The myth and the legend was blending with the truth and the reality.

And so he he became a horse that almost everyone in Wyoming could recognize as having this fiery spirit, never give up.

Always do what your job was and do it really well.

And and for him, his job was bucking and he did that very well, and he actually represented the state really well.

The horse became synonymous with Wyoming.

Steamboat was born on the Foss Ranch over near Wheatland area, was on the Swann Land and Cattle Company.

He was born in 1896 and they went in to break him in 1899.

So he's a three year old and was meant to be a cow pony.

And a cowboy named Jimmy Danks was the first cowboy that really tried to break him, and that was the intent, to break this horse and using using him on the ranch.

He talks about the first time that he tried to ride him.

He wrode him in the corral three or four times, and then he said, OK, we're going to basically was open the gate.

Let's see what happens.

And they open the gate and the horse just took off and was bucking all over the place and he didn't get backed off.

He actually did ride him, got him back to the corral And he said to his friend Sloan, Hey, I thought you were going to haze for me.

And he says, Well, I was too busy watching the horse buck.

So, I mean, that's really when he first made his reputation.

He was very strong, he was from a percheron stud and a Mexican hot blooded mare so he was kind of wiry but really strong.

And Jimmy Danks said he liked to buck that was his business.

That's what he wanted to do.

And so they would do these wagers.

I mean, that's what cowboys did, you know, in the evenings or something like, Hey, we got a rank one for you.

And so let's see who can ride him.

So they did a lot of that, and they kind of found out fairly quickly that this was this was a horse that was going to be a bucking horse.

The guys at Swann Land and Cattle Company gave up on breaking Steamboat for ranch life.

And John Koble bought Steamboat to use in his bucking horse string.

Steamboat's career in the rodeo arena began.

The first time that the horse was used in the rodeo arena was at the Denver Festival of Mountain and Plain in 1901, which is a very big festival, kind of the equivalent of Cheyenne Frontier Days, which had had just started a few years earlier.

Kind of the same timeframe that the horse was born is when Cheyenne Frontier Days was born, so it kind of grew up together.

So John Coble would bring his bucking string there.

And then ultimately, Charles B Irwin obtained Steamboat and used him in the rodeo arena there in Cheyenne as well.

So the early rodeos in this 1900s era they didn't ride for eight seconds.

They rode until the horse stopped bucking and Steamboat would buck and buck and buck for a minute or so, and then he'd stop and catch his breath and then he'd go back again.

And he had, when they had castrated him back on the ranch, they had broken a nose bone and they took it out and they cut it out.

A guy cut it out, and it caused him to whistle.

Kind of when he would breathe hard, he would whistle.

And that's how he got the name Steamboat, and Jimmy Danks is the one that named him Steamboat for that whistling sound.

Steamboat and his whistle took the riders by storm.

He could be ridden, but it took a special cowboy, making a special ride to stay on the now infamous bucking bronco.

And the cowboys who rode him the ones that were, we have documented, that that spoke about the ride always said he just came down like a pile driver, and it was because he was so strong.

And then when he would work, he would buck really hard and he would twist and he wouldn't stop.

Steamboat continued to make his mark growing in popularity just as the Cheyenne Frontier Days developed into a premiere event.

At the time, this was early 1900s, there was no World Championship saddle bronc riding competition.

So if you won Cheyenne, you were considered the world's champion.

That's just the way that it worked back in that time frame.

They wouldn't use Steamboat, though, in the preliminary rounds because he was such a good bucking horse that most of the guys couldn't ride him and they would just be disqualified, even though they were very good cowboys.

So they usually kept Steamboat until the Championship round, and then the cowboy that drew him, if he could ride him, would almost always win.

Steamboats legend grew.

Newspapers loved to give him nicknames, including Twister and King of the Hurricane Deck, Outlaw Horse and the horse that couldn't be rode.

In his career Steamboat threw many of the best riders in the world and those that were lucky enough to ride him had bragging rights few could claim.

Steamboat was traveling almost constantly in the last few years of his life with the Irwin Brothers Wild West Show.

And in 1914, he was out in Utah and Salt Lake City at a show and got with, he was in another pen of horses and they got into some wire and he got cut pretty badly with some wire.

They put him on the train and brought him back to Cheyenne by the time he got to Cheyenne.

He had blood poisoning and they knew they weren't going to be able to save the horse.

And so they took in.

The story goes that they took him down to the Cheyenne Frontier Days Arena, and they used a gun that had belonged to Tom Horn, but that at that time belonged to Charlie Irwin, and they used that gun to put him down.

And then the story goes, if you like legend, that he was buried at the Old Frontier Park.

But most people would say that he was taken out to the Cheyenne City dump, and that's where his body was disposed of.

But he was such a famous horse, and everyone knew him that there was actually an obituary for him in the Cheyenne Leader So I mean, you don't always see an obituary about a horse, but this horse was so famous in Wyoming that and around the West, but certainly in Wyoming that they actually wrote a very nice obituary about him.

And they talked a lot about his history and where he'd been born and what he had done and his achievements.

Just like you'd write about an important person, they wrote about this horse.

The myths and legend of the famous outlaw horse only intensified after his death and persists to this day.

Many of the stories revolve around the famous bucking horse imagery so strongly associated with Wyoming.

During World War One, the Wyoming National Guard went to France and Germany, and there was a man from Sheridan George Ostrom, and he took his horse named Red Wing with him.

And while he was over in France, he painted an image of the horse bucking on the side of some of their equipment over there.

So that really was the first symbol of a bucking horse that represented Wyoming.

The first image of Steamboat as an icon or a symbol of Wyoming as a bucking horse happened in 1921, when the University of Wyoming developed their Wyoming cowboy logo, and they use the BC Buffum photo that had been taken in 1903 of Guy Holt for that image.

And then when you jump forward a couple of decades, you come into 1936 and Lester C Hunt was the Secretary of State in Wyoming.

He wanted to use that Wyoming bucking horse as a logo and put it on our license plate.

And he had Allen True, who was an artist in Denver, draw an image that then was put on the Wyoming license plate in 1936.

And there's all these stories about cowboys who are the cowboy on the on the license plate or the horse that's on the license plate.

And Allen True himself, said that he didn't use any particular cowboy.

When you go around the state of Wyoming, you will hear different areas of the state.

People living in different areas have their preference or their idea of who's who is the rider on the license plate.

You know, you go to Pinedale, it might be Guy Holt You go to Laramie,.

they'll say it's Jake Meiring, you'll go to Lander area and they'll say it's Stub Farlo.

But I believe the artist who did it, and I believe Lester Hunt said it wasn't any particular rider in mind.

I think it's a composite of all the great cowboys in the state of Wyoming.

Steamboat had a fiery spirit and every cowboy that rode him, said he was the hardest bucker that they were ever on, some of them said they couldn't eat for days after they rode him, and that kind of just goes to the whole spirit of a Wyoming cowboy.

He didn't quit.

They they do their job the best way that they possibly can.

They have his independent spirit.

And so I think that's kind of the symbolism of of Steamboat and why we all kind of revere that horse.

There's really no evidence that Steamboat was the horse on the license plate, either.

But by association through the years, that's what we all believe.

He just has become our horse.

People all around the country, all around the world really, recognize that cowboy image.

So it is the most recognized icon of, I think, any state because it's so simple.

And yet it speaks to what we are that we we really we call ourselves the Cowboy State.