R and Selle got the idea during the early days of the pandemic. “It started during COVID,” he says.
“After Cheyenne Frontier Days and the bigger rodeos cancelled, I didn’t think we needed to shut everything down. I figured we could social-distance by staying in our cars. The old-school rodeos didn’t have arenas, and people sat in cars to watch.”
So in July 2020, like-minded folks traveled to Bosler, Wyoming, outside of Laramie, and did just that—they made an arena out of their cars and had themselves a rodeo. This July marks the fourth annual Tom Horn Days rodeo and rendezvous in the small community along the Laramie River.
“My ranch is just 20 miles north of Laramie,” Selle says. “It’s just a little ranch in between two mountain ranges, the Sierra Madres on the left and a little range of hills between here and Cheyenne in that low spot, on the Laramie Plains.” It’s really pretty, he says, and kind of important in the life of the rodeo’s namesake Tom Horn, the famous cowboy,