New Yorkers Love The Western Culture Shock That Comes With Cheyenne Frontier Days

Cheyenne Frontier Days has officially busted out of the chute of its 129th year, bringing wall-to-wall cowboy culture to the masses.

In the eyes of some, CFD is the apotheosis of Western values: ambition, grit, tradition and, perhaps above all, sacrifice, with 3,000 locals who’ve all but waited in line for a chance to use their precious vacation time as rodeo volunteers.

If you’re not from the West, you may be asking yourself, “But why?”

“It’s just the Cheyenne Way,” said John Contos, general chairman of Cheyenne Frontier Days, offering an explanation that neatly embodies what Wyomingites call the Cowboy Way: bold action, Western values and terse words.

CFD has helped brand cowboy culture onto the collective psyche of Cheyennites. But this isn’t a local affair — it’s the Daddy of ’Em All. 

The event is increasingly searing its brand on a growing number of visitors who this year arrive from 31 countries and every single U.S. state.

Whether this is your proverbial first rodeo or just your first time to Cheyenne, CFD is going to leave a mark, especially if you're coming from a big city.

Drawing on the experience of a few CFD fanatics from New York City, here’s a look at what first-timersmight expect.

Brooklyn To Cheyenne 

Michael O’Hare grew up in Long Island, New York, by his estimate “the most populated island on the planet.” 

He’s a career accountant who’s worked for major firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers. He lives in Brooklyn and crunches numbers for the city of New York. 

He came for the first time to CFD in 2022. Before the opening weekend was out, he knew he’d be back again. The biggest reason was the rodeo. 

“I've been to rodeos here, like Madison Square Garden, and they are nothing in comparison,” said O’Hare. “Absolutely nothing.”

Indoor rodeos like those at the Garden leave audiences stranded in long states of boredom, he explained, as the arena's comparatively small footprint limits how much action is possible.

“It's boring, because the portion when they're riding the bull — yeah, it's great while they're riding —but it's so short and then there’s a long delay after. They have to clear the whole arena and do all the set up so the next guy can ride. It feels like you're always just sitting there waiting,” O’Hare said, adding that it's not a conducive atmosphere for a man with an “ADD-crazed mind.”

“At Cheyenne Frontier Days, there was never a time where something was not going on,” he said. “One rider gets bucked off the bull, but when they're getting the next rider ready, there's trick riding going past you in the front field.

“Then girls riding by with the flags, wagon trains passing, then they’re roping and shooting balloons and things like that. For somebody who has an attention span issue, it's amazing.”

Sandra O’Hare is a native of Chile, where rodeo is also big. Yet she says there are key differences that put the Wyoming rodeo well above.

In Chile, contestants ride in a “half-moon” ring, and rather than bull and bronc riding, the main event is known as “steer pinning.” That’s where rider teams herd and pin bulls to wall panels in the arena. 

What she admires most about CFD is the fact that animals are treated well.

“I love that they don’t injure the animals here,” she said. “In Chile, if the animal does not want to cooperate, they won't treat it nicely.”

‘Western Fashion Is The Real Deal Here’ 

Western fashion is experiencing a mainstream moment. Pearl snap shirts and bolos are the rage in social media pics, and similar influences are showing up on runways and moodboards in major metropolitan cities.

But there is something altogether different about the Western wear at Cheyenne Frontier Days, visitors say. It’s borne with a type of homecourt confidence that’s hard to quantify but no less undeniable.

You can hear it in the rhythmic clap of boot heels striking ground. You can sense it in the subtle way a woman hooks her thumb in a belt loop. It’s passed along in the gentlemanly tip of one ten-gallon to another.

It’s Cheyenne swagger, and you can’t buy it at Boot Barn.

“Western fashion is the real deal here. It's just the culture. It's beautiful, and I love it because what you see is what you get,” said Danielle Maninno, a resident of Brooklyn, New York. 

Mannino is a New York-based event planner who coordinates for CFD sponsors. She distinctly recalls her first year in Cheyenne in 2021, when she stepped into a board meeting in her usual New York garb. 

“When I first showed up, I got off the plane in my black suit, a very New York suit, and I walked into this room with 10 people sitting around a conference room table in cowboy hats and cowboy boots,” she said. “They were like, ‘Who are you? How’d you get here?’”

She went shopping in Cheyenne. The transformation was swift.

“Before I stuck out like a sore thumb. But now when I come, I pack my boots, I pack my hat, I pack my jeans,” she said. “No more black suits at this event.”

Fellow Brooklynite Michael O’Hare also went “full Western” since coming to CFD, and he got a little help from the locals.

He recalls a moment in 2022 at a Western store in Cheyenne, where he stood before a wall of hats looking as befuddled as Don Draper in the supermarket in “Mad Men.”

“I turned to this guy in an Air Force uniform next to me and said, ‘I have no idea what I'm doing. I've never owned a cowboy hat before in my life,’” said O’Hare. 

The airman took him under his fashion wing, gave him the skinny on styles and fits. O’Hare later walked out in a pair of square-toed Ariat ramblers and a George Strait-style Resistol hat.  

“I was so grateful for that airman,” he said.

In the years since, Western wear has worked its way permanently into O’Hare’s wardrobe.

He now owns three pairs of cowboy boots. He’s become a pearl snap devotee, and he’s regularly seen walking a dog in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn under the proud shade of a cowboy hat.

It’s an outcome seen before by Cheyenne Frontier Days CEO Tom Hirsig, who says there’s something powerful in wearing a cultural uniform. He thinks of rodeo as the original form of live-action role-playing. 

“One of the things that people who’ve never been to the rodeo are shocked by is the attire,” he said. “Everybody dresses up in boots and hats. It doesn't matter if you're a cowboy or not.

“There's not another sport that's like that, where everybody dresses up in the attire of contestants. I think the original LARPing is rodeo.”

More Than A Rodeo

For Brooklynites like the O’Hares, it’s not just the big and grand that stands out, it's the little details.

It’s the taste of local taffy. It’s a Navy parachuter plunging into the arena with a giant American flag rippling in his wake. It's an unusual contrast of livestock and mega music stars. 

“It’s amazing to walk behind the venue past all the paddocks where they’re keeping the bulls and the horses and the sheep, and then going in to watch a concert being performed right there in the dirt where the bulls were riding all day, you just don’t experience that anywhere else,” O’Hare said.

You can see how CFD would strike awe in big city folk. But keep in mind these Brooklynites are a rather exotic species themselves.

For example, O’Hare in his first year came down with COVID and had to spend most of the trip in his hotel room staring out the window at passing Union Pacific railcars.

Astonishingly, this was an experience he also found “so amazing.”

“I loved it. It was like watching fish in a fish tank,” he said. “We actually kept trying to get this same hotel room in the following years because it was so amazing.”

One man’s sleepless night is another man’s meditative fish tank, we suppose, but at least city and country folk can still agree on other things, like a well-made steak. 

At the Rib and Chop House in Cheyenne, Sandra O’Hare had one of the best cuts of meat she’d ever eaten, a baseball steak cooked to her hyper-rare “black and blue” standard.

Still, there will always be some things that Cheyennites and Brooklynites interpret differently.

“I’ll never forget it: We're walking along Main Street, and we hear this woman scream out her open car windows, ‘I f***ing hate Cheyenne Frontier Days!’ It was awesome,” said O’Hare. “She was screaming at the traffic, and it cracked us up so bad. We were laughing, like, you have no idea what traffic is.”

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.