The World’s Most Dangerous Rodeo Once Happened in Oklahoma Oil Fields

You've been in Oklahoma long enough to have seen them.

Out in a pasture. Beside a county road. Standing behind somebody's house. Nodding away in the distance like a giant steel bird pecking at the earth.

Pumpjacks are so common across oil country that you probably don't even notice them anymore.

I had a very Oklahoma upbringing. Dad worked in the oilfield, and every time we'd pass one, he'd bring up the same stories.

"Stay away from it. Don't climb on 'em. Don't even get near one."

As kids, it always seemed a little dramatic. But as an adult with a fully formed frontal lobe, you realize those warnings existed for a reason.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, there was a strange tradition amongst the youth.

People rode pumpjacks.

How Did Pumpjack Rodeos Start?

Not as part of their jobs... It was the sort of daring fun people had to express what smooth-brained people call "toxic masculinity."

Picture a Friday night in small-town Oklahoma. A handful of friends. A cooler full of beer. A lease road leading to a pumping unit in the middle of nowhere.

Then somebody climbs onto the horsehead and decides they're going to see how long they can stay on.

Basically a mechanical bull, except the bull weighed several tons and had absolutely no interest in your survival.

The stories are surprisingly common if you talk to people who grew up around the oil patch. Ask enough older Oklahomans, and you'll eventually find somebody who either did it themselves or knew somebody who did.

Common Enough To Need Safety Campaigns

It sounds made up now, like how some parents let their kids ride in the back of pickups a hundred years ago, but it used to happen.

What's even more incredible is it all led to massive safety campaigns across the country. I can even remember loading public service announcements about pump jacks early on in my radio daze.

While some were more dramatic than others, the goal was to remind people that nothing in an oilfield is a toy.

Why Pumpjacks Are More Dangerous Than They Look

This is powerful industrial equipment capable of crushing limbs, pulling clothing into moving parts, and causing fatal injuries in an instant. The slow pace of a pumpjack creates a dangerous illusion. It doesn't look threatening until something goes wrong.

And when something goes wrong around machinery designed to move thousands of pounds, people usually lose that argument... Limbs. Life. Etc.

Still, something is fascinating about the old stories, but not because anyone should still try it. Just in the way you'd recall an old legend.

It's one of those snapshots from a different era of Oklahoma, when entertainment was harder to find, common sense occasionally took a night off, and a pumpjack sitting in a field somehow presented a perfect challenge.

Today, most people see a pumpjack and think about oil production.

A few old-timers probably see something else entirely.

The world's most dangerous rodeo.