note: I've received an email concerning the photograph..... it seems the lovely lady on horseback here is Beverly LM, a champion Ladies Traditional Dancer from the Rosebud Area. A special thank you to Scott for the help identifying!.... If anyone knows the gentlemen, please let me know... and as always this is a picture from my personal collection, please don't take it from the website (or any others) and if you are in the picture and prefer not to be on the website please lmk and I will take the image down. - JP
Early impressions of Frontier Days which remain the most vivid are of the Indians. As much as two weeks before, the Rosebud Sioux would start their trek to White River. Tents and tent poles, blankets, food items and cooking utensils, clothes and family were loaded onto the wagons. Teams were hitched up and it was "off to Frontier Days." A never to be forgotten sight - the women in long dresses and wrapped in colorful shawls; the men with their bright shirts and hats - usually black hats with a bright feather - and the youngsters, peeping shyly from the wagon bed or from behind their mother's skirts, or frisking along the roadside with an assortment of colts and dogs.
The hills to the east of the arena would be a mass of humanity by rodeo time. Tents bloomed, groups of Indian ladies gathered to swap family news while the kids and dogs frolicked and the men gossiped in the shade. In the earliest Frontier Days, the Indians made an early morning raid on the town. Sunday morning they would come whooping and charging on their horses from their campground and dash through the town. In those days, many people camped overnight on the courthouse grounds, and many were rudely rousted from their beds by the Indian raid, much to the merriment of the townspeople.
During the rodeo, there was dancing on Main Street and at the arena. Who can forget those Indian Dancers? Eagle-feathered war bonnets and shirts in the brightest colors, vests decorated with porcupine quills and elk teeth, the women dressed usually in somber black or blue dresses with the most intricately beaded trim, or decorated with quills, elk teeth, coins or ribbons. They danced the traditional Sioux dances. Sometimes someone would pass the hat to take donation for the dancers, or spectators would discreetly press a bill into the hand of the drummer. The rodeo producers routinely provided a beef or two for the encampment and strips of jerky fluttering from drying racks were a familiar sight while the Indians camped.