Band of riders to mount upfor trek to the rodeo
Every February for the past 23 years, Alex Prince starts to live like an old-fashioned cowboy.
The leader of Southwest Trail Rider’s Association no longer snoozes on the ground in a sleeping bag at nights onthe annual 120mile journey from the Rosenberg to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. After a long day of riding, Prince, 69, now turns in inside of the living quarters of his horse trailer.
But his favorite memories are of sleeping out in 20 degree weather, surrounded by fellow riders.
“Getting up the next morning and roughing it and having to do everything as the old pioneers did in the sense of living out on the prairie — that was really true trail riding and cowboying, as they call it,” Prince said.
For seven days, Prince, whose day job is managing the facilities at Houston Community College’s four Southwest College campuses,
will lead several hundred members of the association, plus 13 covered wagons, along highways in Fort Bend and Brazoria counties before riding in the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Parade on Feb. 27.
Until he was in his 20s, the only time Houston-born Prince saw horses was from the sidelines of the parade. Now, he owns four.
Some members of the association grew up herding cattle on horseback in the rural South and own horses. For them, spending a week riding from Rosenberg to Houston brings out childhood memories and reaffirms adult identities as cowboys.
“We worked cows. We roped and we broke horses; so yeah, we do think of ourselves as cowboys,” said Paul Simpson, 54, the association’s vice president.
Now a sergeant in the Texas State Highway Patrol, Simpson grew up on a farm in Louisiana, where his family grew cotton, corn and sugar cane and owned farm animals.
Simpson owns two horses.
“It is an everyday part of life for us,” he said of being a cowboy. “The horses still have to be fed. Fences still have to be fixed. Wedo take on that responsibility willingly everyday.”
The historically black association was formed in 1992 from 12 riding clubs. Most of the clubs are in Harris County and surrounding counties, but members live as far away as Oklahoma, Prince said.
Prince has been president for almost all of the association’s 23 years and was a member of Houston’s Outlaws riding club. He’s a member of the Houston-based Diamond LR oping and Riding Club and of the Brookshire-based Butcher Boys.
The association is a year-round commitment. In the last 15 years, it has given nearly a quartermillion dollars’ worth of scholarship money, and its clubs host trail rides and dances year-round.
But the ride to the Houston Rodeo is the highlight of the year.
Earlier this month, the association had its annual wagon checks to make sure equipment was in order.
The ride will start with a campout on Feb. 19 at the Fort Bend County fairgrounds in Rosenberg, where participants will spend the night before heading along Texas 36 to Needville the next morning. Eventually, the group will travel to Angleton, Arcola and then the association’s 19.2 acre property off of Almeda School Road in Houston, where participants camp before the rodeo’s parade.
“They get out there and be a cowboy for a week,” said association member Vincent Carter, 50.
During the day, the riders keep themselves entertained during their six to eight hours on the road by chatting — catching up with old friends is what Simpson is most excited for this year— and listening to zydeco, blues or country music from the sound systems of the clubs’ covered wagons. The sounds of the horses’ hooves and the steel wagon wheels, as well as of traffic whizzing by, provide background noise.
“You ride in open space and it gets your mind off everything,” said Carter. “You sit back and just look and you get peace of mind.”
At night, after taking care of the horses and setting up camp — mostly composed of dozens of RVs and horse trailers with living quarters — the riders swap cowboy boots for sneakers and dance until well past midnight despite legs that ache from being in the saddle all day. More zydeco music plays, gen- erators hum and campfires crackle.
“It’s like Mardi Gras the wholeweek,” Prince said.
Though the number of participants in the Rodeo Ride has fluctuated through the years, ranging from 300 to 400, Carter anticipates it will continue to be popular. He hasn’t been able to make it for the whole week in recent years — he’s been tied up at work, selling Western wear at Cavender’s Boot City to other rodeo-goers — but on the weekends when he joins in, he sees riders of all ages.
“It’s small kids all the way up to Grandma and Grandpa,” Carter said.
For Prince, who is a grandfather, he intends that his 23rd year on the trail will be far from his last. He’ll keep riding, he said, because it puts him in touch with how people used to cross the United States, sitting tall in the saddle as they drove herds of cattle.