A grand vision: How the Calgary Stampede came to be the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth
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'You had a lot of the early cowboy stories being serialized in pulp fiction, but there were also the real accounts because you had Teddy Roosevelt, who went on to become president, talking about the life of the Northwest,' says Donna Livingstone, author of The Cowboy Spirit: Guy Weadick and the Calgary Stampede.
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She said people were moving here looking for freedom and were hearing stories of wide-open spaces and how you could live life on your own terms.
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'All of those things were tremendously attractive,' she said.
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'Guy had heard a lot of these stories from some of his relatives who had written letters home (from the West), but also Buffalo Bill's tour went through Rochester and I'm sure he saw it and heard about it.'
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As a teenager, Weadick headed west and worked on ranches. Along the way, he learned from the cowboys and old-timers who'd tell stories of the golden age of the open range.
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Developing into more than a fair hand at riding and roping, he was 'bitten by the rodeo bug,' late historian James Gray wrote in A Brand of Its Own: A 100 Year History of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede.
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'The essential skills which ranch hands acquired in the course of their daily work . . . (had) become marketable commodities in the entertainment world,' Gray noted.
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'Trick riders, trick ropers, steer wrestlers had already moved from the local fairs to the county fairs, to the state fairs. In the wake of the universal audience appeal of Buffalo Bill's Wild West extravaganza, they were moving into the vaudeville circuits and onto the New York and London stages. Weadick had become part of that movement.'
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Weadick struck a handsome figure, with a long, lean frame over six feet tall.
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And while cowboys can be men of few words, that was not Weadick's style. Few cowpunchers could spin a yarn like him.
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Weadick also found love with one of the more popular female performers on the circuit — Flores La Due — and the two got hitched in Memphis in the fall of 1906. The lovestruck ropers were married until her death in 1951.
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It's said that from early on, Weadick had a hankering to branch out as an impresario and made his first trip to Calgary in 1905 as the agent for Will Pickett, a daring Black cowboy who put on a bulldogging performance at that year's Exhibition.
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Winnipeg Free Press
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