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Plains Folk: The Belgrade bull

By JIM HOY

© Plains Folk

One reason I like going to the National Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock, Texas, each year is that I always pick up some interesting bit of Western or cowboy history that I hadn't previously known.

This year I learned from Rhonda Sedgwick Stearns about a bucking bull that became famous long before bull riding was a standard part of rodeo.

Up until the 1930s and even into the 1940s, in fact, rodeo cowboys (and cowgirls, too) rode steers and cows, not bulls.

In the late '30s the world's first bullfighting rodeo clown came into being when Tin Horn Hank Keenan came running into his trailer behind the chutes at a Leo Cremer rodeo in Idaho, grabbed a saddle blanket and a pistol filled with blanks, and ran back toward the arena, shouting "Those SOBs are going to kill someone!"

Cremer had, for the first time, used Brahma bulls in the steer riding event, and those long-eared, hump-backed beasts were coming back to hunt for and hook the cowboys after they had been thrown.

Some 40 years earlier, however, a Holstein bull calf was dropped on Annie Miller's ranch near Belgrade, Mont., in 1889. Or else he was born on Jim Ballard's ranch, then sold to the Widow Miller for $15.

A year or so later Alva "Kid" Johnston and his brother Preston, who ran a saloon and were master animal trainers (they are said to have trained two turkeys to pull a cart, a mountain lion to pull a buggy, an elk to carry packs, and two black bears to roller skate), bought the bull and named him Corbett after the champion boxer.

By the time Corbett was three years old, he weighed more than 1,600 pounds and had thrown every local cowboy who tried to ride him.

The Johnstons had a standing offer of $150 for anyone who could ride the bull under the following conditions: no hobbled stirrups, buck roll (blanket or slicker tied behind the horn), or night-latch (buck strap) on the saddle and no bridle or halter on the bull.

Over the next few years they made a ton of money and accumulated a shed full of saddles, chaps, and spurs from would-be riders who had bet everything they owned that they could ride the bull. Not only did Corbett buck high and hard, often landing on his front feet with his nose to the ground and his tail high in the air in a straight line from his nose, but his hide was so loose that the saddle rolled uncontrollably from side to side.

One commentator noted that "with a prodigious roll, he sends saddle and rider spinning over to the other side with a momentum that carries them nearly under his belly."

In fact, one rider, thrown under Corbett's belly, claimed that he saw a black spot there that was normally on the bull's withers. Another observer said that he saw him buck a man off so high that the horizon was visible between his boots and the animal's back.

Only three men ever rode the bull, none of them in regulation manner. One hobbled his stirrups, one rode him in a freshly plowed, freshly rained on field in a foot of mud, and one rode him without a saddle.

In 1895 the Johnston brothers sold the bull for $300 and one of his sons, Young Corbett, also a bucker, for $50 to a Wild West show.

The Bull Durham Company provided Corbett with a blanket, advertising tobacco, for parades.

Corbett bucked off his only two challengers, one of them from Australia, in his short-lived Wild West show career, for the show soon folded. The troupe was in Indiana at the time, and the proprietors unceremoniously sold the fabled Holstein to an Indiana farmer where his offspring became milk cows, not bucking bulls. The sale price? Ironically, it was $15.

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