Rodeo Bucking Chutes

'Exciting' and 'really scary'

A family of 16-year-old triplets from Crescent City competed in bull riding events Saturday at the Redwood Coast Rodeo, and one of the boys took home the prize for best junior bull rider.

Collin Sturdevant rode a black and white bull during the rodeo at the Del Norte County Fair, managing to win a Montana silver buckle and the title of junior bull riding champion.

Paula Sturdevant, the triplets’ mother, said Collin was ecstatic about his junior bull riding win.

“He was stoked,” Sturdevant said. “I don’t think his head fit through the barn door.”

Sturdevant said her son was very excited to see a video of himself making the winning bull ride on The Daily Triplicate’s website, triplicate.com.

“He was like, ‘oh my gosh’ because he hadn’t seen it yet,” Sturdevant said. “We watched the video about 20 times.”

Collin and his brothers Hunter and Jordan all competed in both the junior bull riding and bull riding events. Nine boys competed in the junior category and 10 men competed in the standard event.

Two other Crescent City men, Chris Acosta and Donald Phillips, also competed in the standard bull riding event, in which no one placed.

Sturdevant said the junior rodeo was a “huge success” this year. She said she’s proud of her sons for competing, but that it’s a bit nerve-racking now that they’re “onto the big boy (bulls).” 

“It’s exciting and it’s really scary,” Sturdevant said. “You don’t breathe for about eight seconds.”

Sturdevant said her sons have been bull riding since they were 10 or 11. They got started when the family attended a steer-riding event in Orick. Despite not having any gear, she said the boys tried out the steers.

“The boys rode anyway and one of them won,” Sturdevant said.

Since then, she said the boys have continued to compete in Orick, Fortuna and Crescent City. They are the four-year reigning champions in Orick and regularly practice at home on a mechanical bull.

On Saturday, the boys maintained their ability to stay fairly unhurt and not crucially injure themselves.

“We’ve had one trip to the hospital,” Sturdevant said about past experiences. “No broken bones yet.”

She said during Saturday’s rodeo, Collin’s foot got slammed in the chute that holds the bulls, Hunter’s knee got twisted and Jordan got stepped on by a bull.

Point Last Seen - Surviving the county rodeo | Mountain Gazette

By all accounts, the Plains Indian of North America was probably the best guerilla soldier in the history of our continent — lean, mean, highly motivated, a master of the hit-and-run. The eventual loss of his land and culture, through innumerable battles with later arrivals, may be due in part to a single small-but-perverse quirk of strategy — one that caused him to buck the odds again and again. It has to do with “counting coup.”

At its finest expression, coup counting means touching an enemy or hitting him with a hand-held “coup stick” while he is alive and, presumably, trying to kill you. When done correctly, counting coup is the highest form of a proud people’s military art. It is not as effective as, say, napalm.

If the Indian wars were to start again, though, the Indians would inevitably ride up to a tank and slap it with a coup stick. Something like this actually happened, reportedly, at the American Indian Movement (AIM) Wounded Knee standoff in 1973. The target was an armored personnel carrier, the Indian’s pony reportedly a battered Volkswagen sedan. But with no homeland wars in the immediate offing, today’s Indians still participate as best they can.

Sometimes they count coup on each other in reservation bars, with knives. Sometimes, by mistake or design, they count coup on themselves with Chevy pickup trucks. Other times, the coup stick is an empty wine bottle, the victim a deserted back-street alley wall. But these are perversions of what is basically a courageous and honorable act.

For would-be Indian warriors (most guys between 18-35), one of the best ways to count coup is to enter a rodeo. There, you can rent a faux buffalo for eight seconds, and he is a guaranteed worthy adversary. You have no choice as to make, model or color, but you can be sure he is a sport model, that he’ll weigh nearly a ton, and that he’ll have amazing acceleration.

The rules are simple — stay on the bull for eight seconds and you win. Maybe. If you’re bucked off or even if you do win, bos indicus is entitled to the option of re-counting coup on you. Hopefully, you’ll have drawn a bull that is not a coup fanatic, or at least a bull without two-foot-long horns. I lost on both counts at Hailey, Idaho, when the nice lady (rodeo secretaries are always nice ladies; it’s in the job description) reached into her hat and matched my name with Two Bits. Two Bits is a 1,700-pound black “Brangus” (Brahma-Angus cross) with horns like something you’d see on a West Texas truck stop wall. Unridden at the time, he’d scored a lot of coup points against bull riders.