Breath Taking Display At National Finals Rodeo

Happy Canyon is the younger (and in my mind prettier) sister organization to the Pendleton Round-Up, which will be celebrating its 106^th anniversary in 2016.  For Happy Canyon, 2016 is also a milestone year. Happy Canyon will be celebrating its 100^th anniversary September 14-17, 2016.  The four nightly shows during each Pendleton Round-Up commemorate the history of the Columbia River Plateau including Tribal daily life before contact through Euro-American exploration, emigration and establishment of local towns and businesses in the late 19^th century.  The Pageant was originally conceived by the founders of the Pendleton Round-Up as a way to keep rowdy Round-Up fans busy at night.  The wild west themed show first ran in 1913, but the show you see today is a collaboration between Roy Raley and local Cayuse leader Anna Minthorn Wannassay scripted in 1916 to include the Tribal portion of the show.  The timing of this change is pretty exceptional given that the policies of the United States at that time were designed to eliminate the cultural distinctiveness of American Indian Tribes.  “Assimilation”, including the forcible removal of children from families to send them to federal boarding schools, was the order of the day. Instead, Raley and Wannassay portrayed the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla cultures for all the world to see. Raley was an attorney and a showman and he had a pretty good idea about what would sell.  While attending the Carlisle Indian Training School in Pennsylvania, Wannassay had studied drama. For her and her community, this show was a distinct opportunity to demonstrate for the non-Indian audience a way of life they couldn’t learn about anywhere else--with local Tribal people presenting their own culture and history.  It’s unlikely that Raley and Wannassay imagined that the show would last 100 years carried forward by descendants of the non-Indians and Indians who first enacted the story.  Hundreds of local citizens annually make the show happen for only four nights each year. From lights to livestock, musicians to ushers, saloon girls to Tribal leaders, the entire show is the result of the dedicated volunteers who have been handing down their jobs from generation to generation.  Bryson and Chinook are the official representatives of Pendleton Round-Up & Happy Canyon.  In addition to many parades in Oregon & Washington, they can be seen, nightly, at our two PBR events, presenting the colors, during the Happy Canyon pageant, and they are also featured, at times, during the Grand Entry of the Pendleton Round-Up (Chinook needs a rest sometimes).  Chinook has been performing in the show since 2003.  He is owned by Rusty Black, a Happy Canyon volunteer who has provided the “Happy Canyon Paint” for most of her adult life.  Bryson Bronson has been riding Chinook for the past several years.  Bryson is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation which is comprised of members of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes.  Bryson traces his lineage to the Umatilla and also to the Nez Perce tribes.