Calgary Stampede (1948)

This is quite a lively newsreel-style report on the festival in Calgary that celebrates just about everything to do with it’s pioneering provenance. With the town draped in Union Jacks and bunting, it harks back to the days when people travelled by horse-drawn carriage and, indeed, for the rest of it’s twenty minutes illustrates just how important the horse was to this community in days gone by. There are flapjacks with bacon and floats galore parading down the main Street before the focus switches to the town’s Victoria Park. That’s where the racetrack sees the chuck wagons racing around whilst on the field, those brave (or just plain reckless) cowboys are trying to stay aboard wild horses and bulls who would as soon trample their intrepid riders to death as look at them. Now the narration is very much of it’s time and does make you cringe but to compensate, there is loads of quite exciting - if maybe a touch repetitive - photography of bucking and pitching, lassoing and there’s even a variation of pin the tail on the donkey - only this involves a red ribbon and a steer with foot-long horns. It’s an interesting retrospective on a population that still lived off the land to a large extent as the 1950s approached and it is worth a watch.