Stock contractor

Most are allowed to grow up in a natural, semi-wild condition on the open range, but also have to be tamed and gentled to be managed from the ground, safely loaded into trailers, vaccinated and wormed, placed into bucking chutes, and used in the arena.

Due to the rigors of travel and the short bursts of high intensity work required, most horses in a bucking string are at least six or seven years old.

He ran over 18,000 head of cattle and several hundred horses on almost a million acres, and the town of Raymond, Alberta was named after him.

[citation needed] In 1935, Earl W. Bascom, along with his brother Weldon, Mel and Jake Lybbert and Waldo "Salty" Ross produced the first rodeos in southern Mississippi, working from Columbia, in the process holding the South's first night rodeo held outdoors under electric lights and bringing in brahma bulls for the bull riding event.

[3] In the 1950s, one of the best-known modern North American stock contractors, Reg Kesler set up a string of roughstock due to the growing demand for bucking horses.

Kessler was posthumously inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Museum Rodeo Hall of Fame in October 2009.