A new generation revives a historic rodeo on the Blackfeet Nation.
Rodeo runs deep in the Mad on this dirt along the Two Medicine River near Browning, Montana. Raised by his grandfather Shorty, Lynn “Nugget” Mad Plume grew up on horseback in this dust. “It’s in our bloodline to do this,” he says, looking up at the historic buffalo jump that looms over the family’s land. “This is where we originated from.”
He gestures over toward his home, where his family’s tipi is set up, a bison skull painted above the door and silhouettes of ravens circling the top. “My people ran some buffalo off these cliffs.”
The origins of Hell’s Half Acre on this land are a bit murky. The Mad Plume family started the rodeo in 1939 on their ranch just southeast of Browning, in the Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana. In the summer of that year, brothers Edward “Shorty” and Lawrence were breaking horses when a disagreement came about. To settle the beef, they got on some bucking horses. It’s not known, or at least not remembered, which of the two stayed on the longest that day. But ever since, rodeo has been part of the history of that plot of land on Joe Show Road.
The Mad Plumes kept breaking horses, bringing friends over, and eventually got to building some wooden chutes. It became an every-weekend thing. “They’d just gather, raise hell, drink beer, ride bucking horses, fight — it was rowdy,” says Shorty’s grandson Nugget. It also became a path to success for some of the legendary cow- boys out of Browning. “There was everybody — all them old guys, all the cowboys that made it to the Indian National Finals, grew up there. They helped build it,” says Shorty’s son Aarie Mad Plume. Shorty’s mother, Agnes Chewing Black Bones, eventually got sick of the ruckus and told the boys to move it up the hill a bit. They built a barn, a corral, and some chutes. They grew the rodeo there until they moved it yet again, a few hundred yards north up to the bench where it sits now, nestled in the foothills below the old buffalo jump.
The name of the rodeo came from Shorty’s time in the Army during WWII, when he broke mules in Wyoming to be sent overseas to help build the Burma Road. In Wyoming, he spent time at a geologic site known as Hell’s Half Acre that also happened to be a buffalo jump. The name stuck with him, and he brought it back to Two Medicine.
After the third and final move, the action on the dirt was finally far away enough that Agnes got some peace and quiet and eventually had the idea for a Mother’s Day rodeo, which ran until 1994, when Shorty died. The rodeo fell apart after his death, and the land got divvied up.
“Bringing the rodeo back wasn’t some- thing I envisioned for myself,” Lynn says. But one year, she and her sisters got a wild hair to host a kids rodeo. With a two-week turn- around, they managed to pull something together. Lynn has since turned the Mother’s Day rodeo into a weekend-long event.
Hell’s Half was always a bootstraps affair. A wooden corral made from old wire mesh and railroad ties was a defining feature and a point of pride. Back in its heyday, they didn’t have electricity or an announcers booth, so a neighbor stitched an old political poster into a funnel and announced by yelling over the crowd through that make-shift megaphone. For the Mad Plumes, the rodeo has never been about how you dressed or what you looked like — it was about what you aimed to do. If you wanted to get bucked in the dirt, Hell’s Half was the place for you. Show up last minute with no gear and no horse? No boots and just tennis shoes to ride in? No problem. That’s what this family was known for: always giving everybody a chance.
The fourth year back after its 21-yearhiatus, this year’s rodeo featured a borrowed generator powering the newly built announcers booth. The still-unpolished arena has seen some improvements, and the work continues. “I’ve been to rodeos all over the world, but there’s nothing like Hell’s Half,” Nugget re- members one stock contractor commenting. “Where else can you hear boards breaking, hammers going, and people screaming?”
PHOTOGRAPHY: (All images) courtesy Aaron Agosto.
From our October 2025 issue.
