on the cover / By Japhet Weeks

Last Cowboy Standing — A tale of rodeo culture in Humboldt County

Outside of the new milking facility Radelfinger is in the process of building, I asked him what he thought of Moore’s roping skills. He’s “by far” the county’s best team roper, he said. But our visit was cut short when Radelfinger told me he was headed out to Ben McWhorter’s place to practice for the Fortuna rodeo. As for Moore’s training center in Redcrest, he doesn’t get there as much as he’d like, but according to him, for local rodeo cowboys looking to practice, “there ain’t much else in Humboldt County.”

The Fortuna rodeo was filled with American flags and cowgirls and cowboys dressed in clean, starched shirts with what seemed to be a near-infinite range of patterns: from plaids to bayadères to ginghams. Different sorts of facial hair were also well represented: muttonchops, handlebar mustaches and goatees. Kids in cowboy hats and oversized belt buckles sat on the fence around the chutes and cowboys, young and old were building loops and swinging them around, the ability to rope a part of their muscle memory. There was a midget Elvis impersonator, because, I guess, no rodeo is complete without one. And on the bleachers where there was nothing to cast a shadow, a slight breeze mellowed the hot sun. Dust billowed up from the box and covered everything. The smell of manure and beer wafted through the air.

Moore was dressed meticulously. Silver Indian feathers dangled from off the back of his cowboy hat. In Fortuna, when he went out to calf rope, his calf wasn’t like the one he had in Orick. But it did run off to the left instead of straight out, and once he’d roped it around the neck, it tried to foul him up by running towards his horse, causing the rope to go slack. But, seeing that coming, he yanked on the lariat and stopped the calf dead in its tracks. Later, he pulled off the steer wrestling with a respectable time of 6.6 seconds. And his time in team roping won him second place in that event.

Although Moore’s times at Fortuna weren’t quite good enough to win him any single event, combined, they earned him three all-around awards: the Gary Edgmon Memorial saddle for the all-around best cowboy at the Fortuna rodeo, the Tom McWhorter Memorial all-around belt buckle for the best all-around cowboy from Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and Mendocino counties, and the Fred Barry Memorial Top Hand buckle for the best cowboy from Humboldt County.

And though it seemed so natural for a local favorite like Moore to clean up in Fortuna, it was in fact an extraordinary feat. “I don’t think anyone has done that before,” said Shannon McWhorter, president of the Fortuna Rodeo Association.

A cowboy and his steed: Cameron Moore waits on his horse before riding out into the Tom McWhorter arena at the start of the Fortuna rodeo.

When I went up to Dennis Mayo’s ranch in McKinleyville to learn how to lasso a bucket in his gravel driveway, he told me: “There ain’t a goddamn thing glamorous about this way of life … it’s a lot of hard work.” But walking away from a rodeo as old as Fortuna’s after having hung up your professional rodeo spurs with three all-around awards must have made Moore feel at least slightly glamorous.

Still, Moore reminded me when we talked on the phone the Monday after Fortuna had wrapped up its weeklong events, that win or lose, the nature of bein’ a cowboy is inexorable: “There’s always another rodeo,” he said.

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