Fans lingered among the stalls and booths Sunday until just before the barn doors closed on the 102nd edition of the National Western Stock Show.
“We came three times,” said Joss Butler, wearing a fake rodeo buckle and a black hat with her 20-something girlfriends an hour before closing. “It’s just a good place to be a cowgirl.”
Attendance was up: 673,449 over 16 days, second only to the National Western’s centennial show in 2006, when 726,972 turned out.
This year, the show set a record for the largest single-day turnout on Jan. 19 with 68,610.
“I’ve been coming ever since I was a kid, and now my kids are hooked on it,” said Murray Holloway, an accountant herding his three children around the stock dog finals. “It teaches people what the West is really all about, and people should understand where they live.”
The National Western was a homecoming for Baxter Black, the cowboy poet and author and a statesman for the West on national radio and TV programs. As a Brighton resident for 17 years, he never missed a show and sometimes brought home guests for dinner.
The way he tells it, when he landed in Adams County in 1983, he was an out-of-work veterinarian up to his horse’s eyeballs in debt and alimony payments. By the time he left to go take care of his mother in Arizona, he had sold 300,000 books, syndicated a newspaper column, appeared on the “Tonight Show” and became a National Public Radio commentator.
At the stock show Sunday, he signed books, DVDs and CDs. National Western people are his kind of people, he said.
“My stories are their stories. I just tell them back to them,” Black said in an interview.
“I do 50 speaking appearances a year, and it’s always the same people who come, whether they’re in Ohio, or Oklahoma, or Alberta or here in Denver — people who love the land, people who have an attachment to the land,” he said. “People who understand that animals are a part of the circle, like the way the snow in the winter fills the stock ponds in the spring.”
44, 616 Opening-day attendance for the National Western Stock Show this year, a record
68,610 Stock show attendance on Jan. 19, the largest single-day turnout ever
