Busting the Bronco

By James D. Balestrieri

It’s impossible to imagine the American West without the concept of the horse as bronco, or broncho, as the word was first spelled when it made its way from Spanish to English. “Bronco” means “rough” or “gruff” in Spanish and came to mean an unruly, possibly untamable horse. Along the way, the adjective “bucking” attached itself to “bronco” and the “bucking bronco”—which lost the “o” and became the “bucking bronc”—was born.

If the word “bronco” is said to put the wild in Wild West, adding “bucking” to “bronco” might be the phrase that keeps it there. Early on, the bucking bronco was associated with the mustang—from two essentially synonymous Spanish words, mestengo (or mesteño) and mostrenco—meaning a free-roaming animal.

As I began to research this essay, I quickly discovered that there is much more to the story of the bronco in Western art than meets the eye. It’s a story of languages and cultures, as evidenced in the previous paragraphs, but it’s also a story that speaks to differences between painting and sculpture. For instance, an artist can draw or paint a bucking bronco, 4 feet in the air, in a gravity-defying moment, but a sculpture in bronze or stone has to be balanced and anchored to something. What does this mean for the image of the bucking bronco?

More often than not it means that the horse isn’t bucking, but rearing, up on its hind legs, pawing the air with its front. Where bucking indicates a horse out of the rider’s control, rearing might well result from a rider asserting control—even posing heroically—or asking for immediate speed. According to Patricia Janis Broder’s comprehensive publication Bronzes of the American West, artist Clark Mills cast the “first American bronze of a rearing horse” in 1853, the EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF ANDREW JACKSON, which stands to this day in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. As if tipping his general’s hat to the crowd, Jackson is absolutely in control of the horse.

Despite Mills’s heroic bronze, it isn’t until the early 1890s, when Frederic Remington visited the Bavicora Ranch in northern Mexico, that the bronco in art, as we conceive it, comes into being. Remington was dismayed to find the world of the cowboy in the American Southwest vanishing rapidly, but in Mexico he found the cowboy culture he was looking for still intact. He watched and drew the skilled, elegant vaqueros on the enormous ranch, which was owned and managed by an American, “Patron” Jack Follansbee, and published his experiences, first in periodicals and then in his first book, Pony Tracks.

Illustrations for Remington’s writings, such as MOUNTING A WILD ONE and A PITCHING BRONCHO, led directly to his first and most famous bronze, THE BRONCHO BUSTER, first cast in 1895. Remington’s bronze enjoyed immediate acclaim. The two New York foundries he worked with, the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Co. and Roman Bronze Works, were run by European immigrants who specialized in casting techniques that dated back to the French and Italian Renaissance. These techniques, in sand casting and in the lost wax process, brought lightness, balance and exquisite detail to Remington’s visions and made them possible. In THE BRONCHO BUSTER, the rider is part vaquero, part Patron Jack. Remington loved horsemanship and celebrated its various manifestations throughout the world in his art. Here, despite the gravity (pun intended) of the situation, the viewer gets the sense that the rider will emerge victorious, at least for today.

In 1914, Alexander Phimister Proctor attended the Pendleton Round-Up, an annual rodeo show in Oregon. The experience inspired Proctor to return to cowboys for the first time in many years, and to add his interpretation to the bucking horse and rider trope. The result was BUCKAROO, completed in 1915. Before talking about Proctor’s take, we have to take a detour back to etymology. “Buckaroo” (or buckeroo) is an anglicization of, you guessed it, vaquero, which, in translation, means “cow person” or “cow wrangler.” In English, “buckaroo” becomes a synonym for “cowboy,” but the buckaroo always has an atmosphere of swagger about him. Buckaroo seems as though it ought to get us to “bucking” but the idea of bucking as leaping around dates back centuries and has to do with male goats jumping around. What’s interesting about Proctor’s BUCKAROO is that it is the opposite of Remington’s. The horse is on its front legs, kicking out its hind feet, a posture more likely in rodeo than in horse-breaking. The rider, bent back, his right arm up and out, balances the composition and makes this precarious bronze possible.

Women on bucking broncos feature in art surprisingly early. Taos Society co-founder William Herbert Dunton’s black-and-white wash JUDITH’S SPURS ANSWERED HIM, AND THE BIT… BROUGHT HIM ABOUT, WHIRLING… BUCKING AS ONLY… A DEVIL-HEARTED HORSE KNOWS HOW TO BUCK, from circa 1919, is an illustration from Jackson Gregory’s novel Judith of Blue Lake Ranch. In the work, Dunton gives life to a moment where the heroine is riding and taming a wild horse called The Prince, proving her worth as a horsewoman and ranch manager. Gregory’s description from of the contest between horse and rider is particularly apt: “Now he plunged toward the corral his purpose plain the one desire in his heart to crush his rider against the high fence. But Judith’s spurs answered him and the bit savage in his jaws brought him about whirling, sidling, striking, bucking as only a strong, fearless devil hearted horse knows how to buck. He doubled up under her; he rose and fell in a quick series of short jumps which tore and jerked at her body which strove to tear her knees away from his sides and break the grip of her hand on the reins. But it seemed to the men watching that the girl knew before the horse which way he would jump that she knew how to sway her body with his so that she and he were not two separate beings but just one moving together in some mad devil’s dance. The Prince in the midst of the vicious bucking tried to rear seeking to throw himself backward a quick sharp blow of a loaded quirt between his ears brought his forefeet back to earth.”

In BRONC TWISTER (THE WEAVER), Charles M. Russell turns to the bronco buster trope, though with a twist, as it were. As Broder points out in her description of the bronze, where Remington favors the skill of rider, Russell favors, as he often did, the spirit of the animal. The moment of truth is at hand, and it looks as though the rider may lose. Unlike Remington, Russell eschews detail, seeking instead to convey movement through simplicity of form.

In his monumental 1993 bronze JACK KNIFE (that has a tabletop version from 2022 that’s seen in this article), the great Ed Mell brought modernist minimalism and even greater simplicity to the classic image. With cubist forms, Mell fuses mount and rider into a single entity, part centaur, part coiled spring. As his title hints, Mell envisioned the cowboy on the bucking bronc as a mechanical creature, elasticized potential energy on the verge of exploding.

Contemporary artists Grant Redden and Logan Maxwell Hagege pay homage to the bucking bronc in different ways.

In BLACK DEVIL, for example, Redden makes the paint dance, leap and buck in a kind of post-impressionist way, technique mirroring subject. Nothing tethers the horse to the earth in the work. The very wildness of the Wild West—its mythology, perhaps—is in the space under the bronc’s four airborne legs. The rider might prevail—or fall. In a kind of comic twist, the cattle seem to spectate stoically, making sure they are out of the way, but not at all sure of what’s going on, or what the commotion might mean for them.

Hagege’s RUNNING WILD pushes the idea of the bucking bronc even further into myth, as the rider leaps, seemingly over a mountain and into the clouds, behind a barrier of hollyhocks. At first, the viewer finds the painting decorative and beautiful but closer inspection reveals a surreal armature. This isn’t the “cow jumping over the moon,” it’s the American West—or, perhaps, the “American West”—in air quotes, like the title of a novel or film—leaping over the landscape, mount and rider suspended like gods in a daylight constellation.

This is how the American West operates as an idea in our history, and in our story. From the need for tractable horses, the idea of the bronco moves into the mythology of the untamed West and the people who sought to tame it. From there, the idea moves to the bucking bronc as an aspect of sport in the rodeo. Now, we see broncos everywhere, in the names of our cars and in hosts of representations of what we see as manifestations of the American spirit.

This story appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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