Texas Prison Rodeo

The Texas Prison Rodeo was held at the Walls in Huntsville on Sundays in October almost every year from 1931 to 1986, with inmates as the riders. Prison general manager Marshall Lee Simmons proposed it to the Texas Prison Board in September 1931, as recreation for inmates and entertainment for staff and their families. Inmates built the first arena in the baseball field behind the warden's house, east of the prison, with seats for about 800. Within two years attendance had grown to almost 15,000. In 1950 the wooden bleachers were replaced by a concrete-and-steel stadium, and in the decade that followed attendance peaked at about 100,000 a year. Events included calf roping, bronc and bull riding, bareback basketball and wild cow milking.

In the Mad Scramble ten Brahmans charged out of the chutes at once, and in Hard Money inmates raced to snatch a tobacco sack of cash from between a bull's horns, a prize that sometimes reached $1,000 in the 1980s. Women from the Goree farm competed in calf roping, barrel racing and greased pig sacking until their transfer to Gatesville in 1981. Halftime performers included Tom Mix, Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. O'Neal Browning, serving a life sentence, was top hand at seven rodeos over three decades.

Inmates were paid $2 to perform in 1933 and $10 in 1986, plus winnings. The rodeo was cancelled in 1943 and returned in 1944 as the Victory Rodeo. Crowds fell in the 1970s and 1980s, and the 1986 rodeo drew an estimated 50,000 people. The last bull left the chute on October 26, 1986. Engineers condemned the stadium that year, prison officials could not raise the roughly $500,000 needed for repairs, and attempts to revive the rodeo in the early 1990s failed.