Black cowboy legacy lives on at Triangle 7
History and the future are found here, where the Northeastern Trail Ride Association gathers for the main event
It’s the perfect day for riding. Sunday morning, the air is clear and cool in Cheek, the community near Beaumont where the week-long Northeastern trail ride begins every year on its way to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. A small group of cowboys and cowgirls is gathered in a circle for cowboy church, a brief outdoor service.
Then trail boss Anthony Bruno takes the microphone.
If you were to imagine a trail boss, he would be it. A big man, with a red button-up shirt and leather chaps over his blue jeans. Hands rough after a lifetime of riding, including 20 years calf roping at rodeos. Solid.
But this morning, his voice wavers.
“This is tough for me,” he begins.
It’s the first year since his father passed away. Joseph Bruno was one of the original founders of the Northeastern Trail Ride Association back in 1982. His health had been declining for awhile. Anthony was proud to shoulder the responsibilities, but lately, it all got a bit too heavy.
“I was about to quit,” he confesses. “I was tired.” His riders comfort him.
“Take your time, boss.”
“We know.”
Many are relative newcomers to this ride, and Anthony credits the current team for lifting him and the other longtimers.
“Y’all came in and y’all stepped up,” he tells them. “I’m not going to quit. It means too much to our community. It means too much to my father.”
The only time he can remember seeing his father cry was during the Big Ride. The riders were leaving their riding arena, Triangle 7, on their way to Memorial Park. His father was both sad he couldn’t make the trip and grateful to see it carry on without him. The memory overcomes Anthony.
Each year, before the start of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, trail riding groups travel from various places, mainly on horseback or in wagons, to Houston’s Memorial Park. More than
3,000 trail riders spend the night there, then parade grandly to downtown Houston. Authenticity and history are easy to lose sight of, amid RodeoHouston's carnival rides, deep-fried foods and pop star headliners. But there the trail riders are, year after year, their parade stopping the traffic of a city that rarely pauses to reflect.
Given that the trailriders travel for days on horseback, it's easy to imagine that they come from far away. Some do. But many riders, and certainly those in the Northeastern trail ride, are firmly connected to Houston, rooted in the very communities they ride through, where neighbors wave from their driveways each year.
This year 11 trail-riding groups journeyed into Houston. The Northeastern Trail Riders Association is one of four Black trail riding groups, and for Northeastern, the week before the rodeo is only the shiniest, showiest part of a year-round trail-riding life. Trail riders' stables, their neighborhoods, their riding and roping arenas are scattered across the region, and they host weekend rodeos and trail rides throughout the year.
Triangle 7 Arena has hung on at a time when many others have faded. The muggy sevenacre property is a testament to what was, and a symbol of what could be again. Anthony dreams of reviving it.
“I don't want to spoil the moment, but it's tough without my dad,” Anthony says. “Let's go enjoy the ride and have a good time and do what we do.”
‘We still exist’
In the cowboy church group gathered around Anthony, Brian Richard wipes away tears. He too is the son of one of the group's original members. His father, the late Caston “Shorty” Richard, had been the sound man, and now Brian has inherited that job. Every year he steers the white van strapped up with the same speakers his father used.
Brian's parents used to operate an arena at Hirsch Road and Crosstimbers, in a grassy easement beside a church. At the time, arenas were spread all around Houston, especially in the “rurban” Black neighborhoods on the edges of what used to be the city limits — places like Sunnyside and Acres Homes. A little bit country. A little bit city. A description that still fits today even as townhomes creep into the neighborhoods.
After road construction displaced the Richards family's arena, Brian's dad and Anthony's dad drove around together looking for another spot. This time, they decided, they'd buy the land. No more leasing. No more displacement. When they got to the dead end of Parker Road, they knew they'd found it: a triangle-shaped seven acres. They called it Triangle 7.
“It was swamp. Marshland. Nothing but pine trees and water moccasins,” Anthony said.
For months, they worked together to clear the land.
“Cut down trees, dug up all the trees, cleared it all and leveled it out,” remembers Nathan “Pluck” McWhorter, one of the few remaining of the oldest generation of Northeastern riders. They even made a little money taking the trees to a nearby paper mill.
Then the real work began. They built a pavilion for dances and a wooden arena for training and for rodeos. Eventually the pavilion became the red dance hall that still stands today and has hosted many famous zydeco acts. The arena was upgraded after Anthony got back from the military. Friends working at a pipe yard helped purchase reject pipe. An incarcerated friend of a brother helped design the new arena to regulation specifications so it could host official competitions.
“It's always been community,” Anthony said.
And for years, it served the community.
“Back then, in the '80s and the '90s, you said Bruno's or Triangle 7, they knew something was going on,” said Troy McWhorter, Pluck's nephew.
“That whole street was packed,” said Tootie Woods, a mule skinner for the Restoration Riders. “You couldn't even stir a stick from the road leading to Triangle 7 all the way to the dance hall.” Even before she joined with Northeastern in 2016, she spent many nights at Bruno's for dances and rodeos.
They all have favorite memories there, riding bulls, training horses or dancing late into the night. For Anthony, some of his best times at the arena were in his early 30s when he finally took up rodeo after years of riding, training with big-name guys who came through and used the facility.
The arena also hosted an all-girls rodeo where the young women could take part in every competition, not just barrel racing.
For a time, the rodeos even had sponsorships. And when there wasn't a scheduled event, they'd leave the gates unlocked.
“The girls would come in and practice and train,” Anthony recalled. “Guys would come in and unload their calves.”
But things started to change. Things went missing. Saddles. Generators. Even today, you can tell it hurts Anthony that people would steal from them. The gates closed.
With more and more falling to him, it got harder to keep the rodeos going. It's still the home base for the Northeastern Trail Riders. It's where they gather every year for their warm-up ride in January and where they camp on their way downtown during the Big Ride. But it's not what it once was. The paint fades a little more each year.
The rust spreads.
But the spirit lingers.
Some people think Black cowboys “don't still exist,” Troy said. “They're like, ‘my grandpa or my great grandpa,' but we still exist. You've got people who still carry it on.”
People like Anthony, who consider trail-riding a way of life.
“I wasn't going to let him quit,” Richard said.
‘I want it to come back’
As hard as this year has been for Anthony — the first Big Ride since his father's passing in December — there's also a relief to it. Buoyed by the support he's received, he is more at ease than he's been in years.
Maybe his worst fears have passed, too: that the ride wouldn't survive without his father, that he wouldn't survive without his father. Here he is, out on the trail again, surrounded by family and friends, moving forward one day at a time. One step at a time.
“You can't do any of this by yourself,” Anthony said. “If you think you can rodeo or cowboy or ranch by yourself, good luck.”
So, no, he's not going to quit. And he has big plans to make Triangle 7 the destination it once was. He wants to host rodeos again, to train more horses and rodeo competitors, maybe even build housing to host some sort of training residency.
“I want it to come back,” Richard said, smiling at the memory of his bull riding days.
“It would just lighten my life up to see one back there again,” said Pluck, the old hand.
It's the end of another long, hot day when, after riding from Crosby, the groups pulls into the arena in northeast Houston. Still, this day is always Tracy Goines' favorite: “Because we're riding into our side of town.” She grew up here and has been riding with Northeastern now for nine years. Her mom, her aunt and other family and friends always come out to cheer them on. Everybody sees the parade on Saturday. Not everybody sees this. Anthony hopes someday soon, more people will.