Cow Horse, Reining and Cutting
Four Arenas, One Root: Cutting, Reining, Cow Horse and Rodeo
Cutting, reining, reined cow horse and rodeo all began as ranch work. Each has its own association, its own records and its own line of horsemen and horsewomen.
Not everyone in the history of western horsemanship gave clinics. A great many of the best hands made their names in an arena, on a clock or in front of judges. The Two Rein covers them too, and it helps to know how their sports came to be.
All of it was work first
On a ranch, a horse has to separate one cow from a herd and hold it out. It has to run to a cow, stop hard, turn and go the other way. It has to stand quietly while a rope comes tight. Every western performance event is one of those jobs, taken off the range, given rules and judged or timed.
Cutting
Cutting is the job of separating one cow from the herd and keeping it from getting back, with the rider's rein hand down and the horse doing the thinking. Cowboys matched their best cutting horses against each other informally for decades. The National Cutting Horse Association was founded in 1946 to give those contests a common set of rules.
Reined cow horse
In California, the vaquero tradition of the hackamore and the bridle horse turned into a competition that asked one horse to do three things: work a herd, run a reining pattern and take a single cow down the fence. What is now the National Reined Cow Horse Association began in 1949 as the California Reined Cow Horse Association. Its best known event, the Snaffle Bit Futurity, tests horses at the first stage of that long education.
Reining
Reining took the dry work, the circles, lead changes, spins and sliding stops, and made it an event on its own. The National Reining Horse Association was formed in 1966, and the sport has since spread well beyond North America.
Rodeo
Rodeo is older and wilder than the judged events, and several towns claim the first one. As an organized profession it dates from 1936, when contestants formed the Cowboys' Turtle Association. That body became the Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1945 and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in 1975. Women organized separately as the Girls Rodeo Association in 1948, today the Women's Professional Rodeo Association.
The Two Rein covers the parts of rodeo that are horsemanship: the saddle bronc and bareback riders, the ropers and steer wrestlers whose horses are half the team, and the barrel racers.
How these people connect to the line
More than is usually said. Ray Hunt's Hondo was shown in working cow horse classes. Tom Dorrance spent years helping people who rode for a living and showed for a living, and trainers in the cow horse world still describe what they learned from him. The clinicians and the competitors have never been two separate tribes.
How we will write about them
With the record in front of us. Titles and earnings are kept by the associations, and where we state one we will say whose record it is and for what year. We will not rank living riders against each other. The aim is to say, for each person, where they came from, who they learned from and what they added.
