could support or refute that idea by becoming a prehistoric dentist.

“Dental microwear texture analysis can't tell us what an animal was eating, but it can tell us the texture of what the animal was eating,” she said. “Since the diet of entelodonts has been contested, we thought it’d be interesting to see if we could figure that out.”

Wooten scanned and studied 53 hell pig teeth from 13 co-existing species in the collections of the UW Geological Museum, the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

The fossilized teeth Wooten used for her study came from South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon, with a handful from Wyoming.

Teeth wear differently depending on diet. But studying the distinct patterns of microwear on the hell pig teeth, Wooten could determine whether each individual was primarily eating brittle items, like bones, browses, and seeds, or tough items like flesh and grass.

“That's why it's important that we compare the microwear on the fossilized teeth to modern animals,” she said. “We know what modern animals are eating. If we can see similarities in microwear texture, you can infer what the prehistoric animals were eating.”

Wooten had an idea of what she’d see on the teeth. What she exactly saw subverted her scientific expectations.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Who’s Eating What"}]

After examining the dental microwear texture on the teeth of hell pigs and comparing that with that of modern animals, clear patterns emerged. They weren’t the patterns Wooten was expecting.

“I was really expecting to scan these and come out with everything that was eating super hard things,” she said. “When the results came back, I was shocked.”

Several teeth showed the telltale textures of a bony diet, comparable to the teeth of modern hyenas. Others showed little to no evidence of anything hard in their diet, with microwear comparable to that of modern cheetahs.

Wooten decided to explore these differences until she found an explanation.

“As I was exploring these differences, I discovered a body-size difference,” she said. “I ran all the statistics with the body size separated into smaller and larger, and that's when I found that there was this significant difference in diet.”

Wooten’s conclusion was that the smaller hell pigs were eating tougher food while the bigger ones were eating whatever they could. That’s an anomaly in modern ecosystems.

“Larger animals actually eat softer foods because they have the liberty of eating softer foods,” she said. “Smaller animals eat whatever they can get because they're not as advantaged as the larger animals. That’s what we expect to see in nature. The opposite is fairly uncommon.”

Wooten also noted that this size-diet split was tied to species, not age. Smaller species of hell pig had softer diets, while larger species had harder diets.

“The larger-bodied individuals ate like hyenas, but the small-bodied individuals ate like cheetahs,” she said. “Cheetahs are exclusively flesh eaters, so it’s possible the smaller Archaeotherium were exclusive flesh eaters, too.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Gimme, Gimme!"}]

With this intriguing diet disparity determined by body size, it’s only natural to speculate what that could reveal about the biology and behavior of hell pigs.

Wooten doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, but she did say the differences in the diet could have been partially caused by a common behavior scientists see in many modern ecosystems: kleptoparasitism.

That’s a big word for big animals stealing food from small animals. Wyomingites can see it happen all the time in places like Yellowstone National Park.

“Bears will scare wolves, lynxes, or pumas from their kills and eat the remains,” Wooten said. “When you’re scavenging, you eat bone even if you don’t really mean to.”

Wooten referenced a fossil from the White River Formation that suggests the same behavior. It’s believed to be 

, containing several partial skeletons of Poebrotherium, a small prehistoric camel.

“The camels were killed by a bite to the head and neck,” she said. “The meatier portion of their bodies — the butt — was eaten, while front portions, the head and arms, were dragged back to a meat cache.”

This fossil has been cited as evidence of active hunting by hell pig mortoni, which Wooten called “the smallest of the smaller-bodied Archaeotherium species.”

The butt-less Poebrotherium food cache might give more credence to kleptoparasitism among hell pig species. If the camels were killed by a smaller-bodied species, it would align with what Wooten discovered from her dental microwear analysis.

“Maybe the smaller ones would run and actively hunt their food, and the larger ones could have scared them off and consumed their kills,” Wooten said. “It's really hard to have two different kinds of animals that are living at the same place at the same time, because then they're constantly going to be fighting for resources.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Closer Look"}]

Wooten has learned a lot from the dental microwear analysis of hell pig teeth. The next step in her research is more in-depth dentistry.

“The next step is using stable isotope analysis to put more of the puzzle pieces together,” she said. “That’ll give me a better picture of what was going on.”

Stable isotope analysis is an increasingly powerful tool in paleontology. A 2025 study 

determined the diets of Jurassic dinosaurs

, down to the specific salads Brontosaurus ate, using the calcium isotopes preserved in their tooth enamel.

Using stable isotope analysis on hell pig teeth, coupled with the microwear textures, would help Wooten narrow down the dietary preferences of the different-sized species.

It will also shed insight on whether hell pigs were primarily carnivorous or had a more generalist diet of meat and plants.

“Unless we have a time machine, I don't think I'm ever going to know exactly what they were eating day-to-day,” she said. “Stable isotope analysis will help clarify the textures of foods being eaten and potentially lead to a path to infer what actual foods were being eaten.”

Wooten has already done some stable isotope analysis, but she’s not at liberty to share what she’s learned. That’s for the next paper.

[{"type":"text","text":"“It’s embargoed, but it’s very fascinating,” she said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Archaic And Unknown"}]

Wooten’s ultimate goal is to use her ongoing dental analysis to build “a broader picture” of the many species of hell pig in their ancient environment.

“Going forward, I’ll focus more heavily on general paleoecology,” she said. “Where were they living? How might they have adapted to the changing environment? How do they utilize the resources in their habitats?”

Wooten believes there’s a lot to learn from hell pigs. It was a long-lived and diverse genus that served as a top predator in its ecosystem for 17 million years.

“That’s a really long time for any genus, let alone one with over a dozen different species, to survive,” she said. “They’re all related to reach others, but distinctly different, which is another really interesting factor in all this.”

That means she’s more than content to be “the hell-pig person” for the rest of her career.

“I fell in love with these creatures,” she said. “They’re so archaic and unknown. They’re different from anything else we have today, and it’s always going to be exciting to learn a little bit more about them.”

Hell Pig E6 CC83 C8 0 A84 495 B 9723 19 D2 D0 E8 D744 1 6 27 26

<title>Wyoming's Prehistoric Hell Pigs Looked Like Pigs But Were More Like Whales And Hippos | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The first fossils of the prehistoric mammal known as the "North American Hell Pig" were found near Fort Laramie, Wyoming in 1850. Scientists say although they look similar to pigs, they are more closely related to whales and hippos.

Wyoming's Prehistoric Hell Pigs Looked Like Pigs But Were More Like Whales And Hippos

Julie Mankin

Native American Tribes

When the Indian relay races return to the Sheridan WYO Rodeo next month, it will be without the event's longtime announcer of the past 30 years, who quit over an interaction with local law enforcement he claims had "racist overtones."

Kennard Real Bird said he will not return as announcer after the rodeo's directors declined to stand behind him and call out the Sheridan County Sheriff's Office for what Real Bird claims was inappropriate treatment of him after a 2025 arrest.

“I just had an issue with local law enforcement,” said Real Bird, an artist whose 2011 painting "Crow War Pony" hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “I live on an island, so to speak, here on the reservation, and we don’t encounter racism here on a daily basis.”

"As a result of this incident with racist overtones, I decided to not go back for any further humiliation by the Sheridan community," he adds in a June 19 Facebook post about the interactions.

Real Bird, 76, of the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana, began calling Sheridan’s Indian relay races with his own brand of politically incorrect but engaging humor when the races were added to the rodeo in 1997. 

Real Bird told Cowboy State Daily he isn't retiring. He plans to call Indian relay races this summer at Cheyenne Frontier Days — which just added the event on both weekends — and at Wyoming Downs, plus rodeos in North Dakota, Montana and Alberta. 

In September, Real Bird will announce the 10th annual Championship of Champions, a three-day event held for the first time at Cheyenne’s Frontier Park.

[{"type":"text","text":"But he won't be in Sheridan."}]

“I’ve been in a grieving period knowing I’m not going back to Sheridan,” Real Bird said. “I love that audience — their love for the sport and the respect they give the Indian kids.”

[{"type":"text","text":"'Insulted An Humilitated'"}]

Real Bird said he was pulled over in July 2025 by the Wyoming Highway Patrol leaving the rodeo over a bench warrant for his arrest based on an unpaid 2018 speeding ticket. 

He said paid the ticket in 2022, when while attempting to renew his Montana driver’s license he was told by his DMV the Wyoming fine must be paid first.

“I paid it electronically,” he said. “A couple of days later, I went back to the DMV and they said, ‘OK, Wyoming has released your hold because you paid the fine.’ And they renewed my license.”

Nevertheless, Real Bird said he was handcuffed and taken to the Sheridan County Detention Center, where he was “insulted and humiliated” when stripped of his belt and boots and handcuffed to a counter.

“I asked, ‘Is this necessary?’” he recalled. “I’m 76 years old. I’ve been sober 49 years of my life. I was not a flight risk or a threat. I don’t know why they would want to treat me like that, other than me being an Indian.”

Deputy Dillon Buckmeier of the Sheridan County Sheriff’s Department said it's the same standard procedure for all bookings.

“We do a pat-down, take a photo, put them in a changing room to remove clothes, which we search, and we cuff them to a chair or the counter while they’re booked,” Buckmeier told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s safer if they’re secured.”

It was the second time in recent years an incident in Sheridan offended Real Bird, he said.

For decades, the former bronc rider, who still raises bucking horses, would make his way down behind the chutes to watch the rodeo’s bronc riding. One time, he had his young grandsons in tow. 

PRCA rules forbid kids behind the chutes, so security removed the Real Bird family.

Sheridan WYO Rodeo Executive Director Zane Garstad and WYO Indian Relay Director Jess Sams talked Real Bird into returning to keep announcing the races after that. 

And Sams asked him to return in 2026 as well, telling Real Bird the rodeo board doesn't get involved in what happens outside the fairgrounds. 

[{"type":"text","text":"'He's One Of A Kind'"}]

Real Bird's successor announcing the Indian races at the WYO Rodeo will be Randy Taylor, a University of Wyoming graduate and former National Finals Rodeo bareback rider of Cherokee descent. 

Taylor has known Real Bird since he was invited to Montana by the Crow Tribe to ride bucking horses and put up teepees in the 1980s.

The longtime voice of the Sheridan Indian Relay Races has quit over an interaction with law enforcement he claims had "racist overtones." He said the decision to not return was because the rodeo's board didn't stand behind him and condemn his treatment.

Sunday Morning Dance Party: Til Tuesday -- Voices Carry

In case you missed it

More in Same Guys Dancing

Saturday Morning Dance Party: February 28, 2026

Wednesday Morning Dance Party: July 23, 2025

Saturday Morning Dance Party: Dierks Bentley -- 5-1-5-0

Friday Morning Dance Party: Cream -- White Room

Most read